(I'm always a bit wary of organizations whose names follow the model "Concerned {Group of People} {For, Against} {Really important subject matter}" like "Minnesotans Against Terrorism". Vagueness in naming is a great way to conceal really nefarious purposes. - promoted by MNCampaignReport)
I never intended to post anything here about Sunday's Town Hall Forum with Senator Norm Coleman sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Israel Program Center, the Sabes Jewish Community Center, the Saint Paul United Jewish Fund and Council and a group calling itself "Minnesotans Against Terrorism" on "The Iran Crisis: How Should the United States Deal with Iran's Nuclear Ambitions and Hostility to the West."
Nope, campaign issues were the farthest thing from any of our minds when a group of us decided to caravan from Eagan and Apple Valley all the way up to St. Louis Park to get front row seats to hear our senator speak. Mostly we were just interested in seeing how Senator Coleman would run a public "town hall" meeting and what he would say about the dangers posed by Iran. I also thought it a perfect opportunity to hand-deliver a copy of the latest memorandum written by the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS--http://www.huffingto...) since the start of the Iraq War (and to which I had contributed) entitled "Denouement on Iraq: First Stop the Bleeding" (http://www.commondre...) just before Coleman and other senators were slated to take up the topic. (Unfortunately that effort proved for nought as Coleman voted Bush's way yesterday to "stay the course" despite what he's been saying about their failures.)
Read More after the break |
| But about 2/3's of the way through, the political nature of the event really hit me. It wasn't only his digs against Jimmy Carter. Coleman's speech was such a mixture of cherry picked assertions and fear-laden mushroom cloud type rhetoric, that I couldn't help wondering whether if, with a little research, one couldn't find almost verbatim speeches made when he (Coleman) campaigned his first time for that seat against then Senator Paul Wellstone. Only then, the country that needed to be feared and pre-emptively attacked had ended with the "q" instead of the "n". Senator Wellstone of course had, we all know, wisely made the very difficult, politically risky but ultimately correct decision to vote against giving Bush and Cheney the authority to invade Iraq. If I remember right, Norm Coleman wrongly attacked Senator Wellstone's judgment back then, accusing Wellstone of not understanding the imminent threat posed to the U.S. by Iraq's WMD and links to Al Qaeda. It's been a long time and Coleman obviously has got to hope that people have forgotten about his (Coleman's) campaign criticisms challenging Senator Wellstone for not placing his full faith and trust in the Bush Administration's totally false assertions of "mushroom clouds" and the rest of its fear-mongering but over-hyped case for war in Iraq.
It was, finally, the AIPAC crowd's applause for Coleman's loaded statements about the dangers posed by Iran, especially when the Senator would make the jump to repeatedly emphasize the possible need for the U.S. to go to war to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, that really made me aware how politically charged Coleman's speech actually was. By the way, can anyone tell me who these "Minnesotans Against Terrorism" are? I think they might have been applauding louder than the AIPAC folks. Aren't we ALL Minnesotans against terrorism? Just as we're all against nuclear proliferation. Senator Coleman spent a lot of time telling us why nuclear weapons are bad but I don't think anyone much disagreed with him on that point. Nor did he probably have to spend so much time telling us how bad Iran's radical leader Ahmedinejab is. Remember no one ever disagreed that Saddam was a bad guy either. His status as a truly evil tyrant was never the issue. But there's nothing like setting up a straw man to score political points. And using that nifty trick of making the case often and strong enough--for instance that Saddam is a bad guy--will sometimes even lead people to overlook the harder issue of HOW the goal is to be accomplished and whether the ends justify the means. There are no Minnesotans for Terrorism. The disagreement amongst Minnesotans doesn't lie in the goals but in pursuing the best, most effective methods of achieving those goals of reducing terrorism and of reducing nuclear proliferation. Unfortunately Senator Coleman refuses to face the fact that the Bush Administration he has blindly supported and campaigned for has done a rather bad job on both those fronts. In fact many of us think Bush-Cheney-Coleman's "war on terrorism" has been so botched as to actually help the terrorists.
But Senator Coleman steered his political ship clear of all that. Not surprisingly, Senator Coleman didn't want to discuss Iraq at all during the meeting on Sunday, March 25, 2007. He quickly dismissed the whole Iraq fiasco along with the missing WMD and other false rationales and premises that got us into that unending quagmire as not even being relevant to the "Iran Crisis." The preposterousness of his dismissal of the ongoing civil war in Iraq--with all its terrible mistakes and lessons being learned (the hard way) as well as its potential for spill-over to neighboring mid-east countries--as not relevant to the situation of its geographical neighbor, Iran, had several of us not only scratching our heads but madly trying to scribble down questions on notecards. (Which notecards, by the way, we learned for purposes of how to conduct a town hall meeting, are NOT a constituent-friendly method.) The sponsors did end up collecting a large stack of the cards, but only selected three questions for Coleman to address, none of which brought up any of these connections between "Iran Crisis" and Iraq fiasco.
It was just so déjà vu (or déjà entendu for true francophones). Wouldn't it in fact be real interesting to compare Norm Coleman's Iraq war rhetoric during his 2002 campaign with the Iran war rhetoric that he's leading off with in 2007? Has he not learned anything from the terrible mistakes he made back in 2002-2003? |
