Sitcom Character or Dictator?

Guest post/quasi-parody by the Hawthorne Hawkman. Photos from a previous JNS post and www.trumanlibrary.org


One of my favorite time-wasting websites (click here) allows you to pick a TV sitcom character or a dictator in your head. It asks you a series of questions and then it guesses which sitcom character or dictator you had chosen. It's eerily accurate.

Well, if you don't have enough time to fritter away at this oddly addictive (like some controlled substances) site, just check out this entry from the Mpls Mirror. In it, fringe mayoral candidate Al Flowers compares DFL-endorsed incumbent RT Rybak to...

Joseph Stalin.

To which I respond: Какой идиот! Он должен быть высок на ЧТО-ТО!

Whoops! Sometimes when I write good things about our mayor or bad things about his challengers in this election, I forget where I am and accidentally use my evil communist dictator font. It won't happen again, I promise.

But wait, let's look at this a little closer. That's JOSEPH STALIN, who struck fear into the hearts of any who opposed him by sending out past-due water notices and sent secret service police to place marijuana in the same room as many people's personal effects. These brutally savage strong-arm tactics were so effective that people often chose "no endorsement" ahead of anyone challenging Stalin for election. It's true, and I can PROVE IT. Give me ten minutes and then check wikipedia.

If you watched Flowers' campaign kick-off event speech, what he says is kind of a recurring theme. Back then, Flowers alluded to the fact that RT had a picture of Obama on his wall, but Obama didn't know at the time that the mayor might be a reincarnation of one of the worst mass murderers of all time. So he was going to tell Obama about this and then magically everything would be ok. Apparently that strategy hasn't been working so well.

Another tactic that doesn't seem to be going anywhere is claiming to have support from the Hmong community. This was on Flowers' mayoral Facebook and Twitter accounts for a while, but I just ran across this video in my searches for truth to the people.

In the video, he spoke at an event for Fong Lee and got applauded several times. The Mpls Mirror and Al Flowers various campaign pages do not state which entity has given organizational support to Al Flowers for mayor, and his website still lists only four people under "endorsements and supporters." There's a lot that doesn't seem right about the Fong Lee tragedy, and I'm sure Flowers has some Hmong supporters as a result of that. But his claims and the Mpls Mirror article are incomplete at best and perhaps downright deceptive.

So now that the local media have bought into the Rybak politburo, Al is going to "take [his] message to every citizen across this nation who believes in an open and fair democracy." Great, you do that Al. And while you're busy with every citizen across this nation, I'll be over here in Minneapolis, helping RT Rybak get re-elected.

(Эта передовица не была повлияна на в любом случае моим желанием видеть мою семью живую как раз раз больше.)