Gopher Pride

No, not the demolition of Michigan St., I'm talking about the splendiferous gentleman from Minnesota, Norm Coleman getting handled by Brownie at the FEMA hearings. I haven't really been paying a lot of attention to said hearings, but this clip peaked my interests, mainly because Senator Norm was the commencement speaker at my law school graduation*. I'm now so proud. Josh Marshall's take on the exchange is about right:

Coleman tried the standard hearings grandstanding against a disgraced or weakened witness -- a tactic pretty much written into the DNA of every senator and rep. But Brown managed to get in Coleman's face and turn the tables on him.

At the end, Coleman actually used the fact that he had run out of time to run away from the encounter with Brown. I'm not sure I've ever seen that happen before.

It ends with an angry back and forth where Brown asks "What more do you want from me, Senator? Ask me the question?" And he means it, he wants to get into it rightnow. Coleman indeed slinks off.

Say what you want about Brownie, if he's the one going down for this, he's going to go down swinging. I might add that it's a sad state that most of the Senators (R and D) are such gasbags that Brown even comes off as sympathetic in the least. O.K., he's largely admitted he screwed up, let's move on from point-scoring and figure out how we can fix some of the structural problems DHS has?

I swear, you could drop Dick Vitale in on one of these hearings, and no one would notice the difference.



* A wild-eyed rumor breathlessly repeated around Christmas of my 3rd year had it that Karl Rove was going to be the speaker. That I would have liked to see.