What He Said...

Mark Steyn says it so well...

In the wake of the passing of Ted Kennedy we are only going to see and hear what the MSM feels is "appropriate". If, like Michael Jackson's, any of Mr. Kennedy's less than honorable transgressions are mentioned don't blink or cough - you will miss them.

Well Mark Steyn is not afraid and he sums it up nicely in his Orange County Register column of Aug 28th.

As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's – but you're struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy's Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo "would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she'd feel it was worth it." What true-believing liberal lass wouldn't be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second's notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty.

Thank you Mark. Nicely put. Now, I have never, ever been a fan of this Kennedy at all. He may have been a swell guy if one had gotten to know him personally. All I know is his over the top bloviations that put him on par with the most vehement talk radio hosts generally turned my stomach. Yet his adorers have marked this as the end of civility in the body politic. Steyn begs to differ:

An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America 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."

Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in.

Again, so well said. That was the moment the American Cold Civil War began.

So long Mr. Kennedy. I hope you made peace with your maker because you didn't make peace here on this Earth.

CW