The Republicans exploiting the grief of Patricia Smith, the mother of a young man slain in the 2012 Benghazi attack, by putting her on the party’s convention program was irresponsible and ethically revolting, especially from a party that (correctly) labelled Cindy Sheehan a grief-addled nuisance when she was protesting the Iraq War. Smith’s emotional rant against Hillary Clinton was pure grief porn, and expanded the sensationalist  trend in the news media (and legislative hearings) to use the most conflicted and biased figures imaginable—the loved ones of victims of tragedy—to frame a controversial issue in complex events.

Naturally, the Democratic Party’s allies in the media returned the hypocrisy many-fold. Maureen Dowd of the Times, who had pronounced Sheehan as someone with “absolute moral authority”—because having one’s son killed instantly makes you an authority on foreign affairs, at least when a Republican President is in office—was silent about Smith’s moral authority as she was attacked by critics, including the Washington Post, Chris Matthews, and a GQ writer who wrote that he wanted to “beat her to death.”

Foolishly, I took these attacks as  a hopeful sign that the Democrats and progressives were maturing ethically, and had rendered the proper ethics judgment that by prioritizing emotion over reason, it was unfair, misleading, exploitive and irresponsible to use grieving mothers this way. No, it wasn’t hypocrisy. It was ethical growth. Democrats, unlike Republicans, now knew this was a cheap and tawdry tactic, and they would no longer stoop so low.

Boy, am I gullible.

It was hypocrisy, and the Democrats wouldn’t stoop as low as Republicans, they would stoop much, much, much lower.

Among those who appeared on the Hillary Clinton coronation stage last night were members of Mothers of the Movement, an offshoot of Black Lives Matter. Though the message spoken by these women appeared to be about police brutality, unjustly killed black men and the need to ban guns, their commonality was only this: all of them were mothers of African Americans who died violently, and all of them blame whites, police, guns, the justice system or the United States of America, regardless of evidence, the findings of juries, and investigations. That is a fair description.

Let’s look at the women who appeared on stage:

• Sybrina Fulton, mother of Trayvon Martin, who did not die in a confrontation with police, but in a fight with George Zimmerman, an over-zealous neighborhood watch jerk, after Martin confronted him. Zimmerman, who shot Martin, was tried for murder and acquitted on self-defense grounds, in part because the prosecution, responding to race-based lobbying, overcharged.  There is no evidence that race was involved, other than the fact that Martin was black.

• Maria Hamilton, mother of Dontré Hamilton, a schizophrenic man who panicked  out when he awoke on a Milwaukee park bench to find a police officer checking him for weapons, started fighting the officer, got the officer’s club away from him, and was shot to death by the cop. No charges were brought, though the officer involved, who clearly used excessive force, was fired. There is no evidence that race was involved, other than the fact that Hamilton was black.

• Lucia McBath, mother of Jordan Davis, who was shot by non-cop Michael Dunn, a white man, in a dispute over the volume of the music in the van Davis was riding in.   Dunn was charged, tried, and is serving a sentence of life plus 90 years, with no chance of parole.

• Lezley McSpadden, mother of Michael Brown, who was shot resisting arrest, after trying to take a gun away from the officer and then charging him. A Justice Department (headed by then Attorney General Eric Holder, an African American and one who would have loved to be able to please his boss’s core constituency)  found that the officer was blameless. A grand jury brought no charges after reviewing all the evidence. There is no evidence that race was involved, other than the fact that Brown was black.

• Cleopatra Pendleton-Cowley, mother of Hadiya Pendleton, a teen who was mistakenly shot by two African American gang members. There is no evidence that race was involved, other than the fact that the victim and her killers were black.

• Geneva Reed-Veal, mother of Sandra Bland, who was not killed, was not the victim of police brutality, and there were no guns involved in her death. She committed suicide in her jail cell, and the family’s claims that she was murdered (they were not present, you know) are completely unsubstantiated. She had been arrested after a traffic stop for a minor violation escalated and the officer claimed she had assaulted him. Video evidence shows that the officer overreacted, and he lied to investigators. There is no evidence that race was involved, other than the fact that Bland was black.

What did these women have in common to justify their celebrity status on the stage of a major party convention and on national television? Three things: they are all African American mothers, their children are dead, and they are angry about it.  That’s it…wait, no, no, that’s not right: they were packaged like a toxic Wall Street derivative to declare fealty to Hillary Clinton.