Never Let A Good Crisis Go To Waste

Ted Kennedy's Final Hypocrisy

When I read the news article about Kennedy's flip flop on how Massachusetts should replace a Senator unable to fulfill his term, I began formulating how I might post a blog titled "Ted Kennedy's Final Hypocrisy." Doug Bandow of American Spectator published the following article this morning that says what I was going to say much more eloquently than I could have.

By Doug Bandow on 8.28.09 @ 7:50AM

It's a curious spectable. The Left turns someone who left a young lady to die in a car accident into an icon. Then after some of us remember the bad as well as the good about the man's life and character, his groupies shout outrage. They might want to ponder just a minute the life that Mary Jo Kopechne might have led had she not died as a result of Sen. Kennedy's recklessness and negligence 40 Julys ago. As Stacy McCain observed:

When news broke that Ted Kennedy had died, many people had a reaction quite similar to my own: "Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment." It's an old line I'd used often over the years whenever Teddy made news. While I thought I'd stolen it from Ann Coulter, someone else said it actually originated more than two decades ago as a Chevy Chase punchline on Saturday Night Live.

Far more current is the political, rather than moral, scandal of the Senator's last public utterance: his hypocritical call for the selection of his replacement by the governor through appointment rather than by the people through special election. Even a few Democrats are uncomfortable with this rush to let the politicians substitute their preferences for that of the public--the very people who Sen. Kennedy and others supposedly spent their lives defending. Reports the Wall Street Journal:

The question of how to fill Mr. Kennedy's seat is vexing Democrats. In 2004, Mr. Kennedy supported a special election rather than a gubernatorial appointment. Yet more recently, he wrote to Mr. Patrick and legislative leaders, urging that Massachusetts give the governor the power to appoint an interim successor.

Mr. Kennedy wrote that the governor should receive "an explicit personal commitment" from the appointee not to become a candidate in the special election. Mr. Patrick has supported the idea, and brushes aside concerns that Democrats were being inconsistent: "Massachusetts needs two voices in the United States Senate," he said this week.

In 2004, Democrats took the opposite tack. When some Republicans complained of the cost of a special election, Democratic Rep. William Straus said such reasoning might have been used in a "totalitarian country" and that "one person, whoever happens to be governor, will not make the decision for you."

In an interview Thursday, Mr. Straus stood by his words, saying he recently heard from many other Democrats who feel Mr. Patrick is making a mistake.

Mr. Straus said there always will be a pressing issue in Washington that seems more important than having an election. "We need to hold ourselves to the higher principles of democracy," he said.

Massachusetts state Sen. Brian A. Joyce, a Democrat who headed the election-laws committee in 2004, agreed. "If we were to allow an appointment, it would be wholly undemocratic," he said. "When you cut through the rhetoric on both sides, it's pure partisan politics."

There's nothing new about politicians switching sides for rank political purposes. But the Senator's conduct should be kept in mind as the encomiums about his "principles" flow. Yes, he was an ideological liberal. But he also was a hypocritical pol little different than so many of his colleagues in Washington and Massachusetts. And his final public action was to push to strip his constituents of their right to decide on his successor.

My Tribute to Ted Kennedy

Below, you'll find some thoughts about Ted Kennedy's life from a Pajama's Media article. While I share those sentiments, I thought I'd do my own post about Kennedy's death.

I think that out of respect for both the office he held as well as for the family, I will refrain from saying anything too negative about the man for the time being. Besides, my mother taught me to respect my elders and the recently departed.

In that light, I have the following to say about Senator Ted Kennedy:

He's dead.

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.