Whatever happened to "don't speak ill of the dead"?

Michael Schaffer of Politico wonders aloud why people who write obituaries of House Republicans don’t build them around their votes against certifying Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. This was not just a random bad take in a tweet; Schaffer wrote an entire 1,200-word column on the subject. I have a couple of questions.

First, has Schaffer ever met any human beings? “Don’t speak ill of the dead” is not an iron law, but it is typically observed as a guiding principle for organizing obituaries for a reason: most people have virtues and vices, and one need not whitewash the dead in order to start off by painting them in their most sympathetic light. Moreover, most people, even most people in politics, do not suffer from monomania, and the people who do are typically pretty unpleasant to be around.

If Barack Obama died tomorrow, would you start his obituary with “Obama, who promoted the legal abortion regime that has killed 60 million innocent Americans,” or “Obama, who launched his political career in the home of an unrepentant domestic terrorist and named one of his books in honor of a racist preacher,” or “Obama, who droned an American citizen to death without a trial,” or “Obama, who ran on a ‘Hope and Change’ platform but left in place an oppressive capitalist structure dominated by Wall Street and did nothing to dismantle America’s racist system of law enforcement or stave off climate catastrophe”?