King-Sized Mistake

Now for some blogger reaction, starting with Pompous Windbag (how do you insult a guy with that moniker?):

"It is disgusting to listen to these two ... take shots at Pres. Bush at Coretta Scott King's funeral. Rev. Joe Lowery railing against the war in Iraq and making remarks about wmd's was idiotic and Pres. Jimmy Carter popping off about secret government wiretaps is just as silly. Gentlemen . . . you are at a funeral. You are there to honor the deceased. Coretta Scott King, I am sure, would be embarrassed to have you saying these things. I am no Bush apologist, mind you. He has botched the war in Iraq, turns a blind eye to our southern border and spends money like a drunken sailor.

"You should respect the office of the President, respect the fact he was at the funeral and leave it at that."

Radio talk show host Neal Boortz isn't leaving it at that:

"This repugnant behavior was to be expected out of Joseph Lowery. He chose the occasion of the funeral of the widow of Martin Luther King Jr. to announce that we found no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Never mind that Lowery is wrong. He's often wrong. For Lowery, the race baiting and liberal dogma always comes before fact and logic. He didn't measure up as President of King's SCLC, and he didn't measure up to the task of being a gentleman and honoring Coretta Scott King.

"Then there was Jimmy Carter. Some people refer to Carter as "America's best ex-president." Well, if you want to consider his empowerment of people like Kim Jong Ill and Hugo Chavez as good for America, then you may have a point. If measuring the worth of a former president consists of measuring his affection for the world's dictators, then Carter is indeed one of the best. . . . Carter brought up the fact that the FBI wiretapped Martin Luther King. He didn't mention that this happened under Democratic administrations...

"President Bush knew that this would happen when he went to the funeral. He knew that Democrats and liberals would use an overwhelmingly friendly audience to take their shots. He showed great dignity in sitting there and taking it all in stride. Bush stood tall, Lowery and Carter stooped low."

Captain Ed says any estrangement between the prez and African-American leaders isn't Bush's fault:

"In 2000, when Bush ran for president, he made a point to speak at an NAACP meeting in order to 'reach out' to the leadership. He was rewarded for his effort by an NAACP ad campaign that attempted to pin the James Byrd lynching on Bush, who had resisted hate-crime legislation in Texas. The despicable ads never mentioned that Texas had captured, tried, and convicted the men responsible and sentenced them to death -- underscoring Bush's point about the superfluousness of hate-crime laws. The NAACP just wanted to tar Bush with the lynching to smear him as a closet bigot.

"After that ad came out, Bush garnered 9% of the African-American vote, but won office anyway. The NAACP then spent the next five years whining about Bush refusing to visit them. Why should he? They proved to have no appreciation for his earlier appearance, his first attempt to 'reach out', and they effectively marginalized themselves with an insulting, degrading, and unfair smear campaign. Bush decided to 'reach out' in other directions, bypassing old-line organizations like the NAACP and leaders like Jesse Jackson and instead appeal directly to the communities themselves, through the churches and other organizations. . . .

"Bush went to King's funeral because of the stature of her life and the work she accomplished during it. Again, he 'reached out' -- and what happened? The political leaders on the left turned the funeral into an embarrassing recapitulation of the Wellstone funeral, using the corpse of King as a soapbox to harangue a President who had simply come to pay his respects. Instead of focusing on a moment of unity, when people from all walks of life and political persuasions could meet and agree that Coretta Scott King had made a positive difference for America, they turned it into a partisan sniping show, with the ever-bitter Jimmy Carter making himself the center of attention, as always."

But folks on the left are pushing back, such as Bloodless Coup :