The plane carrying the late Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone on October 25 was still burning when the tin-foil hat wearing conspiracy theorists who frequent Internet sites like Indymedia (www.indymedia.org) began speculating about the possibility of foul play and assassination. I first heard the news of Wellstone's death near the end of Friday morning's Working Assets Radio broadcast at about 10:50 a.m. West Coast time. It took me less than a minute to realize that the tin-foil hats would instantly begin shouting "foul play" and even "assassination" on Indymedia, regardless of the lack of any evidence for this position.

Sure enough it took the administrators of the Portland Independent Media Center site only hours to post a feature headline titled "Senator Paul Wellstone Killed In Plane Crash: Foul Play Suspected." The reputed source for the headline? A post at the Twins Cities IMC site authored by Daniesha L., titled "Possible Assassination Of Wellstone." Daniesha's evidence? The facial expressions of Republican politicians and CNN's Wolf Blitzer suggest something sinister is afoot in all this.

Then, Alternet jumped on the Wellstone conspiracy bandwagon when they published an article on October 28 by Buffalo State University journalism instructor Michael I. Niman titled, "Was Paul Wellstone Assassinated?" (www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=14399). Of course, Niman's article lacks any evidence of foul play in the Wellstone plane crash and is only speculative in nature. This doesn't stop the tin-foil hats at Indymedia from arguing that this article vindicates their position.

Foul play can definitely be involved when a plane carrying politicians and important corporate executives go down. Just be sure to have some solid evidence of foul play to back up such an argument.

Circumstantial evidence, like Wellstone's recent vote against Bush's invade Iraq resolution, doesn't cut it as solid evidence in my book. Of course any investigation into the Wellstone plane crash is going to be carried out by the agents of the very Bush administration the tin-foil hats argue must be behind Wellstone's untimely death. The investigation will be a part of the cover-up of the sinister plot that killed off the populist legend Wellstone. It won't matter how transparent the investigation is.

The most detrimental aspect of conspiracy theories surrounding the deaths of prominent politicians, particularly Democrats like JFK or Wellstone, is the inflation of their actual achievements plus the vast inflation of what they might have done had they lived that invariably follows their untimely deaths. The legend is that if only JFK had lived through a second term in office, he have would pulled US troops out of Vietnam and led a campaign for global disarmament. Never mind that JFK was responsible for escalating the low level US intervention on behalf of the regime in Saigon into a full blown US invasion of South Vietnam. There isn't any evidence up until the day he died that he was going to change course regarding US policy in Vietnam.

In his anti-conspiracy theory book "Rethinking Camelot," Noam Chomsky reviews every word that came out of JFK's mouth in his last days. There wasn't the slightest indication he was going to de-escalate the US invasion of South Vietnam. If the tin-foil hats were interested in how conservative elites really think, they would consistently read the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and find that JFK ranks just behind Reagan as the editorial board's favorite post-World War II president. JFK was a hawk and, most importantly, instituted a regressive tax cut policy. This is just one of many examples that leads me to wonder why there is this hero worship of JFK among many on the left.

"Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government," wrote Niman in his Alternet column. Just what exactly was Wellstone stopping the Bush administration from doing? The Bush administration has pretty much had its way, especially since September 11, with the wimpy leadership of the Democratic Party in DC. It's difficult to image the likely return of a token liberal to the Senate, were Wellstone still alive to seek his re-election, stopping the Bush administrations' determined march to Baghdad.

The degree to which any opposition to Bush's Iraq invasion plans was collectively expressed in the House of Representatives and Senate can be attributed mostly to the rise of a publicly visible anti-war movement over the past few months, in my opinion. It's worth noting that when JFK escalated US involvement in South Vietnam into a full blown invasion, there was no protest against it. JFK certainly didn't have to go to the lengths Bush, Jr. has in trying to rally support for an invasion of Iraq.

Just the fact that the Bush administration has had to go to the lengths it has just to get authorization for a military invasion of another country is a sign that the US has become a much more civil society in the past four decades. Wellstone was a product and an expression of the social changes our society has undergone in its recent history.

RIP, Paul Wellstone. Hardly a radical, but a breath of fresh air when compared to most of his colleagues. Let's not mourn but keep on organizing. The movement always goes on and does not live and die by any one individual.