“Why are Republicans such weenies about funeral orations?”

Marty Kaplan slams it home:

Wingnut crybabies are whining that W got dissed at Coretta King's funeral. What did they expect -- praise for his civil rights record? Honor for his warrantless wiretapping? Encomia for widening the gap between rich and poor? Heckofajob's for his post-Katrina promise-keeping?

I can understand why he didn't plan on attending the funeral in the first place; W's kind of African-American event is more like the 2000 Republican convention that nominated him in Philadelphia, where the only black faces were the ones on stage.

Once he did get shamed into coming, is it any wonder that the speakers celebrated what Coretta King's life stood for, and cold-shouldered the Republican wrecking crew that's been trying to destroy what she and her husband worked a lifetime to achieve?

Among other things, it was the wiretapping of MLK Jr. by the FBI that led to the FISA law that George W. Bush has admitted to breaking.

Check that -- the law that Bush is proud to say he has broken.

Republicans love playing the civility card. I wonder where these Emily Posts were when the Pentagon lied about the circumstances of Pat Tillman's death at his funeral. I don't recall them denouncing Pat Robertson -- while the World Trade Center towers were still smoldering -- attributing 9/11 deaths to God's revenge on liberalism. Republicans get all huffy, and invoke Marquess of Queensbury rules, when it suits them, but somehow that's never when they're spreading malicious lies and assassinating their living opponents' characters.

At Caesar's funeral, as Shakespeare tells it, Marc Antony nicely ripped Brutus a new one. Jimmy Carter was no less rhetorically elegant at Coretta King's service.

Why should an elegy be an occasion to turn your back on all you believe, and all that the deceased life's stood for? If they should outlive me, I don't expect that Bill O'Reilly or Ann Coulter would come to my funeral.

But if they or their kind did, I'd hope that at least one of the speakers would have the cojones to call them what they really are. Nicely, of course.

More links:

• Read MLK Jr.'s Eulogy for the Young Victims of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church Bombing, on Sept 18, 1963 in Birmingham, Ala. This was his eulogy for three of the four children killed in the racist attack, Addie Mae Collins, Carol Denise McNair, and Cynthia Diane Wesley. King knew how to speak truth to power.

• Rev. Lowery, criticized by the wingnuts, calls it like he sees it to Tucker Carlson.

• Steve Gilliard's classic rant.