Lies & the Lying Liars Who Tell Them_ A Fair & Balanced Look at the Right - Al Franken [84]
“Take a minute today to think of those things that might not be there tomorrow. I love my family and friends, and I leave you with no quote or words of wisdom to live by. Just these simple words: ‘I love my Dad.’ ”
William, we love you.
So you can see what Rush meant when he said, “It was despicable.” And you can see what Jeff Greenfield meant when he said the event “backfired” for the Democrats. And you can see what Chris Caldwell meant when he said that Democrats were “dancing a jig on the grave of a particularly beloved fallen comrade.”
You can see what Peggy Noonan meant when she wrote, “That memorial was a triumph of politics at the expense of the personal. At the expense of what makes you human.”
And you can see that the media has a liberal bias.
Yes, there’s a difference between the left and the right. There’s a difference between Democrats and Republicans. The day after the memorial, Rush Limbaugh told us his theory of what it is. “The point,” he said, “is that these people are committed to mind control. And we are committed to freedom. That’s the difference.”
Tucker Carlson had a different theory. “You guys really believe,” he told me, “that politics can change people’s lives.”
Well, I do believe that. Here’s a real story about how politics changed a life. When my wife Franni was eighteen months old, her father, a World War II vet who fought in the Battle of the Bulge, died in a car accident. Her mother, at age twenty-nine, was a widow with no college education and five children. They lived in a house in Maine that they’d bought through a GI loan. Franni’s mom worked in the produce department at a grocery store, which added just enough to her Social Security income to allow them to almost scrape by. Sometimes the heat was turned off or the phone was turned off. Franni’s brother went into the Coast Guard, and the four girls all got college educations, thanks in part to Pell Grants and Department of Defense student loans.
There are millions of stories like this. Almost every American family has a story like this. What the hell was Tucker talking about? I’m not saying that everything government does is good, or bad—it’s just that it’s not a game. Politics can be vicious and dirty and cruel. Or, for people like Paul Wellstone and those that loved him, it can be part of what makes us human.
At the memorial, they showed a short film about Paul’s life that captured who he was and what he believed. It had a clip from a speech. In that passionate, exuberant cadence that everyone in the arena remembered from every time they’d heard him speak, Paul said:
Politics is not about power. Politics is not about money. Politics is not about winning for the sake of winning. Politics is about the improvement of people’s lives. It’s about advancing the cause of peace and justice in our country and in our world. Politics is about doing well for people.
26
I Attend the White House Correspondents Dinner and Annoy Karl Rove, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and the Entire Fox News Team
I love the White House Correspondents Dinner. I’ve performed there twice. In 1994, it was the scene of my greatest triumph. (Buy Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot for details.) In 1996, Newt Gingrich almost slugged me. (Buy the paperback edition of Rush.)
This year we were at war, so instead of the usual comedian, the entertainment was Ray Charles. Judging from this year and from 1999, when Aretha Franklin sang, the Correspondents Association has decided that it’s bad form to have a comedian during a war or an impeachment.
I came as a guest of U.S. News & World Report, and I was very excited. Three thousand people in tuxes and gowns (except the generals and admirals, who were in dress uniform) were gathered in the Washington Hilton ballroom. I thought of renting a four-star general uniform from a costume house in New York and wearing that, but, again . . . we were at war.
So there are all these senators and