Posted on 09/15/2006 11:53:41 AM PDT by MplsSteve
There they go again.
No sooner had Keith Ellison been declared the winner in the DFL primary and Minneapolis' likely next member of Congress than Republicans launched a smear campaign intended not only to smudge Ellison but, by association, every Democrat on the DFL ticket.
Here are some of the words, delivered with ample emotion, that came from the mouth of Ellison's Republican opponent, words unlikely to have originated in Alan Fine's heart but more likely crafted by some young Beltway piranha typing away on behalf of Karl Rove's dark national machine:
(Excerpt) Read more at startribune.com ...
Ellison had connections with the Nation of Islam. That is an undeniable fact. It is not a "smear" to say so, just a relevant fact that any voter should be aware of.
Absolutely right...
I will add that Ellison is the new darling topic for this waste of a newspaper, so they're being overly protective of him at even the slightest hint of criticism.
I have to laugh at their predictible response of this being some sort of Rovian conspiracy. The loonies certainly run the asylum at the Red Star!
I used to read until I found a much more pleasant diversion for my time, mashing my nuts flat with a sledge hammer.
I for one will be watching this race closely as a muslum is running against a jew. For us up here in the northland at least this is a first.
Ther have been a lot of true blue dems. lately muttering about crossing over and voting with the good guys on this one.
It will be interesting.
This guy is a leftist version of David Duke and the GOP had damn well better hang him around the Democrats' necks. The Republicans ran Duke out of the party. Yet the DFL and its mouthpiece the Red Star think he is wonderful.
Fine, Ellison and Independent candidate Tammy Lee debated over at MPR (MN Proletariat Radio) at 11:00 this morning. I caught part of it, and Lee seemed quite well prepared compared to the other two. Ellison ducked the Farakhan/Nation of Islam association, said he would not get personal, then attacked the right-wing bloggers. Fine didn't start out strong, but gained momentum as the debate went on.
Listen to the debate here.
You can catch another tonight on TPT's Almanac at 7:00.
Catch yet another one on KSTP's At Issue on Sunday.
I met Tammy Lee earlier this summer. Some friends invited me to a fundraiser she was holding at some house near Lake Harriet.
She's definitely informed and well-prepared. She's is actually hot-looking too!
But she sounds an awfully lot like a reformed Democrat who hasn't entirely walked away from the Kool-Aid. Some of her pronouncements in her speech, her lit and web site kinda sound like DFL-Lite to me.
I don't know about you, but I for one am thrilled that the red star doesn't resort to any smears itself.
Rove, you magnificent Bastard!
"Karl Rove's dark national machine"
That's a keeper.
Oops, they caught republicans telling the truth about democrats again -- evil republicans.
It's hard to argue with the facts. Telling people what democrats really say and do IS a smear on the democrats.
I wonder what the Commie potheads down at the Red Star think they've been doing to the Republicans for the last five years. HYPOCRITES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There's a lot of that going around for as long as I can remember. It just seems so much more
calculatingly coordinated.
One of his names is Keith Ellison Mohhamed.
Do the math.
It never fails... Quote a Democrat accurately and they scream that they're being 'smeared'...
You didn't read that in the "Red" Star though, they are most incurious about Democrat candidates.
Democrats are self-smearing.
Yep they got the Marxist propaganda tactics developed by Vladimir Lenin down pat. Rule one of the Marxist handbook. Always pervert the terms of the debate so that everything you claim is true is in fact 100% opposed of reality. Lenin and his gang call themselves the "Bolsheviks" because it mean "Majority", when they were actually way in the Minority.
Wow MS, you are right! IT really IS the "RED Star"!
Today for the first time the Star Tribune mentions Elllison's shifting public personas, by quotation of Ellison's Republican opponent Alan Fine. Yet the Star Tribune, like the Washington Post earlier this week in Alan Cooperman's story, asserts that these personas were names that Ellison went under as a student. Thus Olson and Smith write in today's Star Tribune story:
"I'm extremely concerned about Keith Ellison, Keith Hakim, Keith X Ellison, Keith Ellison Muhammad," Fine said, referring to names Ellison used when he wrote several editorials for the University of Minnesota Daily when he was a law student in the early 1990s.
How many errors is it possible to pack into a dependent clause commenting on a quotation? Ellison was a law student from 1987-1990, not in the early 1990s. He used the name Keith Hakim in two University of Minnesota Daily columns published in 1989 and 1990. He subsequently used the other names over a period that extended through 1998, on each occasion as an advocate of or spokesman for the Nation of Islam. One such occasion occurred at a public hearing in which Ellison used the name Muhammad, as reported by the Star Tribune itself in the Star Tribune's 1997 story on the hearing.
It is pathetic that the Star Tribune has not familiarized itself or its readers with Ellison's various public identities at this late stage of the campaign, but it is inexcusable for it falsely to assert that these identities were used by Ellison "when he was a law student." The fact that this error has occurred in two stories in the same week, first in the Washington Post and then in the Star Tribune, suggests one of two facts. Either the Star Tribune is relying on the Post for its information about Ellison or Ellison is peddling another canard about his Nation of Islam past that the Star Tribune is gullibly repeating. Now that the Ellison candidacy is a significant national story, would it be too much to ask the Star Tribune to get the facts straight?
Even now, I can hear the hoofbeats of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Must be Jim Boyd's purple, turgid prose.
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