How to write a Nick Coleman column
Nick Coleman is the former St. Paul Pioneer Press columnist who now hangs his shingle out at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Today Coleman hits bottom with yet another column on United States Attorney for Minnesota Rachel Paulose. The column consists of questions that Coleman proposes be asked of Paulose and Monica Goodling by the House Judiciary Committee. The questions range from the easily answered -- easily answered if you bother to ask -- to the absolutely nuts, such as Coleman's McCarthyite ravings about the purported Republican conspiracy to suppress voter turnout and the "archconservative" Federalist Society. The form of Coleman's column lends itself to emulation if you're disinclined to work and don't want to spend more than 15 minutes cranking out a column. Here's how you do it:
• What prompted Coleman's departure from the Pioneer Press? Was his name on an a Pioneer Press editor's firing list? Was Coleman incapable of getting along with his colleagues at the Pioneer Press?
• Does anyone at the Star Tribune with supervisory authority over him read Coleman's columns before publication? Or does he have some kind of sweetheart deal with the paper? I know from first-hand experience that when Coleman wrote a column about me in January 2002, it was riddled with factual errors and false implications and that Coleman's purported editor had never read it before I called to ask him about it.
• Do Coleman's DFL bloodlines have any bearing on his thuggishness and ignorance?
• Does recitation of the words "Federalist Society" and "voter suppression" suspend the need for rational thought in a column ostensibly devoted to weighty public issues?
• Is the regular publication of a column featuring the fulminations and ravings of a Democratic shill part of a strategy to pump up DFL turnout?
• Has anyone seen an MMPI on this guy?
• After you crank out a column like this, what the heck do you do for the rest of the week? That's the $64,000 question.
The degradation of public discourse by the state's leading newspaper is a matter of serious public concern. It is an act of charity to ascribe it to ignorance, but it is ignorance that is willful and malicious. To quote Coleman: "It should not happen here." But it already has.
UPDATE: A perspicacious commenter over at the Forum at the link below helps me add to my "column" with a few more questions that will resonate particularly with Minnesota readers:
Do you get your columns directly from DFL talking points? Are you paid to do so? Are your up for party chair? Is Mike Hatch Lori Swanson’s nanny? Will you be commenting on the troubles in the Minnesota Attorney General’s office? Do you think a conservative could say a Democrat A.G. requires a nanny? Have you ever written a G. D. thing that wasn’t straight party line? How’s that one-party rule working out in that city of yours, the one you callled “bleeding” a few days ago after the execution of two men for the color of their skin?To comment on this post, go here.
