I don’t buy this bullcrap. There was actually only one even slightly political moment in the funeral, when Rick Kahn ended his tribute by exhorting the crowd to win the election for Wellstone.
Furthermore, when a man who’s running for office dies weeks before an election and it’s a man whose whole life was devoted to his political beliefs – you betcha that his funeral is the place to exhort people to honor his memory by continuing his political goals. To pretend otherwise is, well, insincere posturing.
So the Democrats are going to get us totally fucked up in twice the time of the Republicans? Thanks, I feel so much better, now. I’ll rush right out and votre for John Kerry comfortable with the knowledge that I’ve only delayed the inevitable.
Perhaps so.
But the American electorate continually amazes me in that they will vote for anyone who tells them whatever they desire to hear. When they don’t get it, that same politician comes back and tells them we tried, goshdarnit, but those dastardly bastards in The Evil Opposition ™ foiled our sincere efforts on your behalf. But, if you elect us for another term, we’ll continue to fight on your behalf for whatever it is your on about! Oh, and give us some money to do so while you’re at it.
Sorry, acsenray. Even if it were merely Kahn’s comments (which isn’t true) these were out of place at a funeral.
I was an usher at Senator John Heinz’s funeral, which was a dignified affair that included participants from both parties. There wasn’t anything in the service (conducted by John Danforth) that would have aroused partisan sniping at all.
Senator Wellstone deserved a funeral that displayed similar reverence and dignity.
In that case, cite me up. And, no, I don’t consider Rush Limbaugh or the Washington Times or Tucker Carlson or anything on Fox News to be a credible source.
Heinz didn’t die in the midst of an election. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way it is. The idea that Wellstone’s funeral should have avoided any mention of the campaign that Wellstone had dedicated his life to is simply ridiculous. Wellstone was a political man. It’s insincere to demand that his funeral be devoid of his politics.
C’mon, quit shovelling the bull-pucky. I saw most of the Wellstone funeral on C-SPAN, and was sickened by it. While it was doubtful that I would vote for a Democrat under the current partry platform, the Wellstone funeral pretty much cemented my disgust with them.
And that can be accomplished without demonizing your opposition at a funeral, and getting funeral attendees booed. Look how easy it is:
Succint, tastefull, respectfull, without being disrespectfull and outright nasty to the opposition which was in attendance.
And if some people don’t consider the New Yok Times or NBC news a “creditable source?”
Your partisan slip is showing, and there’s no reason to even talk to you, as you’ll believe only what you want to believe, and disregard anything else.
Show me an actual example of “demonizing” the opponents or “getting [someone] booed.” A transcript will do. But I won’t accept the characterizations of the event by a partisan source. The whole point was that the Republican echo-chamber used the opportunity to blow everything out of proportion (similar to the Mary Cheney flap). No, I wouldn’t characterize it as a dirty trick, but it is misleading characterization.
I’ve already said that I believe that a certain degree of political partisanship was justified at the Wellstone memorial. But show me actual “demonizing.” Yes, there were some boos by individuals in attendance, adn if Kerry felt he had to apologize for that, then that’s fine. But I don’t think you can find actual examples of one of the slated speakers actually encouraging that.
And it was a drop in the bucket compared to the travesty of Reagan’s state funeral – basically a week-long political commercial wrapped up in a big bow of insincerity.
I’m not implying that there are other things that what I’ve mentioned, but I don’t want to give specific detailed accounts about the particular areas and situations that could make it incredibly obvious who I am and where I am, just like many posters on this board prefer to remain anonymous.
If you want the Straight Dope on Wellstone’s funeral, go to Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right, by Al Franken (Penguin Group 2003), Chapter 25: “This Was *Not a Memorial to Paul Wellstone”: A Case Study in Right-Wing Lies:
The next day the Republican Noise Machine cranked into action. Vin Weber called the event a “complete, total, absolute sham,” and that dishonest and despicable meme was fertilized and sown throughout the media. Kellyanned Fitzpatrick Conway claimed that the audience was instructed by a screen when to cheer and when to jeer, like a game show audience. (Not true – but there was a monitor for closed captioning for the hearing impaired. Would you expect less at a leading liberal’s funeral?) Rush Limbaugh claimed the mourners of one of the most beloved politicians in Minnesota history were a “planted audience” and “bused in the by AFL-CIO.” Neither statement had a shred of truth in it. 20,000 mourners attended – much more than the organizers expected; the stadium was only built to hold 16,000. The booing of Trent Lott was embellished into an orchestrated mass demonstration of anti-Pub hate. Christopher Caldwell wrote in The Weekly Standard that viewers “turned on television to watch a solemn commemoration and found a rally devoted to a politics that was twisted, pagan, childish, inhumane, and even totalitarian beyond their word nightmares.” The liars just kept repeating their damned shameless arrogant lies until they became the common wisdom.
Damn them all! May their hemmhorroids resist surgery! May their tongues swell and their genitals whither! May the fleas of a thousand camels infest their pubes!
Sometimes playing for time is a smart move, and knowing you can’t get everything you want in politics is DEFINITELY smart. You sound like, “Waaaah, I can’t get everything I want all at once so I’m not gonna play with NOOObody!”
Actually, I suspect that most politicians are predominatedly motivated by vanity and ambition. After all, the great bulk of them at the national level are millionaires anyway.
Of course, campaigns can get rather expensive.
Nobody has claimed that the Democrats are lily white: indeed I understand that LBJ used highly dubious practices when he ran for Senate.
But frankly, to always claim that both parties are equally bad at anything, everything, consistently, all the time seems to me to be placing great faith in supreme coincidence. That, or the speaker has read too many articles in the faux balanced press.
Radical thought: From time to time the Democrats and Republicans will display different characteristics. You don’t have to be a partisan --or a genius-- to distinguish between awkward and not entirely appropriate conduct during a funeral and, oh, false whispering campaigns involving pedophilia as conducted by Karl Rove in a race for the Alabama Supreme Court during the 1990s.
Of course, once one party lowers the party, one would expect the other to either play catch up or innovate.
Appropos nothing, I trust that some members of this board have attended a funeral where everybody acted entirely appropriately and there were no awkward moments. I, however, have not.
Ack! Of course, once one party lowers the bar, one would expect the other to… yada yada.
Yeah, and it turns out that 'ol Chris hadn’t even watched the funeral on CSPAN: he saw clips of it on TV! Same for Tucker, prior to his oh-so-uninformed-but-nonetheless-exercised commentary. Peggy Noonan “knew” that Trent Lott got booed, though she never actually saw it; too bad she couldn’t share that little detail with her viewers. And on and on and on in the bullshit echo chamber.
Then you need to either have your eyes checked for seeing things that aren’t there, or learn how to read English.
If anything, I think I sounded like, “The Titanic is sinking, and Political Party A and Political Party B are arguing over the arrangement of the deck chairs.”
Or perhaps “false allegations” from a lefty reporter for a lefty newsource? Green cites “Many Republican operatives in Texas…” Gee, I’ll just rush right out and believe this guy, he citing anonymous people!
Well maybe. From wikipedia, "The Atlantic Monthly is an American monthly magazine that began in November 1857. It is also known as The Atlantic.
It is a literary and cultural magazine, with frequent articles in the fields of political science and foreign affairs, as well as book reviews and short stories. The magazine made the first publications of Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (on February 1, 1862), and William Parker’s the Freedman’s Story (in February and March, 1866). It has also published many of the works of Mark Twain, including one that managed to escape publication until 2001."
Today they have correspondents such as Robert Kaplan, James Fallows and P.J O’Rourke.
Hey, whaddya know, in 1998 laughing boy Christopher Caldwell (see previous post) penned an article for the Atlantic. Ah well, there goes the neighborhood.
Lefty mag my posterior. I concede, however, that it is part of the reality-based community: it invariably includes a couple of pages with descriptive statistics.
Well, this is an oversimplification of what I have said. I never said that it would only be delaying the inevitable. For example, on cleaning up the air and water (leaving aside greenhouse gas emissions), there has been great progress over the last 30 years…some of it even bipartisan. Bush has worked to slow that progress (and arguably even reverse it in some places).
Of course, if I ran the zoo, it would be run differently. But, since the two alternatives we are presented with is that Kerry runs the zoo or Bush runs the zoo, that is what we realistically have to decide between. And, there is a huge difference between these two choices.
That is why it is important to look at the actual record of what has been done.
Um no. (BTW though, I would characterize The Atlantic as a half-way mix of Harper’s and The New Yorker.)
I don’t currently subscribe to The Atlantic, but I picked up last month’s copy at a newstand. There’s a manila tinted section entitled, “Primary Sources” and “The World In Numbers”.
Primary Sources gives summaries of various policy-oriented articles: original sources are culled from the Rand Corporation (a right-of-center outfit), the Pew Internet and American Life Project, the Federal Reserve Bank of NY, yourDictionary.com (hmmm) and other members of the Great, the Good and the Wannabee.
October’s World in Numbers showed one aspect of globalization: a world map was superimposed with a graphic measure of phone call volume to and from the US. There’s lots of traffic to Europe (unsurprisingly) as well as to China, India and the Philippines (growth in Asia traffic has been huge). Relatively speaking, calls to the mideast and Africa are a trickle. Overall, the map reflects historical immigration fairly well.
(Harper’s section is more akin to The Book of Lists, IMHO)
As it happens, I was a little harsh yesterday in my characterization of the Atlantic. Still, I think it’s fair to say that it isn’t exactly The Nation and it certainly is not Mother Jones.