Avoiding The Mistake Of The Wellstone Memorial

What happened to Paul Pelosi was awful. No one should be attacked by a person with a hammer in their own house. There are a lot of questions as to exactly what went on, but for the moment I am going to avoid them.

The media and many in the Democrat Party have used the attack to condemn the Republicans for ‘hate speech’ which they deem responsible for the attack. But let’s look at some of the recent statements and actions of Democrats.

In June 2018, CNN reported:

The California Democrat (Maxine Waters) and vehement critic of President Donald Trump made the comments on Saturday, first at a rally in Los Angeles and later in a television interview. The comments, which come after several Trump administration officials have been recently protested at restaurants, have raised fresh questions about the state of American political discourse and were seized on by Trump for political gain.

“Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up. And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents,” Waters said at the Wilshire Federal Building, according to video of the event.

Was that hate speech? When Steve Scalise was shot by someone who worked on the Bernie Sanders campaign, was that hate speech?

Politicizing the Paul Pelosi attack is risky on many levels. There are too many unanswered questions about the attack–why were the security cameras turned off, how did the attacker get into a community with its own security force, why didn’t the security system react, why was the glass broken from the inside and the fact that the attacker was an illegal alien with no conservative political ties.

Democrats would do well to remember the Wellstone Memorial–not one of their finer moments.

In 2002, The New York Post reported:

WHAT possessed them? How could Minnesota’s Democrats have been so foolish as to turn a memorial meeting for eight people tragically killed in a plane crash into a campaign rally for the United States Senate?

The Paul Wellstone memorial pep rally will be recorded as one of the supreme mistakes in recent political history – an entirely avoidable and unnecessary fiasco.

Just how big a fiasco? Jesse Ventura, the state’s independent governor, said he felt “violated” by the four-hour event. Ventura said he was considering the appointment of a non-Democrat to fill out the remainder of Wellstone’s Senate term, which lasts until the beginning of the new year.

That’s very significant. Why? Because the U.S. Senate will be meeting again after Election Day in a lame-duck session that will last four weeks or so. If Ventura’s lame-duck appointment were to line up with the Republicans, he would throw them control of the Senate for the first time since 2001.

Turning a tragedy into a political event can easily backfire. The Democrats need to be very careful in handing the attack on Paul Pelosi. (Just as a side note–Ted Kennedy was supposed to be on the airplane with Paul Wellstone, but decided at the last minute not to take the plane.)

The Hate Group Supposedly Naming The Hate Groups

The following video was posted on YouTube on September 12th:

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has been linked to two shootings in Washington. The shooting at the Family Research Council in 2012 was linked to the SPLC having declared them a hate group and there were some questions as to whether the gunman who shot Steve Scalise was influenced by the SPLC. At any rate, when we start declaring organizations hate groups, we need to be careful. The problem with declaring groups hate groups or speech hate speech is that it involves very subjective judgement on the part of the person making the declaration.

The SPLC has every right to exist and state their views. It is the responsibility of those who hear those views to do their own research and draw their own conclusions. As Dr. Swain noted, the SPLC has done nothing for the poor. So what is their actual purpose? Based on their past performance, it appears that their only goal is to create problems between races rather than to solve them.

The Letter

CNS News reported yesterday that Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.) and 153 other House of Representative members sent a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius asking that she suspend a controversial rule that mandates that all insurance providers cover contraception for free.

This is the link to a copy of the letter with all the signatures, scalise.house.gov.

The letter begins:

“As pro-life Members of Congress, we are writing to voice our strong opposition to your final decision on the rule for mandatory contraceptive, sterilization, and abortifacients coverage in the individual and group health insurance market,” the February 6 letter said.

The letter concludes:

In your response to this letter, we request that you provide us specific details on the process followed in the reading and evaluating of the public comments submitted. Additionally, in light of the concerns mentioned, we respectfully request that you suspend the final rule until you can ensure that both employers and individuals are afforded their constitutionally protected conscience rights.”

The problem with conscience rights should not be a surprise to anyone who followed the debate on Obamacare. The surprise is that this ruling came in a year when President Obama is running for re-election. I don’t know if he didn’t understand the uproar it would cause or if he planned to use the mandate to energize his liberal base. Either way, I think it is encouraging that 154 Representatives of both political parties signed the letter.

The article at CNS News concludes:

New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan said that the mandate would force people of faith to violate their consciences and the teachings of their church, violating their First Amendment rights.

“Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience,” Dolan said in a video message released Jan. 23.

“This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.”

Obamacare is an assault on both the U. S. Constitution and American people of faith. Hopefully it will be struck down by the Supreme Court later this year. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is not an elected official, and this mandate was not passed by Congress. I think it is time to look at who is currently writing the laws in America.

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