I posted this in the Minnesota forum, but it was thought a wider DU audience might enjoy this take on his performance this week.
This was in today's Strib, well worth the read.
http://www.startribune.com/stories/562/5415151.html
Paul Scott: Norm's 'Celebrity Jeopardy'
May 22, 2005
It is becoming possible that a local, national and now international disgust is mutating over the disingenuousness of Sen. Norm Coleman. (The Nation's John Nichols recently called him "a plain old-fashioned, drool-on-his-tie fool.") For those who first smelled a phony back when Coleman said he wanted to go to Washington to "change the tone" -- as if the naked hopefulness of Paul Wellstone was a tone that needed changing -- watching his inquisition of Scottish Member of Parliament George Galloway backfire so witheringly on Tuesday was like rolling in a tub of banana cream pie.
Maybe Coleman wasn't already choking on the hypocrisy of having asked for the resignation of U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan over the oil-for-food fiasco, when Coleman stands mute over his the fact of his own party's leadership having so grossly mismanaged both the lead-up to 9/11 and the intelligence behind the case for war. Without the slightest apparent willingness to acknowledge such details, Coleman called to testify one of the chief critics in Britain of the invasion of Iraq, on oil-for-food charges he had already successfully refuted in the British legal system.
Even on a day when the Republicans initiated the so-called nuclear option, Galloway dropped into the U.S. news cycle like a haggis-filled A-bomb. A fierce debater from a land of men who invented hammer-throwing, a bruiser in a parliamentary system where the head of state is regularly treated like a son who smashed in the Acura, Galloway came to clear his name. And he was going to do this in front of the man previously famous for having brought Lawson Software to St. Paul.
He may be a lawyer, but Coleman is simply the wrong person to help the Republicans claim the mantle of justice-seekers. Crusading investigators are idealists. Coleman is a company man. He smiles. He hits his marks. He watches his waistline and he says his lines. Jesse Ventura was able to dispense with him during at least one debate just by pointing at tasseled loafers. In the end, it wasn't clear why Galloway's name was on some sketchy paperwork, and it wasn't clear that it mattered. When Galloway opened with a lengthy evisceration of the proceedings, the full Braveheart, Coleman countered with mumblings that sounded more like a tax audit -- as if he genuinely thought he was merely seeking facts, not political theater.
By mumbling his way through a litany of paperwork, when a strong case had just been made about a larger, more deadly deception, it was clear that the one thing Coleman had neglected to prepare for was the weakness of his moral position. He is in no position, with his president's war going this badly, to be sitting in judgment of those who have argued for the relief of the Iraqi people, and, unlike the path taken by Coleman, placed themselves in political peril by doing so.
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