Remember yesterday morning when I told everyone to be on their best behavior about the death of West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd? Yeah, sorry about that; I didn't realize the epic scale of the whitewash we were going to have to endure. I got through about midmorning, when somewhere around the headline "With Byrd's death, the era of statesmen fades" I found myself unable to resist wondering whether in his honor today all white bedsheets would be flown at half-mast.
I understand not speaking ill of the dead, but the mainstream media pushes it; the career of Robert Byrd may have set a new record for glossing over horrific past views and behavior yesterday, and a new level of praising garden-variety corruption. (See Eleanor Clift approvingly noting how Byrd would alter the Senate schedule to accommodate his friends' fundraisers.) Pick your angle: His career's dawn, unbelievably racist by the standards of today, a long, slow sad decline into a physical inability to perform his duties (falling asleep on the Senate floor, rambling incoherently) and all along, a steady effort to move every last federal dollar back to West Virginia, and as I laid out yesterday, naming seemingly every last one of those projects after himself, in such a relentlessly, ostentatiously egomaniacal manner that even Kim Jong Il would declare it a little gauche. Sure, he loved history, enough to dress up as a Confederate general and do cameos in movies. Swell. Dick Cavett: "But can't you say something good about the dead?" Moms Mabley: "He's dead -- that's good."
Posted by: Mike ||
06/29/2010 09:28 ||
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#1
I'm with Moms.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
06/29/2010 14:05 Comments ||
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#2
Now that Churchill is gone, the only difference between a politician and a statesman is that the politician is still alive.
#5
It's like the writer is from some parallel universe where deceit and perversity are the norm, and are traits to be applauded. There is almost nothing we agree upon.
Or maybe he's just a 'liberal' (as perverted a misnomer for the so-called progressives as there could ever be).
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
06/29/2010 20:26 Comments ||
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#6
Sounds like Matt Taibbi has a few issues with the military. Wonder if Rolling Stone ever gets another interview with the military now. That is unless they hire P.J. O'Rourke again.
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