ZeaLitY, which do you find more ironic: Truthordeal making this thread, or John McCain speaking at Kennedy's funeral? It seems to me Kennedy and McCain should have been diametrically opposed on a ton of issues, though it looks like they did find common ground on immigration reform. But overall, how much could we credit McCain with stymying some of the very things Kennedy fought so hard for?
Yes, the McCain thing also bothers me.
Whenever a figure like this dies, a lot of people suddenly, hypocritically demand a conciliatory tone, attacking anyone who maintains criticism. In some cases, like Michael Jackson, much of the criticism levied on him was unjust, and people who brought up child molestation in the aftermath were trolls. But for people who are ideologically wrong, have committed evil, etc. some sudden withholding of sentiment isn't conciliatory; it's ignorance, hypocrisy, and a grab for publicity. What would it speak about me if a murderer and rapist of women died, and I rushed to say "well now, let's all be respectful" despite my ardent struggle against sexism? "My ideals are great and everything, yeah, but they all fly out of the window when some vague, ceremonial need for respect in death could make me look like an even-headed, understanding fellow." Laughable. I'm in a hungry hurry, so I'm going to save some time with this:
The people who reply with sympathy suffer, I think, from a large infiltration of posers. Many of these people, who espoused sympathy for Norwood, were actually trying to position themselves as morally upright and praiseworthy. I don’t want to single anybody out, because that isn’t the point of my diary, but if you read through the comments you will find no few instances of these fakers selling a message. Fortunately there is no liberal counterpart to Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment, so I am free to say that these people are as off-putting as the Christian fundamentalists whose holier-than-thou chicanery has brought great social injury to this nation.
Those who offer sympathy genuinely are not off the hook either. They are often guilty of a contradiction: We spend an incredible amount of energy here vilifying and denigrating right-wingers. Many of us get so caught up in the whirlwind as to develop genuine hatred toward these people. Markos leads the charge on this, attacking even the most decent Republicans simply because they are Republican—they are the enemy. Indeed, Daily Kos is a partisan Democratic site and our explicit purpose here, our raison d'être, is to win Democratic gains and inflict Republican losses. We are very zealous in that...and very sincere. But our sincerity has ramifications. Do you remember the old Looney Toons cartoons of Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf? They’d punch in the clock at work each morning, try to kill each other all day long, then punch out and be chums again in the evening. Is that us? Are we, as Democrats, simply fighting a political game against Republicans? Because that’s what it seems like when people come along and shout, "O, stop the game! Stop, stop! Charlie Norwood is hurt. We all have to stop right now and give him a big hug!" That is awfully cavalier.
So you see the problem. Or perhaps you don’t: If conservatives really do deserve all that shit we constantly talk about them, then unconditional sympathy is not an appropriate reply to the fate of somebody like Charlie Norwood. Sympathy itself is not the problem here, but we must qualify it with a stern reminder that this is a Bad Man, and the world is better off with him out of power and perhaps even dead. But many of us cannot stomach that kind of a statement, which leads to the contradiction I mentioned: We want to hate Republicans and yet not hate them at the same. We want to call them the scourge of all that is pure in the land, and yet pretend our differences are insignificant when one of them falls sick. That’s irresponsible! We can’t have it both ways. We have to choose. Very few of us at dKos or anywhere else (and I am not one of them) have been consistently willing to place mutual humanity over political ideology and treat Republicans as wayward friends rather than a true enemy. Indeed, people like that are often accused of trolling. The rest of us have to choose whether Republicans are the villains we paint them out to be, or our ideology is less important than we want to think.
The entire thing is a good read at
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/2/9/299959/-When-Republicans-Die. My point is that this thread, given its source, is an example of this stupid "sympathy" (fake or otherwise) that betrays seriousness. This is not an actual memorial thread for Ted Kennedy, at least not by construction. It's the mark of dishonesty.
