The death of former president Ronald Reagan was followed by a week-long awkwardness as non-conservatives, especially the left-leaning and liberal-slanted individuals across the nation, searched for something socially acceptable to say about the late Californian.

The normal mixed feelings of seeing a longtime political adversary take a dirt nap were compounded by the unrelenting, merciless coverage of sunny-side up Reagan throughout the week since his death on June 5. For liberals, who had previously been pouring on the rancor against two-dimensional Reaganite George W. Bush and his re-election campaign, the “sudden” death of the 93-year-old ex-president and conservative icon created an uncomfortable air for expressing their views of the modern political climate, and the right-wing politics inherited from Reagan’s administration.

Daniel Kirkland, a talk show on the left-wing radio network Air America, summed up the difficulty of liberal commentary in the past week.

“You hate to see anybody die, regardless of their politics,” said Kirkland, “but if Muhammad Ali died, and everyone was going around pretending he won every boxing match when he stepped into the ring, you’d start to feel the urge to remind everyone about the losses. Why does someone have to all of a sudden be perfect just because they died?”

Even the usual safe-havens for liberal free speech have felt the pressure to be nice during the funeral hoopla, and the pressure has begun to show.

“You’d think God himself died,” grumbled Tina Crowley, a Green Party campaign organizer in Trenton, New Jersey. “Nobody here has even wanted to talk about politics all this week. And we’re the friggin’ Green Party. Some people were even saying some nice things about Reagan here, it was enough to drive you batshit. Like ‘Maybe James Watt didn’t intend to do all that environmental damage.’ Yeah, that’s possible.”

Professor of Sociology Deatria Lumley experienced the same difficulties with the ex-president’s death.

“Separating a man from his work is easy outside politics, but becomes all the more impossible when that man was a president,” said Lumley. “He may have been a nice guy in his private life, but as someone who works with deteriorating underclasses and witnessing first hand the cuts to social programs and the damage it does, myself and people in my profession find it difficult to conform to social expectations of funeral etiquette.”

Adding her own thoughts on Reagan, Lumley complimented him, “The man didn’t blow us up, no matter how close we might have come. It keeps me up at night thinking about just how close.”

Other liberal mourners included public defender Jacob Howitzer: “He always gave us a lot of laughs. Not directly, or at least I guess he didn’t realize it was funny. Phil Hartman, he did a cool Reagan impression on Saturday Night Live.” Howitzer added: “I miss him, I really do. Hartman was a genius.”

Another mourner, leaflet distributor Bryan Forbes: “He had nice hair.”

Folk concert organizer and self-described “Earth Mother” Loretta Melbourne: “Fuck it. He was a prick. Call me a cold bitch, I just plain didn’t like him.”