The PointBy Daniel Greenfield

All the outrage about an insufficient degree of respect being paid to Senator McCain is not about respect. It’s not about paying tribute to him. It’s about using his death to settle scores with political enemies.

Take Ron Radosh’s latest Daily Beast piece which is mainly a list of conservatives who have failed to pay proper tribute to McCain.

“And after his (Trump’s) tweet offering his family “deepest sympathies and respect,” but omitting anything about McCain’s legacy, the dog whistle to his followers was made clear,” he writes.

What was the dog whistle? Who knows.

“Some do praise his record of service to the nation, they do not dwell on “the ideas to which he devoted his public life.”

What are those ideas? Who knows.

“The only reason McCain is being praised, Rush Limbaugh explained, “is the opportunity it provides to continue to savage Donald Trump… showing Trump coming up short on virtually every measure.” It evidently has little to do with McCain’s principles, dignity, and willingness to stand by what he believes.”

Except Radosh’s article demonstrates Limbaugh’s point.

It’s little more than a lazy roundup of quotes from a few conservative thinkers combined with enthusiastic arm waving about McCain’s “ideas”, without ever spelling them out, about his principles, dignity, etc, which are mentioned only at the end and never elaborated on.

If Radosh were really brimming over with respect for these ideas and principles, he could have dedicated an article to them. But he found it much more worthwhile to use McCain’s death to settle ideological scores. But McCain isn’t Kirov. And using his death to attack conservatives while making passing vague references to his ideas or principles is the height of cynicism.

If McCain’s ideas are so compelling, surely they deserve an article of their own. But instead what engages the professional McCain mourner class seems to be using his death to deliver their own “Friends, Romans and Countrymen” speech in the hopes of turning some imagined mob on Trump. But the mob hasn’t materialized and will never materialize. The latest outrage that incenses political elites leaves the rest of the country cold. And the average American, including Trump voters, respects McCain’s death far more than the pundits trying to use him as a political weapon.