"I Shouted Out 'Who Killed Paul Wellstone', When After All..."

Anyone who didn't see this one coming? Show of hands, please?

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- When federal investigators released a report last month about the plane crash that killed Sen. Paul Wellstone, some members of Congress hoped it would dispel talk that his plane was sabotaged.

It didn't.

In Internet chat groups, political Web sites and the published reports of several leftist academics, conspiracy theories about Wellstone's death last October maintain a life of their own, particularly in northern Minnesota.

I've heard some of these. During the welter of pro-Hussein protests last spring, I saw lots of signs with the Wellstone picture and a simple caption: "Accident?"

In one story, Karl Rove hired a marksman to shoot down the plane with a "high powered rifle". You know the rumor comes from up north; had it originated in the Metro, the story would say "handgun carried by a permit-holder".

But I digress:

In one nasty exchange, a retired prosecutor from Duluth has threatened to take legal action against a University of Minnesota-Duluth philosophy professor who espouses the belief that the Bush White House had a hand in Wellstone's demise.

The former prosecutor, Thomas Bieter, alleges that the professor, Kennedy-assassination theorist James Fetzer, has committed "criminal defamation" by publishing articles suggesting a government coverup of the crash investigation.

Where does one contribute to this lawsuit?

The Strib continues:

When a prominent political figure dies suddenly, it isn't uncommon for rumors and speculation to spring to life....In Wellstone's case, suspicions surfaced within days of the Oct. 25 crash near the Eveleth-Virginia Municipal Airport that killed him, his wife, Sheila, their daughter Marcia, three staffers and both pilots operating the chartered Beechcraft King Air A100 airplane.

In an Oct. 28 article published on an alternative journalism Web site under the title "Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" Buffalo State College journalism professor Michael Niman wrote, "There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone."

Except that while he was a visible obstacle to the putative "draconian agenda", he was far from the most effective. Outspoken as he ws, he was a fairly marginal legislative voice. Had Tom Daschle or Barbara Boxer or Charles Schumer's planes crashed, that would have been another entire matter.

Killing Paul Wellstone would have been like passing on Adolf Hitler to rub out Ernst Röhm instead.

Of course, most Democrats are rational enough:

Rep. Jim Oberstar of Duluth, the top Democrat on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said the joint FBI and NTSB investigation has raised enough questions about the two pilots' approach in low cloud cover to put aside the theories of "conspiratorialists."

"Every allegation regarding sabotage was fully investigated, and the NTSB came up with no evidence of that," said Mary Kerr, Oberstar's press aide.

I said most:

But the cause of the crash is still far from settled in articles and Internet discussions involving Fetzer, the Duluth philosophy professor who won a $100,000 McKnight Foundation grant in 1996 for his work in the philosophy of science.

Fetzer, an ex-Marine who has published several books and papers about the JFK assassination, opened the first of six articles in the Duluth Reader Weekly about the Wellstone crash by saying, "Conspiracies are as American as apple pie."

Discounting weather, pilot error or mechanical problems in Wellstone's flight, Fetzer's articles have seized on the possibility of sabotage brought on by a futuristic electromagnetic pulse weapon that he said could have disabled the plane's computerized components.

Evidence for this, he said in an interview, was the absence of any distress call from the pilots and the odd cell-phone experience reported by St. Louis County lobbyist John Ongaro.

Ongaro, who was near the airport when Wellstone's plane went down, has dismissed the significance of his experience, in which he said his cell phone made "strange" sounds and then disconnected.

"It's not unusual for cell phones to cut out, especially in northern Minnesota," he said.

Fetzer's articles rely less on hard evidence of any kind of murder plot than on arguing that the investigators' findings don't add up.

More provocative than Fetzer's theories about how Wellstone's plane went down are his conclusions about who was responsible.

"When I suggest Republicans may have been involved," he wrote in the Reader, "I do not mean the average GOP voter. I mean the troika that runs the government, consisting of Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Donald Rumsfeld."

A White House spokesman said he had no comment about Fetzer's allegations. Fetzer's theories do not implicate Sen. Norm Coleman, R-Minn., who was running against Wellstone when he died. Two Coleman aides dismissed Fetzer's accusations privately but declined to make any public comment.

One wonders why Fetzer is alive to tell the tale.

Fetzer said he has not spoken out about the Wellstone death as a university professor but as a private citizen.

"This is not done off the top of my head," he said. "I'm not just interested in stirring up some . . . storm. I'm interested in the truth. If I can become convinced that I am mistaken about this, I will gladly accept that and sleep easier at night. Because, believe me, the implications of this are profoundly disturbing."

Yes. Kids going to UM-Duluth are in profoundly disturbed hands.

Here's the real story; Paul Wellstone was more than a political leader. He was a messiah. To his fiftysomething Highland Park followers, he was their lost youth, a one-man time-machine back to the Summer of Love, when All You Needed was Commitment. To his hordes of birkenstock-clad college supporters, he was walking proof that their entitlement-level sense of idealism never had to die. To the chattering classes, he exemplified their collective vision of what politics in Minnesota was supposed to be (which is itself an ironic juxtaposition; grassroots support for big institutional government). And to his supporters outstate, he was an example of applied idealism; he promised the pork, and delivered on plenty of it.

Wellstone, of course, protested his lionization. But he also took advantage of it; recreating Bobby Kennedy's "Poverty Tour" during his brief exploration of a run for the presidency ('96, if memory serves) was hardly a random, coincidental notion. Recreating the sixties was to Wellstone was exhuming the seventies is for KISS.

But for whatever reason, he was a secular messiah, imbued by his followers with all the attributes of He Who Has Come To Save Us.

Which is what's behind all the harebrained conspiracy theories. Because ones' messiah can not die of mundane causes; he must be sacrificed to atone for our sins, if your faith is fundamentally otherworldly; if your faith focuses on the here and now, your messiah must go out like Gandhi, or Joan of Arc, assassinated by the evil benighted enemy, those evil Bengalis or English - or Karl Rove.

Having your messiah meet a bigger-than-life end makes your own life, by association, bigger than life; you were there when they crucified your lord. You marched with Mohammed. You sat at the Lord's feet. You got on the Green Bus.

Having your messiah check out due to pilot error is like having your anointed one die by choking on a sandwich.

Posted by Mitch at June 3, 2003 06:32 AM