Did Ted Rall Assassinate Paul Wellstone?
Editor's Note: Below is a parody of a recent column by left-wing wacko Ted Rall. You may want to read this first.

Political soulmates of Ted Rall tried to steal the presidency. They tried to have votes counted under double standards that favored their presidential candidate, and threw out the ballots of thousands of innocent military personnel, tossing their votes into the trash can because they probably voted for the "wrong" people even though that's not a crime. They're gearing up to oppose military action against Iraq without bothering to come up with a coherent justification. Now some Republicans and sensible Americans are asking the unthinkable about a newspaper columnist they increasingly believe to be ruled by thuggish hatred and renegade insanity. Did Ted Rall or his gangsters murder the United States' most liberal legislator?

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 "conservative Republican" not from St. Paul e-mailed me that evening. "I want to be wrong, but I wouldn't put it past liberal columnists - like Ted Rall - to sabotage Wellstone's plane." Internet discussion groups and e-mail in-boxes quickly echoed his sentiment.

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

A Convenient Death
The Minnesota senator's death certainly comes at an auspicious time for Ted Rall's political 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 politically damaging 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. Rall was so anxious to support the Senate's most liberal voice (Mother Jones magazine called him "the first 1960s radical elected to the U.S. Senate") that he often has written slanderous personal attacks against Bush and the Republicans. Rall campaigns furiously in his columns for left-wingers like Wellstone, and writes columns slamming those who raise funds for Republican candidates. To see Wellstone possibly on the brink of losing must have greatly unnerved Rall.

Rall's friends, the Democrats, have resorted to dirty tricks in campaign to defeat Coleman, implying slanderously that he planned to privatize social security and that Coleman was some sort of wacko right-wing extremist.

Democrat Party ads warn senior citizens that Coleman was plotting to work with Bush to take away their Social Security, and that he was in favor of helping the National Rifle Association give everyone in America a sniper rifle. They even ran newspaper ads warning that Coleman opposed killing unborn babies while Wellstone was for it.

Despite the money and sleazy tactics being used against him, recent polls showed Coleman had a real chance to defeat Wellstone. With Election Day looming on Nov. 5, many analysts were predicting a Coleman victory would give the GOP control of the Senate. Perhaps, the thinking goes, one of the multiple competing voices of extreme irrationality shouting inside Rall's addled brain decided Wellstone had to go.

Assassination by Aviation
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.

Many American politicians - mostly Democrats and liberal Republicans - have died in aviation disasters. Senator John Tower (R-TX) Senator John Heinz (R-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.

Wherefore the Black Box?
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."

So why did Wellstone's go down? Weather is one possible explanation. 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 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, 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? Ted Rall may know, but so far he isn't saying.

A Reflection on Rall
Odds are unlikely there is 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 can help a party win an election. Ted Rall of course saw how Mel Carnahan's dying in a plane crash helped the Democrats win Ashcroft's seat and regain the Senate.

If anything, Mondale is more likely to win than Wellstone was, notwithstanding the inadvertent prediction of China's president Jiang Zemin, 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 Rall and his dogged devotion to insane left-wing conspiracy theories and hatred of all things conservative has had on the United States since his column achieved syndication and even more so since the Left started blaming America for the "root causes" of the Sept. 11 attacks. Columnists routinely cause their political detractors to take offense, but one would have to go back to, well, Ted Rall's lies about civilian casualties in Afghanistan, to find an American newspaper columnist who crossed the line of acceptable discourse as extremely as Ted Rall has done.

Maureen Dowd may be a hard line liberal columnist whose writings often make little sense, but now that Wellstone has died during her career, you don't hear conservatives asking whether the liberal Dowd had him offed to help the Democrats retain control of the Senate. Rall is different. Writing slanderous lies, siding with the enemy, smearing public officials and otherwise making stuff up at a rate that makes Michael Moore look like an amateur - these are acts that transgress essential American reasonableness. A man capable of these things seems, by definition, capable of anything.

Ironically, Paul Wellstone would have been the last person to suspect Rall of such a monstrous crime. One of his final acts in the Senate was to vote against going to war in Iraq, a position Rall supports. 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 by a left-wing columnist who agreed with him on most everything, just in hopes that the sympathy vote would propel his replacement to victory and keep the Democrats in control of the Senate.

Neither do I. So let's hope those black boxes - and a good alibi for Ted Rall - turn up.

Editor's Note: The above is a parody of Ted Rall's column and is meant as such. I have no evidence Rall had anything to do with Wellstone's death. But we must do as Rall's ideological soulmate Rep. Cynthia McKinney urged regarding another conspiracy theory that lacked evidence. To use Rep. McKinney's elegant phrasing, I am not aware of any evidence showing that the columnist Rall was personally involved in the death of Sen. Wellstone. A complete investigation might reveal that to be the case.

For more on Rall, see this.

UPDATE: Andrew Breitbart's very good piece in National Review Online is well worth the read. Breitbart takes on Rall's strange allegations and other wacky left-wing conspiracy theories. So good I wish I'd written it.