Ellison Errs on Wellstone Tribute

In what Minnesota Public Radio’s Bob Collins called “one of the most bizarre floor speeches we’ve seen,” Rep. Keith Ellison gave a stirring tribute to Paul Wellstone yesterday in advance of today’s five-year anniversary of the Minnesota senator’s death. The only problem: He flubbed some major facts. “It was a long night, Mr. Speaker, when we heard back the reports as the news reports said that a plane has gone down in Ely, Minnesota,” he said. “We hoped all night that what we thought might have happened didn’t happen, but at the end of the evening, we learned that that tragedy, in fact, did occur.”

Wellstone’s plane crashed not in Ely, but near Eveleth, and not at night but just after 10 a.m. in the morning.

Ellison can’t revise his apparently off-the-cuff remarks yesterday; C-SPAN footage remains on his website. But since writing his Polinaut post at mid-day, Collins has altered the entry to remove a reference comparing Ellison and his speechwriters to characters in the TV show MASH: perhaps Ellison, his reasoning went, was a bit like Col. Blake, who signs whatever Radar O’Reilly puts in front of him without reading it.