Last night, I caught a small piece of Matthew Rothschild's editorial on the death of Gerald Ford while driving home from work. Also, last night, Keith Olbermann devoted nearly his entire show to an analysis and retrospective of Ford's presidency. The two pieces were radically different in tone and tenor, though the conclusions were basically the same.
Mr. Rothschild's premise that national mourning of a former president is unnecessary, juvenile even, if that president held a heinous ideology. From the essay:
There’s something profoundly undemocratic and vaguely medieval about the almost mandatory salutes that we, the people, are supposed to offer when a former President dies.
The niceties of custom all too often reinforce the habits of blind obedience to the unworthy wielders of power.
Say no ill of the dead, we are told.
Hogwash. Let’s look at Gerald Ford’s record.
Meanwhile, on Countdown last night, Keith Olbermann somehow managed to analyze nearly every aspect of Mr. Ford's presidency, from the assassination attempts to the connections to the current White House, without resorting to sarcasm, venomous insult or anything that could be construed as "disrespecting the dead."
Look, I'm no defender of the man. He was a Republican, he brought us Rumsfeld and Cheney, and he pardoned Richard Nixon. But really, Mr. Ford had been deceased for less than 12 hours when Mr. Rothschild unleashed his venom.
One of my principles of life as a liberal comes from an unlikely place: Stephen King's The Stand. It's a small quote from one of the main characters, attempting to calm a large crowd bent on revenge:
"We're supposed to be the good guys here."
Think of it this way - what if the shoe were on the other foot? What if this was the editor of the National Review, and the dead president was Bill Clinton? We'd all be furious. There is a way to criticize a dead man without being, well, rude. Being a liberal means recognizing the humanity in everyone, regardless of ideology, and Mr. Rothschild really missed the boat here.