At least George W. Bush knows from dignity. Tucked snugly into Presidential Row at Our Lady of Perpetual Hope Basilica in Boston, next to the Clintons and behind the Obamas, the Bidens, and the Carters, our immediate past president was a model of decorum and proper ceremony, as the nation's leaders on both sides of the political aisle bowed their heads in stirring Roman Catholic farewell to Senator Edward Kennedy, a legislative giant whose death leaves a hole in our national debate the approximate size of Boston Harbor.
The same praise cannot be extended to the former President's most ardent defenders, the assassination-fomenting and out-of-power right, whose leading online voices descended into a nasty and inbred bully pit of scummy prep school humor, one giant steaming pus pool collected from the scabby adolescent skinned knee of loss and failure, hatred and irrelevancy.
As the Ave Maria rose into the rainy tropical air that has engulfed the northeast this late-August weekend, the party of public Christian values turned its sump pump of hatred to maximum spewage. Oh, it's all the ooze and stuff of the recount rowdies and all those healthcare townies and the machine-gun-toting Obama attendees and the birthers and the Vince Foster liars and the Gore haters. It's all about hatred and anger and the despicable self - because what else could a self-hater write but the kind of slime that appears under the bylines of such thoughtful conservatives as Robert "The Other" McCain, whose diatribes about Senator Kennedy's "bloated corpse" yield clever comments like this one from the Rushbo faithful: "Ted Kennedy is ONE shovel-ready project the Obama administration can claim to have finished by Saturday." [Google it. No links here.]
The "look at me, I'm hateful and proud!" cowardice of such fools - encouraged as they are by the loutish Limbaugh-led conservative establishment, some of whom actually served in the same great chamber as the Senate's last lion - is just another graffito tag of a discredited movement that has devolved into thuggery and caricature. My friend Jim Wolcott has these people well-measured:
I'm struck by the immature, sniggering bravado of it all, as if they actually thought they were being naughty and standing athwart Political Correctness crying, "Eat me." These guys seem to think that if they keep waving around Mary Jo Kopechne's name like a rubber chicken it's a sign of the Swiftian saeva indignatio that justifies their stale brand of insult comedy, which is little more than the usual liberal baiting with an extra topping of ghoulish glee.
Roy Edroso is (as usual) on the case. I think these good right-wing men and women of God should have taken their lead from my friend M.A. Peel and a dignified bit of Latin that is always appropriate at these moments, no matter your politics or personal opinion: Pie Jesu Domine, dona eis requiem.
