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

tainly reverberated into the mainstream. In fact, within hours of Rush's first broadcast about
the memorial, CNN's Tucker Carlson was repeating and embellishing the story on Crossfire.
The political world is still reeling tonight from yesterday's nauseating display in
Minnesota, where a memorial service for the late Senator Wellstone was hijacked
by partisan zealots and turned into a political rally. Republican friends of Senator
Wellstone were booed and shouted down as they tried to speak.
Tucker had clearly seen a different memorial than I had. By that, I don't mean he had a different
perspective on the same memorial. Because at my memorial, there was no open mic
where friends could get up and reminisce about the dearly departed. No, the one I went to had
a stage in the middle of a basketball arena with a preprinted program listing all the speakers,
who had been chosen in advance by the families.
What exactly had Tucker been talking about? I called him six months later and asked.
"Did I say that?" he said.
"Uh-huh," I grunted in affirmation.
Tucker seemed genuinely embarrassed. "Gee, I try to always tell the truth, because I
know people are watching and can catch me."
do."
"No, Tucker," I assured him, "I know you tell the truth because it's the right thing to
Tucker seemed genuinely perplexed. He told me he had a tape of the memorial that he
had watched, and he couldn't understand how he had gotten it so wrong. Still, he wanted me
to know, he had found the memorial very disturbing—especially Rick Kahn's speech.
"Does it make any difference to you that he lost his best friend, his best friend's wi-"
"I don't know if he was his best friend. I heard he wasn't his best friend."
This was a wrinkle I hadn't come across. If Kahn wasn't Wellstone's best friend, but
instead a cynical political operative, then maybe his speech really was just a shameless bid
for votes rather than a misguided expression of raw pain. But then I thought back to the memorial,
when George Latimer introduced Kahn with a quote from the acknowledgments in
Wellstone's book, The Conscience of a Liberal. "Everyone should be blessed to have one
friend like you. There is no one person outside my family that I admire and love so much." I
wondered if Tucker had seen that on his tape of the memorial service.