The body has barely cooled (although, admittedly, the media frenzy is just beginning to hit a good stride) and someone has already sold Anna Nicole Smith’s death video for a plump bundle of cash. Perhaps that’s not fair, given that she doesn’t’ actually die in the video, but the rush to buy a near-snuff film should still disgust most of us.

The two-minute tape, shot from three different angles from a distance of about 50 feet, shows Smith’s sheet-covered body, with an oxygen mask over her face, being taken out of the Hard Rock Hotel by a gaggle of emergency responders, including paramedics and police.

You cannot see her face, you cannot see hair flowing out from underneath the mask,” [FOX News Channel producer] Spinder said. “Again if someone didn’t tell me this was Anna Nicole Smith, I totally would not have known it. You can’t even tell it’s a woman.”

It’s sick to pick over the dead flesh of even someone like Anna Nicole Smith. I admit that it’s hard to talk about dignity or respect in the context of the life and death of Smith--she made such a spectacle of herself that it’s no surprise that, in her passing, the spectacle didn’t quite end--but that’s exactly what I’m doing. If she didn’t deserve the kindness and respect afforded any passing, then at least her surviving family and friends deserve what respect we can offer.

Watching vultures haggle over a video that captures such a painful moment for them is far less than they deserve.

Read the story.

Update: Let us simply say that this represents a very different view on what to do with the pictures and the video.