After lamenting the lack of recently deceased freak show coverage on this blog, Witrack wonders if I have any interest in the living versions:
Are you going to comment on Al Franken now being a United States Senator?
I don’t really have much to say about it, except that I recently received an email from Chad the Elder of the Fraters Libertas, who reminded me that I was sufficiently familiar with the fragile Minnesota psyche back in May 2004 to know that the ex-comedian’s candidacy was no laughing matter:
I’d like to luxuriate in the joys of what Jonah Goldberg calls Frankenfreude as Air America loses executives and misses payrolls. But that’s not possible now that Alice is bruiting about the idea of running for the Senate. In any other state, that might be laughable, but not in Minnesota. It’s the one state where he could actually win. Do the words “Gov. Jesse Ventura” ring a bell?
First, Minnesota is one of the most reliably leftist states in the country. Second, the Star & Sickle, otherwise known as the Star Tribune, already loves Alice to distraction. Third, never underestimate the desperate Minneapolitan appetite for celebrity. You can’t appreciate the meaning of trying too hard until you’ve read a local columnist hyperventilating over Minneapolis being compared to Des Moines instead of Paris. Fourth, Paul Wellstone. It could happen. And frankly, socionomics appears to predict it. I can’t think of anyone, short of the Lizard Queen herself, better suited to help that grand supercycle wave get rolling.
That last sentence is rather fortuitous, seeing as how it’s turned out to be Franken who gives the Senate Democrats a filibuster-proof majority, enabling Obama to torch the economy at will with an increasingly expansionary fiscal policy.