Rightbloggers scour Kennedy funeral for Anti-Obamacare ammo

Starting today, Roy Edroso’s Rightbloggers: Exploring the right Wing Blogosphere will run here every Monday until Armageddon.

After a plane crash killed liberal Sen. Paul Wellstone, his wife and daughter, and several staff members in 2002, his friends and family held a memorial at the University of Minnesota attended by 15,000 people. The theme was “Stand up, keep fighting” for Wellstone’s beliefs, and the expected Democratic replacement for Wellstone on the November ticket, Walter Mondale, was ardently cheered. Wellstone’s son and other speakers called for victory in that election as a tribute to the fallen senator.

Outrage from Wellstone’s non-family and non-friends ensued. “His family went and turned his funeral into a goddamned political rally,” cried Cold Fury. Andrew Sullivan echoed a friend who “felt the pure partisanship, the jeering and cheering, the fanaticism almost, just after a family has been killed, was about as unseemly a spectacle as anything one could imagine.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Peggy Noonan topped them all, actually offering a Wellstone memo from the great beyond. “When the rally was over, I grieved,” she had him say. She also had Wellstone castigate his family for “turning everything in your life into politics. … There are people with the same sickness on the other side too. But I’m telling you, this polar thinking thing has gotten worse on our side the past few years. It’s becoming the Democratic disease.”

Notwithstanding the absurdity of this pretended solicitude for one of their mortal enemies, the rhubarb was thought to have helped elect Republican Norm Coleman to Wellstone’s seat.

Last week Ted Kennedy, a longtime advocate of health-care reform, died of brain cancer, and rightbloggers hauled out the Wellstone memorial template in hopes of again defeating a dead senator’s cause by using the dead senator himself.