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

laughed. They wanted to type the speeches in for the closed captioning, but we
just didn't have anything.
On Monday night, our press guy said to me, "Oh my gosh—this is going to be
on TV. Should we be thinking about something?" By then, it was just kind of too
late.
So that was the huge Democratic Party conspiracy to use Paul Wellstone's death to gain
advantage in the upcoming elections. Shame on you, Ann Mulholland.
Rush said, "There was nothing sacred about this last night at all, unless the only thing
sacred to these people was the advancement of their own careers." I don't know, Rush. I'm
not sure Ann's nonprofit felt one way or the other about her involvement.
Rush really got into the story line that this was all a preplanned, calculated power
grab by the Democrats. He quoted Harry Reid saying that Gingrich's (lying) attack on Mondale
had been "classless." Rush took this one for a ride:
Senator Reid, you are the one to speak to classlessness. I mean, you obviously
know it when you see it each day when you get up to shave. For Harry Reid to talk
about classlessness knowing what he knew was coming, is illustrative of the sham
that this whole thing last night was.
"Knowing what he knew was coming." "Sham." "Planted audience." "This was not a memorial
service for Paul Wellstone." "Disgusting." Twenty million listeners.
On November 23, eighteen days after the election, Tim Russert interviewed Limbaugh
on CNBC.
RUSSERT: Mark Penn, Bill Clinton's former pollster, said that 69 percent of Americans had
heard about that memorial service before they voted all across the country.
LIMBAUGH: Oh, gotta say something about that.
RUSSERT: Go ahead.
LIMBAUGH: It was only broadcast on C-SPAN. How did they hear about it, Tim? CBS, ABC,
Washington-there wasn't a whole lot of coverage of that in the mainstream press the
next day.
RUSSERT: Talk radio?
LIMBAUGH: I think so. That's my point.
I don't know if Limbaugh can really take all the credit for the way coverage of Wellstone's
memorial was cynically distorted for partisan political advantage. But the misinformation cer-