Why is Simpson receiving a presidential honor?

The 17 recipients of the Presidential Medal of Freedom named recently by the Biden White House are, by and large, distinguished Americans deserving of the nation’s highest civilian honor.

They include five social justice activists; leaders in the medical, labor technology and entertainment fields; and Olympic athletes.

As these things go, 16 out of 17 isn’t bad. But that 17th honoree — hoo boy, what a terrible blunder.

He’s former Sen. Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming. He is one of three ex-politicians on the list, the others being former Rep. Gabriel Giffords, who after being grievously wounded in a shooting in 2012, founded a nonprofit devoted to stamping out gun violence; and the late Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam War hero and GOP candidate for president in 2008.

Simpson, 90, isn’t worthy of carrying their luggage — not theirs, not anyone else’s on the list. In announcing the honor, President Joe Biden lauded Simpson for speaking up in favor of campaign reform and for marriage equality. He didn’t mention, however, Simpson’s long campaign to undermine Social Security benefits as the token Republican co-chair of an Obama-created commission on the federal deficit in 2010.

In that role, Simpson distinguished himself as a foul-mouthed, intemperate, obnoxious purveyor of misinformation about Social Security.

The commission’s inclination was to bring this all-important federal program into fiscal balance essentially by cutting benefits. As it happened, its proposals were unable to achieve sufficient support from the panel’s 18 members, so it disbanded, unlamented, before the end of 2010 without issuing any recommendations at all.

Simpson, however, continued to argue for benefit cuts for years. Remarkably, he never responded to the multiple critiques of his ideas with cogent rebuttals. Instead, he attacked his critics with name-calling of the most infantile, vulgar variety, and with transparent lies.

I tracked Simpson’s prevarications for years in print, eventually receiving a bilious email from him in which he simply repeated the lies I had debunked.

This was like a reflex with Simpson. He disdained recipients of Social Security as “greedy geezers.”

(The average Social Security retirement benefit today is $19,455 a year, a couple of notches above the federal poverty line. My back-of-the-envelope calculation places Simpson’s congressional pension, which he became eligible for after retiring from the Senate in 1997, at about $87,000 a year.)

Honoring Simpson with a Presidential Medal of Freedom appears to reflect Biden’s determination to reach across the partisan aisle, presumably to narrow the ideological divide in America. It’s not his only misstep on that score: A deal he apparently struck with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to place a viciously anti-abortion judge on the federal bench in Kentucky in return for Senate approval of two Democratic U.S. attorneys in Kentucky has predictably, and properly, infuriated Democrats.

But nothing can justify gifting Simpson with any honor at all. Simpson worked assiduously to undermine a program that is the cornerstone of Democratic policy and the most successful government program in American history. He did as much as any politician of his era to lower the standard of public discourse. He was never able to rebut the challenges made to his claims but filled the vacuum with invective.

That his record is treated as honorable, rather than hushed up and relegated to the trash bin of history, is a sour commentary on heroism and distinction in modern America.