Auto Bailouts: Where Did We Go Wrong?

This is likely to be a fairly long post, but I'll try to make it as readable as possible. The information here is condensed from a couple of research projects and a number of articles from the auto industry.

At one time, the American auto industry was king. Nobody in the world produced the quality of cars, with the technology and engineering at the prices that the United States was producing before and after World War II. That ended around the 1970s and 1980s. (It's hard to pinpoint an exact year, but for the purposes of this article, within a decade or so is accurate enough).

After 1980, the Japanese auto industry, which already had a foothold in the U.S. began to take off by leaps and bounds. At the same time, Americans were discovering the quality and drivability of European makes like BMW, Saab, Volvo, Mercedes and others. Around this time, foreign makes were jumping ahead of American manufacturers with regard to quality, engineering, technology and, especially, design.

Many auto industry insiders view the "beginning of the end" of the dominance of American auto companies to be the book "Unsafe at any Speed" by Ralph Nadar.

The book was written about Chevrolet's unique car, the Corvair. The Corvair was designed in the late 1950's by very forward-thinking GM engineers and designers. These people inside GM were looking at Porsche and Volkswagen and they wanted to see what they could learn from the popularity of those German cars. In terms of handling, reliability and technology, these cars were simple designs with sporty performance (at least Porsche was) and were noted for reliability in extreme weather and road conditions.

Chevrolet wanted to see what it could do with a similar concept. They wanted to create a rear-engine, air-cooled, rear-wheel-drive car. Unlike Porsche and Volkswagen, they wanted to make the car a little larger so that it could be used as both a sporty car as well as a small family sedan.

The Corvair was introduced in 1959 (as a 1960 model) and was Motor Trend's Car of the Year. It brought to market a number of firsts and innovations for an American car: A rear-engine air-cooled aluminum flat six cylinder engine with rear transaxle, four wheel independent suspension, with the front and rear suspension components each attached independently to the subframe. In terms of design, technology, innovation and concept, it was different in every way from every other car Detroit was producing and different than anything Detroit had ever produced.

A few years later, Ralph Nadar wrote his book in which he alleged that the Corvair was an unsafe vehicle. Nadar was an unknown "consumer advocate" looking for a cause, and he found it in the Corvair. He alleged that the vehicle was prone to turn over easier than other vehicles, that it was more prone to catch fire in a front end collision and that it was more likely to cause injury to passengers in a rear end collision than any other car.

These allegations were proven false. The government held hearings and then conducted its own safety tests of the car. Their findings: The car was as safe, or safer, than any other vehicle on the road. (The government actually found that the car was less likely to catch fire in a collision than other cars.)

The damage, however, had been done. Sales of the car dropped and it was phased out in 1969, to be replaced by the more conventional Chevrolet Vega, a car with all the disadvantages of a small car along with poor fuel economy and poor handling. The lesson the Big Three Automakers took from this episode of automotive history is this: Don't innovate. Just make your traditional vehicles like you've always done, and don't try anything new, exciting or innovative.

When Subaru introduced front wheel drive to small asian imports, (Saab actually beat them to it in the American market), the other imports followed. By the mid 1980s, Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Mazda had front-drive on most of their car models. The U.S. manufacturers did not follow suit until it became apparent that they were losing sales because of this feature. The same can be said of smaller, four cylinder, more fuel efficient models. Most other innovations and engineering breakthroughs after the 1960s came from either European or Japanese manufacturers. The Japanese in the 1980s and 1990s and later on the European manufacturers even began leading the way in styling. Today, if you take the nameplate off of a car and show it to the average consumer, most people would pick a foreign car to most domestic models.

All of this has led up to our current situation in which the government "had" to bail out two of the Big Three automakers.

I would be the last person to suggest that Ralph Nadar is single-handedly responsible for all of the ills of the auto industry. Over the past 40 years, there has been enough bad decisions, bad design and stupidity within the industry for a lot of folks to share the blame.

The question I have is, who is holding Nadar's feet to the fire? If industry insiders had lied and conspired in some way to bring an entire industry to its knees, no doubt those folks would be held accountable. Yet, Nadar is a darling of the left; a champion of the "little guy"; even a "green" presidential candidate. I doubt the American public is even aware of his role in the decline of the American auto industry (and by extension, American manufacturing).

While this post probably isn't as timely as it could have been (I recently ran across a series of articles that spurred this entry), I suppose the whole point is that I'm now doing my part to help people understand why we are where we are, today. Something as seemingly small and innocuous as a little book with a few little lies has had an effect that has spread to every American some 45 years later.

Now, use your imagination and look ahead to the next thirty or forty years. How do you think the lies currently being spread by O.B.A.M.,A., and Reid and Pelosi about health care and how much universal coverage will "save us" is going to affect America in the coming years?

A Trip Down Memory Lane

Premiums to Rise under ObamaCare

(Source: Newsbusters)

It's no shock to rational, thinking people that healthcare legislation currently before Congress will do nothing to halt rising insurance premiums, but that the folks at the Associated Press would come to such a conclusion AND write about it is quite surprising.

There it was in a piece published Wednesday called, "FACT CHECK: Premiums would rise under Obama plan."

Readers are strongly encouraged to fasten seatbelts tightly, for they're about to enter what has to be an alternate universe (h/t Ed Morrissey):

Buyers, beware: President Barack Obama says his health care overhaul will lower premiums by double digits, but check the fine print.

Premiums are likely to keep going up even if the health care bill passes, experts say.

Shhh. Wait. It got better:

Listening to Obama pitch his plan, you might not realize that's how it works. [...]

An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office of earlier Senate legislation suggested savings could be fairly modest.

It found that large employers would see premium savings of at most 3 percent compared with what their costs would have been without the legislation. That would be more like a few hundred dollars instead of several thousand.

The claim that people buying coverage individually would save 14 percent to 20 percent comes from the same budget office report, prepared in November for Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind. But the presidential sound bite fails to convey the full picture.

The budget office concluded that premiums for people buying their own coverage would go up by an average of 10 percent to 13 percent, compared with the levels they'd reach without the legislation.

Imagine that. Real facts about ObamaCare from the AP as the Democrats try to garner enough votes to get it passed.

Who'd have thunk it?

Unfortunately, this piece still didn't accurately reflect the entire truth as Ed Morrissey noted Wednesday:

The insurance policies of the future under ObamaCare would provide more comprehensive benefits, but that’s because ObamaCare would outlaw more modest plans. The federal mandates of ObamaCare would mean that healthy people would no longer have the choice of low-cost, high-deductible plans that encourage direct spending on routine medical issues, the exact kind of policies that realreform would emphasize. Obama and the Democrats want to force young, healthy people into committing more money into risk pools in order to keep premium increases down for others — in essence, subsidizing medical care for older, higher-risk pool members.

Despite this oversight, the AP did a pretty good job, especially as it referred to a speech Obama just made this week in a Cleveland suburb:

"You'll be able to buy in, or a small business will be able to buy into this pool," Obama said. "And that will lower rates, it's estimated, by up to 14 to 20 percent over what you're currently getting. That's money out of pocket." [...]

"Your employer, it's estimated, would see premiums fall by as much as 3,000 percent," said the president, "which means they could give you a raise."

A White House press spokesman later said the president misspoke; he had meant to say annual premiums would drop by $3,000.

It could be a long wait.

Makes you wonder what might have happened during the presidential campaign in 2008 if the AP had spent its time fact-checking Obama's stump speeches rather than gushing and fawning over them.

Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2010/03/17/shocking-ap-fact-check-premiums-will-rise-under-obamacare#ixzz0jPp1zDv0

One Year Ago, He Saved the Economy

Yes, one year ago, he saved the economy. Not Barack Obama, but rather, Blogger William Jacobson from Legal Insurrection. Or so he claims in his most recent, clever blog:

Barack Obama is claiming credit for "saving" the economy from a full-blown depression based on passage of the stimulus plan.

As with most Obama claims of success, Obama simply is exhibiting his prowess at using strawman arguments.

Obama compares where the economy is now, versus where the economy would have been on some hypothetical downward spiral assuming government did nothing. The "some say doing nothing would be better" paradigm is classic Obama.

But the alternative to the Obama stimulus plan and ramped-up budget deficits was not nothing, but a lowering of the tax and regulatory burdens on businesses and individuals which would have created real, economically sustainable jobs.

Instead, at most, we had subsidies to state governments to perpetuate completely unsustainable budgets drowning in union-related labor costs and pensions, and infrastructure projects notorious for cost overruns. No jobs were created or saved; unless of course the federal government is going to continue to subsidize these jobs indefinitely.

Obama confuses association and causation. Just because two events occurred (the economy did not go into a full-blown depression and Obama passed the stimulus) does not mean that the stimulus saved the economy. It is the intellectually lazy person's idea of logic, since it is much, much more difficult to compare what was to what could have been.

Now to the point of this post. Using Obama's logic, I saved the economy.

On February 20, 2009, I wrote The Last Bull Capitulates. In that post I wrote about the damaging effects of Obama deliberately talking down the markets to create a crisis atmosphere necessary to pass the stimulus (as in Rahm Emanuel's "never let a crisis go to waste"):

For the first time in my adult life [yes, h/t MO], I am convinced that we have a President who sees capitalism and markets as the enemy. There is no other explanation for the hyperbolic rhetoric Obama has used to create a sense of economic crisis far in excess of reality. We are in a recession, but as others have documented extensively, to compare the current economy to the Great Depression is damaging.

The result of my analysis was that the time had come to take some money off the investment table until Obama stopped talking down the markets (which he did in fact do in April 2009 when he needed to pass his expansive budget).

But I recognized that I probably was a counter-indicator, the so-called "last bull" capitulating, and that my capitulation probably signalled we had hit bottom:

There's an old saying on Wall Street that a bear market has not bottomed out until the last bull capitulates. News flash. The last bull has capitulated. Me....

I hope I'm selling at the bottom, because that will mean the markets and the country will have recovered from the worst economic policies since the Great Depression.

And so it came to pass.

I capitulated, and the economy did not sink into depression. Therefore, I saved the economy.

So please give credit where credit is due.

Unless, of course, we continue to stay at or near 10% unemployment, in which case it's all Bush's fault and there was nothing I could do about it.

You Lie

President Obama's misplaced budget priorities may be the result of his misdiagnosing the cause of the deficits. During his State of the Union speech, the President asserted that "by the time I took office, we had a one-year deficit of over $1 trillion and projected deficits of $8 trillion over the next decade. Most of this was the result of not paying for two wars, two tax cuts, and an expensive prescription drug program."

This is simply not true.

The policies mentioned by President Obama were implemented in the early 2000s. Yet even with all those policies in place, the 2007 budget deficit stood at only $162 billion. The trillion-dollar deficits did not begin until 2009 (driven by financial bailouts, stimulus, and declining revenues) as the recession hit its trough.

And the policies mentioned by the President certainly could not be responsible for most of the trillion-deficits over the next decade, given that most war spending will phased out by then and the tax cuts and Medicare drug benefit are expected to cost a combined 2 percent of GDP over the next decade--even as the baseline budget deficit rises past 8 percent of GDP.

Still, it is hypocritical of Obama to rail about ANY deficit spending under the Bush administration, when his own policies will create more debt than has been created by all of the presidents who held office before him ... combined.

Stimulus At Work, Jobs Created in Non-Existent Places

I must tip my hat and congratulate this administration. They've done what no conservative would have been able to do.

A few weeks ago, they created more jobs than even existed in a number of school districts. Districts reported that the Generational Theft Act of 2009 "saved" five-, six- or seven-hundred jobs in districts that only employed two or three hundred people. Miraculous!

Now, they've gone a step further. The Washington Times in this article is reporting that the stimulus has now created jobs in school districts that don't exist and has created school districts in Congressional districts that don't exist.

Who would have thought.

Of course, some of this is explained away by reporting errors, but given the thousands of reporting errors that would have to be made, and the tens of thousands of jobs (if not hundreds of thousands), a couple of questions have to be asked:

First, is the administration making some of these "errors" intentionally to inflate the numbers? (I don't think there's any question but what that is taking place.)

Second, is some of the Stimulus money (perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars) being diverted? While there is no evidence, given the false reporting going on, I strongly suspect that stimulus dollars are ending up in the pockets of Timothy "Turbo Tax" Geithner, Kathleen Sebelius, and some of the other Administration officials that have a tendency to "hide" large chunks of income in order to not have to pay taxes on it. What better place to hide it?

Stimulus Jobs Don't Add Up

Hey Illinois teachers, how is the stimulus working out for you? Bob Secter and Erika Slife of theChicago Tribune give you a report from the field.

More than $4.7 million in federal stimulus aid so far has been funneled to schools in North Chicago, and state and federal officials say that money has saved the jobs of 473 teachers.

Problem is, the district employs only 290 teachers.

(snip)

In the official report, Wilmette Public Schools District 39 was credited with 166 jobs saved by stimulus aid. Superintendent Raymond Lechner said the number should be zero.

At Dolton-Riverdale School District 148, stimulus funds were said to have saved the equivalent of 382 full-time teaching jobs -- 142 more than the district actually has.

A similar discrepancy was found in data for Kankakee School District 111, where the stimulus report logged the equivalent of 665 full-time jobs saved. "That's impossible," a top Kankakee school official said, adding that the entire payroll -- full and part time -- is 600 workers.

(snip)

Last spring, Dolton-Riverdale received $3.6 million in stimulus money and reported to the state that the money saved 181 teaching jobs. A follow-up report this fall on another installment of $750,000 brought the total to 201. The official state report states that stimulus money saved 382 jobs.

And no, this wasn't even deliberate fraud, not even in Illinois. Rather

Problems with the Illinois stimulus data illustrate how difficult it is to benchmark the impact of so sprawling an initiative. Many districts were unclear about what they should report. And there also may have been confusion over how the data were collated once the figures arrived at the state level.

And so it goes throughout the country with all types of jobs allegedly saved by the stimulus; not just teachers, not just Illinois. The following summary by a school superintendent applies to all stimulus jobs; about the only continuity in them will be the next generational debt to pay for them.

Just a handful of the jobs were new, Rafferty said, and he warned that every position propped up by stimulus money would be in jeopardy when the program expires. "Unless there's a guarantee of continuation of (federal or state) money, the vast majority of these will be eliminated because there won't be local resources to fund them," he said.

UPDATE: I wonder if all the new teachers being hired are needed to teach schoolchildren all the new "Barack Obama Praise Hymns" that seem to be so popular these days.

Yesterday, Fox; Today, Associated Press

Showing no shame, the Obama administration today slammed a report from The Associated Press alleging the government had overstated by thousands the number of jobs it has created or saved with federal contracts under President Obama's $787 billion recovery program.

The White House seized on an initial report from a government oversight board weeks ago that claimed federal contracts awarded to businesses under the recovery plan already had helped pay for more than 30,000 jobs. The administration said the number was evidence that the stimulus program had exceeded early expectations toward reaching the president's promise of creating or saving 3.5 million jobs by the end of next year.

But the 30,000 figure is overstated by thousands -- at the very least by nearly 5,000, or one in six, based on AP's limited review of some of the contracts -- because some federal agencies and recipients of the money provided incorrect job counts. The review found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs were credited to stimulus spending when, in fact, none were produced.

Within minutes of the publication of AP's story, the White House released a statement at 12:15 a.m. Thursday that it said was the "real facts" about how jobs were counted in the stimulus data distributed two weeks ago.

"This story draws misleading conclusions from a handful of examples," Ed DeSeve, an Obama adviser helping to oversee the stimulus program, said.

"Tomorrow, more than 100,000 recipient reports will be posted on Recovery.gov," DeSeve said. "Unlike the small number of reports reviewed by AP, these reports have been reviewed for weeks, errors have been spotted and corrected, and additional layers of review by state and local governments have further improved the data quality."

Nevertheless, the White House said it is aware there are problems. In an interview, the advisor said agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes. It asserted that had been a test run of a small subset of data that had been subjected only to three days of reviews, that it had already corrected "virtually all" the mistakes identified by the AP and that the discovery of mistakes "does not provide a statistically significant indication of the quality of the full reporting that will come on Friday."

"If there's an error that was made, let's get it fixed," DeSeve said.

There's no evidence the White House sought to inflate job numbers in the report, but the administration embraced the flawed figures the moment they were released.

The data partially reviewed by the AP for errors included all the data presently available, representing all known federal contracts awarded to businesses under the stimulus program. The figures being released Friday include different categories of stimulus spending by state governments, housing authorities, nonprofit groups and other organizations.

As of early Thursday, on its recovery.org Web site, the government was still citing 30,383 as the actual number of jobs linked so far to stimulus spending, despite the mistakes the White House has now acknowledged and said were being corrected.

A Colorado company said it created 4,231 jobs with the help of Obama's economic recovery plan. The real number: fewer than 1,000.

A child care center in Florida said it saved 129 jobs with the help of stimulus money. Instead, it gave pay raises to its existing employees.

Elsewhere in the U.S., some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two, three, four or even more times.

The discrepancy raises questions about the reliability of a key benchmark the administration uses to gauge the success of the stimulus. The errors could be magnified Friday when a much larger round of reports is released. It is expected to show hundreds of thousands of jobs repairing public housing, building schools, repaving highways and keeping teachers on local payrolls.

Quote of the Day

File this one under "sarcasm" and "broken promises"....

"I'm watching the whole health care reform debate on C-SPAN, just like he promised during the campaign."

-- An Anonymous Comment on another blog

Krauthammer: Does He Lie?

By Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post

You lie? No. Barack Obama doesn't lie. He's too subtle for that. He . . . well, you judge.

Herewith three examples within a single speech -- the now-famous Obama-Wilson "you lie" address to Congress on health care -- of Obama's relationship with truth.

(1) "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits -- either now or in the future," he solemnly pledged. "I will not sign it if it adds one dime to the deficit, now or in the future. Period."

Wonderful. The president seems serious, veto-ready, determined to hold the line. Until, notes Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, you get to Obama's very next sentence: "And to prove that I'm serious, there will be a provision in this plan that requires us to come forward with more spending cuts if the savings we promised don't materialize."

This apparent strengthening of the pledge brilliantly and deceptively undermines it. What Obama suggests is that his plan will require mandatory spending cuts if the current rosy projections prove false. But there's absolutely nothing automatic about such cuts. Every Congress is sovereign. Nothing enacted today will force a future Congress or a future president to make any cuts in any spending, mandatory or not.

Just look at the supposedly automatic Medicare cuts contained in the Sustainable Growth Rate formula enacted to constrain out-of-control Medicare spending. Every year since 2003, Congress has waived the cuts.

Mankiw puts the Obama bait-and-switch in plain language. "Translation: I promise to fix the problem. And if I do not fix the problem now, I will fix it later, or some future president will, after I am long gone. I promise he will. Absolutely, positively, I am committed to that future president fixing the problem. You can count on it. Would I lie to you?"

(2) And then there's the famous contretemps about health insurance for illegal immigrants. Obama said they would not be insured. Well, all four committee-passed bills in Congress allow illegal immigrants to take part in the proposed Health Insurance Exchange.

But more important, the problem is that laws are not self-enforcing. If they were, we'd have no illegal immigrants because, as I understand it, it's illegal to enter the United States illegally. We have laws against burglary, too. But we also provide for cops and jails on the assumption that most burglars don't voluntarily turn themselves in.

When Republicans proposed requiring proof of citizenship, the Democrats twice voted that down in committee. Indeed, after Rep. Joe Wilson's "You lie!" shout-out, the Senate Finance Committee revisited the language of its bill to prevent illegal immigrants from getting any federal benefits. Why would the Finance Committee fix a nonexistent problem?

(3) Obama said he would largely solve the insoluble cost problem of Obamacare by eliminating "hundreds of billions of dollars in waste and fraud" from Medicare.

That's not a lie. That's not even deception. That's just an insult to our intelligence. Waste, fraud and abuse -- Meg Greenfield once called this phrase "the dread big three" -- as the all-purpose piggy bank for budget savings has been a joke since Jimmy Carter first used it in 1977.

Moreover, if half a trillion is waiting to be squeezed painlessly out of Medicare, why wait for health-care reform? If, as Obama repeatedly insists, Medicare overspending is breaking the budget, why hasn't he gotten started on the painless billions in "waste and fraud" savings?

Obama doesn't lie. He merely elides, gliding from one dubious assertion to another. This has been the story throughout his whole health-care crusade. Its original premise was that our current financial crisis was rooted in neglect of three things -- energy, education and health care. That transparent attempt to exploit Emanuel's Law -- a crisis is a terrible thing to waste -- failed for health care because no one is stupid enough to believe that the 2008 financial collapse was caused by a lack of universal health care.

So on to the next gambit: selling health-care reform as a cure for the deficit. When that was exploded by the Congressional Budget Office's demonstration of staggering Obamacare deficits, Obama tried a new tack: selling his plan as revenue-neutral insurance reform -- until the revenue neutrality is exposed as phony future cuts and chimerical waste and fraud.

Obama doesn't lie. He implies, he misdirects, he misleads -- so fluidly and incessantly that he risks transmuting eloquence into mere slickness.

Slickness wasn't fatal to "Slick Willie" Clinton because he possessed a winning, nearly irresistible charm. Obama's persona is more cool, distant, imperial. The charming scoundrel can get away with endless deception; the righteous redeemer cannot.

Joe Wilson Sends a Simple Message to Obama

Have you ever watched the proceedings of the House of Parliament in Britain? It's quite a ruckus. I don't know if it goes on all the time, or just during certain speeches, but every time I've ever seen a video clip of a speech in Britain's Parliament, it's filled with all sorts of yelling and heckling. I wonder how they ever accomplish anything.

On the other hand, the halls of Congress here in the U.S. are generally civil. There may be very sharp debates, and there are times when someone is making a case for a bill or a policy and nobody is there to listen, but at least when someone has the floor, he can usually expect to be treated in a civil manner.

During last night's speech, that civility was disrupted when Obama pledged that no illegal aliens would be covered under "his" health care reform bill. Unable to contain himself, Rep. Ron Wilson called out "Liar!" I guess you gotta give the guy credit. He was calling it like he was seeing it. And let's be honest with ourselves, the speech was full of lies, including that one. It would be an interesting exercise to go back and listen to the speech counting how many lies per breath Obama was able to make.

That being said, Wilson should have kept his mouth shut. There is a time and a place, and that wasn't it. The last thing our country need (besides Obama's leftist policies) is to turn our halls of Congress into the WWE like Britain has. In spite of the fact that Congress rarely passes a good law or spending bill, at the very least we are capable of having civil debates and discussions about what is being passed. Granted, the debates and discussions as of late have been cut off so that things can be rushed through in order to prevent the United States from falling off the edge of the planet, but we are capable of having civil discourse.

Wilson did the right thing afterwards when he contacted the White House and apologized for the remark. I can't blame him too much. If I had been there, it would have been all I could do to keep my mouth shut, too. Still, the time to call Obama a liar is after the speech is over, not during.

At least if you're present in person.

I'm sure that many, many Americans were sitting at home yelling "Liar" all night long.

Important Lessons From Ted Kennedy: A Tribute

Roger Kimball writing for Pajama's Media writes:

I am deeply grateful for the contribution that Ted Kennedy, who died last night, made to my education. Until Kennedy delivered his intemperate tirade against Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court in the summer of 1987, I hadn’t known that a United States Senator could brazenly lie to his colleagues and the American people and get away with it. I’m not talking about little fibs, or broken promises, or private dissimulations: all that I took as standard operating procedure in a fallen world. No, Ted Kennedy raised — that is to say, he dramatically lowered — the standard by standing up on the floor of the Senate and emitting one lie after the next against one of the finest legal minds America has ever produced. “Robert Bork’s America,” he said

is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of democracy.

A breathtaking congeries of falsehoods that, were they not protected by the prerogatives of senatorial privilege, would have taken a conspicuous place in the annals of malicious slander and character assassination.

In The Tempting of America, Judge Bork recounts his incredulity at this tissue of malign fabrication. “It had simply never occurred to me that anybody could misrepresent my career and views as Kennedy did.” At the time, he notes, many people thought that Kennedy had blundered by emitting so flagrant, and flagrantly untrue, an attack. They were wrong. His “calculated personal assault, . . . more violent than any against a judicial nominee in our country’s history,” did the job (with a little help from Joe Biden and Arlen Specter).

Not only was Kennedy instrumental in preventing a great jurist from taking his place on the Supreme Court, he also contributed immeasurably to the cheapening of American political discourse. The fact that “bork” has entered the language as a transitive verb is, I’ve always thought, a final unfairness. Really, the verb should involve the name “Kennedy.” Less staccato, I admit, but in that scenario, the malfeasance was practiced not by Robert Bork but Edward Kennedy and his cronies.

Indeed, Kennedy was a veritable fount of enlightenment. A waddling argument for the wisdom of term limits, he showed the world how, provided you came from a rich and unscrupulous family, you can get caught cheating on a Spanish test at Harvard and still manage to graduate a few years later.

But of course, Ted Kennedy’s most important lesson for the world involved Mary Jo Kopechne, the secretary he let drown in 1969 when he drove his car off a bridge at Chappaquiddick Island late at night after a party.

Kennedy said he endeavored to rescue the girl. Maybe.

But what we know he did was contact several aides to work out a story. He waited until after the police discovered the car and Kopechne’s body the next morning before informing the police about the incident. He received a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident after causing an injury. Wikipedia calmly notes that “Questions remained about Kennedy’s time line of events that night, about his actions after the accident, and the quality of the investigation and whether official deference was given to a powerful politician and family.” Do you think, just possibly, that unusual deference was shown to Ted Kennedy?

The Kennedy family has issued a eulogistic statement about the death of the Senior Senator from Massachusetts. Right and proper, I suppose, but I couldn’t help recoiling from its lists: “Edward M. Kennedy — the husband, father, grandfather, brother and uncle we loved so deeply — died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis Port.”

“Edward M. Kennedy,” I heard echoing behind those words, “Liar, cheat, drunk, philanderer, and — let’s not forget — inadvertent murderer.”

The tsunami of sentimental pap about Kennedy is already churning, gushing, rushing to inundate the public with a nauseating and untruthful fairy tale about the “Lion of the Senate.” The Lyin’ in the Senate is more like it. Kennedy was 77 when he was taken off last night, Mary Jo Kopechne had just turned 29 when Kennedy’s car veered off the bridge in Chappaquiddick and he wriggled free and swam to shore, leaving the young woman trapped in the car to drown.