• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 700 0

Mark. Caldwell probably saw them on Fox, although the same clips were played on CNN and MSNBC. The right wing’s story line played to the mainstream media biases of sensationalism, negativity, and laziness. Once the right wing had created its myth about what had happened, it became a lot easier to report the distortion than to report the truth. A journalist would just have to read a couple of op-ed pieces and watch the clips on TV, and he’d have his story. That’s a lot easier than watching the tape of an emotionally wrenching four-hour memorial service or talking to people who were actually there.

Pretty soon, the story became the story. Predictions about the election noted the public reaction to the memorial myth rather than what happened at the memorial itself. The day before the election, Jeff Greenfield of CNN, one of the smartest and most thoughtful political commentators on the air, said, “Republican senators who had come there were booed by the crowd. It was a crowd of thousands.”

When I called Jeff that day, he told me, “Al, the memorial backfired.”

If the Wellstone people, or, worse, the Democratic Party, had tried to use the memorial for political gain, then, yes, it could be said to have backfired. Greenfield had bought the spin.

Jeff Blodgett told Mpls/StPaul Magazine about how the Democrats’ dastardly plan had backfired so badly. “We had already been to five funerals. . . . We weren’t thinking straight. If we had been preparing for a televised event that large numbers of voters would be watching, we would have scripted every minute. We would have known what every person was going to say.”

“The ultimate irony,” Wellstone field director Dan Cramer said, “was that what would later be billed as a political event came about because we didn’t think about it in political terms.”

It was the right, not the left, that tried to cheapen Paul Wellstone’s life by dishonoring his death. It was the right-wing media, not the friends and family who spoke at the memorial or the people who came to it, that seized on an opportunity to use a tragedy for political gain. It was Rush, and the Republican Party, and the Weekly Standard, and the Wall Street Journal, and Fox—and then it was CNN and MSNBC and all the newspapers that wrote hundreds of articles—that got it wrong. Some of them did it maliciously. Some of them just picked up the story. Some were evil, some just lazy.

Sometimes I wonder why people do what they do for a living and how they feel about their work. What is it about their work that gives them a sense of a job well done? As a comedian, I know I’ve done my job when people laugh. David Wellstone builds low-cost housing for the poor. I think he feels a real sense of accomplishment when a family can move into its own home for the first time. What do you suppose gives Rush Limbaugh that warm glow?

Maybe it’s when he gets into a real groove like he did the day after the Wellstone memorial. Maybe it was when he said:

People took the occasion of his death and hijacked his soul last night and told us what was in it. For their own personal gain. It was despicable. It was despicable. They wrenched Wellstone’s soul right out of the grave, assumed it for themselves, and then used it for their own blatant selfish personal ambitions.

Or maybe it was when he said:

What about the man who’s dead? And the wife? And the people? It was their memory last night, and their work, that was supposedly being heralded, and remembered, and memorialized. And that didn’t happen last night. It didn’t happen.

Or maybe he really got that natural high when he said:

Show me where the grief was. Where was the grief? Where were the tears? Where was the mourning? Where was the memorial service? There wasn’t any of this.

It would be kind of funny if that’s what made Rush feel great, because it made me want to cry. I was remembering the eulogies and the lives of those who had passed away. You’ve heard the right-wing story of what happened that night. Here’s an excerpt from a eulogy by David McLaughlin. His younger brother Will was Wellstone