Playing that funeral card again
by digby
The wingnuts are partying like it’s 2002, policing funeral behavior. You knew somebody would drag this old trope out again:
Democrats (and some Republicans) turned John McCain’s funeral into an orgy of Trump-bashing. Evidently they though it made political sense. It reminds me of another politicized funeral, 16 years ago.
In the fall of 2002, Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone was running for re-election against Norm Coleman. Tim Pawlenty was running his first race for Governor. And, of course, it was the first midterm election of George W. Bush’s presidency. In the last days of the campaign, Wellstone’s campaign airplane crashed in northern Minnesota, killing Wellstone and a number of others. Former Vice-President Walter Mondale was hurriedly recruited to replace Wellstone on the ticket.
And leading Democrats from around the country assembled in the Twin Cities for Wellstone’s funeral. The funeral was broadcast live to the nation. To the shock of most who watched, the Democrats turned Wellstone’s funeral into a partisan hate-fest. Reaction was overwhelmingly negative.
Coleman went on to defeat Mondale handily. Pawlenty won his first term. And nationally, Republicans gained seats in both the House and the Senate. Revulsion against the Democrats’ politicized funeral was widely credited as a factor in Republicans’ success.
Scott and I started Power Line at the end of May of that year, and Paul joined us later in the Summer. It was Minnesota’s central role in the 2002 elections that gave this site its initial influx of readers from around the country.
Will the politicizing of McCain’s funeral by anti-Trumpers have a similar boomerang effect? Probably not to the same degree; standards have declined considerably since 2002. But it won’t help the anti-Trumpers’ cause, just as similar anti-Trump speeches at Aretha Franklin’s funeral won’t be helpful.
What can we conclude if there is a funeral for Person A, and the “eulogies” are mostly about Person B? For one thing, Person B is obviously a heck of a lot more important than Person A. John McCain was heroic in some ways, notoriously small-minded in others. It is perhaps a fitting coda to his career that his funeral was mostly about someone else.
That’s by the blogger formerly known as “Hindrocket” of the blog Powerline which once won “blog of the year” by Times Magazine. He’s reliving former triumphs with this post.
However, one of the people who subtweeted the hell out of Donald Trump yesterday was George W. Bush of whom Hindrocket once said:
POSTED ON JULY 28, 2005 BY JOHN HINDERAKER
A STROKE OF GENIUS?
It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can’t get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.
Hyperbolic? Well, maybe. But consider Bush’s latest master stroke: the Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate. The pact includes the U.S., Japan, Australia, China, India and South Korea; these six countries account for most of the world’s carbon emissions. The treaty is, in essence, a technology transfer agreement. The U.S., Japan and Australia will share advanced pollution control technology, and the pact’s members will contribute to a fund that will help implement the technologies. The details are still sketchy and more countries may be admitted to the group later on. The pact’s stated goal is to cut production of “greenhouse gases” in half by the end of the century.
What distinguishes this plan from the Kyoto protocol is that it will actually lead to a major reduction in carbon emissions! This substitution of practical impact for well-crafted verbiage stunned and infuriated European observers.
I doubt that the pact will make any difference to the earth’s climate, which will be determined, as always, by variations in the energy emitted by the sun. But when the real cause of a phenomenon is inaccessible, it makes people feel better to tinker with something that they can control. Unlike Kyoto, this agreement won’t devastate the U.S. economy, and, also unlike Kyoto, the agreement will reduce carbon emissions in the countries where they are now rising most rapidly, India and China. Brilliant.
But I don’t suppose President Bush is holding his breath, waiting for the crowd to start applauding.
UPDATE: Of all the thousands of posts we have done over the years, this one seems to most outrage the Left, I suppose because it is so at odds with liberals’ cherished illusions about President Bush. The tone of the post is obviously tongue in cheek, but liberals never seem to notice. They are, to put it charitably, not big on nuance. More important, I’ve never seen a liberal respond to, let alone rebut, the point of the post: that President Bush’s proposal to share pollution control technology with the countries where carbon emissions are rising most rapidly made far more sense than the Kyoto approach, which combined ineffectiveness with economic disaster. That, too, is a sign of the intellectual vacuity of modern liberalism.
Obviously, Hindracker is one of those people who doesn’t understand the definition of irony. (“I was like being totally ironic and I don’t get why people didn’t take it seriously.”)
Either that or he’s a bit of a weasel. You decide.
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