"Too soon!" That was a standard response to my criticisms of John McCain after his death.

My cartoon and social media posts reminded readers that McCain had volunteered to bomb innocent civilians in an illegal war of aggression to prop up a corrupt and reviled regime at the time of his capture. The real heroes of the Vietnam War were the tens of thousands of draft dodgers forced to give up their lives to flee to Canada and the many conscripted veterans who came home appalled by what they had seen and done and spent the rest of their lives fighting for peace.

McCain, on the other hand, learned nothing from his experience. He never met a war — or a possible war — he didn't like. McCain voted for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He criticized Bill Clinton for limiting his war against Serbia to airstrikes; he wanted ground troops, too. He supported arming the Islamists in Syria and Libya, expanding the civil wars there. He threatened war against Iran. He engaged in saber rattling when it came to Russia. North Korea and even China were also in this deranged right-winger's sights.

These were not minor failings in an otherwise distinguished life. They were defining acts that erased the myths on which McCain built his career — his military service and his "maverick" persona. The war he fought in was disgusting and is now widely considered a mistake. McCain was a run-of-the-mill right-wing Republican warmonger. His straight-talk shtick was fake.

Media accounts sanitized the myriad very bad things McCain did throughout his life. So I've been doing my part to help counter the tsunami of BS.

"Do not speak ill of the dead." This dictum, attributed to the sixth-century philosopher Chilon of Sparta, may be appropriate at your uncle's funeral; who wants to hear that the dead man's widow discovered foot fetish websites in his browser history?

Public figures are different.

In cartoons and the written word, I have attempted to counter the fulsome praise that followed the deaths of people such as Ronald Reagan. I wasn't trying to be mean to Nancy Reagan when I criticized her late husband — though I doubt she read my work.

Ronald Reagan hurt and killed a lot of people. As much as Reagan's admirers didn't enjoy my reminders that he (we believed at the time) murdered Moammar Gadhafi's daughter or that he didn't care about victims of AIDS, Americans who lost friends and relatives to the "gay plague" deserved to be acknowledged in assessments of Reagan's life and legacy. The media pretended Reagan's crimes never happened. I corrected the record.

The "too soon" and "can't you wait until the body is cold?" arguments fall flat. What better time to point out and discuss a dead leader's flaws than the time immediately after his death? That's when obituaries appear, the eulogies are said and the nation is focused on the issues and policies he affected and effected. A few weeks later, no one cares.

Presumably referring to himself, former President Theodore Roosevelt argued in a 1910 speech that men of action, those "in the arena," matter and their critics do not.

"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better," Roosevelt said. "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds, who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who, at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."

Soaring oratory! But self-serving and obsolete.

If effort and taking chances are all that matter when assessing a person's life, the firefighter who enters a burning house to save a baby has no more worth than the serial killer who sneaks inside to kill it. Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Osama bin Laden all had grand visions they strove valiantly to turn into reality. They were daring. They achieved. They counted, but so what?

These days, it's the "timid souls" who stand aside, keeping mum while the mass media wallows in sordid orgies of mawkish praise for problematic figures such as Reagan and McCain. Adding perspective and nuance to assessments of mass adulation requires courage. In this age of relentless propaganda and unmitigated BS, the critic is in the arena just as much as a dead senator.

Ted Rall, an editorial cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of "Francis: The People's Pope."

Photo credit: at Pixabay