Jerome Mullins, one of Gretchen Hoffman's supporters in Fergus Falls, worries about the quality of Democrats' drugs. But instead of sharing, he wrote Is DFL ingesting questional substances?, a letter to the editor of the local paper.
Given the quality of Mullins' prose, Bluestem suspects Mullins may possess a personal stash of the famed local "blue skunk."
Little else can explain his defense of Hoffman as so not a Tea Party member. He writes:
DFL director LaRon Bayliss Adkins attacks with the the statements , “Republicans …ran on creating jobs. After they took office they switched.., gun rights and… union busting, abortion, gay marriage…the issues the Republican Tea Partiers pushed in the Minnesota State Legislature”. . . .
I have checked the public records of this last session of our State legislature, and I see that there are no Tea Party members registered in the House or Senate.
Bluestem took a hit of that and promptly passed out in surprise. Once recovered, we realised that Mullins simply objected to the use of Republican as an adjective to describe the noun phrase Tea Partier.
Bluestem concurs. Those seeking to enlist grammar in the service of truth should describe Gretchen Hoffman as a Tea Party Republican, however much she personally may insist that "The Tea Party is not a phenomenon of the Republican Party[.]"...
Is Hoffman a Tea Party member, as well as a Republican? Bluestem's Pretend Internet boyfriend and research pal Mr. Google suggests that this is the case. In April 2010, Peggy Simpson at the Women's Media Center reported under the subheading "Some Tea Party Women Who Run" in The Tea Party Movement – Taking the Pulse:
In Minnesota, a GOP candidate for the state legislature with Tea Party support, Gretchen Hoffman, told a St. Paul reporter that she got involved during the U.S. Senate recount last year and “didn’t like the direction things were going in this country…I’d always been informed, but never really involved. And then one day I woke up and I saw my country going away.” She met with others who felt the same way, organized small gatherings and says that while they’re “not affiliated with any larger Tea Party group, there are a bunch of us around…. we have something to say and we’re going to say it.”
Whatever made Mullins forget this, the Internet preserves Hoffman's involvement in the Tea Party. Here's a clip from a Browerville Tea Party, where she's supporting Mary Franson and agreeing with Phil Krinkie about taking on insufficiently conservative Republicans.
Hoffman refers to herself and Franson as "pink elephants," so perhaps that explains Mullins' memory lapse rather than this year's crop of Otter Tail County "voodoo" or "poison":
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