Empty victory for a hollow man How Norm Coleman sold his soul for a Senate seat.

I'm not trying to be contrary, but I've always wondered why no one around here seemed to care that Norm Coleman was a long haired VietNam war protester (ala Clinton) and was Minnesota chair of Bill Clinton's re-election campaign in 1998. I've seen plenty of other politicians skewered for actions they took long before 1998 -- I don't get it.

Many of the skewered either (a) don't admit to their misdeeds or (b) are still unrepentantly, if disingenuously, mired in their anti-American and/or liberal pasts (Bill Clinton's continued animus for the military comes to mind).

Quite a few of us have made youthful mistakes that rightly earned us the appellation "young and dumb." As a callow youngster who lacked the depth to fathom his parents' conservatism, I voted for McGovern as a first-time voter.

Norm Coleman simply grew up, something that can't be said of Keillor, Moyers, and Clinton. For a man whose conscience rightly tells him that unborn children are unmistakably children, the rigidly pro-abortion Democrat Party could not continue to be a home.

This appeared in the Nov. 14th Minneapolis Star Tribune. It was in the column written by C.J. (sort of a local Liz Smith, I guess you'd call her) .......

Back at ya, Keillor

Garrison Keillor is catching flak for his Salon.com attack on Sen.-elect Norm Coleman. "Norm got a free ride from the press," Keillor writes of the "slick retail campaigner, the grabbiest and touchingest and feelingest politician in Minnesota history." Keillor goes on to talk in code about Coleman's personal life. "Amazing he didn't write this back when Coleman was a Democrat," reads one message posted on Salon.com. It's even more amazing when you recall that Keillor was so protective of his personal life that he moved from St. Paul to New York City and then out of the country. Admittedly, he's come a long way since then. In March, Keillor penned a piece about his Ramsey Hill manse for Traditional Home mag, which included a photo of him and his daughter. The Coleman attack seems like unequal treatment to those who can't recall Keillor picking apart President Bill Clinton's bad behavior. We do, however, vividly recall Keillor's ex-wife Ulla Skaerved's open letter to Keillor that took exception to his yarns suggesting they were together: "The truth is that the marriage ended two years ago when you moved in with another woman." Keillor probably is right when he says, "The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm." Media from NYC and DC, I predict, will show no mercy for the zone of privacy desired by Norm and his actor-model wife, Laurie Coleman. Until then, right-leaning radio show host Jason Lewis, of KSTP-AM, has this advice: "If you're going to make innuendo and rumor, as Keillor did in the column, you go ahead and make the charge. . . . And if you can't, shut up."

They heard, ignored

I know that this is a conservative forum, so what I'm about to say is going to anger some of you, but here goes.

I live in Minnesota. I work in St. Paul. Stories about Norm's improprieties are common, if not legend. I never really cared about them until I was in a bar called Club Ashe and saw Mr. Coleman there. A nice young woman with us was approached by the now senator-elect Coleman and propositioned. She, of course refused, but Coleman didn't take the rebuff well and grabbed her and tried to force her to leave with him.

My friend and I forced him to leave her alone and escorted Norm out of the club.

Why didn't the press pursue these types of stories? I don't know. Why is it such a problem when Clinton has sexual misconducts and people like Coleman, Gingrich, and Guiliani (sp?) get the free public perception ride?

Don't be hypocrites. A slimball is a slimeball.

I attended Hofstra at the same time as Norm Coleman and knew him fairly well. He WAS a leftist, but was never really willing to follow through on anything difficult (like real student activism) as he was always afraid that if he got arrested, it would hinder his future plans to be a lawyer and politician. Frankly, we all used to laugh at that, as it was obvious that reputation was more important to him than values.

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