NO TRIBUTES.

Stop rehabilitating the legacies of those responsible for our pain.

Lindsey Graham is dead. No, really.

The television tributes have begun. The flags have descended. The statements have arrived from presidents, senators, generals, foreign leaders, professional mourners, institutional flatterers, and every other custodian of American political respectability.

The familiar vocabulary has already been deployed: patriot, statesman, public servant, friend, fighter, giant, defender of freedom.

We know this ritual. We have watched it happen too many times. A powerful man spends decades supporting war, reaction, repression, austerity, empire, judicial extremism, and the steady demolition of human dignity. He dies.

Within hours, the institutions that documented his conduct begin laundering it. The record is softened. The victims disappear. Political cruelty becomes conviction. Opportunism becomes pragmatism. Militarism becomes leadership. Obedience to power becomes service.

Then the public receives its assignment. We are expected to lower our voices, suspend our judgment, and participate in a compulsory performance of reverence. Decline the assignment. Death ends a life. It leaves the record untouched.

Graham died on 11 July 2026, after more than three decades in Congress. He spent much of that career championing American military power, conservative judges, restrictions on reproductive freedom, opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, and the priorities of the Republican right.

He spent his final political era transforming himself from one of Donald Trump’s most vicious Republican critics into one of Trump’s most dependable courtiers.

That is the legacy. The people who loved him may mourn him. Their grief does not govern history. His family’s memories cannot determine the public meaning of decisions imposed upon millions of strangers. The dead politician belongs to the historical record, and the historical record belongs to everyone who lived beneath the power he exercised.

We owe powerful men accuracy. Reverence is optional. Silence is permitted. Condemnation remains available.

THE FUNERAL CANONIZATION MACHINE

American political culture treats death as a sacrament of reputational purification. Public officials who were destructive, dishonest, cruel, or catastrophically wrong emerge from death remade as national treasures.

Their careers are drained of blood and consequence. Their personalities take center stage. Their jokes, friendships, childhood hardships, pets, marriages, and private acts of kindness become substitutes for judgment.

This process serves a political purpose. It protects the ruling class from meaningful historical accountability. The political establishment understands that serious memory can become dangerous. A public that remembers clearly may identify patterns.

It may recognize that celebrated institutions repeatedly elevate people who produce mass suffering. It may connect foreign graves to Senate votes, poverty to tax policy, judicial cruelty to confirmation hearings, and shattered nations to respectable men seated beneath polished wood and marble.

Reputation rehabilitation severs those connections. It reduces political history to personality. It asks whether the official was pleasant at dinner, charming backstage, cordial across the aisle, affectionate toward family, or capable of making colleagues laugh. None of these details answer the central question: What did this person do with power?

That question should control every public obituary of a president, senator, governor, judge, general, billionaire, media proprietor, or political operative. Power creates consequences far beyond the private circles of those who possess it. Its moral evaluation requires an accounting of those consequences.

The people killed by war do not receive televised memorial weeks. The families destroyed by deportation, incarceration, unemployment, austerity, environmental poisoning, and preventable disease rarely receive lengthy profiles about their courage. Their suffering becomes data. Their architects become legends.

This arrangement is obscene.

LIBERALISM’S SELECTIVE MEMORY

The rehabilitation of powerful conservatives frequently acquires its greatest legitimacy through liberal participation. Conservatives already defend the men who built their movement.

They praise Reagan, celebrate Bush, sentimentalize McCain, and excuse Graham because these figures advanced conservative power. The decisive laundering often begins when liberals who once opposed these men start presenting them as models of dignity, honor, responsibility, and democratic restraint.

That process rarely announces itself as ideological surrender. It emerges through small acts of normalization. A warm photograph circulates. A former president tells an affectionate story. A liberal television host recalls a private joke.

A documentary emphasizes character. A magazine profile praises an unexpected friendship. A funeral speech invokes bipartisan service. Each moment appears harmless in isolation. Together, they produce an alternate historical identity.

George W. Bush becomes the smiling painter. John McCain becomes the honorable maverick. George H. W. Bush becomes the dignified statesman. Ronald Reagan becomes the optimistic grandfather of modern America. The transformation depends upon systematic forgetting.

The Iraq War remains. The AIDS dead remain. Union busting remains. Iran-Contra remains. The Willie Horton campaign remains. Torture remains. Mass incarceration remains.

The judicial destruction of reproductive rights remains. Their political usefulness fades once liberal institutions decide that a newer Republican villain makes the previous generation appear respectable.

Donald Trump accelerated this process by offending liberal sensibilities in ways that his predecessors often avoided. His vulgarity, open contempt, personal corruption, incoherence, and authoritarian appetite produced a longing for Republicans who knew how to speak the language of institutions.

Liberal elites began searching the recent past for conservatives who could symbolize maturity. They found men whose policies had already damaged the world and declared them guardians of a lost civic order.

This nostalgia reveals the shallow moral structure of establishment liberalism. Political violence becomes easier to forgive when it arrives through formal speeches, polished advisers, respectable newspapers, bipartisan commissions, and solemn invocations of national security.

A president who destroys a country while using proper grammar can later be welcomed into the fellowship of democratic elders. A senator who spends decades calling for war can become a symbol of conscience if he maintains friendships with journalists and occasionally disagrees with his own party.

Trump changed the aesthetic standard. He did not change the records of the people who preceded him. Liberal institutions changed the way they narrated those records.

Every successful rehabilitation teaches the governing class that accountability has an expiration date. Time, friendship, elite access, and favorable media treatment can soften almost any legacy.

The people harmed by policy are expected to live permanently with its consequences. The people who imposed those consequences may eventually receive documentaries, libraries, honorary medals, affectionate interviews, and funerals framed as national healing.

That arrangement protects the entire political order. A serious reckoning with Reagan, both Bushes, McCain, Graham, Clinton, Obama, Biden, Trump, and the institutions surrounding them would expose continuity across administrations.

It would reveal a governing class committed to empire, militarism, concentrated wealth, carceral power, and the preservation of elite control. Selective memory protects the fantasy that every catastrophe originated with one uniquely evil individual.

The canonization of yesterday’s Republicans allows liberal America to present itself as the custodian of reason while avoiding an examination of the political system it shares with them.

LINDSEY GRAHAM’S RECORD REMAINS

Lindsey Graham built his reputation as a foreign-policy hawk. In Washington, that designation often functions as an elegant description for someone who consistently recommends violence for other people’s countries and sacrifice for other people’s children.

Graham supported expansive American military involvement abroad, cultivated close alliances with interventionists such as John McCain and Joe Lieberman, and spent decades presenting war as the natural language of American leadership.

His final years included aggressive positions concerning Russia, Ukraine, Iran, and Israel, accompanied by a continued belief in military power as the foundation of international order.

He also helped construct the judiciary that now governs intimate areas of American life. Graham chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee during a crucial period of Republican judicial consolidation.

He participated in the machinery that denied Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland a hearing and later helped secure Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation immediately before the 2020 presidential election. His support helped create the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade.

Graham later promoted a federal abortion ban. He presented reproductive control as moral seriousness while supporting a political movement that repeatedly showed contempt for health care, social provision, family support, child welfare, and the material conditions required for human flourishing.

His most revealing political transformation concerned Donald Trump. During the 2016 Republican primary, Graham described Trump as dangerous, unfit, and ruinous to the party.

Once Trump captured the presidency and Republican power reorganized itself around him, Graham discovered loyalty. The critic became a courtier. The warnings evaporated. Access, influence, judges, golf, and proximity to presidential authority supplied the new governing principles.

After the January 6 attack, Graham announced that he was finished with Trump. The separation barely survived the political weather. He returned to Trump’s side, defended him, campaigned for him, and helped preserve the man he had once identified as a menace.

This was no tragic mystery. Graham understood Trump. He had described him accurately before submission became advantageous. His later loyalty revealed the depth of his opportunism and the emptiness of the institutionalist persona cultivated around him. He knew what Trump was. He chose him anyway. That choice belongs near the center of his obituary.

Liberal political culture will still search for redeeming details. It will remember moments of cooperation, private jokes, military expertise, occasional criticism of Republican excess, and friendships maintained across the aisle.

These recollections will be presented as evidence of a more honorable Senate. They will allow Democratic officials to praise Graham as an institutionalist while avoiding the obvious truth that he helped degrade the institution whenever degradation served his power.

His willingness to dine with Democrats never repaired the judiciary he helped construct. His cordiality toward colleagues never returned reproductive rights to the people stripped of them. His familiarity with foreign affairs never sanctified the wars he supported. Bipartisan intimacy cannot erase partisan destruction.

JOHN THE WARMONGER

John McCain received one of the most extravagant posthumous rehabilitations in recent American history. His death activated every sentimental impulse within the political press. He became courage personified, the last honorable Republican, the defender of institutions, the noble warrior, the conscience of the Senate.

The legend depended upon aggressive editing. McCain supported the authorization for war in Iraq. The Senate passed that authorization by a vote of 77–23 in October 2002, and McCain stood among the senators who empowered George W. Bush to launch one of the defining catastrophes of the twenty-first century.

The case for war rested upon falsehoods concerning weapons of mass destruction, terrorism, and Iraq’s supposed relationship to September 11. Public support grew within an atmosphere saturated with fear and misinformation. McCain participated in that political project and remained a prominent defender of the war after its premises collapsed.

He later criticized the Bush administration’s execution of the occupation and demanded more troops. This distinction earned him praise for seriousness. McCain objected to the management of a disastrous war he had helped authorize and prescribed a larger military commitment as the cure.

He became one of the foremost advocates of the Iraq surge, pressing the case for escalation when much of the country wanted withdrawal.

His interventionism extended far beyond Iraq. McCain approached world politics with a persistent appetite for American military involvement. His political persona transformed belligerence into moral courage.

Television studios rewarded him with endless appearances. Journalists admired his accessibility. Colleagues repeated stories about his humor, temper, candor, and friendship.

The dead in Iraq could not appear on Sunday morning programs to discuss his charm.

Meghan McCain can continue to grieve her father, but her grief holds no veto over public judgment. A famous surname, inherited platform, television contract, and endless access to elite media cannot convert filial devotion into historical authority.

She knew John McCain as her father. The world knew him as a senator who helped authorize war and spent decades advocating an aggressive American empire.

Her tears do not erase anyone else’s blood.

The public owes the McCain family no participation in the family mythology. Personal affection has never been a reliable instrument for evaluating state power.

The children of powerful men frequently experience warmth, generosity, protection, opportunity, and love. The people living beneath bombs, sanctions, occupations, prisons, and hostile laws encounter another person entirely.

The private McCain remembered by his daughter occupies one small part of his biography. The public McCain helped authorize a catastrophic war and spent decades advocating the projection of American power. Political history must center the exercise of power and the consequences that followed.

Liberal elites participated enthusiastically in McCain’s canonization because his conflict with Trump supplied them with a convenient Republican hero. His criticism of Trump, defense of certain Senate norms, and final vote preserving the Affordable Care Act became evidence that the entire man deserved reverence.

Democratic leaders, cable news hosts, and editorial boards elevated McCain into an emblem of honor while the bodies produced by the Iraq War disappeared from view.

One late act of institutional independence cannot settle the moral account of an entire career. McCain’s opposition to Trump never revoked his Iraq vote. His friendship with Joe Biden never buried the dead. His relationship with the press never transformed militarism into wisdom.

The people who built McCain’s legend understood the value of personal narrative. Heroism, captivity, sacrifice, family, honor, and bipartisan friendship supplied an emotionally powerful story. Iraq supplied an indictment. The story won because institutions chose to tell it more often.

NO HALO FOR RONNIE

Ronald Reagan remains the patron saint of the American right and a recurring object of liberal nostalgia. The Reagan mythology presents optimism, patriotism, humor, confidence, and national renewal. His presidency left behind a harsher inheritance.

Reagan accelerated the political assault on organized labor, public provision, taxation of wealth, social welfare, and the regulatory state. His administration helped entrench the economic order that transferred power upward, weakened working people, and treated concentrated wealth as a national virtue.

His firing of striking air-traffic controllers in 1981 delivered a clear message to employers across the country. Organized labor could be attacked directly from the White House. The federal government would lend its authority to the disciplining of workers.

His administration’s response to the AIDS crisis remains a moral stain. The epidemic ravaged gay communities while the federal government moved with deadly indifference. The silence, mockery, delay, and ideological contempt surrounding AIDS policy cost time during a public-health emergency where time meant lives.

Abroad, Reagan supported violent anticommunist projects across the Global South. His administration backed the Contras in Nicaragua and treated reactionary insurgencies as instruments of American purpose.

Reagan praised the Contras as moral equivalents of the American founders while his government became entangled in covert operations, arms sales, and efforts to evade congressional restrictions.

Iran-Contra exposed a government selling weapons to Iran and directing money toward the Contras in defiance of congressional limits. The scandal produced indictments and convictions within Reagan’s administration. It revealed an executive branch committed to pursuing its ideological warfare through secrecy, deception, and contempt for democratic constraint.

Latin America remembers the Reagan era through graves, massacres, displaced communities, armed proxies, and U.S.-supported forces. That memory deserves greater authority than the polished recollections of Washington speechwriters.

Liberal complicity in the Reagan mythology emerged through gradual surrender. Democratic politicians adopted portions of his economic framework, accepted the rightward movement of national politics, and treated his popularity as evidence of political wisdom.

Bill Clinton’s triangulation later demonstrated how thoroughly Reaganism had rearranged the boundaries of respectable governance. Deregulation, punitive welfare reform, mass incarceration, financialization, and market discipline became features of bipartisan rule.

Reagan’s greatest posthumous victory came through the acceptance of his premises by political opponents. Liberal leaders who claimed to reject his ideology continued governing within the world his presidency helped build. Their ceremonial admiration reflected a deeper accommodation.

Reagan’s smile did not humanize his policies. His communication skills made those policies easier to sell.

AN IMPERIAL OPERATIVE

George H.W. Bush received the full statesman treatment after his death in 2018. Obituaries praised his decency, manners, restraint, experience, patriotism, and devotion to public service. His passing became an occasion for elite America to mourn an era of supposedly honorable Republican leadership.

The record contains the invasion of Panama, the Gulf War, the escalation of punitive criminal politics, the racial manipulation of the 1988 campaign, and the use of presidential pardons to terminate accountability for Iran-Contra.

Bush’s campaign benefited from the infamous Willie Horton attack, which weaponized racial fear and helped establish a model of punitive politics that shaped American elections and criminal-justice policy for decades.

The campaign turned a Black prisoner into a national symbol of menace and used him to portray Michael Dukakis as weak, permissive, and dangerous. The lesson absorbed by American politicians was clear: racialized fear could deliver power.

Bush later pardoned six figures implicated in Iran-Contra, including former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger. Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh described the pardons as completing the cover-up.

The pardons protected officials connected to a scandal in which the executive branch had pursued covert foreign policy, deceived Congress, and obstructed accountability.

That is part of George H. W. Bush’s legacy. His courtesy toward colleagues does not resolve it. His handwritten notes do not resolve it. His marriage, military service, patrician manners, and postpresidential friendships do not resolve it.

American elites admired Bush because he embodied their preferred style of power: controlled, credentialed, polite, imperial, and fluent in the language of institutional legitimacy. The bombs still exploded. The pardons still obstructed justice. The racial appeals still poisoned democracy.

Democratic participation in Bush’s rehabilitation supplied the bipartisan seal of approval. Former rivals praised his temperament. Liberal commentators celebrated his friendship with Bill Clinton.

The two former presidents appeared together as elder statesmen whose personal warmth supposedly demonstrated the better nature of American politics.

Their friendship carried no moral answer for Panama. It supplied no remedy for Iraqis subjected to war and sanctions. It offered no accountability for the racial politics that helped Bush enter the White House. Elite reconciliation created a comforting story for people who shared stages, donors, institutions, and social circles.

Decorum never cleansed the consequences.

THE NATIONAL DISGRACE

George W. Bush remains alive, which has allowed Americans to observe reputation laundering in real time.

He paints. He smiles. He shares candy with Michelle Obama. He appears at national ceremonies beside former presidents. Lifestyle features describe his friendships. Social media circulates charming images of bipartisan affection.

Public memory increasingly treats him as a harmless elder statesman from a simpler era. The warmth between the Bush and Obama families has become a recurring symbol of elite civility.

This spectacle reveals the emptiness of establishment morality.

Bush entered office after the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount in Bush v. Gore, securing the presidency despite losing the national popular vote.

His administration then presided over the September 11 attacks, launched the Afghanistan War, invaded Iraq under false pretenses, authorized torture, expanded surveillance, established a global detention system, and delivered a catastrophic response to Hurricane Katrina.

On August 6, 2001, Bush received a presidential intelligence brief titled Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US. The document referred to al-Qaeda’s desire to attack inside the country, suspicious activity consistent with hijacking preparations, and possible surveillance of federal buildings.

That document did not provide the exact date, flight numbers, or operational plan for September 11. It did establish that the threat of an al-Qaeda attack inside the United States had reached the president’s desk thirty-six days before nearly three thousand people were killed. Bush’s administration later defended its handling of the warning by emphasizing its historical and general character.

The public is entitled to judge that defense with severity.

Bush then used the trauma of September 11 to construct the political environment for invading Iraq, a country that had not carried out the attacks. The war was sold through false claims and manufactured associations concerning terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

It killed enormous numbers of people, displaced millions, destabilized the region, empowered sectarian violence, enriched military contractors, and damaged international law.

John McCain helped authorize it. Lindsey Graham supported the political order that sustained it. George W. Bush ordered it.

The Bush administration also authorized interrogation practices that included waterboarding. Secret legal memoranda attempted to place torture within the boundaries of executive authority, producing a bureaucratic vocabulary for cruelty.

Painting portraits does not answer for Abu Ghraib. Candy does not answer for Baghdad. A friendship with Michelle Obama does not resurrect the dead.

The liberal embrace of Bush represents one of the most shameful developments of the Trump era. Trump’s vulgarity allowed respectable America to rediscover affection for a president whose crimes arrived in polished sentences, tailored suits, patriotic staging, and the disciplined language of national security.

Bush’s rehabilitation required active liberal participation. Michelle Obama’s public warmth toward him became a recurring national image. Ellen DeGeneres defended her friendship with him as an expression of kindness across political difference.

Democratic leaders treated his presence at ceremonies as evidence of institutional continuity. Liberal media outlets produced human-interest stories about his art, humor, family, and relationship with the Obamas.

Every one of these gestures pulled attention away from the people whose lives his administration shattered. The friendship became the story. Iraq became the background. Personal charm became the dominant narrative. Torture became an old controversy.

The message was unmistakable. A Republican president could invade a country under false pretenses, build a global torture regime, preside over mass death, expand surveillance, fail catastrophically during Hurricane Katrina, and return to respectable society after a sufficient period of silence. Liberal acceptance would complete the restoration.

Bush’s recovery also exposed the Democratic Party’s investment in protecting the presidency as an institution. A thorough judgment of Bush would raise questions about the Obama administration’s refusal to prosecute officials responsible for torture, its continuation of expansive surveillance, its reliance upon drone warfare, and its broader preservation of the national-security architecture Bush constructed.

Accountability for Bush could have established precedents threatening to future administrations. Institutional protection became easier. “Looking forward” preserved the continuity of power.

The victims of Bush’s presidency received no corresponding restoration. Iraq remained devastated. Torture remained torture. The dead remained dead.

Anyone participating in Bush’s rehabilitation is helping power escape history.

CIVILITY IS THE PERFUME SPRAYED OVER ATROCITY

The obsession with civility has distorted American political memory. A politician who speaks softly while destroying lives receives greater respect than one who announces his cruelty with crude language. The public is trained to evaluate tone while institutions evaluate power. This arrangement allows respectable brutality to flourish.

George H.W. Bush possessed manners. Ronald Reagan possessed charm. John McCain possessed media friendships. Lindsey Graham possessed access, humor, and an ability to move comfortably among partisan factions. George W. Bush possessed an affable public personality.

Their victims experienced policy.

Civility becomes dangerous when it functions as absolution. It converts elite familiarity into moral credibility. Journalists who enjoyed private jokes with senators begin describing them as honorable.

Politicians who shared committee rooms speak of lifelong friendship. Television hosts remember generous personal gestures. A social class gathers around one of its own and confuses intimacy with innocence.

The rest of us have no obligation to accept their verdict.

A senator can be kind to staff and cruel to a nation. A president can love his family and destroy families abroad. A public official can display courage in one chapter of life and produce cowardice, suffering, or catastrophe in another. Human complexity supplies no exemption from judgment.

Liberal political culture remains especially vulnerable to the language of civility because it frequently treats procedural respectability as a moral achievement.

Bipartisan friendship becomes evidence of virtue. Institutional loyalty becomes evidence of character. Familiarity with norms becomes evidence of democratic commitment.

These judgments privilege the experiences of political insiders. A senator who treats colleagues warmly may still vote to deny millions of people health care.

A president who honors ceremonial tradition may still order unlawful violence abroad. A judge who writes elegant opinions may still strip vulnerable people of fundamental rights.

Elite courtesy describes relations within the ruling class. It says little about how that class governs everyone else.

HEIRS DON’T OWN HISTORY

The families of prominent officials often assume a public role in defending the deceased. Their access to media allows private memory to become national narrative.

They speak of the father at home, the husband at dinner, the grandfather at Christmas, the friend who called during illness, the mentor who offered encouragement, the colleague who crossed the aisle. These stories may contain genuine affection. They occupy a tiny portion of the historical field.

Meghan McCain’s John McCain existed within a family. Iraq’s John McCain existed within a war authorization. The public record cannot be subordinated to the comfort of his daughter.

The same principle governs every political dynasty. The child of a president inherits memories, connections, opportunities, social status, institutional protection, and frequently a lucrative media career.

The people harmed by that president inherit grief, debt, disability, displacement, ecological destruction, political instability, and graves.

The dynasty already possesses enough. It does not get ownership of memory.

Corporate media make this distortion possible by treating the children, spouses, friends, and former aides of powerful officials as natural authorities on public legacy.

Their access is rarely matched by equal attention to the people harmed by the policies under discussion. The family receives a national platform. The victims receive a sentence, an archival photograph, or a statistic.

The resulting narrative privileges proximity to power. Those who knew the official personally become interpreters of history. Those who knew him through war, imprisonment, poverty, deportation, surveillance, discrimination, or bereavement remain outside the studio.

THE UNDERTAKERS

Corporate journalism presents itself as the guardian of democratic memory. During the death of a powerful political figure, it frequently becomes the guardian of elite reputation.

News organizations that spent years reporting controversial policies suddenly produce retrospectives dominated by family interviews, military ceremonies, presidential condolences, campaign nostalgia, bipartisan friendships, and carefully selected moments of personal warmth. Entire editorial staffs adopt the language of reverence.

The framing determines what survives. Most people will never read every vote cast by a senator, every intelligence report received by a president, every legal memorandum authorizing state violence, or every declassified record documenting covert policy.

They encounter history through televised memorials, newspaper obituaries, documentaries, podcasts, anniversary programs, and the images chosen for circulation.

Every obituary makes decisions. Every documentary establishes emphasis. Every retrospective determines which events deserve examination and which can be compressed into a phrase about controversy. Reputation forms through accumulation. Hundreds of editorial judgments gradually construct the final public figure.

The vocabulary performs much of the laundering. Statesman, patriot, public servant, war hero, institutionalist, and voice of conscience arrive before the record has been examined. These words establish admiration as the emotional baseline.

The public then receives a political biography framed through personal nobility. War becomes a difficult decision. Racism becomes a product of the era.

Union busting becomes economic reform. Torture becomes an interrogation controversy. Imperial violence becomes foreign-policy resolve. Political submission becomes pragmatism.

The media’s relationship with John McCain illustrates this process. Reporters admired his availability, humor, and informal exchanges aboard the Straight Talk Express.

These personal relationships shaped coverage throughout his career and became central to his legacy. The people affected by his support for war never enjoyed comparable access to the journalists responsible for narrating him.

Corporate journalism frequently mistakes access for understanding. A politician who returns calls, provides quotes, jokes with reporters, and cultivates relationships becomes human in ways unavailable to distant victims. Familiarity generates sympathy. Sympathy shapes emphasis. Emphasis shapes memory.

This is how structural violence disappears beneath anecdotes.

SILENCE IS AVAILABLE

No one is required to celebrate the death of a political enemy. No one is required to perform sorrow, either. Silence exists.

People who feel uncomfortable criticizing the newly dead can close their mouths. They can refrain from posting. They can allow family and friends to mourn without joining the public canonization campaign. They can resist the urge to issue polished statements about honor, service, patriotism, and national greatness.

This option requires almost no effort.

The demand for silence should never run in only one direction. Political elites invoke restraint when the powerful die, then tolerate endless contempt for the people harmed by those same officials.

Civilians killed abroad become collateral damage. The poor become irresponsible. Prisoners become monsters. Migrants become invaders. Protesters become thugs. Workers become greedy. The powerful receive dignity in death after denying dignity to countless people in life.

Anyone seeking peace at the funeral should have pursued justice during the administration.

FACTUAL CONDEMNATION IS A PUBLIC SERVICE

A clear recitation of a deceased official’s record serves democracy. It preserves memory against propaganda. It honors victims by refusing their erasure.

It teaches future generations how power operated. It prevents sentimental mythology from replacing analysis. It reminds living officials that death cannot guarantee reputational escape.

This work should be factual, relentless, and specific. Name the wars, votes, judges, coups, sanctions, union busting, racial appeals, torture memoranda, pardons, and dead.

The establishment prefers abstractions because abstraction softens responsibility. Mistakes were made. The intelligence was flawed. The country was divided. The era was complicated. He served during turbulent times.

Human beings made decisions. They possessed names, titles, offices, advisers, intelligence reports, legal counsel, alternatives, and authority. They chose. Other people paid.

Political journalism often treats direct moral judgment as evidence of bias while accepting ceremonial praise as neutrality. An obituary calling a senator a statesman appears professional.

An obituary describing the bloodshed produced by his votes appears inflammatory. This imbalance demonstrates how thoroughly elite admiration has been embedded within the language of objectivity.

Accuracy requires proportion. A politician who helped authorize war should be remembered through that war. A president who enabled torture should be remembered through torture. A senator who built a reactionary judiciary should be remembered through the rights that judiciary destroyed.

THE DEMOCRATIC ESTABLISHMENT HELPED BUILD THE AMNESIA

The Democratic establishment bears direct responsibility for the rehabilitation of reactionary Republicans. Its leaders repeatedly elevate personal relationships above historical accountability.

They speak of friendship, shared service, common patriotism, institutional loyalty, and respect across party lines. These sentiments flatter the people expressing them. They also reinforce the social unity of a political class whose disagreements rarely threaten its shared control.

Democratic officials praised Reagan’s optimism, George H. W. Bush’s decency, John McCain’s honor, George W. Bush’s humanity, and Lindsey Graham’s institutional relationships.

Each act of praise helped narrow the terms of historical debate. The victims became impolite interruptions. The wars became old business. The reactionary policies became evidence of honest disagreement among honorable people.

This culture has consequences. When Democratic leaders present architects of war and repression as good people with different views, they teach the public to understand politics as a disagreement among respectable professionals.

The material stakes disappear. Bombed cities, broken unions, gutted welfare systems, imprisoned communities, deported families, dead patients, and stripped rights become secondary to the maintenance of elite civility.

The Democratic establishment embraces these narratives because it shares responsibility for much of the governing order. Democratic presidents have expanded surveillance, conducted wars, deported migrants, supported police power, protected financial institutions, and maintained American empire.

A rigorous accounting of Republican crimes would establish standards capable of reaching Democratic administrations.

Selective condemnation protects everyone inside the club.

This explains the tenderness shown toward George W. Bush. Prosecution for torture would have imposed a legal and moral boundary upon executive power. The Obama administration chose continuity.

Its refusal to pursue accountability allowed Bush to move from disgraced president to lovable elder. The same political culture that declined to prosecute him later celebrated his candy-sharing friendship with Michelle Obama.

The gesture appears sweet because the dead and displaced have been edited out of the frame.

ENOUGH.

The deaths of powerful men routinely become opportunities for the living to manufacture innocence. This practice should end.

Lindsey Graham’s death does not require anyone to call him a great senator. John McCain’s death never required anyone to call him a hero. George H. W. Bush’s death never required anyone to describe him as decent. Ronald Reagan’s death never required anyone to accept the fantasy of morning in America.

George W. Bush remains alive, and his rehabilitation should be rejected while he is still present to witness the historical judgment.

Public officials who wielded immense power deserve an accounting proportionate to that power. Their families may remember birthdays, vacations, private jokes, tenderness, and love. The public must remember legislation, wars, appointments, lies, deaths, and consequences.

The Democratic establishment should stop using bipartisan friendship as detergent for bloodstained legacies. Corporate media should stop converting access, charm, and private warmth into evidence of public virtue.

Editorial boards should stop writing obituaries that read like applications for sainthood. Cable networks should stop treating the death of a powerful man as an order to suspend historical intelligence.

They know what these men did. Many of them reported it. Many voted against it, campaigned against it, protested it, documented it, or built careers describing it. Their later amnesia represents a choice.

The ritual continues because elite institutions benefit from it. Politicians learn that their enemies may become their eulogists. Journalists learn that access survives through deference.

Families learn that inherited influence can dominate public memory. The ruling class learns that death offers one final protection from accountability.

The public is allowed to refuse.

We can remember Lindsey Graham as the opportunist and militarist he chose to become. We can remember John McCain through the war he helped authorize. We can remember Ronald Reagan through the workers, AIDS victims, and Latin American communities harmed under his rule.

We can remember George H. W. Bush through Panama, Iraq, Willie Horton, and the Iran-Contra pardons. We can remember George W. Bush through a stolen election, ignored warnings, two wars, torture, surveillance, Katrina, and mass death.

No television tribute can compel reverence. No presidential friendship can erase responsibility. No daughter’s tears can dictate the judgment of history. No funeral can transform policy into innocence.

History is under no obligation to attend the funeral. The dead politician has finished speaking, and so the record gets the final word.