Michelle Malkin/TownHall:
Question: What is more cringe-inducing than a celebrity funeral?
Answer: Two back-to-back celebrity funerals.
The ghoulish twin spectacles last week memorializing Aretha Franklin and John McCain brought out the worst in family, friends and frenemies. No matter your partisan affiliation, these vulgar exercises in self-indulgence should serve as object lessons on how not to depart with dignity.
There was the nation’s most infamous anti-Semite, Louis Farrakhan, smiling like the Cheshire cat onstage with hate crime hoax godfather Al Sharpton and shakedown con artist Jesse Jackson, who exploited his honored platform to threaten funeral attendees: “If you leave here today and don’t register to vote, you’re dishonoring Aretha.”
There was lascivious 72-year-old Bill Clinton ogling 25-year-old Ariana Grande, who was wearing slightly more fabric than she normally wears, roughly equivalent to two 12- by 12-inch lace doilies, as she warbled “Natural Woman.” (Clinton’s latest public display of asininity closely rivaled his indecent conduct at his former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s funeral, where the master media manipulator fake-cried after news videographers captured him yukking it up after the National Cathedral service.)
There was boorish Bishop Charles H. Ellis III copping a side-feel of Grande’s barely covered bosom in the name of “friendliness.”
There was Atlanta pastor Jasper Williams hijacking the Detroit dais to share his unsolicited views on crime and parenting.
And there was Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson taking a somber moment to honor Aretha Franklin’s transcendent talent by wallowing in Trump Derangement Syndrome. Dyson called the president a “lugubrious leech,” “dopey doppleganger of deceit and deviance,” “lethal liar,” “dimwitted dictator” and “foolish fascist.”
A-plus for alliterative abomination!
Not to be outdone by the disrespectful requiem for the Queen of Soul, the five-day, three-city McCain processional marathon featured a vindictive blacklist (reportedly devised by the decedent himself); passive-aggressive eulogy swipes at President Trump by Meghan McCain, Joe Biden, Barack Obama and George W. Bush; and a hyperbolic media declaration about how the late Arizona senator’s passing augured “the death of political courage” itself. MORE
You forgot Eric Holder barry’s Attorney General cozying up to Calypso Louie at Aretha Franklin’s funeral. Although ol horndog bill ogling a young chick at her funeral was nothing new, how does he even get it up, he looks like hell and is only 6 or 7 years older than I am. I look and don’t feel like I’m 65 but I also didn’t screw everything not tied down like he did, one good wife was enough for me.
I thought the way they were dragging McCain’s corpse around from place to place was rather ghoulish. And no matter how you cover him in a flag or how many patriotic songs sung over him – it doesn’t change what he was and where he is now.
I quit paying attention to celebrity funerals when Diana was killed in a car crash a couple of decades ago. She was pretty, seemed to do a lot of charitable work, and was popular with the media but I didn’t know her and so far as I know her work affected me not at all.
The death of a U.S. President is more newsworthy. Nixon and Reagan affected the lives of millions, and were among the select 45 individuals who led the greatest nation on earth for a period of time. Similarly, the death of a Pope is also newsworthy; the demise of a man who led about a billion Catholics.
But we reserve our crocodile tears for celebrities and politicians whose primary achievement was managing to get re-elected several times and refusing to go away quietly and with dignity. Michael Jackson may have been the king of pop, but I didn’t know him, he seemed very off-kilter, and his music is still around. Ted Kennedy was a Senator for 50 years, and he did little during his time as a Senator and even much of that was bad. John McCain may have been even worse; he traded on family connections, did little to nothing as a Senator, seemed to mail in a Presidential campaign, and proved to be petty and vindictive even in death.
In truth, I didn’t watch the coverage of either Aretha Franklin’s funeral or the John McCain dead tour, nor did I stand in line to pay respects to either – although if it makes you feel better, I’ll tell you I did and you can prove me wrong.
I won’t be in Annapolis again anytime soon, but I’ll make arrangements to deposit some of my kidneys best work on McLame’s ‘resting’ place.