Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [72]
Part of it was that I grew up in Minnesota. And Paul knew my folks. In Wellstone’s first campaign for the Senate in 1990, my dad was part of a senior citizen theater troupe that did skits for Paul at nursing homes. That’s pretty grassroots, don’t you think?
My dad died in 1993, and my mom went downhill pretty fast. They had been married for fifty-one years. She got depressed, and about four years ago went into a severe psychotic depression, which brought with it an exciting element of paranoia.
One night at the hospital, I went up to one of the nurses and said, “Excuse me, it’s kind of awkward to ask this, but I feel out of loyalty to my mom, I should.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Yeah. What I was wondering is, um, are you pumping poison gas into my mom’s room? And are you videotaping her? And are you not really a nurse, but actually an actress who is trying to kill my mom?”
“No,” said the kindly nurse.
“I didn’t think so. But I felt I had to ask.”
Fortunately, the doctors pulled Mom out of it with some miracle drug. But she’s never really been the same.
The last time I saw Paul was in the late summer of 2002, about six weeks before he died in a plane crash. It was an evening event in the Twin Cities. Paul was in the middle of an intense, dead-even Senate race. He’d been targeted as vulnerable by the national Republican Party and money was flowing in from around the country for his opponent, a suit named Norm Coleman. Paul was fighting for his political life. The first thing he asked me was, “How’s your mom?”
I told Paul I had just visited her. “It was tough. I couldn’t even have a conversation with her.”
Paul nodded, and said, “You know, touch means so much.”
The next day I took my mom out into the nursing home garden in her wheelchair. It was a beautiful day. I sat next to her for a couple of hours with my arm around her. I can’t tell you whether it meant a thing to her, but it meant a lot to me.
So, that was Paul. “Touch means so much” wasn’t the kind of thing you’d hear from a Michael Dukakis. I, along with innumerable people, loved Paul Wellstone. For what he stood for, for what he fought for, and for who he was. I loved his wife Sheila, too. I don’t think I ever saw Paul without Sheila by his side.
Paul died on October 25, 2002, when his plane went down in Northern Minnesota. Sheila; their daughter, Marcia; his driver, Will McLaughlin; two other close aides, Tom Lapic and Mary McEvoy; and two pilots died with him. Four days later, C-SPAN, along with almost every Minnesota TV and radio station, carried a hastily-put-together memorial service for Paul, Sheila, Marcia, Will, Tom, and Mary. I was there. It was a beautiful memorial, sometimes incredibly sad, sometimes funny, sometimes rowdy, and sometimes political. Some people watching on television were offended. Some people were moved. But the right saw an opening. They took moments out of context, lied about the rest, and used it as a political club to attack the Democrats. It won them the Senate election in Minnesota and probably in Missouri, which means it gave Republicans control of the Senate.
This chapter is a case study of how the right lies and viciously distorts. It is the story of how the right-wing media repeats its fabrications until they echo into the mainstream press. It is a story of pure cynicism in the pursuit of power. It is the story of how the lying liars took the death of my friends and invented a myth that changed the 2002 elections.
And the best part is, it’s hilarious! No, it’s not. But read it anyway. You paid for the book.
The Wellstone-Coleman campaign had been considered one of the most negative in recent memory. Coleman had called Wellstone a “joke.” He told KSTP radio on July 7, “I run against a guy who I quite often think is just the lowest common denominator, the lowest common denominator.” Coleman said that Wellstone “opposed any program that