Pennsylvania Grave-Robber

If this story is anywhere close to being accurate, there should be hell to pay:

The family of a Marine who was killed in Iraq is furious with Lieutenant-Governor Catherine Baker Knoll for showing up uninvited at his funeral this week, handing out her business card and then saying "our government" is against the war.

Rhonda Goodrich of Indiana, Pennsylvania, said yesterday that a funeral was held Tuesday at a church in Carnegie for her brother-in-law, Staff Sergeant Joseph Goodrich, 32. She said he "died bravely and courageously in Iraq on July 10, serving his country....

"Our family deserves an apology," Rhonda Goodrich said. "Here you have a soldier who was killed - dying for his country - in a church full of grieving family members and she shows up uninvited. It made a mockery of Joey's death."

What really upset the family, Goodrich said, is that Knoll said, 'I want you to know our government is against this war,' " Goodrich said.

She said she is going to seek an answer from Governor Ed Rendell's administration if it opposes the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan....

It's one thing to oppose the war on lofty, if misguided, principle; it's another thing to oppose it based on nothing more than crass partisan hatred. But to crash the funeral of an American soldier killed in action, crap on his honored sacrifice and everything he stood for and believed in, and rub the noses of his grieving loved ones in it, all to impress them into involuntary service as Bushophobic props, is indescribably vile and unconscionably obscene.

Outrages like this aren't anything new, but the fact that a high-ranking elected official has gotten into that reprehensible act is a new depth in a politically subterranean expedition that seems determined to plunge all the way to infamy's core.

It goes without saying that Catherine Baker-Knoll should be "driven from public life" if she pulled this despicable stunt. It also merits mention that such a fate would probably be too good for her.

Let the lesson go out to every future bereavement gathering: make sure you hire bouncers. You never know what kind of scum is going to barge in uninvited.

[HT: Blackfive via B4B]

UPDATE 7/25: If Ed Rendell thinks he's getting out of this tempest this easily, he's got another think coming.

And then there is this atrocity from Cincinnati, Ohio:

American flags, lining the lawn of the mother- and father-in-law of fallen U.S. Army Pfc. Timothy Hines Jr., were heaped in a pile early Saturday and burned under a car parked in front of the home - less than 24 hours after Hines was buried in Cincinnati's Spring Grove Cemetery....

The flames totaled Sara Wessel's car.

Sara is Hines' sister-in-law and Jim Wessel's oldest daughter. She had been staying at the house on Sando Drive since the family returned last week from Washington, D.C., where they were visiting Hines at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

Hines, 21, was buried Friday after more than 400 people mourned his passing and celebrated his life at the Vineyard Community Church in Springdale. He was buried with full military honors, leaving behind a pregnant widow who expects to give birth in about two weeks and a 2-year-old daughter.

A random act of violence? I don't think so, and neither does the Cap'n:

This doesn't constitute protest or political speech; it reflects madness. America-haters have come unhinged. When displaying our country's flag makes a dead soldier's family a target for political violence - and there seems to be little doubt of the nature of this attack - something terrible has gone wrong with the Left.

And as I wrote last fall during the campaign home stretch rash of such left-wing insurgent attacks, it's only going to get worse.