ON THE POLITICS OF POSTHUMOUS HONOR
We the People, Not We
the Vindictive
The nation’s highest civic tributes have become
spoils of a partisan war that ought to end at the grave.
It is time to bind them in statute.
When Lindsey Graham lies in state beneath the Capitol dome on July 28, the Rotunda
will do what it too often does. It will confer the republic’s highest civic honor
by the oldest and least honorable of standards: who had the votes.
There is no statute that governs this. None. Lying in state requires only a concurrent
resolution of Congress, and the criteria are whatever the majority happens to
feel that week. That is precisely why the Rev. Jesse Jackson, a man who marched
from Selma, ran twice for president, and carried the moral weight of a movement,
was denied the Capitol Rotunda his supporters requested and sent home to a state
capitol instead.
Honor flows to friends․ Insult flows to rivals․
The dead deserve better than a scorecard․
It is why John McCain, a genuine war hero, was saluted with the flag grudgingly
lowered to half staff. A sitting president raised it and lowered it again only after veterans’
groups shamed him into decency.
The pattern is unmistakable. The dead are ranked not by service to the country
but by their standing with whoever holds the gavel and the flagpole. And so the
machinery of national mourning, including the Rotunda, the flag at half staff, and
commemorative coins and stamps, becomes one more prize in a feud that should
have no place beside a casket.
This is a disgrace, and it is fixable. Congress should establish clear, neutral criteria
in federal law for who receives these honors, considering the length and character
of national service and measuring it by law rather than by grudge. It should take
the decision out of the hands of small men who treat a funeral as a ballot.
The Rotunda belongs to the nation, not to a faction. The flag at half staff should
salute the citizen, not flatter the powerful. Let these honors be dispensed by We the
People, not We the Vindictive.
The Wanted Poster
and the Parade
Picture your own town. Then look at what we’ve become.
Picture the sheriff’s office in your own town. On the wall hangs a poster: WANTED.
The charge is stealing children by carrying them off from a neighboring county
in the middle of a fight. Everyone who walks in sees that face. Everyone knows what
he is accused of. Now picture the Fourth of July. The mayor doesn’t just let that man
into town. He gives him the lead float. He seats him up front where the children can
wave. He rides beside him down Main Street, smiling for the cameras, while the
band plays and the flags snap in the wind. Nobody mentions the poster. It is still on
the wall, three blocks away, gathering dust.
“The poster is still on the wall․ We just handed him the float․”
That parade was real. It happened on August 15, 2025, in Anchorage, Alaska. The
man on the float was Vladimir Putin, wanted by the International Criminal Court
since March 2023 for the unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children. The lead float
was a red carpet and a shared limousine. The mayor was the President of the United
States. And the poster, the warrant, is still on the wall, gathering dust.
There is a second float in this parade. Israel’s prime minister rides it while under
his own ICC warrant for the conduct of the war in Gaza. He is welcomed to the
reviewing stand more often than any other guest in town. When someone asks the
mayor why, the answer is always the same: these are good men to do business with.
As if a warrant were a credit rating. As if the poster on the wall were a suggestion.
And here is the part that should turn a decent stomach. There is one poster that
can never be printed in this town: the mayor’s own. We built the sheriff’s office so
that no outside court could ever hang our leaders on that wall. A rule that binds
only the strangers you dislike, and never the friends you profit from, is not the law.
It is a parade permit.
You can tell what a town honors by whom it puts on the lead float. Right now, we
are saving that seat for wanted men while asking the children to wave.
The Chickenhawk’s Ledger
They declare the wars. Someone else’s children pay for them.
They send the young to die, then call it honor.
Consider the arithmetic no one in power wants totaled. The average American
killed in Iraq and Afghanistan was about 26 years old. He earned a junior enlisted
wage, often $25,000 to $40,000 a year, and his net worth, after a truck payment and
some debt, hovered near zero. He left behind a spouse who will raise his children
on the memory of a folded flag.
Now consider those who signed his orders. The President draws $400,000 a year.
A member of Congress draws $174,000, and the median lawmaker is worth roughly
$1 million. In the House, the average member is worth some $8 million. They vote
for war from marble chambers, confident that their own sons will never have to
trade civilian life for a Humvee.
“The powerful discover their courage precisely when
the bleeding will be done by someone else․”
The pattern is bipartisan and shameless. Donald Trump, who as commander
in chief ordered strikes and deployments, sat out Vietnam through a string of deferments,
capped by a convenient diagnosis of heel spurs. Bill Clinton, who fired
cruise missiles from the Oval Office, maneuvered clear of that same war through
his own tangle of deferments. Two men, two parties, one privilege: the wars are
always for other people’s children.
This is the oldest swindle in the republic. The powerful discover their courage
precisely when the bleeding will be done by someone poorer, younger, and more
decent than themselves. The soldier believes he is defending a democracy. Too often
he is defending the fortunes and reputations of men who arranged, when it was
their turn, to be somewhere safe.
We are told to honor the fallen. Fine. But honor is cheap when it costs a wreath
and a speech. Real honor would mean this: no one who dodged a war should vote
to start one, and no lecture on sacrifice from a millionaire who never risked a dime
or a son.
The ultimate price is paid by the few: the young, the broke, and the loyal, all
on behalf of the many who profit and preen. Until that ledger is read aloud, the
speeches are only noise over fresh graves.
Selling Tickets to Insider Information
on a Platform Called “Truth Social”?
Consider the branding. A company named for truth, running a platform named
for truth, now proposes to sell truth itself by the millisecond to the highest bidder.
Beginning August 1, Trump Media & Technology Group’s “Truth API” will pipe the
president’s posts that move markets to banks and trading firms milliseconds before
the public sees them, for a reported monthly fee in the six figures. The name promises
information for the people; the product delivers it to the auction winner.
Recall Joseph Kennedy’s shoeshine boy, trading on the same tip as the tycoon.
At least he shared the tycoon’s information. Today, the White House teleprompter
operator reads the words that move markets before they are even spoken and is
better informed than Kennedy’s bootblack ever was, while the public learns them
last. Proximity to the podium is now an asset for rent.
One set of rules for you․ No rules for him․
Strip the euphemism and it is plain: tickets to insider information, sold at the
door. Speed, when the merchandise is government policy, is no convenience. It is
a head start on the Treasury, marketed by a company largely owned by the president’s
own trust. The SEC exists to forbid exactly this asymmetry. That presidents
were exempted from conflict of interest statutes decades ago does not bless the arrangement;
it exposes the loophole. Every prior occupant treated policy as public
property and released it to everyone at the same time. This one meters the tap and
pockets the meter.
Retire the pretense: “Truth Social” is a turnstile, and truth is the commodity behind
it, sold first to the few and delayed for the many. Veritas pro populo? Not at
these prices. “Markets already move on our posts,” the company boasts. Precisely.
That is the confession, not the defense.
