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As a Coleman-Pawlenty supporter, I have to admit I'm heartened by the spate of recent entries in the Peter Jennings: "Voters Had a Temper Tantrum" Whine Contest. In their supercilious rationalizations for defeat at the hands of an unwashed electorate, Garrison Keillor and a host of dyspeptic letter writers to the Twin Cities dailies are telling me the Democrats would rather keep plodding the road to political perdition than repair their retrograde ideology.

Happy trails to you, unhappy warriors

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