The Internet is collectively enjoying this scene from Aretha Franklin’s funeral today, for understandable reasons:

Oh my. Bill Clinton is creepy as hell. pic.twitter.com/IO2agZvMrg

— Kassy Dillon (@KassyDillon) August 31, 2018

Bill has escaped serious consequences for his behavior with women but he’ll never escape being an online joke every time he looks approvingly in the direction of a pretty young thing. Don’t let goofing on the Clenis distract you, though, from the fact that he shared the stage today with Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Louis Farrakhan, all three of whom have had … pointed things to say about Jews over the years, shall we say, but one of whom has made basically a career of it. This wasn’t a state event and a person’s entitled to invite whomever they like to their funeral but they’re not entitled to have every person they invite attend. Why’d Bill attend knowing that he’d be asked to share a stage with a cretin like Farrakhan?

It’s not like nothing was happening elsewhere in the political world today that he could have attended instead as an excuse to get out of going.

Unlike Bill and Hillary, the Obamas had the good sense to stay away and send their regards to Franklin’s family via a letter. Then again, Obama’s not above posing for the cameras with Farrakhan either. That’s really the whole point: Clinton shared a stage with Farrakhan because he had no reason to think doing so would be viewed dimly by the public, particularly the Democratic half of it. It’s exceptionally weird at a moment when lefties regularly dunk on TrumpWorld and its hangers-on for associations with white nationalists, Euro-fascists, conspiracy cranks, and assorted other political detritus that more isn’t done to keep their distance from one of the country’s foremost anti-semites. But it is what it is, with excuses made time and time again by the biggest Democratic names for gladhanding him. It’s this simple, I think: Farrakhan has a large following in black America, and given what blacks in America have been through, they get a full pass on whichever racist cranks on their own side they choose to admire.

Imagine how sleazy you need to be, though, for Bill Clinton to be shamed by your proximity to him. Here’s Jake Tapper, one of the few reporters willing to call the left on this, doing battle over it with a guy who nearly became chairman of the DNC.