Last Wednesday felt like Minnesota’s hanging-chad moment might finally arrive after all, as some of the highest judges in the state shrugged at an apparent gap between election law and polling practice that left unclear what to do about wrongly counted or uncounted absentee ballots in the dragged-out recount between Republican U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman and Democratic challenger Al Franken. As if to seal that fate, a Rolling Stone story on the recount appears online today (and in the magazine’s Dec. 11 edition). Even if writer Matt Taibbi takes the tack that this isn’t Florida in 2000 all over again, the mere appearance of our dirty electoral laundry in the pages that put Hunter S. Thompson’s fear and loathing of American politics on display signals Minnesota’s arrival in the annals of screwy elections. It’s a Franken-friendly piece — inevitably, especially with Coleman not cooperating — that ends with a rundown of Coleman’s current scandals: Rentgate, Suitgate and Wifegate.

… [T]he ugliest, mudslingiest campaign season in recent history may well end with a quiet, civil, orderly recount in a laid-back Midwestern state that saves its vitriol for hockey games. The Bush era is gone, and this time around there will be no mob scenes, no high-court coup d’état, no hired tough guys in chamois shirts barging into the counting rooms. We’re past that shit and neck-deep in real problems now.

More excerpts after the jump.

“What do we want?” Franken shouts.
“PATIENCE!” the volunteers respond.
“When do we want it?” Franken asks.
“NOW!” the crowd demands.

Franken turns to former Clinton adviser Paul Begala, whom he has invited to the meeting to talk about the recount. “You like that?” he says, beaming. “It’s the only dada version of that meme.”

The public chiding of Coleman to chill out by [Tim] Pawlenty, the state’s most prominent Republican and a much-talked-about potential presidential candidate in 2012, is the kind of thing that probably wouldn’t have happened back in the heyday of Newt Gingrich or Karl Rove. But this just seems to be the wrong time in American history — and the wrong state — to start a full-blown piss-fight.