OK, since nobody wants to take on the original question directly - may I just assume that Tim Russert was revered by everyone here on JWD and no nasty comments were made about him when he died?
Did it have anything to do with his ideology - (you are aware that he also was in Government as well as being a commentator?)
I have a hate story about these memorial threads myself:
Remember Lucianno Pavarotti, the great Opera Star? It turns out that he was (not surprisingly) quite a Ferrari and Maserati enthusiast, even owning several. When he died, one of the guys put up a tribute on our Ferrari website.
Some anti-Pavarotti nut was so obsessed about the fact that he was fat, that he posted literally dozens of ad-hominem attacks on him, going so far as to say that it was a lesson from God not to overeat and overdrink, to excercise like a good Christian, and that he probably got cancer because he was a bad fat person.
He got banned for about 30 days. I think that regardless of the politics, this kind of thread is no place for the trash talk. You are not educating anybody with this kind of hate - except to show us in explicit detail what kind of narrow mind you really have.