Patriot Politics

We who are of a certain age remember being told, “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”  Alice Roosevelt Longworth famously modified that admonition, and we generally find ourselves more closely aligned with her take on the sentiment.

We anticipated there would be plenty from which to draw in Alice’s emulation when Senator Ted Kennedy passed, and we haven’t been disappointed.  However, even those expectations have been exceeded by the sheer obsequiousness and tawdry revisionism that has accompanied mainstream commentary in the past few days.  It’s as though some people, and we don’t mean his older sister Rosemary whatsoever, have been lobotomized.

Emanating from my car radio on Sunday were the down-home, folksy tones of Bob Schieffer commenting on the Senator’s passing.  The content of his remarks was enough to incite me to pull over and vomit, and I would have save for the TARP project sign on the shoulder of the Illinois tollway (irony alert):

BOB SCHIEFFER: Finally, as I watched Ted Kennedy’s funeral yesterday, I thought of a book I read last week called ‘The Art of Racing In the Rain,’ in which the protagonist observes that no race has ever been won on the first turn, but many have ended there. Ted Kennedy crashed and crashed again during the early turns of his life, but somehow he kept on going through the sorrows and tragedies over which he had no control and the self-destructiveness over which he did. And in the final laps he won. His children loved him. His contemporaries, even those who often opposed him, admired him. And those whose causes he championed thanked him. To what else can a man aspire? His personal friend and sometime political foe, the long-time Republican leader Bob Dole, told me the day Kennedy died that what impressed him was the Kennedy boys could have gone through life and never worked a day. But all of them did. The thousands of laws that he authored changed the lives of millions who were less fortunate, a legacy few can match. In a sense he was the classic American hero, the imperfect man who was sorely tested and yet in that testing found a way to overcome personal flaws and go on to accomplish great things. You didn’t have to agree with his politics to appreciate what he achieved. Ted Kennedy made a difference.

I couldn’t help but wonder what the Kopechne family might think of the difference Ted Kennedy’s personal flaws made to them.  You certainly wouldn’t have to agree with his politics to appreciate what he did for the Kopechnes, no?

Before Bob S. waxed eloquently and euphemistically in conclusion, listeners were treated to his guest, Michael Eric Dyson, who didn’t need an introduction once he opened his mouth – not that Bob was giving one.  Dyson opined in quasi-religious tones (unusual for a sociologist) that the Kennedy family endorsement was a “powerful gust of wind” that propelled Barack Obama’s sails atop the tides of hope and change.  Ted’s support represented a passing of the mantle of liberal leadership.  “I think that Senator Kennedy identified in Barack Obama the same hopefulness that he had seen glowing in the face of his brother John and radiating from the heart of his brother Robert.”

As with so much of what passes for journalism these days, translation into understandable language often requires interpretation of liberal doublespeak.  Even as much is said, the truth often resides in the unsaid and unrevealed.  Fortunately, there are plenty of sources from which we can make a more accurate measure of the late Senator despite how glowingly he has recently been portrayed.

Kennedy’s Massachusetts Senate seat has been in the family’s control for over 50 years.  While Ted was elected in 1962 to replace his brother, John, who had been elected President, John had held the seat since 1953.  And we all know how Daddy got John the job.  A family friend, Benjamin Smith, was appointed to fill the seat for two years until Ted was old enough to be eligible for it.

Just a couple weeks ago, Teddy wrote to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and legislators, urging them to change state law to allow Patrick to appoint his successor.  These would ostensibly be the same legislators who passed the law precluding Mitt Romney, a Republican, from appointing a successor to John Kerry should the latter have won the Presidency in 2004.

Professor Dyson’s fawning admiration notwithstanding, has anyone considered that Caroline Kennedy’s endorsement, closely followed by that of her uncle, for Barack Obama was a brilliantly calculated move designed to derail Hillary (and by proxy, Bill) Clinton’s appeal with Democratic voters.  It’s not a stretch to imagine a deal with Obama that might include Hillary’s Secretary of State appointment, so that Caroline could have dibs on her Senate seat.  After all, it’s a natural ascendancy from volunteer work to the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body, the club to which no Kennedy had yet been barred, except by premature demise, isn’t it? And it probably would have happened if not for that messy little Spitzer incident, n’est ce pas?

It’s safe to say the Kennedys are used to manipulating the law to suit their purposes without even mentioning Chappaquiddick.  And, it’s safe to say that Chappaquiddick is so infrequently mentioned as time passes that younger journalists and historians can be or appear to be entirely unaware of the incident. The irony of Gloria Steinem excusing Bill Clinton on sexual harassment is similar.

Speaking of sexual harassment, did anyone notice how very little was said about the William Kennedy Smith incident?  Teddy’s story of his involvement and knowledge of the incident took some familiar-sounding twists and turns through a series of conflicting sworn statements and obstructive moves. But that was so long ago (1991), like Chappaquiddick, that little mention is made of the matter.

Evidently Teddy was busy writing letters up until just about the end.  In a 10 page missive to the Pope, he describes himself as being “committed to universal health care.”  Given the fact that other reports have him in and out of consciousness for the last few weeks, one wonders how all that writing might have come to be?  Might someone concerned about disposition in the afterlife make an appeal to God’s earthly authority similar to this:

I want you to know, Your Holiness, that in my nearly 50 years of elective office, I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I have worked to welcome the immigrant, to fight discrimination and expand access to health care and education. I have opposed the death penalty and fought to end war. Those are the issues that have motivated me and have been the focus of my work as a United States senator.

I also want you to know that even though I am ill, I’m committed to doing everything I can to achieve access to health care for everyone in my country. This has been the political cause of my life. I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field and I’ll continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone.

I have always tried to be a faithful Catholic, Your Holiness, and though I have fallen short through human failings, I have never failed to believe and respect the fundamental teachings of my faith…

Errr…uhhhh…errr especially when advocating and voting for abortion law.  Evidently, theocratic law doesn’t apply to this man, either.  It is the height of either hubris or fear of the hereafter that prompted this characteristically self-serving communication.

But wait!  There’s more! Let’s not forget that Ted Kennedy contacted representatives from the Soviet Union, including their General Secretary Andropov, on numerous occasions during Ronald Reagan’s presidency.  Kennedy felt, according to John O’Sullivan in The President, The Pope and The Prime Minister, the Soviets needed better tactics in their negotiations with the Reagan and Thatcher administrations, and he was just the person to provide the ammunition.

According to Ted Kennedy, something needed to happen to break the spell Reagan had on the people:  “The present complacency of the Americans, their almost Christmas mood, must be broken. You should put more pressure, and firmer pressure, on Reagan.” Teddy confidently thought he was just the guy to do it.  Somebody else might have been charged with treason, but hey. . .

Now of course Ted Kennedy isn’t the only American politician or celebrity who has tried to undermine a President’s diplomatic efforts with a rogue foreign power (see John Kerry in Paris and Syria, Nancy Pelosi et al in Syria, and Jimmy Carter almost everywhere).  But as Peter Robinson, in Forbes Magazine points out, “Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov–the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring–at least in part to advance his own political prospects.” With friends like that, my dad used to say, who needs enemas?

In Slate Magazine today, Christopher Hitchens, generally laudatory of Kennedy’s legislative accomplishments, rues, “One of the many dreadful aspects of the Kennedy “legacy” is the now-unbreakable grip of celebrity politics, image-doctoring, stage management, and “torch passing” rhetoric in general.”

Inimitably, Hitchens reminds us that precedent in the media for whitewashing is akin to precedent in the Kennedy family for legal circumvention:

“Sure, the “tragedy” of Chappaquiddick had its necessary moment, but even in those days Barbara Walters was doing her damage control, and it was amazing to see a clip of Walter Cronkite referring deadpan to the “driving accident” that had kept Kennedy away from the Senate. It must take some ingenuity at the networks, even so, to simply airbrush the fascist sympathies and bootlegging background of Joseph Kennedy Sr., his sons’ murder campaigns in Cuba, the recruitment of the mafia for same, the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in Vietnam, the increasingly frantic and pathetic narco-addictions of JFK, the exploitation of unstable broads like Marilyn Monroe, and so much else besides.”

The New York Times, commenting on the election of Edward Kennedy to the Senate in 1962, opined, “The Democratic voters of Massachusetts have evidently decided that if a man has the right connections, those are all the qualifications necessary for nomination to the United States Senate.” Cultivating the right connections in the media, the third brother managed to fool some of the people into believing his portion of the family mythology.  Some of the time.

We think Alec Baldwin’s well-intentioned advice is sound:  Don’t name a bridge after Ted.  Yep, that’s what he said.  But Alec reveals his own obstreperousness with the truth in the following: “How unusual to mark the death of a Kennedy man in old age and from ordinary circumstances like illness. No tragic accidents. No political homicides. No footage to watch, obsessively, for decades to come, wondering what brought that moment on.”

Please, Alec.  This is a joke, right?  We all know Teddy enjoyed a good joke as much as the next guy, unless he might be Mr. Kopechne.  Who else would name his dog “Splash,” after all? It’s just now that he’s gone, we think you and your leftist cronies in and out of the media need an intervention.  Or maybe an introduction to the concept of truth.  Good night, Ted.

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