Kennedy goes nuts, conservatives rejoice

I am not a conservative.

I am a liberatarian.

But people like Ted Kennedy make me wonder. He's pushing me to the right.

After the Alito vote, Teddy Kennedy stumbled up to Senate podium, held himself steady on the banister, and managed to hold his pee through seven minutes of stammering, slurring and screaming - at straw men only his unfocused, gin-infused eyes could see:

The march towards knocking down the walls of discrimination that permitted us to pass a 1964 civil right act in public accommodations so people whose skin was not white could go into restaurants and go into hotels. Public accommodation. The 1965 act for voting rights. 1968 Act for public accommodations. The 1973 act to say that women are going to be treated equally. The americans with disabilities act that said the disabled are going to be part of the american family. All of that is the march to progress. And my friends, the one organization, the one institution that protects it is the supreme court of the United States.

I might not be up on the news lately, butI was unaware that Alito intended to revisit the Voting Rights Act or the Civil Rights Act.

Oh yeah, he won't. In fact, I have never heard any mainstream conservative argue in favor of doing so.

Those issues are straw men - slumping, elderly ghost issues from the '60's - and the drunken senior senator from Massachusetts dutifully beats the stuffing out of them, to the cheers of his graying hippy fans.

But those issues are irrelvant.

Alito might someday redefine Affirmative Action, which to Kennedy is no different from repealing the Voting Rights Act. (And the Americans with Disabilities Act could use an overhaul.)

Unfortunately for hacks like Ted, revisiting Affirmative Action is something that 80+% of Americans support.

Yes, politics is becoming like religion, and Ted Kennedy is one of the nuttiest fundamentalist preachers one can imagine.

But I see him a more pitiful creature: he is the dinosaur - at ease in the gentle flora of the 1960's - unaware that the meteor in the sky has already made creatures like him irrelevant.

And if creatures like Kennedy did not exist, Karl Rove would need to invent them, so effective are they at making people say "all liberals are nuts."

All liberals aren't nuts. Many are good and conscientious people, trying to better the nation.

Ted Kennedy isn't among them.

It is a pity. His brother, John F. Kennedy, was a great leader: strong foreign policy, visionary cold warrior, aggressive tax cutter and commitment to racial justice...

Democrats would do well to rediscover him.

And while they are at it, they might want to rediscover Thomas Jefferson.
- posted by total @ 2/02/2006 05:23:00 AM .