Reposted with edits from a well-received series of comments:
Much broader issues are raised, by Hillary’s Nancy AIDS “Gaffe”, than any questions about Hillary herself (including the breadth of her campaigning skills or the depth of her empathy)
We all could usefully consider two deep takeaways from this controversy.
A. Background Questions
Setting aside the context of one Presidential spouse attending the funeral of another, … please consider the broader context of all those dead who have committed great crimes.
Did Scalia deserve to have post-death reports of crude and self-indulgent racism omitted from his (broadly defined) obituaries?
Will Cheney deserve the same?
Did Pinochet? Stalin? Hitler?
Wasn’t the original underlying tradition, of “speak no ill”, premised upon an assumption that God will punish and reward in the afterlife? If the only afterlife is in our memories (and soon enough, of other people’s memories of us) then where is the punishment and reward for the abusers who die before being brought to account?
B. My Takeaways
1. Cultural: Speaking kindly of the unkind dead is a cultural tic that is inappropriate for dead public figures. If they abused us in life, then we should abuse their memories after their death. If you assume that the only afterlife is the way that you are remembered, then rehabilitating dead villains is (as Hillary has just demonstrated in the worst possible way) an insult to dead heroes, dead innocents and the people who treasure their memories.
2. Political: Broader VIP clubby-ness
(of which attending funerals is the least offensive of a much broader range of VIPs’ activities) … is also inappropriate, in our era of grave political dysfunction. Funeral pleasantries are not as troubling or politically destructive as, for example:
Bill Clinton bonding with H.W.Bush and his idiot son
… apparently because of their shared experience holding a stopping-buck in one hand and the nuclear launch button in the other. This is a particularly clear example reflecting our deep problem that VIPs feel more connected to opposing VIPs than to the people they were elected to represent — which is a big part of the reason so many different people are now outraged by so many differently diagnosed, but greatly overlapping, sell-outs by the political establishment.