Among life's most reliable performance indicators, when your wife screams at you for something you've written, you know you've got a problem.

That's what happened to the News Corp blogger Andrew Bolt when he started dancing on Gough Whitlam's grave within hours of the great man's death. His wife yelled at him. And with good reason.

Whitlam died in the early morning of Tuesday, October 21. By 8.13am Bolt was attacking him, particularly the Whitlam government's decision to "end the assimilation project, both for Aborigines and immigrants".

Bolt thought it was more important to vent, for the 865th time, his personal obsession with race than to show respect for the Whitlam family in its moment of grief.

He thought that abusing a fallen prime minister was more important than conveying respect for the pinnacle of Australian democracy: the office of prime minister itself.

Perhaps, in her anger, Mrs Bolt is an advocate of the timeless adage, passed down by generations of Australian mothers and grandmothers, that "if you can't say something good about someone who has just died, don't say anything at all".

It's not as if her husband is short of things to say – space fillers for this role in the media. He could have published his 539th condemnation of the ABC, for instance, or his 724th denial of climate change.

But that's the thing about fanaticism: it blurs one's judgment. It makes political nutters regurgitate their ideological obsessions, blind to the respectful norms of the rest of society.

While 99 per cent of people lead normal, reasonably balanced lives, in which the emotions of life and death are seen as vastly more important than party politics, inside Australia's media bubble there's a group of activists with a different mindset. They regard all aspects of life as inherently political.

Thus for Bolt, Whitlam's death had nothing to do with the passing of a father, a grandfather, a brother – the mournful sorrow of a grieving family. It was solely a political event, requiring a right-wing response.

But it wasn't just Bolt. If the sounds of fury in his household had been one-off, an aberrant domestic dispute between husband and wife, it might have been possible to ignore his vindictiveness.

Regrettably, Bolt's response was typical of the right-wing hunting pack. Like a gang of skinheads kicking over tombstones, Gerard Henderson, Greg Sheridan, Miranda Devine and Rowan Dean also rushed into print, vilifying Whitlam within days of his death.

In a piercing commentary on his own values, Henderson said that praise of the former prime minister had made him unwell, forcing him to "lie on the floor with a wet towel on his forehead".

This is part of a pattern in our national life – an echo of Alan Jones' slur that Julia Gillard's father had "died of shame".

Australian conservatives don't do death well.

Rhetorically, they claim to respect the institutions of family and democracy, but in moments of loss and personal tragedy, their true nature surfaces: displaying a subhuman meanness of spirit.

In objecting to the media's praise of Whitlam, Bolt asked: "Will John Howard, a conservative who ruled four times longer and left the economy in wonderful shape, be given this massive and worshipful coverage?"

I hope so. Anyone who has served our country in its highest office deserves a reverential period of national mourning – similar in tone to Whitlam's memorial service on Wednesday.

Howard wasn't my cup of tea, but when the time comes, I won't be critical of his public record. It's not that hard to hold one's tongue out of consideration for a family feeling the loss of a well-loved patriarch.

For many years, in and outside Parliament, I gave Howard both barrels. A repeat dose at the time of his passing would be a sign of OPD: obsessive political disorder.

Even worse, it would raise the spectre of that most horrible thought in life: being like Andrew Bolt.

Mark Latham is a former Labor opposition leader. This column originally appeared in the Australian Financial Review.

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