Well, yeah - what did you think it meant?

Ace notes Obama praising Reagan, and he's not buying it. As he shouldn't. Because, as he correctly observes,

...[P]raising the dead is pretty cheap theater, because the dead cannot run for election nor campaign for candidates nor write op-eds in response. (Reagan, were he alive, might have mentioned to Obama that it wasn't all about his messaging, but rather the substance of his policies, which generally worked and worked well.)

This is of a piece with liberals' dishonest comparison of all living, active politicians to the previous generation's dead or inactive ones -- and of course the current crop is always the worst ever. Praising the dead is simply a rhetorical gimmick to purchase some unearned credibility -- see, I can praise my opponents, so that means I'm objective and fair-minded and should be listened to in my other judgments.

And then finishes by asking "So is this 'civility' then? Dishonesty and hypocrisy and manipulation, and all of a cheap and shabby sort besides?" Which I answer in the post title. Or, as I put it last week, calls for civility are "not a general principle, but a political weapon that the left can use to cudgel the right." That's the sort of thing that happens when the nominal referees (the media) are actually playing for one of the teams...