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Hagedorn does not represent Minnesota values

To the editor:

In 2002, Hagedorn was a blogger. On Nov. 5, he authored a lengthy blog titled Election 2002 Master Analysis in which he predicted the outcomes of various elections. It reads like a bully’s manifesto in which he disparages women, the physically disabled, Native Americans and veterans. Here is just a small sample:

Jim opined California should run “female actresses with nice boobs” for congress. For Hawaii, he stated “Good news, [Pasty] Mink is still dead.” Patsy Mink was the first non-white woman and first Asian-American woman in Congress. Get it? He switched Patsy to Pasty! Funny stuff, Jim.

He called Maryland gubernatorial candidate Kathleen Townsend “unattractive,” “a dog,” and “repellent.” He refers to Las Vegas as “nuclear waste and thankless Indians.” He calls Elizabeth Dole “Bob Dole in Drag.” Hagedorn called Sens. Cantwell and Murray, “undeserving bimbos in tennis shoes.” He called the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination an effort “to fill the bra of Sandra Day O’Connor.”

Hagedorn’s Montana and Wisconsin rants are just unbroken streams of gay bashing unfit for print in any civilized publication. Of former Missouri First Lady and Senator Jean Carnahan, whose husband died in a plane crash days before the 2000 election: “Carnahan contest: She’s as dead as her husband.”

In SD, when it was alleged that Native Americans who were no longer alive casts ballots, Jim wrote “Leave it to the liberals to ruin John Wayne’s wisdom of the only good Indian being a dead Indian.”

Finally, Max Cleland was a former Georgia senator and Vietnam Veteran whose legs and one of his arms were blown off by a grenade and was confined to a wheelchair. Of Sen. Cleland, Hagedorn uttered the following: “Had Cleland found the courage to partner with Georgia’s popular junior conservative Democrat Zell Miller,… he would have wheeled to victory…As Lee Van Cleef said in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly: Adios, half-soldier.” Hagedorn has never served in our Military.

This type of rhetoric not only falls well below conduct befitting our representative in Congress, it falls well below common human decency. Dan Feehan is a veteran of the Iraq war, enlisting after 9/11. He has dedicated his life to public service. We Minnesotans have a choice. We can tell the rest of the country that we will not reward hateful, misogynistic rhetoric. There is enough of it in Washington already, thank you.

Dan Kalk

New Ulm

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