Published on Tuesday, November 1, 2005 by the Minneapolis Star Tribune

by Susan Lenfestey

Last week marked the third anniversary of the crash that killed Paul and Sheila Wellstone, their daughter and their friends. It went by without much notice in the press, but for many of us it fell with an even heavier thud, as the number of Americans killed in Iraq rolled past 2,000.

Yet those of us who admired Paul Wellstone's courageous vote against invading Iraq, and grieve for all that was lost, are ridiculed by those on the right and told to get over it.

So it was truly bizarre to have right-wing columnist Katherine Kersten be the one to bring them up Sunday, not to mourn them, but to criticize, one more time, the memorial service that went awry.

I know that we are supposed to tone down our rhetoric and use indoor voices, so I will try to say this politely: Ms. Kersten, have you no shame?

For thousands of people, but particularly those who had to plan this service, it was a time of the most profound raw grief they'd ever known. The irony is that there was very little planning at all for the memorial, other than the sheer logistics, all done by people who had not slept, who had buried their best friends, parents, sister, colleagues the day before.

For four hours there were moving personal tributes. For 20 minutes there was one terribly misguided speech from a man's tormented heart and not his head. That speech was not vetted by strategists or by anyone else, and yes, that was a mistake.

Kersten calls the memorial a huge political miscalculation, yet in fact there was no political thinking at all. If there had been, do Kersten and her cohorts on the right, like Vin Weber, who pounced on this gaffe with partisan glee, truly think we Democrats would have been so stupid as to use such a tactic in an attempt to win votes? Blinding grief was guiding that service and nothing more.

Kersten leaps from there to scolding war protester Cindy Sheehan for doing the same, as she puts it, for using grief to achieve political goals. Well, yes, if your son was killed in a mismanaged war that was started by a president who lied about the need for that war, it does tend to make you want to hold that president politically accountable. Either that or take up arms, but the former is what we prefer in a democracy.

Then, in a classic right-wing jujitsu move, she flips all this death back on those who mourn, blaming them for using grief and "the empathy it inspires ... as a weapon to silence political opponents."

Even if it were true, is this a weapon any of us would choose?

If Kersten wants to talk about using death to silence political opponents, let's talk about how the president continues to shield himself behind the deaths of 9/11 and brand his critics unpatriotic. Or how he accuses those who question his disastrous foray into Iraq of dishonoring those who have died there. Or how he uses those deaths to justify more deaths. In this war without end, the silencing has hardly been from our side.

At the end of her heartless political attack on those who have lost loved ones and beloved leaders, Kersten asks, "In this age of frenzied partisanship, is there a space set aside for basic human decency, where politics is off-limits?"

It's a question she would do well to consider herself.