McCain’s funeral turns into resistance meeting

Susan Glasser of the New Yorker calls John McCain’s funeral “the biggest resistance meeting yet.” I think Glasser is right, but is this a good thing?

Glasser certainly thinks so. She seems ecstatic about it.

McCain probably would have thought so too. He was a world class grudge holder. McCain was also capable of forgiveness, but that capacity ran in only one direction — left.

It’s rich, though, that Meghan McCain, Barack Obama and others attempted to wax eloquent about the good old days of bipartisanship, civility, and respect, as exemplified by John McCain, while trying to stick it to the President of the United States during a funeral.

I’n not a fan of Donald Trump the man, but I’ll say this for him: When he sticks the knife in, he doesn’t pretend to be the guardian of civility and related virtues.

Obama’s speech was a particularly pedestrian affair. The only surprise — and maybe it shouldn’t have been — was his poor grammar. One would hope that the smartest man in any room and the possessor of degrees from Columbia and Harvard could avoid saying this: “After all, what better way to get a last laugh than to make George and I say nice things about him to a national audience?”?

Meghan McCain’s big line was: “The America of John McCain has no need to be made great again, because America was always great.” It brought applause from the mourner-resisters — a rarity, if not a first, at a funeral at the National Cathedral, according to Glasser.

The key word here is “was” (Glasser changed it to “is” in her New Yorker piece). Although the left denies it, the America of John McCain was great. But the question is whether the American of John McCain is the America of today. Barack Obama ran against that America (and, of course, against McCain) in 2008, insisting that it needed a major transformation. Obama won. Handily.

I don’t blame Meghan McCain for taking shots at President Trump. It’s clearly what her father wanted her to do, and Trump started the feud. I do blame former presidents Obama and Bush for joining in the resistance-fest.

The political class isn’t wrong to bemoan the lack of civility and decorum constantly exhibited by President Trump. But it is wrong to do so while using a funeral to try to score political points. That’s the kind of smugness and hypocrisy that gave rise to Trump’s political success.

UPDATE: More here.

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