With Friends Like These

The long knives are out in the DFL party today and they are all aimed at one Senatorial candidate - and it is not Norm Coleman. Whether it is Minn Post, the Star Tribune, The Washington City Post, USA Today or CBS News all everyone is talking about is Al Franken's flight of pornographic fantasy! Stories about Al Franken's 2000 Playboy Article have dominated the talk of all of the organizations tracking this high profile Senate race and most of the talk focuses on the fact that it is fellow Democrats that are the ones raising a ruckus.

Democratic Rep. Betty McCollum said that a Playboy column written by Senate candidate Al Franken eight years ago was offensive and presents a serious political problem for Democratic candidates this year. McCollum, who had supported Franken rival Mike Ciresi until he dropped out of the race, told The Associated Press on Thursday that she was worried that Minnesota Democratic congressional candidates will be running with a candidate “who has pornographic writings that are indefensible.”

Ed Morrissey, writing at Hot Air, asks an interesting question...why were these Democrats so quiet when the issue was Franken's tax problems.

I guess in the end it doesn’t matter much how Al Franken loses this election, but a broadside from two key members of the Minnesota DFL’s Congressional delegation reflects a strange set of priorities. Betty McCollum and Keith Ellison attacked Franken not for his serial tax evasions or his failure to provide workers-comp insurance to his employees, but for a sexually graphic and sophomoric piece of fiction Franken wrote for Playboy eight years ago. Apparently for the DFL, breaking the law doesn’t rise to the level of outrage, but idiotic fantasy is a disqualification:

In a way, I understand why Reps. Ellison and McCollum are on the attack now. Tax evasion is a "crime" against the government, but this kind of sexual exploitation is a crime against a DFL protected class and it simply can not be allowed to stand! However I don't agree with Ed that this is "column" is nothing more than a "piece of silly sexual fiction" that should be so easily dismissed. It is a window into the soul of the satirist. Yes satire can be offensive, but as we have seen in the past, there is a mean streak to Al Franken that takes his satire to a level of nasty thoughtlessness that most people do not want to see out of a member of "the worlds greatest deliberative body". Al Franken's form of satire is of the speak first, deliberate only if your words come back to bite you and it seems like lately everything Franken says is coming back to bite him.

I just hope that it blowing all of this political "ammo" now does not come back to bite the MNGOP in the next two weeks. Al Franken is a beatable candidate - especially if you have all of this intel in your back pocket. Why blow the wad now, in the last two weeks before the DFL Endorsing convention. What happens if the DFL decides to pull a stronger candidate off of the back bench. Say a Mike Cirisi or a Tom Bakk? What will the MNGOP do then?