If that boat is “speaking the truth” versus “Ignoring the truth just to be nice because someone is dead”, then I choose that boat with open arms, and shall sail with my speak-truth-to-power brethren with no weight on my conscience.
I accept that your opinion of me and my boatmates is lowered by this stance. But I do not hide who I am or what I believe, and if I would speak ill of someone in life, then I choose to also do so in death.
Further, I welcome anyone to do the same at my funeral. Tell it like it was, please. If I was an asshole then so be it. If people are going to tell others how nice I was, then I want it to be because I was, in fact, nice, not because some IMHO antiquated rule of decorum mandated they do so.
Believe it or not, I am generally thought of as a nice person in meatspace. But that’s because I have the bloody luxury and privilege of no-one starting from the assumption that they can walk all over me. I’m not going to blindly criticise anyone who doesn’t enjoy that privilege for not being nice, especially when (like yourself) they’ve also demonstrated high levels of compassion and kindness and empathy toward others. That matters more than “nice”.
In the end, this is a day to reflect on the legacy of a public figure, both the good and the bad. The MSM, in the name of being nice and polite, has dropped the ball on the latter, so a corrective, however harsh, from other sectors of the media is not uncalled for today.
Good job (/s) derailing this thread with your demands that others share your same fastidious sense of decorum.
Personally (which is how you might have considered prefacing your opinions here, no?), the only good reason I can think of for not speaking ill of the dead is because someone close to that person is within earshot. Otherwise, who gives a damn? I mean really, who else important would be listening, the Sky Daddy?
Jesus dude, really bad look there, telling others how they should “behave” on the basis of your own beliefs. You remind me of anti-abortionists, insisting on control of a woman’s body because of THEIR definition of what’s inside of her (“God made that baby as soon as sperm met egg, and now you want to KILL it!” etc, ad nauseam.)
Do you honestly believe right-wing pundits will be able to restrain their glee when Noam Chomsky dies? GHW died last week, his funeral was Tuesday. How much longer do you expect people to wait to express righteous anger over his legacy of inflicting so much suffering on at least two continents?
Can 't you wait until he’s buried? If The Intercept wants to demonize the recently departed, that’s one thing, when you do it, it’s another. I’ve been reading BB for over 20 years and I’m about to stop completely. This posting is horrific. No matter how you feel about Bush and his politics, respect for humanity is supposed to be a desirable quality. Cory, you show you are just as bad as the Trumpkins in DC when you publish this shit. Have some compassion. I’m not sure whether I’ll stop reading BB yet, but I will not read any more of your books.
Why? We’re not at his funeral shouting our disapprobation into the ears of his family and close friends, we’re on a BBS that the man himself probably never even heard of.
Bush SR was an awful president. As was Bush JR. They might have been decent human beings to be around (heck, even DT might be), but they were awful presidents with awful agendas.
I get people want to ‘show some class’ on his funeral. But IMHO enough ‘class’ has been shown all around. Time to highlight the negatives as well.
I bet when Karl f*cking Rove dies they’ll find the ‘decency’ to praise him as a compassionate man. And when Ruport ‘supervillain’ Murdoch bites the dust he will be praised as a ‘media innovator’. Hypocrisy, it is.
At some point it stops being decency, and it starts being whitewashing.
True, but in the case of the Bush family the balance is not quite even.
