Don't fly with Democratic incumbent Senators who are up for re-election.
U. S. Senator Paul Wellstone, running in a very tough campaign for reelection for a third term, was killed with his wife Sheila, his daughter Marcia and three staff aides when their plane crashed in a wooded area, two miles short of a runway on Friday, Oct. 25, in Minnesota. Today, Americans have lost not just a fine Senator but a passionate voice for justice and peace. Progressives across the land are in shock as the person many think of as the conscience of the Senate is gone.
The Kansas City Star mentioned that we've seen this movie before.
The accident that killed Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat, members of his family and three of his staff on Friday chilled political figures from Missouri, coming as it did almost exactly two years after the death of Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan.Sen. Jean Carnahan, the Missouri Democrat who now finds herself in a tough campaign against Republican Jim Talent to keep the seat she was appointed to after her husband's posthumous election, canceled an afternoon campaign event out of respect for Wellstone.
I'm confident the Republicans wouldn't pull the exact same shit twice. I wouldn't put murdering opponents past them, but it's nice to think they'd be a bit more creative in going about it.
NPR just mentioned former vice-president Walter Mondale as a candidate to take over for the late Senator Wellstone, but put it in terms of running against Republican Norm Coleman. The Green and Independence party candidates don't exist, apparently.
Heard they suspended campaigning on Friday, too. Guess after a few days of silence, they fell off the radar completely.
Atrios reminds us: ... So, when a few inhabitants of internet message boards get a bit suspicious about the death of a Democratic Senator, I don't want to hear generalizations about the paranoid left. I've been listening to the paranoid right and its conspiracy theories in mainstream media for years. Part of the reason those on the left are a bit paranoid now, aside from the fact The Other Side is in power now, is that the mainstream media has by and large failed to aggressively follow up on the many potential 'conspiracies' of this administration, as well as the very real conspiracies against the last one.
Besides, it was about one year ago that two prominent Democratic senators survived assasination attempts by someone who likely had access to the bioweapons program of our military. Still unsolved. Political assasinations - whether done by disgruntled 'lone gunmen' unconnected to the political power structure or done at the behest of those in power, directly or indirectly, are not of course impossible. ...
i think we need to dig a little deeper than the GOP for suspects. after all, they're just the mannikins in the store window. but it definitely stinks any way you look at it. i'm going to be looking at the NTSB reports very closely--assuming they're not completely whitewashed, which they probably will be. my suspicion is that certain people behind the curtain could rig something undetectable to go wrong with the plane, as easily as programming their VCR. hell, i knew a drunk former homeless guy who was an airplane repair tech who was homicidally insane, and HE could have done it in his sleep, just for entertainment...in fact i'm kinda scared he did.
Thank you for your thoughts on this story. You are so right on so many points. The official investigation was weak, at best. I think, without being a total conspiracy theorist, that Wellstone was taken out. You will have to look further than the CIA, though. THEY tried to take him out in Columbia earlier, but the plan went
sour and they had to go with a back up plan, which did not leave them with a tidy cover story. Notice that they took his family, too, since families often become troublesome in demanding better investigation and are problematic because they get press coverage. No family-no problems. Do not think that it was strictly a partisan event. Wellstone's integrity and independence was as much a problem for his own party as the opposition. It is far deeper than partisan politics.
Karell Reader