Remember the fuss over a different one?
The twice-impeached, much-investigated instigator of the Jan. 6 insurrection was in North Carolina on Saturday for the memorial service of Ineitha Lynette Hardaway, a.k.a. “Diamond” of the right-wing political duo Diamond and Silk.
The memorial service at Fayetteville’s Crown Theater was not the political rally for himself that Donald Trump had hoped. Size matters to him. He didn’t get it.
The Fayetteville Observer reports that just over 150 people attended the event in the theater that holds 2,400. Donald Trump’s audience was smaller and the event took longer than he’d expected.
Still, the memorial service did resemble a Trump rally.
Yes, the pillow guy was at Hardaway’s funeral … to praise Donald Trump.
Trump’s eulogy had plenty of his usual shtick.
Those of a certain age will recall what a fuss Republicans and conservative pundits raised in 2002 over the memorial service for Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. He’d died in a plane crash along with his wife, Sheila Wellstone, his daughter, Marcia Wellstone, aides Will McLaughlin and Tom Lapic, family friend Mary McEvoy and the two pilots, Richard Conry and Michael Guess. The event was carried on CSPAN and broadcast over Minnesota Public Radio. Over 20,000 attended.
And, oh, the handwringing over the inappropriate politicalness of it all!
In studying the anatomy of a debacle, many critics have focused on the blunt-edged speech of Wellstone’s close friend Rick Kahn. But the event was designed from the start to be boisterous and, yes, political.
“The problem was the labeling,” said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. “The mistake was in labeling this as a memorial instead of a celebration of the lives of these individuals, which is what it was.”
She said people tuned in expecting a funeral and instead got a rally.
CNN reported:
Vin Weber, a former congressman from Minnesota, lambasted Democrats for what he called a “complete, total absolute sham.”
“To them, Wellstone’s death, apparently, was just another campaign event,” he told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Dave Ryan, a radio talk show host in Minneapolis, said the airwaves have been full of talk about the service, which featured speeches from Wellstone family members and friends who urged the crowd to remember Wellstone when they cast their votes next week.
“I guess the local stations here were swamped with phone calls from people who were angry because they had been sold a memorial service that had turned into a political rally,” Ryan said in an interview with CNN. “And I really thought that was kind of shameful. I really did.”
The early part of the service was done beautifully, former mayor of St. Paul mayor George Latimer told the Minneapolis Post in 2008. Then Kahn, Wellstone’s campaign manager, delivered a barnburner.
Six years later they were still talking about it.
Fifteen years later they were still talking about it.
That Hardaway’s memorial turned into a pathetically small Trump rally people will forget by tomorrow.