Nick Coleman: Partisan Hack, And Proud Of It

Nick Coleman, having shamed himself already, digs the hole a little deeper with a full-throated apologia for all-consuming partisanship. While investigators piece together what really happened with the I-35W bridge, Coleman is already putting on his partisan pom-poms and taking aim at his carefully-crafted strawman enemies in a column that demonstrates that Nick Coleman is the undisputed mastery of partisan hackery in Minnesota.

Everything about this disaster — except the heroic efforts to rescue and recover the victims — has been steeped in politics. And the most calculated political effort has been the posturing and spinning by public officials trying to act commanding while making sure they don’t get pinned with responsibility for the collapse.

To Nick Coleman, everything is political — like the 12-year-old boy who thinks that the Boston Red Socks are the greatest team ever and everything involving the New York Yankees is pure evil, Coleman has his “team” and everything revolves around support that team. Blind partisanship is one thing when it involves baseball, but when it involves more grown-up matters, it’s simply infantile.

The reality remains that we don’t know what caused the bridge to fall — it may have been a design flaw that no amount of money could fix. It may have been a combination of factors, but to Coleman, there’s no sense of waiting for the facts when he can engage in a partisan witch-hunt.

If you think everyone should play nice about it, you are living in Pollyanna Land. We are in a bare-knuckled political brawl in this country, and the government is in the hands of government haters who want to starve it or, in the alleged belief of presidential ally Grover Norquist, want to “drown it.”

You can’t drown government. It is people who drown.

This is a typical left-wing strawman conveniently trotted out: it’s just as idiotic as calling all Democrats closed Bolsheviks that want to nationalize all industry: that sort of silly name-calling is counterproductive and insipid.

Certainly the President who has grown government at a nearly unprecedented rate, who has dramatically expanded entitlement spending, and has constantly rejected the very line which Coleman attributes to him is not the sort of radical anti-government activist that Coleman makes him out to be — but then again, to some, the facts are inconvenient things best ignored.

Again, reality must intercede. There’s no evidence that there was a lack of funding to fix the bridge — but you can’t fix problems that you don’t know exist. It’s clear that the bridge was structurally deficient, but nobody was suggesting it was in dire need of immediate replacement or that it was unsafe for use. There was no lack of funds that kept an unsafe bridge in operation, unlike Coleman’s simplistic partisan tale, but a bridge that was deemed safe that turned out not to be. For Coleman and his ilk, it isn’t a matter of learning the truth, it’s all about pointing fingers.

Coleman is nothing more than a ghoul — using this tragedy as an excuse for flogging his political agenda. Conservatives can point right back and ask why Minnesota government was paying billions for a light-rail boondoggle when bridges were decaying. Why Minnesota government was chipping in for a new stadium for a privately-owned sports team instead of fixing potholes. Why Minnesota government is now demanding more money rather than wisely spending the money that they had.

Conservatives aren’t anti-government zealots, they simply realize that government should be limited to doing the things that government should do — not subsidizing ballparks, blowing money on pet projects, and expanding its own scope. Infrastructure repairs are not politically sexy — no Congressperson gets their picture taken when a bridge is repaired. And as my Second Law of Public Policy states, if there’s no photo-op involved, politicians are far less likely to care.

This state doesn’t need partisan hacks like Nick Coleman. Partisan hackery is why Congress has the sort of approval ratings usually reserved for used-car salesmen and slime molds. What this state needs are real solutions — that means ensuring that the money that government spends is used where it is needed, not where it’s politically convenient. That means more money for road repairs and less for mass transit boondoggles. That means ensuring that our government does the job it must do before spending billions on other projects. That means analytically and dispassionately finding out what really went wrong on that bridge and ensuring that any bridges like it are reinforced or replaced.

Partisan hackery doesn’t build bridges, it burns them. We don’t need people sitting around and turning this tragedy into another idiotic political pissing match. It’s an utter waste of our time and resources.

Politics isn’t about cheerleading for your team, it’s about getting things done, and making excuses for slavish adherence to the political line in the midst of a tragedy is childish. Sadly, the reason we have such a dysfunctional system of government is because some people value pissant politics over real results — and that’s exactly what Nick Coleman stands for.

3 thoughts on “Nick Coleman: Partisan Hack, And Proud Of It

  1. Liberals conceive of government as the means by which to impose their own preferences, values, and beliefs on others. For them, there is no objective truth and certainly no moral imperative. Such things are all relative, so the only important truth or moral imperative that really matters to liberals is whatever consensus happens to be in their own personal interest at the time.

    For liberals, the only instrument of government is the Party, which is why today there is this sort of soft totalitarianism spreading all across the country. Don’t like people who smoke? Over-tax that minority and take away their freedom to smoke in public. Don’t like people who enjoy fried foods? Ban their cooking oils. Boys misbehaving in the classroom? Chemically scald their brains. Don’t like the outcome of a vote? Refuse to accept it. Disallow it. Lie about it, erase the record. The only real truth that matters, the only morality that counts, is that liberals get what they want while someone else has to pay. So if lying and cheating and stealing is what it takes to succeed, then lying and cheating and stealing, for a liberal, becomes the right thing to do, no?

    So…..Don’t like all those happy people driving their own cars around the metro? Then don’t fix their roads, tear up their throughfares, and let their bridges decay. As Nick Coleman well knows, the DFL’s priority is not people being free to drive around in their own cars, afterall. Their priorities are mass transit, planned communities, and all the free government services you can imagine. So while we have government-funded programs in Minnesota to teach urban women how to fish, it takes nearly two decades to put a new lane down on 494. Meanwhile, Best Buy got its corporate campus, freeway overpasses, frontage roads and parking lots in what, maybe a year? Do you really think MNDoT and the Minnesota DFL don’t know exactly what they’re doing and why?

    The examples of liberalism’s excesses and abuses are myriad these days. If you think that somehow for some reason in this or that particular instance, liberals, especially those ultra-left hard-core communists running Minnesota’s DFL and their media syncophants, are going to have an epiphany of reason and clarity and miraculously begin to “do the right thing” for the benefit of anyone but the Party, you just don’t understand the magnitude of the problem we face in this country today. It ain’t ever gonna happen without a big knock-down, drag-out fight. Nick’s right about that.

    Planned communities and public mass transit is and has been the Minnesota DFL’s top priority since I was a child. I remember that particular bridge being “under repair” almost as soon as it was opened. Road repairs, or the lack of them, is but just one of the various means by which this liberal DFL “government” imposes its will on an otherwise free society. Few people understand this tyranny better than Nick Coleman, or embrace its communist principles as passionately, which explains why he is so dedicated a partisan defending the Party he knows is responsible for not fixing that bridge.

    That he would do so should surprise no one. They don’t call it The Red Star for nothing, y’know….

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