Prayers for Ted

You know, it was really nice yesterday to see so many conservative bloggers — like Michelle Malkin, or this happy fellow here — taking a few moments to express their sympathies for Ted Kennedy and his family. But I’m wondering if there isn’t anything less plausible than a wingnut who insists that his or her disagreements with Ted Kennedy are of a “merely political” nature?

If you’re JammieWearingFool, for example, your “political disagreements” with Ted Kennedy have consisted almost entirely of describing him as a traitor — literally — and reminding your readers that Mary Jo Kopechne died in his car. If you’re Michelle Malkin . . . goodness, I’m not sure the rest of that sentence would make any sense. Let’s just make a tentative assertion that if you’re kind of person who goes dumpster-diving in an effort to prove that a 12-year-old boy is receiving health care he doesn’t deserve, you’re also the sort of person whose public prayers for Ted Kennedy should not be taken seriously. The incongruity between what these folks have written about Kennedy in the past and what they wrote yesterday is so extraordinary that one has to wonder why on earth they’d bother to break character and say anything at all.

But the point of these false-ringing gestures, though, is for certain bloggers to preserve the self-delusion that their work is, at the end of the day, fundamentally humane. The comment threads bear this observation out, as readers climb over one another to remind themselves that the diarists at Daily Kos would never be so generous if George Bush were similarly afflicted. Of course, if Ted Kennedy had drowned in a hotel bathtub, or if his liver had suddenly petrified, I’d wager the insincere mourning would have been harder to summon. But like the Bush administration — which believes it preserved the nation’s soul by drawing the threshold for torture just south of organ failure and death — there appear to be a great many conservative bloggers who needed to congratulate themselves for discovering a tiny spark of conscience that they’ll quickly discard in the name of, say, urging a war against Iran or advocating the internment of Muslims.

At the bottom of it all, it’s pretty simple. No one cares how wingnut bloggers feel about the glioma in Ted Kennedy’s brain, just as no one would (or should) care about my thoughts — however earnest they might be — if Dick Cheney were trounced by elephants or if Donald Rumsfeld were overcome by blood-born parasites. Having written a great deal of unfriendly things about these and other public figures, I’d like to think I’d at least have the good sense to say nothing at all.