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I disagreed with Senator Wellstone on just about every issue, but he was a liberal who really believed in what he was doing and stood for his principles and fought for them. I'd like to see more people like this on both sides.

This is just wrong to me. A "liberal who really believed in what he was doing" is like someone who really believes the moon is made of green cheese. Wellstone wasn't someone who belived in the classical liberal ideas of inalianble rights, he was a modern liberal who wanted government enforcing his ideas of social engineering. Like other modern liberals, his tools of the trade were lies, hypocrisy, going back on his word, and being mean spirited to name just a few. Wellstone and other modern liberals would never say a conservative "stood on his principles" because modern liberals simply don't believe one can truly disagree with them, or at the least, those that do are Nazis. Someone fighting for principles that are not only wrong, but proven dangerous, is not in my mind someone to be praised. We can all be sorry he died (as I do), but let's please stop this praise of a terribly misguided person who sought to bring the whole country down with him.

I agree with you that Wellstone's principles were misguided and dangerous. However, he had the courage of his convictions, as not many people in Washington on either side have (Bob Smith comes to mind, and Ron Paul, but I can't think of many others) and while he worked passionately for his misguided principles, unlike most liberals, you weren't his enemy if you disagreed with him. That is a kind of civility that our political process could use.

And liberals do sometimes say this about conservatives, but usually only when they're dead. They will almost all say it, now, about Barry Goldwater.

You know, Barry had many friends on the other side of the aisle. One of them was JFK. In fact, it's been widely written that Kennedy and Goldwater were planning to do a new type of campaign in '64, one in which they would have spent at least part of the campaign doing a whistle-stop tour together, with Kennedy speaking first at one stop and Goldwater rebutting him and then reversing the order at the next stop.

What these men shared, and what Wellstone apparently did as well (as do the most principled people on our side), was a belief in civility in politics -- fervent, pratisan, principled, fierce disagreement, but not the slash-and-burn that characterizes most politicians.