Culture Watch: The Rev. Thug.(Al Sharpton)(Brief Article)

The 22-year-old pop singer and actress Aaliyah died in the Bahamas when her plane crashed, after her entourage overloaded it with equipment. Her fans were stricken, and her funeral on Manhattan's Upper East Side featured a horse-drawn hearse, a silver-plated coffin, and the release of 22 white doves.

This struck Rod Dreher, a columnist for the New York Post, as a little much. "The family of Aaliyah," he wrote, "does the poor woman's memory no favors with this tasteless gesture."

This struck the Rev. Al Sharpton as much too much. Sharpton held a rally and a press conference at his Harlem headquarters, and hung Dreher out to dry. "What you really mean is, you should have a nice little Negro funeral." (Dreher had actually compared the singer's exequies with those of Princess Diana-"a ghoulish saturnalia of sentimentality . . . the epitome of modern celebrity worship.") "To say that she was less than someone else is abysmal, insulting, and racist." (This is Jefferson run amok-everybody is equal in every way.) But this was Sharpton's kicker: "We will bring down anybody who tells us how to mourn our own."

As if on cue-no, exactly on cue-the Post's phone lines lit up with threats to Dreher. Here is one beauty: "Look, white bitch, you're not answering your phone, but you can't hide forever. One of us is going to be waiting for you outside your building . . . We're gonna step out and choke your motherf***ing neck."

New Yorkers know better than to take these threats lightly. In 1995 Al Sharpton's National Action Network fastened on a landlord-tenant dispute in ...