I haven’t beaten up on Ted Rall much recently. But I don’t want to get out of practice. Here’s his latest mind-boggling, retch-inducing spew. It’s already been discussed by the sub-intellects at Democratic Underground, but now the head moron, the supreme leader of the flying idiotarian monkeys, is on the case.

George W. Bush and his henchmen stole the presidency.

Lie Numero Uno

They threw thousands of innocent people into prison without even charging them with a crime.

Lie Numero Dos. Which “thousands of innocent people” would those be? Can he provide a cite. Or even a description? And how does he know they’re innocent?

They’re gearing up to invade Iraq without bothering to come up with a substantial justification.

I’ll be generous. This isn’t a lie. It’s just an idiotic and uninformed opinion. What he really means is that he doesn’t agree with (or more likely) doesn’t understand the stated justification. But to say they “haven’t bothered” is to ignore all the speeches made over the past few weeks in a futile attempt to convince idiotarians like Mr. Rall, who apparently lack the perspicacity, by their own admission, to even understand that they were at least making the attempt.

Now some Democrats and progressive Americans are asking the unthinkable about an administration they increasingly believe to be ruled by thugs and renegades. Did government gangsters murder the United States’ most liberal legislator?

Unthinkable is a good word. It accurately represents the non-thought processes that would be necessary to result in the typing of such a sentence.

Talk of foul play began hours after Senator Paul Wellstone’s plane went down over northeastern Minnesota on Oct. 25, killing him, his wife and his daughter, along with three staffers and two pilots. “Please tell me I’m wrong to be thinking what I’m thinking,” a self-described “liberal Democrat” from St. Paul e-mailed me that evening. “I want to be wrong, but I wouldn’t put it past the Republicans- -THESE Republicans–to sabotage Wellstone’s plane.” Internet discussion groups and e-mail in-boxes quickly echoed her sentiment.

Well, if unnamed “self-described ‘liberal Democrats’ from St. Paul” and denizens of Internet discussion groups (you know, like the ones that think that not only was Paul Wellstone assassinated, but that Elvis did it from his secret command post on the Moon?) are concerned about it, it must be something to be taken seriously. At least if you’re a journalist of the lofty calibre of Ted Rall.

People expressed similar fears after Commerce Secretary Ron Brown and Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan (news – web sites) died in plane crashes–the latter weeks before facing an election challenge from future Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft (news – web sites)–but the whispers of assassination following the Wellstone tragedy are more widespread and gaining mainstream currency far beyond the usual conspiracy nuts.

Of course, Ron Brown died under extremely strange circumstances. He went down in what was described as “the storm of the century,” which was later found to be a light drizzle, and his body was found with a hole in its skull and X-rays of lead chaff that was physically difficult to reconcile with a plane crash, but was easy to reconcile with a gun to the head after apparent survival of same. This is, of course, ignoring the fact that the X-rays were destroyed, or at least disappeared under mysterious circumstances, and the few military officers with the integrity to point this out were drummed out of the service…

Does Mr. Rall have any equivalent situation to relate here, a few days after the crash?

I didn’t think so.

The Minnesota senator’s death certainly comes at an auspicious time for the Republican Party. Wellstone’s challenger, former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman, was considered by both parties to be the GOP’s best chance for recapturing the 50-to-49 Democratic U.S. Senate. Wellstone had been considered vulnerable for two reasons: his principled opposition to Bush’s Iraq war resolution (the Senate voted 99-to-1 in favor) and a strong Green Party candidacy sure to siphon off leftie votes. Bush was so anxious to silence the Senate’s most liberal voice (Mother Jones magazine called him “the first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. Senate”) that he personally recruited Coleman to run against him. Bush then campaigned furiously against Wellstone, attending two fundraisers which raised over $2.3 million–more than he raised for any other Republican candidate, including his brother Jeb.

So let me get this right, Ted. Wellstone, by your own admission in the paragraphs above, was vulnerable to his Republican challenger, so the evil (“unelected”) Bush Administration decided to rub him out?

Republicans resorted to Nixon-style dirty tricks in the Coleman campaign. Coleman called Wellstone “extremist” and implied he was a communist.

How did he do that, Ted? Can you provide at least a quote, if not a cite?

GOP workers phoned senior citizens to tell them that Wellstone was plotting to take away their Social Security (news – web sites).

“News – web sites”? Is that the best you can do to buttress your slander? This is century twenty-one, Ted. You ought to at least provide a specific URL.

They called members of the National Rifle Association to tell them that Wellstone was plotting to take away their guns.

Is that a false charge, Ted? What was the Senator’s position on guns?

They even ran newspaper ads depicting gruesome photos of late- term abortions.

Why is that dirty politics, Ted? Was the Senator pro-life, or did he support late-term abortions? If the latter, why is it so horrible to display the consequences of his position?

Despite the money and sleazy tactics being used against him, recent polls showed Wellstone beginning to pull ahead. With Election Day looming on Nov. 5, many analysts were predicting a Wellstone victory and continued Democratic dominance of the Senate.

Ahhh, now he’s changing his story. Now Wellstone is winning. Note again that he provides no URLs or cites–we are just supposed to take the word of the immaculate and unimpeachable Ted Rall.

Perhaps, the thinking goes, someone in the Bush regime decided Wellstone had to go.

“So the thinking goes”? That’s a generous description of it. I would say more, “so the paranoid fantasizing goes.” But that’s just me. I don’t have the brilliance of Ted Rall.

If Wellstone’s plane was sabotaged, it wouldn’t be the first time that a political figure met his end in the friendly skies. A plane carrying Chinese leader Mao Tse-Tung’s hand-picked successor, Lin Biao, crashed under mysterious circumstances en route to Moscow during 1971. The Chinese later claimed that Lin was defecting to the Soviet Union after a botched coup attempt against Mao; guilty or not, most historians believe that his plane was probably sabotaged. On March 3, 2001, a phosphorus bomb blew up a Thai Airways Boeing 737-400 minutes before the country’s new prime minister, Thaksin Shinawatra, was set to board the jet.

Note his choice of precedent. Because a totalitarian dictator may have decided to off his rival (assuming, again being extremely generous, that Mr. Rall isn’t outright lying, since once again he is unable or unwilling to provide even a cite), obviously this isn’t beyond the evil Bush Administration.

Many American politicians–mostly Democrats and liberal Republicans–have died in aviation disasters. Senator John Tower (R-TX) Senator John Heinz (D- PA), Congressman Mickey Leland (D-TX); Ron Brown and Mel Carnahan are among those who have been killed in airplanes since 1989. “Elected officials expose themselves every day to these kinds of risks as they travel across their states or districts,” Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL) commented, noting the perils of frequently using small aircraft.

Anyone who has traveled on what is euphemistically called “civil aviation” can tell horror stories about sudden drops, lurches and violent thunderstorms. But it’s also true that security at the regional airports and small terminals at major airports used for such flights–Wellstone flew out of St. Paul–is more easily penetrable than that at JFK and LAX. It would hardly be impossible to sabotage a plane chartered for an inconvenient politician.

No, and of course it would also hardly be impossible to slip a lethal mickey into his drink. But much less difficult. We’ll just ignore the fact that small aircraft like this have much poorer safety records than commercial airlines, and that anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time in them is more likely to thereby die, and that campaigning politicians (given their limited funding, which must be conserved for television ads rather than commercial airline tickets, and their limited time, which must be conserved for handshake time with potential or actual constituents, rather than minimum-wage cretins in airline-security lines) do exactly that.

According to aviation consultant Robert Breiling, the plane that carried Senator Wellstone–the King Air A-100 “business turboprop,” also known as a Beech King Air–is remarkably safe, with 25 percent fewer fatal accidents than other planes in its class. Warren Morningstar, spokesman for the Airline Owners and Pilots Association, says: “It’s a great airplane.”

Note that he compares it to “other planes in its class.” If you want safe travel, that’s not a great class to be in.

So why did Wellstone’s go down? Weather is the lead suspect. Freezing temperatures, which can be severe in Minnesota, came early this year. “This airplane would typically be equipped with de-ice equipment but there are icing conditions that are beyond the measure of any equipment to remove,” Morningstar notes.

Local pilots, however, doubt that ice was a problem. “There was little ice. It was normal. We see it all the time,” said Don Sipola, a flight instructor with 25 years experience.

“Black boxes”–a flight data recorder and a cockpit voice recorder–are often crucial for discovering the cause of airplane crashes. According to Federal Aviation Administration (news – web sites) spokesman Paul Takemoto, the plane was required to be equipped with both. Contradicting the FAA, Carol Carmody, acting chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board (news – web sites), which is investigating the site of the crash, says that the plane apparently carried neither. Were the black boxes lost or were they never aboard? Someone may know, but thus far no one’s saying.

Note again that he provides no cites other than “news – web sites.”

But now, after setting the stage for his conspiracy theory, and setting the paradigm in the minds of readers dim enough to take him seriously, he backtracks in a feeble (and laughable) attempt to regain some semblence of credibility.

Odds are overwhelmingly in favor of a natural or mechanical explanation for the crash of Paul Wellstone’s plane. For one thing, substitute candidate Walter Mondale is expected to retain Wellstone’s senate seat for the Democrats. That’s predictable. The victories of last-minute substitute candidates like Missouri’s Jean Carnahan in 2000 and New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg this year provide ample evidence that losing a candidate needn’t mean losing an election. If anything, Mondale is more likely to win than Wellstone was, notwithstanding the inadvertent prediction of China’s president Jiang Zemin (news – web sites), who offered his “deep condolences for the loss of the Senate.”

The fact that we’re having this discussion at all is a symptom of the polarizing effect that Bush and his top dogs have had on the United States since assuming office and even more so in the hard-right free-for-all that followed the Sept. 11 attacks. Presidents routinely cause their political detractors to take offense, but one would have to go back to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempt to stack the U.S. Supreme Court (news – web sites) or Richard Nixon’s wiretapping and enemies list to find another American leader who crossed the line of acceptable discourse as extremely as George W. Bush has done.

See, he isn’t asking these questions because he really believes it possible–it’s just because that spawn of the devil, George W. Bush obviously has no scruples.

Ronald Reagan (news – web sites) may have been a hard line conservative, but had Wellstone died during his watch you wouldn’t have heard liberals asking whether the Gipper had had him offed. Bush is different.

Ooooohhhh, that’s good. Unusual for Ted, because he’s usually much less subtle. He pretends that he thinks that this is above Reagan, so that he might be able to pull in another two percent of the morons who are wavering, and like Reagan.

Asking mailmen to spy on ordinary Americans, creating military tribunals for anyone deemed an “enemy combatant,” locking prisoners of war in dog cages, spending a decade’s worth of savings in six months, allowing journalists to die rather than provide them with help in a war zone, smearing Democratic politicians as anti- American, invading sovereign nations without excuse–these are acts that transgress essential American reasonableness. A man capable of these things seems, by definition, capable of anything.

Well, yes, and any crimes so egregious obviously don’t require any explanation, or citation. It should simply be accepted without question that George Bush is guilty of them, and therefore it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone (at least anyone with Ted Rall’s brilliance) that W would have Paul Wellstone whacked, even though he was recovering in the polls. Don’t want to take any chances, you know, with the Senate in the balance, and the opportunity to get some Supreme Court justices that will allow him to lock up everyone who might stand his way of bestriding the earth, like the Father Of All Caesars.

Ironically, Paul Wellstone would have been the last person to suspect Republicans of such a monstrous crime. One of his final acts in the Senate was to praise the career of retiring Senator Jesse Helms, his ideological counterpart on the Right. Like most idealists, Wellstone thought the best of humanity, that people would do the right thing if the choices were properly and clearly explained. Wellstone wouldn’t have wanted to believe that he was assassinated.

Neither do I. So let’s hope those black boxes turn up.

Awwwwww, isn’t that sweet.

Ted is torn. He doesn’t want to believe that our President would assassinate a political opponent. He hopes that his slanderous insinuations aren’t true.

Almost as much as he hopes that he persuades the mental deficients who take him seriously will believe that they are…

[Update the next morning]

Several have commented that there were links in the article that might in theory support Ted’s statements, so I’ll retract my complaints that he doesn’t provide URLs. But considering the source, I’m not going to waste my time going to look at them. I already spent far too much time on this subject.

Another point that I missed, but shouldn’t have, was that Senator Heinz was a Republican, not a Democrat. I’ll assume that Ted was just too dumb to realize this (almost always a safe assumption), and that it’s not an outright lie.

It’s easy to get confused about it because (if I recall correctly) his widow became a big-time Democratic donor with her inherited fortune. Great way to honor her husband’s memory.

[Update in the afternoon]

For an even better critique of Ted’s nonsense, see what Bill Hobbs did to him.

[Another update, at 3:45 PM PST[

Commercial pilot Stephen Quick appropriately chastises me for dissing the safety of chartered King Airs:

Corporate and charter aircraft of this type have a safety record that is equivalent to the airlines. It also has the unfortunate experience of being lumped in with the private pilots (like Carnahan’s son, who was doing the flying in that accident). Most of us hold the same pilot certificate, Airline Transport Pilot, that the pilots at Southwest, American, United, Delta, Continental, etc. hold.

He has further pertinent comments.