Inappropriate. That's the kindest word one could use to describe some of the comments made by leading Democrats at the funeral of Coretta Scott King. Chief among them was, of course, former President Jim-ah, whose lambasting of George W. Bush, who was sitting three feet behind him as he spoke, was nothing short of an angry diatribe from a sore loser.
Not to be outdone, Joseph Lowery, who was a co-founder of Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference, also blasted the president. Carter, whose mouth gets more offensive by the day, used Mrs. King's funeral to criticize the National Security Agency's program of monitoring emails and telephone calls made to or from suspected Al Qaeda members coming into or out of the United States. Carter said that both Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King had their civil rights violated through illegal secret wiretaps and covert surveillance, almost as if George W. Bush was personally guilty of these violations. The thing Prez Jim-ah omitted to tell the assembled mourners that the Kings' privacy was invaded by two Democratic presidents, one whom, John F. Kennedy, is still considered to be a liberal icon.
In addition, Carter also implied that Bush purposefully ignored black victims of hurricane Katrina, linking the storm's aftermath to the civil rights struggle. "The struggle for equal rights is not over," he lamented. "We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi; those who were most devastated by Katrina, to know that there are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans." The tacit implication being that somehow the storm either missed all white people, or Bush somehow engineered it so that whites were given immediate aid while blacks were purposefully ignored.
This is Jimmy Carter at his worst (or best, depending on your political views). Attempting to make political hay and rack up brownie points at the funeral of a woman whose name stands synonymous with good manners and integrity is the best one can expect from the man who is personally responsible for much of the discord plaguing the Middle East, and by extension the U.S. today. I am surprised that Carter had the guts to speak at all, much less launch into his ugly and spiteful tirade. To me, he's still the peanut president who demonstrated he was better suited to Dogpatch than the White House.
Lowery's attack on President Bush was largely about the war in Iraq. "We know now there were no weapons of mass destruction over there," Lowery intoned in his best traditional black-southern-preacher cadence. "But Coretta knew, and we knew, that there are weapons of misdirection right down here. Millions without health insurance; poverty abounds. For war, billions more, but no more for the poor." It's nice and poetic, but hardly appropriate for a ceremony that celebrates the life of someone like Coretta King.
Both Carter and Lowery were in sharp contrast with President Bush whose simple, yet eloquent eulogy celebrated the life of Mrs. King. Mr. Bush called Coretta King "a kind a gentle woman…who kept her husband's legacy alive."
I was, however, pleasantly surprised by Bill Clinton's eulogy, which praised Mrs. King's courage and acknowledged Bush 41 and Bush 43 as "my former president" and "current president" respectively. I was also somewhat surprised that Clinton didn't take the opportunity to introduce his wife, Hillary as his future president.
To say that the old guard Democrats are "tacky" is to understate their tackiness. It seems that nothing is ever about anyone or anything but their agenda and so it was with Coretta King's funeral. Their attempts at gaining a political edge from her funeral are the moral equivalent of adding up what one stands to inherit upon learning that a loved on is terminally ill. But then, what more can you expect from people who haven't managed to change their perspective in life in over 30 years?
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