Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [76]
The emotions unleashed by his death—the tributes from even his staunchest political opponents—are certainly a consequence of Wellstone’s, and his family’s, bracing, unvarnished humanity; but, one senses, there is also a more general mourning for the politics of larger themes and for politicians willing to discuss them. It is, in any case, stunning that the death of one man has occasioned the only breath of life we’ve seen in this election year.
That was pretty much the way I saw it. (Though a lot less eloquently.) What I didn’t realize was that between the raucous crowd, Kahn’s fiery speech, and the imprimatur of independent outrage provided by Ventura’s walkout, the memorial service had created a sort of perfect political storm for Republican opportunists.
The morning after the memorial, I picked up the Minneapolis Star Tribune and turned to the special section devoted to the event. It was titled “One Last Rally: Victims Remembered with Cheers and Tears,” with a heartbreaking picture of Paul and Sheila’s granddaughter, Cari, crying. There were two stories on the front page. One was about the event itself: “Overflow Crowd Pays Tribute to Wellstone.” The other was about GOP spin: “Republicans Decry Service as Political.” With the stories side by side, it was as if two different events had taken place. The real one, and the lie one.
Vin Weber was framing the Republican story line. “This was NOT a memorial to Paul Wellstone. This was a political event.” Weber said that the event was a “complete, total, absolute sham” and accused the Democrats of “exploit[ing] Wellstone’s memory totally, completely and shamelessly for political gain.”
This seemed almost surreally dishonest. I flipped to the real story and read an excerpt from the eulogies. This one from Paul and Sheila’s younger son, Mark:
The one thing that comes to mind when I think about my dad is how proud he was of everybody around him and how he wanted to shed light on everybody’s accomplishments. It was never about him. It was never about Paul Wellstone. It was about the ideal; it was about the dream he had. . . . More than anything I just have a message to my dad. The message to my dad is, “Dad, we’re okay. Dave and I are okay. The thousands and thousands of people that you left behind that care about you, we are okay. We will carry on. . . .” These are some of his favorite words that he ever spoke . . . “Never separate the lives you live from the words you speak.”
That doesn’t sound like a complete, total, absolute sham. In fact, it hardly sounds like a sham at all. That sounds like the kind of eulogy a father would love from his son. (Hear that, Joe?)
When I called Vin Weber to research this chapter, I asked him whether he had watched the whole event and whether he had seen any of the eulogies. He said, “Yeah, there was some very nice stuff.” This candid Vin was a refreshing break from the lying Vin who talked to the Star Tribune in 2002. But Lying Vin had planted the story line: The memorial was a total sham, a political charade.
Going back to the lie story in the Star Tribune, I found a gem from a local Republican apparatchik.
Republican political analyst and lobbyist Sarah Janacek said that what she found most outrageous were the screens inside Williams Arena prompting audience reaction—when to laugh and how loudly to clap.
Janacek was referring to the closed captioning that the memorial’s organizers had thoughtfully provided for the hearing impaired. Janacek, perhaps, was thinking impaired. Or, more likely, honesty impaired. On radio, she said that the text on the Jumbotrons was proof positive that the entire event had been scripted. She didn’t mention that words appeared on the screen about five seconds after they had been spoken.
Janacek’s insanely stupid and/or viciously dishonest