Folks on the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) e-mail list got slightly harsher rhetoric than they bargained for when they opened a Tim Pawlenty-bashing missive from the state Democrats today. At 5:11 p.m., Deputy Communications Director Kristin Sosanie of the DFL sent out the "DFL Party's Statement on Governor Pawlenty's Speech to the RNC." The first paragraph contained these run-of-the-mill press release sentiments:
"Governor Pawlenty has no room to criticize President Obama or any other Democratic leaders since, under his watch, fewer Minnesotans are employed, including 112,000 who have lost jobs since June 2008; Minnesota is facing a projected deficit of over $6 billion for the next budget cycle; and more Minnesotans are fighting to stay afloat while the Governor kicks more than 35,000 people out of the state health-care programs.
But if one were to click the first link in the paragraph (content warning!), one would find a rather unorthodox message for a political press release. Content warning for dirty language in the link, which leads readers to a YouTube video of a young man tricking his Chinese-speaking grandmother into saying various curse words under the guise of teaching her English. It opens with the young man writing the F-word in capital letters on an easel, and inducing his grandmother to repeatedly shout it at her husband while the young man snickers. The same pattern is repeated with other colorful vocabulary. It was not immediately clear what this had to do with Gov. Pawlenty's record on the economy. Perhaps not so many would have noticed the link had Sosanie not sent out a follow-up e-mail five minutes later, which said simply:
Kristin Sosanie would like to recall the message, "DFL Party's Statement on Governor Pawlenty's Speech to the RNC".
A recall e-mail- catnip for any good gossip-monger. A revised version of the e-mail, this time without a link, came in seconds later. But 10 minutes after that version Sosanie sent yet another e-mail with this irresistible sentence at the top (piquing the interest of anyone not already intrigued by the recall e-mail):
**The previous version of this release contained an incorrect and inappropriate link. We did not check the links before the release was sent. We apologize for this error.**
At which point every single person on the list undoubtedly did exactly what the WEEKLY STANDARD did and promptly clicked through all the links in the first e-mail, finding the very educational English as a Second Language class to which the DFL had subjected us. Luckily, Sosanie works for the party who got Al Franken into the Senate, so this kind of thing may be smiled upon at this point. Quick screenshots of the relevant portions of each e-mail below the fold.1. View image 2. View image 3. View image 4. View image