The next afternoon, Michael Brodkorb, the Senate's powerful communications chief, was asked by an old junior high school friend who also worked in the Senate to meet at the Moose Country restaurant in Mendota Heights. Once there, Brodkorb was shocked to see Secretary of the Senate Cal Ludeman walk in and tell him he was out of a job and barred from Senate offices.
The fresh account provides new details on what could be the most tumultuous 72 hours in state Senate history. The events snuffed out Koch's fast legislative rise and leveled a chief aide who had helped lead the Senate's Republican caucus and served as deputy chair of the state party.
That's getting melodramatic, but it's the pray as we do, judge as we do, let us define a nation's morality as we would local GOP, not sane people with a live-and-let-live attitude.
Sure, Brodkorb was sucking ninety-four grand from state coffers for partisan hackmanship, but that's what was immoral on a big stage, not who's bedding down with someone else.
That's probably the biggest GOP frustration. They went after Clinton, and the Dems all had the attitude, "Who cares, it's their business."
So enraged, they cannot help themselves but to consume their own.
What a bunch. Have your Stalinist-Moralist purge, all eager to throw stones -- thinking themselves collectively as without sin probably - but it's a tempest in a tea pot really, except for overzealous zealots.
And because it is Brodkorb, it is amusing. From my perspective here in Anoka County, in SD 48, my biggest let down in the whole thing is she was not also carrying on with Michael Jungbauer. Collecting Mikes. That would have been a better tempest, as, for other reasons, it would likely upgrade my teapot.
Not to have been, too bad. But what's poor Brodkorb to be doing, these days? What's his skill set? Where can he turn? He's been handed a scarlet letter to wear. On him, it looks good.
Finally, film critics among the readers, how would you write a review about this GOP saga, would it be like this one - flat characters, heavy=handed, one star story?
That review is one among several, with the other drama generally rated higher. For a holiday season's drama enjoyment, look elsewhere. The GOP's production themes , diversity, and plot lines are stale and as sound as global warming skepticism or teaching "intelligent design" because the Supreme Court's already said that teaching pure creationism is outside of the law in a decision decades ago out of - you guessed it - Louisiana. Those embracing such stuff have no imagination of how much better things would be if we had but one hundred Wellstones in the U.S. Senate - a far better world if not a perfect one.
____________UPDATE____________
This has to be said, crystal clear: Let them have their litmus tests for each other as they want, but the rest of us should recognize it as crap, and deny them any opportunity to try to extend that stuff outside of their own elephant tent show. It is not anyone else's standards of what is acceptable in government or not, or it should not be.
Sucking out public money for oneself or for cronies is the ultimate, if not only sin of officials. Ditto for bedfellows, but affairs between consenting adults without on-the-job sexual harassment aspects is not and should not be the concern of a self appointed board of village elders acting as morality police. That's wholly out of line with notions of privacy being golden.
Never lose sight of that. Hold them to fiscal standards of sin-free conduct with public money. The rest of it, lifestyle choice, it's their own business. Nobody's the right to try to put a moral straitjacket on the rest of us who'd rather not wear one. Patty Smith sang, "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine."