Sometimes, heroes outlive themselves.  John McCain's reputation would have stood up better to scrutiny had he died a younger man.  The same is true for John Lewis.  In his heyday, he was a brave and honorable civil rights icon.  In his final years, he was an angry, dishonest partisan.  The younger Lewis would have been embarrassed by his funeral; the older Lewis would have reveled in it.

The funeral took place at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.  Washington was left empty of Democrat politicians, for they were in Atlanta paying homage, which led some to wonder about their return home:

John Lewis’s funeral was in Georgia. Dozens of Members of Congress were there.

Georgia is on Washington D.C. Mayor Bowser’s list of states that require 2 week mandatory quarantine for 14 days

Are these politicians going into quarantine, or are rules just for the little people?

— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) July 30, 2020

The funeral was fairly well attended.  Democrats, who have strongly supported barring people from attending loved funerals for their loved ones or attending regular church services, seemed comfortable with a different set of rules for themselves:

Image: YouTube screen grab.

Those are just minor issues.  The big takeaway was Barack Obama standing before the television cameras and demanding that we do away with the filibuster to destroy the integrity of the American voting system.  Oh, and of course, he implied that Donald Trump is George Wallace.

The eulogy began well enough, with Obama reciting Lewis's childhood in the Jim Crow South, his history-making commitment to the civil rights movement, and his long career at the heart of the American government.  Some might say that Lewis's political career alone, augmented by a eulogy from a black president, proves that the civil rights movement in America was a smashing success, but that's not how Democrats roll.

Instead, Obama insisted that America is a racist hellhole, and he stopped just short of explicitly stating that Donald Trump is George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama.  He also essentially said that those federal police officers pushing back against violent Antifa terrorists are an army of Bull Connors, the Birmingham commissioner of public safety who used attack dogs and fire hoses against peaceful civil rights marchers:

Bull Connor may be gone. But today we witness with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone. But we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.

Further, said Obama, the Republican party is trying to reinstate Jim Crow–era disenfranchisement:

We may no longer have to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar in order to cast a ballot. But even as we sit here, there are those in power are doing their darnedest to discourage people from voting – by closing polling locations, and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision, even undermining the postal service in the runup to an election that is going to be dependent on mailed-in ballots so people don't get sick.

Each of those statements is a lie: this is not 1790, and voters don't have to walk three days through the snow, uphill in both directions to vote — something their forebears would have done for that precious vote.  If getting to the polls is a real problem, voters can apply for absentee ballots.  Restrictive ID laws affect only illegal aliens and fraudulent voters.  After all, Americans need ID for everything else they do.

Lastly, the reference to the postal service is a demand that ballots get mailed to everyone in America with a driver's license (which puts the lie to the claim that voters can't get IDs), which is an invitation to vote fraud on an epic scale.  (Absentee ballots differ because voters must request them.)  Even without fraud, this video of an experiment in Philadelphia shows how risky it is to rely on the postal service to protect American votes:

Local news’ experiment in mail-in voting ends in disaster: "I just don’t trust the mail" pic.twitter.com/BUPP5a9TK9

— Steve Guest (@SteveGuest) July 29, 2020

Having set the stage, Obama insisted the only way to honor Lewis's legacy was to enact automatic voter registration; re-enfranchise ex-felons; make Election Day a national holiday; give senators to D.C. and Puerto Rico; and, to make all that happen, eliminate the filibuster.

In the end, Lewis had slipped from a place on the pedestal that he'd earned through bravery and integrity.  I suspect that the elder Lewis would have applauded Obama's demagoguery.  Still, I'd like to think the young Lewis, who valued the vote above anything, would have resented these efforts to disenfranchise half of America — the half that votes for the party that fought to end slavery during the Civil War and that ensured the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

Image: YouTube screen grab.