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 better. 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 and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for 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 he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
Falwell
Well I suppose the kind thing to say is that maybe he repented his past at the time of his death. You always hope people change in the end. In order to have good guys, you need good bad guys. A hero needs villains. Falwell was an excellent villain for the left.
Of course I'm sure Larry Flynt is already hard at work on the Jerry Falwell Memorial Issue of Hustler Magazine. In which Flynt will claim to have had a seance and contacted Falwell in the hereafter, and gotten his old adversary to relate the rest of his sexual fantasies he had about his mother. I mean being dead, he can finally admit Flynt was telling the truth.