Franken-Lies-And-the-Lying-Liars-Who-Tell

Wow. Ugly. Yes, there were some buses. Robert Richman, who took care of all the
logistics for the memorial, arranged for buses for the families of those who died in the crash.
The families weren't a "planted audience." Neither was the Apple Valley High School wrestling
team, which came in on its bus because Mark Wellstone, Paul's younger son, was their
assistant coach. And yes, some unions chartered their own buses to the memorial. That's because
Paul had been fighting for unions since long before he went into politics. When he was
a young professor, he took his students to walk the picket line for striking Hormel meatpackers
in Austin, Minnesota. Oh, and some veterans' groups chartered their own buses as well,
maybe because Paul wrote legislation to help homeless vets.
By four o'clock, a full hour before the event, there were so many people at Williams
Arena that Twin Cities radio and TV had to tell people that if they hadn't already left their
homes, there was no point in coming down. On top of the twenty thousand in the main arena,
there were four thousand watching on screens in an adjacent gym, and thousands more standing
outside watching an outdoor screen on a cold Minnesota evening.
It was the largest spontaneous display of grief in memory in Minnesota. As Joe Klein
wrote in The New Yorker, "The most striking aspect of the evening was the crowd." He went
on:
Such crowds-indeed, crowds of any sort-have almost disappeared from American
public life. Most political events, particularly in this election year, consist of a candidate,
a microphone, and a few television cameras. Often there will be more people
standing behind the candidate—police officers, veterans, students, anyone
who might seem evocative or picturesque—than in front.
"Everybody knows it was a planted audience." It was as if Limbaugh and Republicans in
general couldn't believe that people cared enough about a politician and what he stood for to
actually show up. And besides, spontaneous outpouring of grief didn't fit the picture Limbaugh
was trying to paint.
Back to my bet. Lie number three. "Who was the first to come up with it?" Limbaugh
mused to his twenty million listeners. "Okay, Wellstone's plane goes down. Who was the first
Democrat whose eyebrows went up and whose eyes lit up? Said, 'Wow, what an opportunity
we've got now'? Ah, was it a call from Clinton, whose eyebrows went up and whose eyes
went up the soonest, who saw this as an opportunity? Because somebody did. Somebody
must have seen this as an opportunity for last night to have even happened."