And another thing: what's this rubbish about saying nothing bad about the deceased? What's the societal value in this? Making the bereaved feel better? The only reason I can think of is the avoidance of blood feuds, wherein maligning Cletus's late, drunken clod of an uncle will cause Cletus and all of his mean-tempered kin come knocking on your door to club in your pointed skull. I'm not sure I feel the need to buy into that kind of clannish customary law.

Grace? Grace is how political losers demonstrate moral superiority. Nobody ever lauds grace in a winner, and in the rare cases where they do, it's the sort of lordly grace where the serf is allowed his "dignity", to crawl away in silence and solitude to recoup what hath been taken from him. No winner is owed a demonstration of "grace", and the last Senator Kennedy was nothing if not life's winner - a drunken, treacherous slob who reveled in familial privilege, a shake-and-bake aristocrat with his own political fiefdom, a senatorial seat left to him in entailment by his brother's political will, held by a family retainer in wardship until the advent of the young lord's majority.

Edward Kennedy was aristocratic swine. The legacy of the Kennedy family is an abomination, a living insult against the honor of the Republic.

Good men have bled and died to kill the idea of inherited power in this nation. Be damned to those who celebrate it with officious funerary rites!

Be damned to his bereaved, who are a pack of trust-fund parasites, no doubt squabbling sotto voce over his political legacy as they do their best to look solemn and miserable for the cameras!

Be damned to his mourners, who are the half of them slavish worshipers of oligarchy, and the rest idolaters of the State, and neither of them worthy of the franchise won for them by their ancestors and preserved for them by too few of their peers!