Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [78]
“Everybody knows it was a planted audience.” It was as if Limbaugh and Republicans in general couldn’t believe that people cared enough about a politician and what he stood for to actually show up. And besides, spontaneous outpouring of grief didn’t fit the picture Limbaugh was trying to paint.
Back to my bet. Lie number three. “Who was the first to come up with it?” Limbaugh mused to his twenty million listeners. “Okay, Wellstone’s plane goes down. Who was the first Democrat whose eyebrows went up and whose eyes lit up? Said, ‘Wow, what an opportunity we’ve got now’? Ah, was it a call from Clinton, whose eyebrows went up and whose eyes went up the soonest, who saw this as an opportunity? Because somebody did. Somebody must have seen this as an opportunity for last night to have even happened.”
That’s it, Rush. The old fallback. Blame Clinton. That always works with your audience when you’re trying to make something up. (When I don’t know something, I just tell a joke about Gingrich having a mistress.)
Rush, I know you have a three-hour show every day that leaves precious little time for bothering to know what you’re talking about. So let me tell you how it happened. And let me tell you how I found out: I called the people involved and asked them. Try it sometime.
On Saturday, after David Wellstone had returned from the crash site, he met with Jeff Blodgett, Wellstone’s campaign manager. David said that he and his brother wanted a small service for their parents and sister. But both realized the need for a larger public memorial. The family and staff had been deluged by condolence calls, impromptu prayer vigils, and crowds at the makeshift “memorial wall” outside Wellstone campaign headquarters. So, Rush, it was Paul’s son David who first saw this as an opportunity. An opportunity to honor the depth of feeling for his parents, his sister, and their friends.
They were under tremendous time constraints. It was now only eleven days before November 5, and they felt it would have been unfair to Coleman to schedule the memorial too close to the election. They settled on Tuesday, October 29. Blodgett knew that the campaign staff was a wreck. So he approached Ann Mulholland, whom he had worked with before she took time off to raise her three little kids, and asked her if she could give him three or four days to help plan the memorial. Ann had just accepted a new job at a nonprofit, but they agreed to let her start a little late. Ann told me what it was like when she went to work.
The staff was a mess. They had lost not just their boss, their cause that they had been working for for months, years—but their best friends. They were all grieving. I didn’t want to make a noise. No one else was functioning. I took a cell phone to the bathroom and called my husband, and told him, “I don’t know how these people are standing.”
Anytime I’d sit down at a desk, someone would start crying and tell me, “That was Mary’s desk”—so I’d move, and someone would start crying. “That was Tom’s desk.” You have to understand that Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, these people were going to funerals.
Six people died. That was the overwhelming reality. Six people. Every one equal. We asked each family to choose someone to do the eulogy. At no point did it ever cross anyone’s mind to read the speeches. The day before, the people from the hearing impaired group asked, “Do you have any of the speeches?” I just laughed. They wanted to type the speeches in for the closed captioning, but we just didn’t have anything.
On Monday night, our press guy said to me, “Oh my gosh—this is going to be on TV. Should we be thinking about something?” By then, it was just kind of too late.
So that was the huge Democratic Party conspiracy to use Paul Wellstone’s death to gain advantage in the upcoming elections. Shame on you, Ann Mulholland.
Rush said, “There was nothing sacred about this last