Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [77]
CONWAY: The Star Tribune covers the fact that the people who were in attendance were told by screen when to cheer and when to jeer, and they were told to cheer when the Clintons and Ted Kennedy were displayed, and they were told to jeer when Trent Lott and Rod Grams, former senator of Minnesota who lost in 2000, were displayed.
The Republican Lie Machine was whirring up to speed.
Driving to the airport, I happened to tune in to the Excellence in Broadcasting network. I don’t normally listen to Rush Limbaugh—I felt I’d paid my dues while researching Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot—but I’d made a little bet with myself that I’d hear at least three lies before I reached the airport.
I won the bet, and I had to give myself ten bucks.
Almost the entire three-hour show was about the memorial. The first lie was sort of an overarching, background lie. Rush claimed to be absolutely “distraught” about the “appalling” spectacle he had witnessed the night before. He was “depressed,” “embarrassed,” and “feeling shame.” He was “near speechless” because the whole thing had been “a giant setup.” Wellstone (whom Rush used to refer to as Senator Welfare) had been used for “disgusting” and “ghoulish” political ends. The whole thing had “basically cheapened Wellstone’s life.” Limbaugh’s entire three-hour show was based on his faked sorrow about the total absence of decency on the left.
Limbaugh’s big lie, lie number two, was that this was all a calculated plot by the national Democratic Party to win a Senate election. “They pulled a fast one over everybody,” Limbaugh blustered, pulling a fast one over his audience. “This was not a memorial service for Paul Wellstone, it was not. And that’s to me what’s so sad about it.” Limbaugh was taking the high road, mourning Wellstone’s death, just like Coleman. And the Democrats were a bunch of craven political opportunists.
A Democrat called in and asked if maybe there was a note of jealousy that twenty thousand people had come to the memorial.
“Oh, come on,” Rush responded dismissively. “They were bused in by the AFL-CIO. I haven’t even talked about the audience. Everybody knows it was a planted audience.”
Wow. Ugly. Yes, there were some buses. Robert Richman, who took care of all the logistics for the memorial, arranged for buses for the families of those who died in the crash. The families weren’t a “planted audience.” Neither was the Apple Valley High School wrestling team, which came in on its bus because Mark Wellstone, Paul’s younger son, was their assistant coach. And yes, some unions chartered their own buses to the memorial. That’s because Paul had been fighting for unions since long before he went into politics. When he was a young professor, he took his students to walk the picket line for striking Hormel meatpackers in Austin, Minnesota. Oh, and some veterans’ groups chartered their own buses as well, maybe because Paul wrote legislation to help homeless vets.
By four o’clock, a full hour before the event, there were so many people at Williams Arena that Twin Cities radio and TV had to tell people that if they hadn’t already left their homes, there was no point in coming down. On top of the twenty thousand in the main arena, there were four thousand watching on screens in an adjacent gym, and thousands more standing outside watching an outdoor screen on a cold Minnesota evening.
It was the largest spontaneous display of grief in memory in Minnesota. As Joe Klein wrote in The New Yorker, “The most striking aspect of the evening was the crowd.” He went on:
Such crowds—indeed, crowds of any sort—have almost disappeared from American public life. Most political events, particularly in this election year, consist of a candidate, a microphone, and a few television cameras.