Klobuchar Pere: "l'etoile c'etait moi"

From The Read Menace at The Rake Today:

For those of you who remember afternoon newspapers, you know that one of the best things about the Minneapolis Star was columnist Jim Klobuchar. When it came to homespun humor, he was Garrison Keillor before there was a Prairie Home Companion.

Characteristic, often, of his portraits of typical Minnesotans, was his outrage at how they'd been treated by government, circumstances, or just plain bad luck. He was the first thing I went to in the paper I actually liked.

He's weighed in again, over at voxverax, (which means true voice in my favorite dead language). There's nothing startling here. In fact, the Louis XIV reference showed up in a Helen Thomas column on Friday. It's another Bush bash, but we love it when the old indignation raises its head. Let's hope his daughter has inherited it enough to start taking some real stands on some critical issues. This "we can do better" pap we're getting from her is not worthy of her father's straight forward example.

Our response:

We're very honored to have Jim Klobuchar share his disciplined and often humorous vitriol on our site.

It is said that as people get older they mellow. Thank God this is not true for Jim or Tom Maertens or Joe Mayer, who are all my seniors and contributors to this site, nor Garrison Keillor, nor a couple of Texans whose work we admire -- Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower -- just to name a few more aging curmudgeons.

They see no reason to pull punches, especially when the enemy is as underhanded, hypocritical, corrupt, antidemocratic, self-serving and downright mean as are the folks who are now running Congress and the White House.

Having been a candidate I know the pressures to "head to the middle" that Jim K's daughter must get on a daily basis. That's because, with few exceptions, most people running campaigns for candidates of both major parties are cut from the same cloth. How one becomes a Democrat and another a Republican is often a minor issue: They both resort to the same tactics. (Though I'd like to believe that Democratic campaign poobahs use the most objectionable tactics slightly less frequently.)

Real change in Washington and the state capitals will not come about till money and politics are ripped apart, for as long as money dictates winners and losers, whether it's above or below the table, great candidates like Amy Klobuchar will have to kowtow to its conforming influence.

LEIGH POMEROY