Marcus Tullius was a cantankerous old windbag, and incredibly pompous, to boot. But his tagline in the title of this post for once seems apt for what I have to say, so I'm using it.
I watched some of the coverage tonight as President Ford's body was brought to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda in Washington, D.C. It is a sad commentary on the parlous state of our nation in these troubled and troubling times that the network talking heads couldn't just shut the hell up and let the proceedings pass in a dignified silence. Instead, they felt the need to politicize and to polarize just about everything that possibly could be polarized or politicized about the event.
Say whatever else you like about the man, but Gerald Ford may well have been the last decent Republican politician in a generation. Even sadder than that fact is the fact that he apparently had thoughts in a similar vein, but was too much of a gentleman to give them voice while he was alive and might have done something to change the tenor of the times.
But all the bloviators could talk about tonight was how the obsequies for President Ford could not be seen in any light but that of politics, given the imminent takeover of Congress by the Democrats in a few days' time. Personally, I fail to see what the one has to do with the other, but that's probably one very good reason I'm not a member in god standing of the Beltway Bloviators' Club.
After the president's casket was reverently placed on the same catafalque used for Abraham Lincoln in 1865, the House chaplain read out a few words that were as much a stump speech as a prayer--and that, too, was a troubling sign of these troubling times. Still more so was the fact that his words about the need for peace and gentle reconciliation in our land went right over the heads of most of the people who needed to hear--and to heed--them the most. Within the sound of his voice at the time stood most of the Republicans most responsible for moving their party hard to the right over the generation since the man they were putatively gathered to honor stepped down from the highest office in the land. It was those very men who engineered the shift to divisiveness, disrespect, and the politics of personal destruction, and I would wager long odds that there wasn't a single one standing there listening to the chaplain's words that regretted anything that he had done.
And how about the point that James Wolcott raised this afternoon:
It's as if we're trying to soothe ourselves into believing that we're still the country we used to be, that's [sic] there's a higher seamlessness to American life undisturbed by the staccato rhythms of bad news. What happens in Iraq stays in Iraq. A flag-draped coffin is acceptable viewing only if a dead president is inside.
The one thing the untelevised and unreported arrival ceremonies at Dover Air Force Base and the arrival of President Ford's body in the capital have in common is that the Boy Who Would Be King wasn't there. Now, in the preznit's defense, neither were any of the other living presidents in evidence at the Capitol tonight. Nevertheless, I'm disinclined to excuse the Deciderer-in-Chief. As the one currently holding the office, he really should have been there to pay honor to someone else who held it, all the more so given that they were both members of the same party.
The tighty righties' tighty whities were all in a wad earlier this week, because Harry Reid, the soon-to-be Senate Majority Leader, halfway around the world on a trade mission, refused to cut his trip short to hurry home for every last second of President Ford's funeral. As we've come to expect from them, however, the only sound we heard from their corner when their man Bush declined to cut even a day off of his vacation to come back for those same ceremonies was that of crickets chirping in the silence.
"O for these times and customs," indeed.
To the best of my knowledge the only time he has cut short a vacation was to sign the Terry Schiavo bill, and I'm fairly certain he has racked up more time off than any other American President.
The current lack of comity in politics has its roots in the Republican party, especially after Gingrich became Speaker and all pretense of bipartisanship was rejected.
Posted by: Bryan | Sunday, 31 December 2006 at 22:47