Mandela

My picks for notable writing on Mandela's death:

From Charles Pierce on those Reaganite hypocrites who came too late to the Mandela dance and now think they can jump on the bandwagon:

It's too late now to seek absolution at the bier of Nelson Mandela, who is dead and can't speak for himself.  Back in the era in which you all opposed him, all you chickenhawk bastards, keeping your campus sandwich joints safe from the Sandinistas, you did so because your politics and your world view were formed in an abattoir, built on the bones of butchered civilians in El Mozote and a hundred other places, steeped in the blood of people like Sister Jean Donovan. You opposed Mandela when it really counted for the same reason you cheered on murderers in this hemisphere. Ronald Reagan was a dim hack who did horrible damage to almost everything he touched. You can own him and be welcome to him, but you don't get Nelson Mandela.

And from Hunter writing for Daily Kos:

Jerry Falwell was against him. Pat Robertson was against him. Dick Cheney was against him, and William F. Buckley was against him, and George Will was against him, and Grover Norquist travelled to South Africa to be against him, and the Heritage Foundation was against him, and of course Ronald Reagan was steadfastly and famously against him.

Everyone would agree that apartheid was wrong, mind you, but Nelson Mandela and the others who fought against the system were just so ... uppity? In the rancidity of Jesse Helms' behavior towards the man it would be impossible to not detect the lingering fury of our own nation's not-that-distant civil rights battles, a fight that many of the same segregationists were still eager to fight, a fight where everyone could agree on the inherent unacceptability of institutional racism but who were forever finding reasons why those who stood up against those things could not be trusted and would not be supported. When his government declared him a terrorist, compliant American forces declared him a terrorist. When his government warned that he was a communist, vast portions of our own country nodded and understood that being a suspected communist was an obviously more troubling thing than the proven violence of apartheid.