You Choose

The GOP Glee Club and Propaganda Society is in full throat over the "politicization" of Coretta Scott King's funeral yesterday. How dare Liberal mourners of a Liberal icon who was the wife of one of the major Liberal icons in American history present Liberal views at the funeral. How dare people give standing ovations, heartfelt, passionate, to Bill Clinton while golf-clapping President Bush. How dare these people, say supporters of an administration which calculates every decision on political ramifications, politicize the funeral of a political figure.

Rather than recite all the obvious reasons, at a funeral service of over 10,000 people - many of them battle-scarred veterans of the Civil Rights battles of the 1960s, most of them keenly aware of the deliberate, concerted effort by the GOP over the past 40 years to milk white resentment of black enfranchisement as political strategy - why the majority of mourners at the funeral of a civil rights icon was Liberal, let's consider two alternatives to the Conservative whining about the funeral.

First, they get it. They recognize that as a party, as conservatives, they would have opposed integration of schools in 1956 and opposed the Civil Right Act of 1964. They recognize that they currently are seeking to decimate programs which disproportionately benefit the poor in general and Blacks in particular. They recognize Republicans stoke crackers to bigotry for political gain. They understand - and expected - the funeral to play out the way it did, calculating the hit Bush would take being there would be less than the hit he would take for not being there, and they are trying to neutralize the anti-Conservative, anti-Bush, anti-Republican rhetoric of the funeral by pretending to an outraged civility which is aimed exactly at the very strategy of stoking cracker bigotry which in part causes the anti-Republican rhetoric. Business as usual, in other words.

Or, they don't get it and are genuinely puzzled and outraged.

Which is worse? They understand they're bullshit or they're bullshitters bullshitted?

Trick questions. It's both, of course.