When the Rev. Jerry Falwell was dispatched from Lynchburg, Virginia to a Better Place last Tuesday, there was not a single Republican candidate for president to see him off. What an ungrateful bunch.

The night Falwell died, their grief was so palpable before the Fox News presidential debate, the moderator had to caution them to refrain from further expressions of sorrow, lest valuable time be taken from examinations of their near-unanimous defense of torture.

But on Tuesday, the man who created a Moral Majority to elect right thinking Christians couldn’t attract higher quality Republican mourners than a few shopworn former presidential candidates like Gary Bauer and Pat Robertson. You’d think the lowest tier candidates Michael Huckabee, Sam Brownback and Tom Tancredo, who attacked evolution in the first Republican debate, would have found it in their interests to show up, but no. Not even Newt Gingrich, who spoke last week at Falwell’s Liberty University commencement and railed against radical secularism, could make it back.

There was one might-have-been Republican president in the congregation, last year’s fallen star, former Virginia governor and senator George Allen. Allen has more time for funerals than Romney, McCain, Giuliani and the rest ever since that Macaca thing cut short his own campaign for president mainly by causing him to lose his bid for reelection to the Senate last year.

The Bush administration expressed its gratitude for Falwell’s unstinting support by sending Tim Goeglein, described as a mid-level White House staff member in charge of outreach to religious and other special interest groups.

Tim did as expected, though, telling the mourners Falwell was “a great friend of the Administration.” But he may have risked offending the Big Guy — Bush, not Jehovah—when he gushed, “In all my time in the White House, I have never met a man who loved God and Country more than Jerry Falwell.”

Forgetting someone, Tim? Aren’t you the same White House official Tim Goeglin, who said after 9/11, “I think President Bush is God’s man at this hour, and I say this with a great sense of humility?” Or is there, God help us, more than one mid-level Tim Goeglin in the White House?

However, we should not be too hard on Tim, as he is not without redeeming values. In trying to find out who the Bushies sent to the Falwell rites, I discovered Tim is the author of a brief appraisal of George W. Bush that all of us can endorse:

“It’s amazing and I mean amazing what God has wrought in George W. Bush.”