Paint Continues to Dry in Minnesota

The Al Franken/Norm Coleman senate stand-off in Minnesota sure is moving along at a steady pace, isn't it?

As of Monday night, with more than 78 percent of the votes counted, Coleman led Franken by just 210 votes out of a total of almost three million. At the beginning of the recount, he led by 215, and that number has been changing slightly ever since. (Franken has apparently gained more than just the five votes these numbers would indicate; the Minneapolis Star Tribune's analysis shows the Democrat netting 46 votes, but the numbers are off due to the high number of ballots challenged by the two campaigns.)

Even with the recount itself so close to completion, an actual result might not be determined until the middle of next month. Both campaigns have challenged more than 1,500 ballots apiece, and the result of those challenges won't be known until after the recount is complete.

This is like watching a Guillermo del Toro movie: You think it's gonna be exciting, and then nothing happens; you have a lot of people thinking too hard and other people yelling nonsensical things, all of a sudden there's some lizard people for no reason; and, in the end, you're more confused than when you started off.

I'm sorry, but this endless race is just failing to capture my imagination. Partly because I've just never been able to muster a sufficient amount of support for Franken, partly because I think Minnesota is a fake state (I've been there; I'm telling you, those buildings are made of paper mache), and partly because I don't buy into this Holy Grail-like myth of the 60-seat filibuster-proof majority.

First of all, I've never known the Democrats to have their shit together enough to act as a cohesive team (Sanders and Lieberman included), and that's what you'd need for a situation like that to even be useful. And, besides that, I have zero belief that they even want to do anything on their own? The Democrats couldn't even bring themselves to defy the president-elect enough to punish Lieberman. When was the last time Congress did anything on their own? Anything besides signing off on whatever the president asked of them?

Seriously, when? Harriet Miers?

So, sorry, but I just can't put my heart into this race. Anything that the Senate can do with 60 Democrats, it can do with 58.

And, by that, I mean nothing.