Wellstone: a motive for murder

To pipe up about the Wellstone deaths as part of a conspiracy is to relegate oneself to the rear of the hall these days. What, after all, could the motive have been? It was by no means clear that Paul Wellstone would have won the election.

And looking forward, it was predictable that a stalwart stand-in like Walter Mondale would be found. Murder made no sense, so why run around like a headless chicken?

We now have a motive.

The Star Tribune this morning reported on absentee ballots. Because of the timing of Wellstone's death, absentee ballots figured to be the decisive margin in the Coleman/Wellstone contest.

Since Wellstone crashed three days after the state's absentee ballots were mailed out, and the election was only 9 days later, state law required that votes for Wellstone be cast aside. Which, in the close election it was shaping up to be, could easily have provided the margin of victory.

As it was, 11,381 votes for Paul Wellstone were declared null. Several thousand others were "revoted," with the presumable lion's share going to Mondale. But those 11,381 vanished down a hole.

I am not charging a conspiracy. There is no evidence a crime was committed. We don't know why the plane went down a mile or so from the Eveleth airport runway, nose first. Perhaps a propeller hit a duck. Perhaps a wing iced up.

But it is no longer logical to claim that there was no motive for murder. Wellstone was the biggest thorn nationwide in the opposition's side. He represented a segment of the opposition that was politically anathema to the administration -- the part that is courageous enough to speak truth to power. A world without Wellstone is a more manageable world for them.

Second, there was the chance to alter the election results by 11,381 votes. That would have meant the world in Florida, or in any close election, as this contest was shaping up to be, before the sky collapsed yet again on the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.

In the meantime, there is an accepted rule among civilized nations worldwide. When the leader of the opposition dies mysteriously and violently a few days prior to an election, an inquest is held to ensure that no law has been broken, and that no misperceptions persist.  

Ours is a civilized nation, so without question, such an inquest will be conducted here.

A party designed to lose

One of the sharper observers of politics and the agony of democracy is Larry Jacobs of Saint Paul. [Disclosure: Larry is a very cool friend.]

In this essay he suggests that the well-flogged canard that the Wellstone memorial service was cunning and calculated was exactly wrong.

The responsibility for this decisive event lies not with the much-maligned Rick Kahn but with the DFL organization and its lack of strategic intelligence.

More time and thought was spent on the details of seating arrangements, podium placement and musical selection than on the most fundamental aspect of the memorial -- its content. The memorial's flaw was not (as its critics charged) that the DFL tried to sneak through a partisan event in the guise of a memorial, but just the opposite.

However, in his analysis, Jacobs details just how badly -- incompetently may be right word here -- Minnesota's DFL party has been in recent campaigns, and suggests that if they don't get it together soon, and look outside their cozy inner ranks for insight and intelligence, it may be wrap time for a remarkable tradition.

The Fisking of Garrison Keillor

This link, to The Poor Man, examines the evisceration of The Old Scout in the wake of his anti-Coleman letter in Salon this week. It could have been an eviceration of me, if anyone gave two hoots about what pisses me off. Envy aside, here is my response:

What turns me off is not the fisking -- though it is a cowardly way to disagree with someone.

It is the limitlessness of the new way of debating. In will-to-power politics, the person who wins is the person who will say anything.

I think this was how Bush beat Gore -- Bush was willing to make any statement at all about the tax cut or Social Security. Somehow he knew that if he pronounced it baldly enough, it would go unchallenged.

It is the certitude that creates fear in people, and sends a shiver of helplessness even through patriots.

I am a St. Paulite, too, and I am both jarred by, yet recognize Keillor's despair at the death of comity in public dialog. Read his letters, if you can find them.

They sound like he is drunk, which is a remarkable let-down from this immaculately controlled figure.

But he isn't drunk -- it's the misery talking.

Seeing what is happening in the country,  I understand the 1950s better, when the will to power trumped everything, and no one could stand up to its force.

Interesting that Keillor, with all the support he must get from the other side of the aisle, thought to raise his fist.
 

What Would Jesus Drive?

The New Republic has a neat essay this week on efforts by the Evangelical Environmental Network (I did not know there was such a group) protesting Chevrolet's sponsorship of a Christian rock tour. You don't expect Christians to think twice about gas economy and the impact big cars have on, say Middle East politics. It was nice.

What has been striking me all week is how Democrats have ceded the religious mindset to their opposition. Now we are all furrowing our foreheads and wondering What do we do now?

It appears to be the choice of many of my progressive brother and sister weblogs (Media Whores Online, Free Pie, Rittenhouse Review, Tad Barlow, Cooped Up, and numerous others) to shut down until those paralyzed foreheads unknit.

Well, it may be a while. If you ask me, under the current set of stars, the Democrats as they are currently constituted are forever screwed:

• They are on the dark end of the campaign financing stick. Remember how well we did with soft money under Clinton?
• The media is massed against them (even as they are blamed for the media being liberal (hey, now my forehead is furrowing)). (Stop the parentheses!)
• "Liberal" is forever a pejorative term to about 60% of the population.

Whattaya know, the Death Star was fully operational all along.

So what does that leave? Death, that's what. So why don't we, as death with its gnarly fingers parts the curtain, do what dying entities through time immemorial have done.

Let's get religion.

Why don't we become the party of justice, and mercy, and atonement? I mean, we sort always have seen ourselves that way. But correctness and sectarian propriety prevented us from saying so upfront. And our intellectual vanity. And, uh, the fact that half of us are atheists.

Still and all ...

The heck with that. It is wrong that Republicans drape war, and despoliation, and favoritism to the rich, in the fabric of Christianity. That Christianity is a Pharisaical tread which any true and devout believer -- of Christianity, of Judaism, of Islam, or Buddhism -- knows in his or her heart to be false, and vain, and begging for a lightning bolt, right in the unfurrowed (because placid and smug) forehead.

Better call that Christianism, a politically deformed version of the teachings of Jesus. The equivalent of Islamist to Islam.

I understand that Pat Robertson got his start in the ministry from a guy who preached that Jesus wants us to be rich -- well, Pat Robertson, anyway. That is so much baloney, I don't know what to say.

We should say so,and we should say so not ironically, as from the lips of nonbelievers -- but from the impassioned voices of people who believe the teachings of the great religions, and are calling false prophets on the carpet.

I was raised Catholic, and I know what the teachings of Jesus are on justice to workers, on kindness to the afflicted, on forbearance,on overcoming miscommunication, and on the ultimate destiny of the meek and the poor.

It begins with this notion, in the story of the Rich Young Man, who asked Jesus what he could do to follow. Jesus told him to sell everything. The Rich Young Man, being normal, never came around again. This is the story Pat Robertson has tried to glide around.

It is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said, than it is for a camel to fit through the eye of a needle.

Yet our government is a kind of temple to the acquisition and maintenance of wealth -- or, as President Bush calls it, freedom.

Imagine the Jesus who threw the moneychangers out of the temple countenancing the Bush tax cut.

Imagine Jesus not kicking the crap out of Pat Robertson ... or Jerry Falwell with his obscene disparagings of Muslim men and women ...

Or Bush himself, who cited Jesus as his favorite political philosopher, then schemed to lure the entire world into an attack on a decrepit third-world nation. (I mean Iraq, but Afghanistan had problems too.)

We need to go way back and remember where we left our political souls, back before we doomed ourselves with fast money, shiny shoes, and hearty handshakes.

It means going pedal to the metal, all out. We aren't going to be in business another three years if we keep doing as we have been. 

Be the truth and justice party. Hold a light to the lies and betrayals of the opposition. Raise up candidates who can move our hearts as well as our ad rotations.

Remember, everything is at stake. To say we are the most "religious nation on earth," as some polls do, misses the point. What do we do with our faith? How are we perceived? As friends to the world, or masters of it?

And if we lose then, we agee to clear the deck, and fall back to the role of Greek chorus to power, following the president around and rattling our beads.

Unable to prevent the bold protagonist from reaching too far, we warn, we cite the ancient law, and we weep when the golden city is reduced to rubble.

And say, it was the will of the gods.

Interesting Problem

I just found out this week that I am diabetic. Which is no fun in and of itself, since it means that food is now toxic to me in any volume greater than a half a handful, but I found out that the diabetes, maybe, is why I've steadily been losing my hearing since August.

The diabetes destroys the circulatory system which cuts off the blood supply to nerves, like the left auditory nerve, which replaces the bright, light world of sound with a loud, low whirring sensation, and the feeling I am stuck without a stick of chewing gum in the elevator between the 83rd and 84th floors of a very tall building.

But, bad as this sounds, it does beat the other theory, which is that the brain tumor that caused me to have a stroke 4 years ago, and then stopped growing, is on the move again, and masticating my inner left ear.

So, sometimes, bad news is good news. Three days on, I've already lost four pounds, which is a lot for me -- though there is still a lot of me.

Wish me well, as I do you.