Norm Coleman confesses

So, Norm Coleman (R-MN), the former Senator from Minnesota, admits to what lefty bloggers have been stating for months, that his quest to hang onto an ever-dimmer hope of prevailing in last November’s decision by the voters of Minnesota. (Coleman lost by a margin considerably thinner than 1%, but by Mid-April, even fellow Republicans were advising Coleman to pack it in as he had clearly lost)

Now, Coleman makes himself out to be something of a hero for hanging onto a Republican minority that has just the numbers necessary to sustain a veto If Al Franken takes office, the Republican’s ability to frustrate national policy is pretty much gone.

So what will the country lose when that happens? The view of Republicans such as John McCain, John Bolton and Joe Lieberman on how to deal with the Iranian situation are pretty much to come galloping in on horseback, shoot up the place and kill people by the millions (They’ve announced plans for “surgical strikes,” but no one believes that civilians will not suffer mass casualties). Very sensibly, President Obama has declared that he doesn’t want America to be seen as meddling in Iranian politics. Senator Lugar (R-IN) also disagrees with the idea of acting aggressively.

What else have they got? Well, they don’t appear to have anything constructive to say about health care. Their budget proposal had no numbers in it. There’s of course their earning the score of “major fail” for their use of Twitter. They launched the “National Council for a New America” in May. It contained John McCain, the guy who lost the 2008 election; Mitt Romney, who lost the GOP primary to John McCain; Jeb Bush, the brother of the guy who essentially ran the country into the ground for eight years (In a poll, Jeb Bush ran well behind [unspecified] “Someone else” and just ahead of “No one”). Of course, lowering taxes on capital gains, an old tried and true applause-winner in Republican circles, was the solution du jour for whatever the problem of the moment was. Republicans did complain when abstinence-only sex education was cut, but as they couldn’t point to any successes the program had ever had, no one cared.

So how vitally important is it, really, to have Norm Coleman continue to deny Al Franken his rightful seat?