Please Don't Turn This Memorial Into A Paul Wellstone Type Event......

don't give the right wing talk machine more ammunition to criticize.

"event."

The right wing exploitation of it was disgusting.

:thumbsup:

I guess its inevitable that whatever is done here tonight - the right wing will criticize it anyway. Sorry.

in their familiar disgusting way.

....it was so fine we lost Wellstone's Senate seat. It was a public relations disaster which cost us all the sympathy over Wellstone's tragic death.

to shill?

That's disgusting.

...carrying Wellstone signs, booing Trent Lott, and turning a memorial service into a political rally. Maybe the media spun it the wrong way, but the fact is it should never have been allowed to happen. Had Walter Mondale walked up to the podium and said these words, he would have won the election by at least 10 points:

"Let me remind everyone why we are here today. I know many of you are very anxious to pick up Sen. Wellstone's torch and carry on his fight. There will be plenty of time for that. However, this is not a political rally, this is a memorial service and we all need to show respect to those who have taken the time to come today to grieve the loss of a great public servant and a good friend. Please do show some restraint at this time. Thank you."

The media may have spun it the wrong way, and maybe what we saw on television isn't indicative of what truly happened, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is what people PERCEIVED happened. Mondale was way ahead of Coleman in that Senate race until that memorial service which people interpreted as a partisan political rally. Those signs should never have been allowed in there and the booing of Trent Lott was inexcusable and should not have been allowed to get by. It was a total public relations disaster.

What signs are you talking about?

Mondale wasn't in the race until the day after the memorial service.

Period.

read Al Franken's account of the memorial in his book "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them"

Back off. You don't know a damn thing about what really happened. :mad:

People perceived that the memorial service became a partisan political rally. Whether or not that's true is irrelevant. Signs should have NEVER been allowed into the service hall and nobody, not even Trent Lott, should be booed when speaking at a memorial service.

should check their values at the door? For the sake of the right wing noise machine?

You must be joking.

Memorials are for the living and to celebrate a life. Why should people who have ALWAYS been for something stop being for that just because it's a memorial? I don't understand that.

"Political" means what the polity, the people, do together.

TRUTH matters, that's ALL that matters. AND YOU DON'T KNOW THE DAMN TRUTH.

and I was there too.

Let's remember that one of the things the right wing noise machine tried to make a issue of was the closed captioning on the screens placed around Williams Arena. Sarah Janacek claimed that the crowd was being told when to laugh or applaud because, of course, the people coding the capitioning tell the crowd "laughter" or "clapping". She has denied saying this for years, but Franken did call her out on this both on the air and in one of his books.

We could have sat in solemn silence all through the event and the right wing would have found something to make an issue about.

Instead refer them to Al Franken "Lies, and the Lying Liars who tell them"

"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." p. 200

I've never read Franken's book (although it's on my someday-when-I-get-to-it list), so there's way I would have thought of that reference.

Having been at the actual event, and living through the aftermath, the wounds are still raw, even after all these years.

Right after the event, I spent what now seems like WEEKS on DU fending off the lies about the Memorial that all too many DUers had swallowed whole from the MSM. It wore me out and I really don't have the patience anymore to walk through that again, it's just too damn painful.

You can't imagine what it felt like; to be in that space, so charged up and full of grief and joy all mixed together, and leaving on an exquisite high -- feeling like all of us had given our beloved Paul a damn fine send-off.

And then by the next morning, discovering that this whole beautiful precious thing that thousands of us had shared was being ripped apart and shat upon and desecrated by soulless monsters -- it was like being stabbed in the heart.

Losing Paul was bad enough, but being confronted by the unmitigated hatred and lies after that wonderful memorial was the closest I ever hope to get to hell.

So I hope I can be forgiven for not wanting to revisit it.

sw

I still think it is better to engage people instead of just asserting "I know what I am talking about, so back off" (and shut up).

I cannot even remember what I thought at the time. I didn't concern myself too much about Minnesota or get that much news about it way down in Kansas. I was foolishly optimistic thinking that there was no way blue Minnesota would defeat a Minnesota icon like Mondale. But then again I never thought 'the body' would defeat a Minnesota icon like HHH 3.

Yes, of course it's better to engage.

However, on the subject of the Wellstone memorial, I'm just not willing to go there again. I'll just say I was there and that's not how it was, and leave it at that.

If someone tells ME I'm wrong about something that THEY witnessed/experienced, I am inclined to then shut up about it or else ask them nicely if they want to say more about it. What I don't do is persist in pushing my own interpretation of said event in the face of someone who by definition knows more about it than I do.

As for Mondale, we had no time to really get a campaign together. I was a state delegate, we had to race to pull together a formal nomination meeting in order to get him on the ballot, and after that we only had one week before the election.

And once the RW noise machine and their corporate media lapdogs got busy shredding the memorial to bits, the low-information voters were dribbling away to Coleman day after day. We still actually came close, I think we lost by only about 3-4%.

Ventura -- who had been elected governor 2 years earlier -- is a whole 'nother story. Basically, he just plain ran a totally kick-ass campaign and got lots of young people to vote for him. The other candidates looked utterly boring and dull in comparison. It's just the way it was.

Gotta go,
sw

Seriously.

And surely, implicit in your darkly humorous observation is the realization that no matter what we do they will, ah, "criticize," as you so politely understate it.

zzzZZZzzz

sigh

Seriously, I don't give a farting fuck what they think.

flying f*uck what the right wing thinks, does and says.

They were mourners. Stupid is falling for the right wing twisting every important event in our lives.

That's stupid.

It feels like a graduation.

on her feet applaudimg. Let's get mad at HER!

Maybe this is typical of memorials?

about the President! I'm just glad the police won't have to be called like at my brother's memorial.
Cheering people's life and memory is a good thing. Beats sobbing.

It's a celebration of the deceased's life and the fact that they are going to a better place.

even at a memorial .

there are many similarities.

On the bright side, none is drunk...

I'm not sure I know anyone Irish. If they have some it's all mixed up with other things.

Maybe you think they should have wailed and moaned while flailing themselves with willow branches. Or perhaps they could have held their emotion inside and wore faces of stone.

But maybe they were expressing what they were feeling in their own way. It could have been a collective sigh of relief that words of sanity were being spoken.

It's not all about you, dfk.

The slain and victims were being honored tonight. Bravery was rightly cheered and the hope for a better tomorrow could not be contained.

probably best left out. Time and place for everything and a memorial service is not that place of time.

And you can bet the mortgage that they will take advantage of this, and any opportunity.

Time to start doing the right thing.

Just because a few righties didn't like to hear some 'librul' talk is beside the point.

It was the most beautiful, moving, and inspiring gathering I've ever attended in my life.

And the slavering, howling right wing hyenas who jumped in to tear into Wellstone's corpse, and shit all over our grieving and our celebration of everything Paul stood for can fuck themselves sideways with a rusty pitchfork for all eternity.

:hug:

There was nothing wrong with the Wellstone service.

edit: meant to post in official thread

They are the Mighty Slime Machine. That is their job.

The Wellstone memorial was wonderful.

The media's hyperpartisan reaction to it was a real disappointment, however.

Otherwise, you're telling the victim to stop blaming the bullies.