Call me an only-partially reformed shitstirrer if you must, but with the news of Ted Kennedy’s death, I found myself looking at right wing political blogs to see how they reported the story. Michelle Malkin was respectful:
The U.S. Senator from Massachusetts succumbed to brain cancer at the age of 77 tonight. Put aside your ideological differences for an appropriate moment and mark this passing with solemnity.
There is a time and place for political analysis and criticism. Not now.
Same with Powerline:
With the passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy, we can expect the usual suspects — liberal talking heads, Senate colleagues and the like — to tell us how Kennedy was a giant of the Senate, among the most influential Senators of the 20th century, etc.
This time, the usual suspects will be right.
I was, I admit, surprised a little and heartened: Even in the insanely partisan American political landscape, there’s such a thing as respect for the dead! Even Malkin - who clearly disagreed with the man’s politics - offered up a somber, sober quiet disagreement that focused instead on the man instead of the politics. Score one for basic human decency, right? And then, I got to RedState.
RedState, for those who aren’t familiar with it, calls itself
the leading blog for right of center online activists… [It is] the most widely read right of center blog on Capitol Hill and is the most cited right of center blog in the media.
How do you think the “most widely read right of center blog on Capitol Hill” remembered Kennedy? Well, there’s this:
I can’t say that I’ll miss him. He, to me, represented all that is wrong with Washington — a kingdom of nepotism and worship at the alter of failed liberal policies that get repeated ad infinitum.
And, in another post, there’s this:
It is traditional, upon the passing of an important and famous person - however controversial - to find some good words to say. This is not an easy task in the case of Ted Kennedy, a man whose personal life ranged from alcoholism to debauchery to sexual harrassment to (sadly, uncharged) second-degree murder, and whose public career entailed the embrace of nearly every foolish, ruinous and cruel political idea of the past five decades and whose most enduring legacy is installing the bitterly polarized modern Supreme Court confirmation process.
There’s also this, in a third post on the subject:
However, it is also worth noting that Kennedy was personally and politically a hypocrite, that he wilfully slandered men more honorable than he in the service of legalized abortion (and in so doing poisoned the judicial confirmation process in this country, probably forever), and that he built a political career out of provoking class warfare despite having been been born with a diamond spoon in his mouth and having everything he ever wanted handed to him on a silver platter. Insofar as he was a man of any religious faith at all, he was nominally a Catholic, a faith he besmirched repeatedly with the grave sin of scandal: a cornerstone of Kennedy’s entire public career centered upon using his position of leadership and prominence to present abortion (categorically defined by the Catholic church as a mortal) sin as good and normal, to say nothing of Kennedy’s many other failings which those who looked to him for example might follow. In the later stages of his career, Kennedy was not content to rest upon his laurels, but spent most of his time making the world safer for terrorists.
Yes, three different posts attacking a man who’d died less than 24 hours before. If it’d been one post, that almost would’ve been better, but the fact that three different people piled on new accusations one after another just makes me feel sad, although that word is too small to explain it properly. I kind of want to ask “Really, RedState? Really?” but also kind of know that the answer would be “Yes, really, that man wanted to kill America and we’re not so sure that you don’t, either.”
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To be honest, sounds like you found what you were looking for. Trawling the seedy underbelly of Republican opinion on the web strikes me as a poor way of getting a grasp of conservative reaction to Kennedy’s death. Considering how nutty these sites usually are, two out of three did very well.
Plus, if one genuinely believes, that Kennedy had a negative impact on the country, why not say so? It’s hardly a sign of moral superiority when you have to lie in order to conform to a particular notion of politeness that doesn’t make a lot of sense in the first place. (I’d make more sense to hold back while someone is dying and potentially still able to be hurt by one’s words.)
I mean, turn it around: what if it had been Rush Limbaugh, someone I clearly consider a negative influence and to whom I have no more of a personal connection than to some random person in India? I’d not be happy about the death of a fellow human being, but I certainly would think that the world just got a bit better. That’s inherent in the notion of him being a negative influence, whose passing must, logically, improve things overall.
(If that’s to abstract, consider Hitler. Surely his death was an improvement. If that’s true, it follows that the deaths of other, lesser, evil people also could be an improvement. So where do you draw the line: Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, …, a serial killer, a rapist, or George W. Bush??? Sure, at some point you’re just demonizing people you disagree with, branding them evil on spurious grounds to justify your own hate. But at some point before that you’re just being honest. And I’m not sure these Redstaters weren’t being just that.)