Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [79]
Rush really got into the story line that this was all a preplanned, calculated power grab by the Democrats. He quoted Harry Reid saying that Gingrich’s (lying) attack on Mondale had been “classless.” Rush took this one for a ride:
Senator Reid, you are the one to speak to classlessness. I mean, you obviously know it when you see it each day when you get up to shave. For Harry Reid to talk about classlessness knowing what he knew was coming, is illustrative of the sham that this whole thing last night was.
“Knowing what he knew was coming.” “Sham.” “Planted audience.” “This was not a memorial service for Paul Wellstone.” “Disgusting.” Twenty million listeners.
On November 23, eighteen days after the election, Tim Russert interviewed Limbaugh on CNBC.
RUSSERT: Mark Penn, Bill Clinton’s former pollster, said that 69 percent of Americans had heard about that memorial service before they voted all across the country.
LIMBAUGH: Oh, gotta say something about that.
RUSSERT: Go ahead.
LIMBAUGH: It was only broadcast on C-SPAN. How did they hear about it, Tim? CBS, ABC, Washington—there wasn’t a whole lot of coverage of that in the mainstream press the next day.
RUSSERT: Talk radio?
LIMBAUGH: I think so. That’s my point.
I don’t know if Limbaugh can really take all the credit for the way coverage of Wellstone’s memorial was cynically distorted for partisan political advantage. But the misinformation certainly reverberated into the mainstream. In fact, within hours of Rush’s first broadcast about the memorial, CNN’s Tucker Carlson was repeating and embellishing the story on Crossfire.
The political world is still reeling tonight from yesterday’s nauseating display in Minnesota, where a memorial service for the late Senator Wellstone was hijacked by partisan zealots and turned into a political rally. Republican friends of Senator Wellstone were booed and shouted down as they tried to speak.
Tucker had clearly seen a different memorial than I had. By that, I don’t mean he had a different perspective on the same memorial. Because at my memorial, there was no open mic where friends could get up and reminisce about the dearly departed. No, the one I went to had a stage in the middle of a basketball arena with a preprinted program listing all the speakers, who had been chosen in advance by the families.
What exactly had Tucker been talking about? I called him six months later and asked.
“Did I say that?” he said.
“Uh-huh,” I grunted in affirmation.
Tucker seemed genuinely embarrassed. “Gee, I try to always tell the truth, because I know people are watching and can catch me.”
“No, Tucker,” I assured him, “I know you tell the truth because it’s the right thing to do.”
Tucker seemed genuinely perplexed. He told me he had a tape of the memorial that he had watched, and he couldn’t understand how he had gotten it so wrong. Still, he wanted me to know, he had found the memorial very disturbing—especially Rick Kahn’s speech.
“Does it make any difference to you that he lost his best friend, his best friend’s wi—”
“I don’t know if he was his best friend. I heard he wasn’t his best friend.”
This was a wrinkle I hadn’t come across. If Kahn wasn’t Wellstone’s best friend, but instead a cynical political operative, then maybe his speech really was just a shameless bid for votes rather than a misguided expression of raw pain. But then I thought back to the memorial, when George Latimer introduced Kahn with a quote from the acknowledgments in Wellstone’s book, The Conscience of a Liberal: “Everyone should be blessed to have one friend like you. There is no one person outside my family that I admire and love so much.” I wondered if Tucker had seen that on his tape of the memorial service.
Tucker was still stumped about why he’d said the thing about Republicans being shouted down as they tried to speak. He said