At the start of August, Hot Air’s Allahpundit noted that so much of the Democrats’ health care sturm und drang has been kabuki theater of the highest order:

Let me remind you again: They can pass any bill they want any time they want. Conservatives can scream their heads off at these things and there’s not an ounce of good it’ll do if Democrats are united. This whole partisan “war” Obama and Axelrod have concocted is kabuki theater against an enemy they’ve already (momentarily) defeated; it’s the Blue Dogs’ fear that they’ll be thrown out of office if they vote for this travesty that’s put the left in the predicament they’re in. The cowardice they’re showing in not wanting to face their constituents is actually obscuring the deeper cowardice of the the party stalling on a landmark bill they finally have the numbers to pass for no better reason than that doing so will jeopardize their hold on power next year. They want ObamaCare and they want their permanent majority, and if the only way they can get both is by calling conservatives Nazis then that’s what they’re a-gonna do.

Nearly a month later, the charade continues, as the Rhetorican writes:

Politico: Gibbs says [Senator] Mike Enzi [R-WY] is betraying bipartisanship because of how he “trashed Democrat reform ideas”.

Bipartisanship?  Pffft.  This White House and this President don’t need bipartisanship.  HE WON, remember?  You Dem, Sillyheads.  Such poor memories.

Besides, what do you need bipartisanship for when you control both houses and the White House?

And what happens if they lose? Not to worry, PBS’s Bill Moyers helpfully opines, unintentionally echoing Bill Murray’s “It just doesn’t matter” rant from Meatballs: if President Obama were to “lose this fight, this fall – I guarantee you it would reinvigorate the party that we all know is suffering now from not being sure who it is and who it’s for.”

It just doesn’t matter! And yet, in Salon, liberal pundit Michael Lind asks, in a recurring theme of his, “Why can’t Democrats mobilize the public for healthcare reform? Blame the demagogy gap”:

FDR would be shocked by the inability of his party to mobilize the public on behalf of reform.

The irony is that the modern conservative movement started out by opposing the very populism it later embraced. The late William F. Buckley Jr. was influenced by the philosopher Albert Jay Nock, a family friend who despised mass democracy. Buckley’s never-published philosophical manifesto, written in the 1950s and early 1960s (he allowed me to read the manuscript), was a critique of the mass society, inspired by the Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset’s “The Revolt of the Masses.” The symbol of empty, decadent mass politics for the young Buckley, as for Gore Vidal in his novel “Washington, D.C.,” was the telegenic celebrity politician John F. Kennedy. A few years later in the 1960s, Buckley wrote that he would rather be governed by the first 400 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty, and in 1980 the conservative movement captured the White House in the person of the ultimate telegenic celebrity master of mass politics, Ronald Reagan.

While the right was rejecting its gloomy elitism and embracing the mass society and populist politics, liberalism was moving in the other direction. Liberal intellectuals, shocked by McCarthyism and the rejection by the voters of the urbane Adlai Stevenson for Dwight Eisenhower, concluded that the American people themselves were the problem.

As Orrin Judd adds, “We are.”

Related: Speaking of Robert Gibbs and the president’s agenda, Jim Geraghty asks, “Boy, Nobody Knows When the Senate Will Vote on Cap-and-Trade, Huh?”

Related: From CNS News, “Chances of Health Compromise Fading, After Republican Negotiator [Enzi] Criticizes Democrats’ Plan.”

Update: Jennifer Rubin spots the legacy media “Stunned as ObamaCare Unravels”:

Film screenwriter William Goldman once wrote of Hollywood, “Nobody knows anything.” What is often true of movie-makers — due largely to the all-too human inability to predict what the public will like — is all the more accurate of mainstream media pundits. For all their years of experience and their supposed grasp of the fine points of politics, it seems most of them were caught flat-footed, just like the White House, when it came to the unraveling of ObamaCare.

As Yogi Berra once quipped, “You can observe a lot just by watching.” But not the MSM, where the job invariably seems to be to keep the news out of the public eye, rather than disseminating it.

In September of 2008, Naomi Wolf looked at Sarah Palin and saw the second coming of a cross between Evita Peron and the Third Reich, in a Huffington Post essay that seems particularly rich nearly one year later, in light of her fellow leftists’ meltdown over fiscally conservative Tea Party attendees and town hall-related protests against further socializing medicine:

Please understand what you are looking at when you look at Sarah “Evita” Palin. You are looking at the designated muse of the coming American police state.

You have to understand how things work in a closing society in order to understand “Palin Power.” A gang or cabal seizes power, usually with an affable, weak figurehead at the fore. Then they will hold elections — but they will make sure that the election will be corrupted and that the next affable, weak figurehead is entirely in their control. Remember, Russia has Presidents; Russia holds elections. Dictators and gangs of thugs all over the world hold elections. It means nothing. When a cabal has seized power you can have elections and even presidents, but you don’t have freedom.

I realized early on with horror what I was seeing in Governor Palin: the continuation of the Rove-Cheney cabal, but this time without restraints.

Not surprisingly for the woman who put Al Gore in earth tones, the aesthetics of this fantasy were particularly important, as Newsbusters’ P.J. Gladnick noted with the passages from the above-linked HuffPo screed that he excerpted and highlighted:

…Look at the RNC. This is supposed to be McCain’s America. But you see the unmistakable theatre of Rove’s S and M imagery — and you see stages eight, nine and ten of the steps to a dictatorship as I outlined them in The End of America. Preemptive arrest? Abusive arrest? “Newly released footage, which was buried to avoid confiscation, shows riot cops arresting and abusing a giant group of people for nothing.”

…The riot police wore the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life and carried the four foot batons cops carry in North Korea. All this is not John McCain’s imagery or strategy: it is Karl Rove’s…

…In McCain-Palin’s America, citizens who are protesting are being charged as terrorists. This means that a violent war had been declared on American citizens. A well known reporter leaked to me on background that St Paul police had dressed as protesters and, dressed in Black — shades of the Blackshirts of 1920 — infiltrated protest groups…

Contrast those V For Vendetta halucinations with Wolf’s observations on real-life Islamofascism and its impact on Muslim women, which boil down to, as Phyllis Chesler writes today, “Naomi Wolf Discovers That Shrouds Are Sexy”:

Women in chadors are really feminist ninja warriors. Rather than allow themselves to be gawked at by male strangers, they choose to defeat the “male gaze” by hiding from it in plain view.

But don’t you worry: Beneath that chador, abaya, burqa, or veil, there is a sexy courtesan wearing “Victoria Secret, elegant fashion, and skin care lotion,” just waiting for her husband to come home for a night of wild and sensuous marital lovemaking.

Obviously, these are not my ideas. I am quoting from a piece by Naomi Wolf that appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald a few days ago. Yes, Wolf is the bubbly, feminist author who once advised Vice President Al “The Climate” Gore on what colors he should wear while campaigning and who is or was friendly with Gore’s daughter. Full disclosure: I have casually known Wolf and her parents for more than a quarter-century.

Wolf recently traveled to Morocco, Jordan, and Eygpt, where she found the women “as interested in allure, seduction, and pleasure as women anywhere in the world.” Whew! What a relief. She writes:

“Many Muslim women I spoke with did not feel at all subjugated by the chador or the headscarf. On the contrary, they felt liberated from what they experienced as the intrusive, commodifying, basely sexualizing Western gaze. … Many women said something like this: …’how tiring it can be to be on display all the time. When I wear my headscarf or chador, people relate to me as an individual, not an object; I feel respected.’ This may not be expressed in a traditional Western feminist set of images, but it is a recognizably Western feminist set of feelings.”

Or as Chesler adds, “Really? If so, I’m the Queen of England.”

At the New Ledger, Brad Jackson asks, “Why Does Nancy Pelosi Have a Problem With Patriotic Music?”

If you’ve ever been stuck on hold with a congressional office in the past, at least you’ve been able to enjoy some good patriotic music, as opposed to the lilting tones of generic smooth jazz that have been driving elevator users insane for decades. For years, congressional offices have played patriotic anthems as the background music during hold times.

Not any more. After we were startled by the hold music when we called a House office recently, sources on Capitol Hill informed us this week that the Democratic House leadership has made a sweeping decision that congressional offices now have the options of “smooth jazz” elevator music or no music at all.

Michigan Republican Fred Upton sent a letter to House Chief Administrative Officer Daniel Beard, who reports to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, this week to protest this decision:

Upon contacting CAO Telecommunications it has come to my attention that as of Tuesday, August 11th all “holding” music was changed at your request from the traditional patriotic songs to elevator music. CAO Telecommunications affirmed that congressional offices currently have no choice in the genre of music played, but merely are given the option between the elevator music on hold or no music at all, despite the fact that we’ve had the patriotic music for years!

According to Upton, no notification was sent to inform congressional offices of this change, and there was no monetary benefit to the taxpayers for making it. “Callers routinely express their delight in listening to a few notes of Americana while briefly waiting for their call to go through,” Upton writes, adding: “We should proudly embrace our nation’s patriotic songs, not callously shun them for elevator music.”

Clearly, this is the kind of change America was craving with the election of such a wide Democratic majority — out with the old musty tunes of patriotism, in with the jazz flute.

Why, it’s almost as if post-LBJ liberals and San Francisco Democrats have some sort of visceral discomfort with the history of this nation. But that can’t possibly be true, can it?

Meanwhile, a reminder of the impermanence of the seemingly indefinite from Deceiver.com.

Ever since the days of FDR’s first winning coalition, which combined northeast progressives and Wilsonian southern segregationists, the Democratic party has been a patchwork of grievance groups and special interests that often have little in common, aside from a visceral hatred of Republicans. And very often, the goals of these disparate groups collide hard — for example, NIMBY environmentalism stifling building projects, which cripples pro-construction unions. Or with this example, in which The Hill spots the “AFL-CIO, Dems pushing new Wall Street tax:”

The nation’s largest labor union and some allied Democrats are pushing a new tax that would hit big investment firms such as Goldman Sachs reaping billions of dollars in profits while the rest of the economy sputters.

The AFL-CIO, one of the Democratic Party’s most powerful allies, would like to assess a small tax — about a tenth of a percent — on every stock transaction.

Small and medium-sized investors would hardly notice such a tax, but major trading firms, such as Goldman, which reported $3.44 billion in profits during the second quarter of 2009, may see this as a significant threat to their profits.

Yeah, stick it to those fat cats on Wall Street! What did they ever do for Obama? Err, wait a second…

Meanwhile, to bring this post full-circle, UCLA spots another progressive, pro-labor president whose policies helped cause an earlier extended period of economic strife.

On Iraq: “This war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything” – April 19, 2007

On the importance of energy diversity during the early stages of an economic recession: “Coal makes us sick, oil makes us sick, it’s ruining our country, it’s ruining our world.” — June of 2008

From December of 2008, Harry’s shares some advice on proper grooming and hygiene:

“My staff tells me not to say this, but I’m going to say it anyway,” said Reid in his remarks. “In the summer because of the heat and high humidity, you could literally smell the tourists coming into the Capitol. It may be descriptive but it’s true.”

But it’s no longer going to be true, noted Reid, thanks to the air conditioned, indoor space.

And yet, clearly, Harry is a Democrat who believes that democracy is what makes this nation great, as he reaffirmed earlier this month:

Town hall protesters are “evil-mongers,” says Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.)

Reid coined the term in a speech to an energy conference in Las Vegas this week and repeated it in an interview with Politics Daily.

Such “evil-mongers” are using “lies, innuendo and rumor,” to drown out rational debate, Reid said.

From this past Friday, on how the passing of Ted Kennedy, a fellow Democratic senator, could aid in the government’s efforts to nationalize health care: “I think it’s going to help us.”

And also this month, Harry on the importance of the First Amendment and a diversified media environment:

On Wednesday, before he addressed a Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce luncheon, Reid joined the chamber’s board members for a meet-’n'-greet and a photo. One of the last in line was the Review-Journal’s director of advertising, Bob Brown, a hard-working Nevadan who toils every day on behalf of advertisers. He has nothing to do with news coverage or the opinion pages of the Review-Journal.

Yet, as Bob shook hands with our senior U.S. senator in what should have been nothing but a gracious business setting, Reid said: “I hope you go out of business.”

Regarding that last pronouncement from Senator Geary, Glenn Thrush of the Politico believes “It Was All Just A Joke!”

It was, indeed.

Back in 1948, a certain Mr. E. Blair wrote:

Winston was smoking a Victory Cigarette which he held carefully horizontal. The new ration did not start till tomorrow and he had only four cigarettes left. For the moment he had shut his ears to the remoter noises and was listening to the stuff that streamed out of the telescreen. It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was to be reduced to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that last week the ration had been thirty grammes.

As a certain Mr. E. Morrissey quips in 2009, “All hail the jobless recovery!”

What a difference a (D) makes!  In 2003-4, George Bush got derided for talking about economic recovery during the 2004 election campaign while unemployment declined from 6.2% to 5.6%.  Critics derided it as a “jobless recovery,” including the Washington Post.  Now, however, an increase in unemployment has become a measure of improvement in the economy as it goes up to 9.5%:

The big news of the week should be Friday’s employment report, which many analysts suspect will show that the labor market, while still quite bad, continues on a path toward stabilization. Economists are expecting the unemployment rate to rise to 9.5 percent, from 9.4 percent, and for employers to have cut 228,000 net jobs in August, compared with the 247,000 jobs lost in March. That job loss number — or even better, a figure that starts with a “1,” would be strong evidence that improvement in the economy is finally filtering through to the job market in a serious way.

But there are reasons to doubt that will happen. Most notably, the rate of new jobless claims has failed to come down significantly in recent weeks, which suggests businesses are still eager to pare back their payrolls. Thursday, the Labor Department said 570,000 Americans put in new claims for unemployment insurance benefits, down only barely from 580,000 the previous week.

Really!  This is what the Post had to say in a news report from August 2004 about “jobless recovery”:

For President Bush, tax cuts have been an all-purpose elixir, a cure for budget surpluses and a bursting stock bubble, for terrorist attacks and boardroom scandals, for the march to war and a jobless recovery in peacetime.

Now, after three successive tax cuts, and after a record budget surplus has turned to a record deficit, the president faces an unenviable choice. He can either concede that his $1.7 trillion tonic has not worked as advertised, or he can insist that the economy is strong despite the slowdown in growth and job creation.

Unemployment at that time: 5.4%, down from 5.5% the prior month.

And yet in spite of their boundless praise for Big Barack’s glorious economic triumphs, as Jennifer Rubin notes, the Post is also “running an advice column for the floundering president: what is to be done?”

Jennifer writes:

Well, it’s never a good sign when mainstream papers are running symposiums to examine what, if anything, can be done to save the remainder of the president’s term.

If the problem is that the president is doing too much and stressing everyone out, then he should follow Donna Brazile’s advice and tell Americans not to worry about deficits, focus on health care (which is going to reduce the deficit or make it worse?), and get back to the bipartisan appeal that worked during the campaign. Harold Ford suggests that Obama downscale health-care reform and work on insurance regulation. But Newt Gingrich gets to the core issue and the real choice for the president:

Obama faces a choice: He can attempt to run a left-wing government against the American people. Or he can govern from the center with a large majority of Americans supporting him. He can have either his left angry or the American people angry. We will know in September which choice he has made.

And that is really what it’s all about. Analysts and pollsters will give suggestions on rhetoric or strategy, but Obama’s dilemma is a philosophical one. He’s shown himself to be a far-Left liberal, and the country doesn’t like it. He can keep at it and try to muscle through the top agenda items on the liberal wish list, putting at risk his congressional majority and his own popularity (what remains of it). Or he can swing back to the center, start over on health care, put aside cap-and-trade, come up with a tax-reform and tax-relief plan, and get serious about spending control. That would require a heartfelt realization that his agenda is too radical and will, over time, erode his standing and potentially render him a one-term president.

I suspect that so long as there are allies and advisers whispering in his ear that all he needs is some rhetorical tweaking, we won’t see anything approaching a substantive revision of his agenda. If the president doesn’t correct course, the voters may do it for him in 2010. But for now, don’t get your hopes up for a swing to the center. After all, Obama is being told, and no doubt believes, that the mantle of liberalism has been passed to him from Ted Kennedy. He won’t give it up—unless the voters force him to.

All of which may be why the American Thinker isn’t wasting any time issuing their assessment of President Obama’s ultimate legacy.

As Sister Toldjah highlights in this excerpt, the New Republic spots Young David Brooks In Love:

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard, had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Talk about walking a fine line — who decides a first term senator is going to be president based on the crease in his trousers? (And to avoid the mere appearance of sexism — a mortal sin for any employee of the Gray Lady — did Brooks examine the creases in Hillary’s pantsuits as well?) On the other hand, it does help to explain why so far at least, President Obama seems to be governing, in more ways than one, from the seat of his pants.

Update: Not surprisingly, Stacy McCain is teeing off on Bobo Number One.

In the American Spectator, Daniel J. Flynn explores a religion unto itself, “Kennedy Catholicism:”

Though Ted Kennedy never won the role his supporters had scripted for him, those emotionally invested in “President Ted Kennedy” acted as though he had. Massachusetts’s senior senator often played along, compiling a staff that dwarfed those of his colleagues and acting as a shadow president for various liberal constituencies outside of power in a conservative age. The prolonged made-for-TV funeral, which traveled from Hyannis to Boston and then from Capitol Hill to Arlington National Cemetery, was a mourning event fit for a president. But Ted Kennedy was a senator, not a president.

That fact alone, leaving aside Kennedy’s friction with the church over abortion, gay marriage, and other hot-button issues, should explain why the pope added no further fuel to the public relations juggernaut that has dominated the American news cycle for almost a week. Those generationally, geographically, or politically tethered to Camelot mythology are befuddled why others, particularly the pope, haven’t embraced their delusion that the man whom they had wished to be president should be mourned as a president — rather than a parochial figure infused with special meaning to baby boomers, New Englanders, and the Democratic Party’s left wing.

“Here in Rome, Ted Kennedy is nobody,” a Vatican official bluntly told Time. “He’s a legend with his own constituency. If he had influence in the past, it was only with the Archdiocese of Boston, and that eventually disappeared too.”

“Running against a Kennedy is almost like running against the church,” one Massachusetts pol observed during Ted Kennedy’s initial run for Senate in 1962. But after Ted Kennedy enlisted as a combatant in the culture wars against his church, few conflate Kennedyism with Catholicism as they did a half century ago.

With the exception of Teddy’s myth-builders in the liberal media, of course. As we noted on Saturday, MSNBC’s Craig Crawford (co-author of Listen Up, Mr. President with Helen Thomas) was, shall we say, curious about the Vatican maintaining radio silence on the day of Teddy’s funeral (you, known the day “the Heavens were weeping”, according to another MSNBC correspondent). Crawford was Tweeting the following coolly dispassionate objective non-biased missives, and more:

My guess is that in 50 years more people will visit Ted Kennedy’s grave than Pope Benedict’s, and for good reason. The Vatican just blew it.

* * *

How could the Pope not personally respond to Ted’s amazing letter? What a jerk! Ted wins the moment. He’s the one in God’s hands now.

* * *

Ted Kennedy turned out to be a bigger man than the Pope.

The next day, Crawford Tweeted, “Guess i was too hard on the Pope (this time), Will take religion writer David Gibson’s word for it.” And then, somehow, several of his Tweets from Saturday on the topic vanished. Fortunately, we took a screen capture before they were permanently dispatched to Twitter Heaven.

Click to enlarge:

Andrea Mitchell can’t figure out the biases of her colleagues at NBC, but she does know that, as she said on air, “The heavens were weeping for Teddy Kennedy” on the day of his funeral.

Did she check with multiple sources in the Great Beyond to verify the accuracy of that reporting?

Heck, maybe of the year. Linking to a David Broder stemwinder bemoaning “A Scary Season For Obama”, Orrin Judd quips, “He Likes Partial Birth Abortion So Much He Turned His Presidency Into One.”

Heh, indeed.™

“I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me. And I’m not interested in isolating myself.”

– Barack Obama in 1990. The latter-day President Obama has plenty of company in that department amongst his fellow leftists: “Reversing our suburban, commuting lifestyle.”

As James Lileks wrote in 2000:

I’m reading, for review purposes, “Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.” (Someday I want to write a book called “Subtitle Overkill: the Pointless Elongation of Book Titles and the Difficulty of Remembering All the Words.”) I face the same conundrum every time I grapple with the New Urbanist model – I agree with every argument about the aesthetics of suburban development; I deplore the barren landscape of post-war suburban America, and I completely, utterly distrust anyone else who agrees with me.

This book regards suburbia as the equivalent of a Chemlawn gulag, a vapid archipelago into which Americans have mutely filed like sheep to the abbatoir. The authors hold up Alexandria, Virginia as a model for urban living – everything’s pedestrian-accessible, human-scaled, with mixed-use blocks and definable urban centers. All true. But I remember the apartment we looked at in Alexandria. It was twice the size of the room in which I now sit. And that included the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, the bedroom, and a back porch. The ceilings were low, the stairs as narrow as a gnat’s urethra. I recall a friend’s apartment – the bedroom had room for the bed. That was it. A bed. Two people could not live in that place – well, they could, but only if no one wore nappy fabrics, because you’d get rugburn from rubbing against each other all the time. Now, if you want that – and it had its charm, once you stepped outside – then fine. It’s yours. But not everyone wants that. And here’s the dilemma: if the suburbs are such a horror, and inner-city life a clearly superior option, why do people live in the burbs?

I was thinking of this as I watched the end of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” last night; at the end, the movie turns into an anti-sprawl tract, of all things. In the curious mythology of our freedom-encumbered age, the post-war vision of freeways and big back yards has curdled into a dark plot imposed on people, not an option freely chosen. It all goes back to the streetcars, of course; once the shadowy forces of evil did away with loveable old Thomas the Tank Engine and poked us into autos , it’s been all downhill, Toontown traded for Toys ‘R Us. (Sniff.)

“The problem with suburbia,” says this book, “is that it is not functional: it does not serve society or preserve the environment.”

Hmm. Well, leave aside the environmental issue. Serve society? It serves the people who make up society, or they wouldn’t live there. People make rational decisions: I will give up X amount of hours in travel time to live in a place where I have a big yard, easy access to a wide variety of goods and services, and personal safety. As for me, I live in the city because I prefer to live around history, around scenic beauty, and because I am comfortable with this level of density. DC had history and scenic beauty, but it was too fargin’ dense for me; I left. Do I judge those who stay, who like it? No. Do I regard that particular model, with tall buildings full of people who don’t know each other, as “good for society?” Not necessarily. It all depends.

But I’m not going to pass laws to prohibit people from living in apartment buildings. Nor would I object to a municipality changing its zoning codes to prohibit large-lot developments, if that’s what the citizens of that town desire. Likewise, let them ban dense developments. I don’t care. I have no right to impose my urban standards on someone else – even though I’m generally right. As with all wedge issues: better to persuade through example.

The book frowns on gated communities, of course, because they’re exclusionary. Conversely, they praise urban developments with dense housing – which include, I presume, apartment buildings with doormen and security systems. Driving past a guard booth or getting buzzed up via intercom – what’s the difference? “The unity of society is threatened not by the use of gates, but by the uniformity and exclusivity of the people behind them.” Oh, blow it out your ass. Doctors will never live next to janitors. The streets of New York are full of people from all walks, races, creeds, colors; they are the antithesis of a gated sprawling suburban development. Does this mean that doctors invite their housekeepers to their parties? Or that racist morons cannot be forged in a big city? “A child growing up in such a homogeneous environment is less likely to develop a sense of empathy for people from other walks of life, and is ill prepared to live in a diverse society.” Boolsheet! If this is the case, then we’d best forcibly integrate North Dakota, right now. And Cabrini Green, as long as we’re at it. Make them more like Brooklyn. Why, everyone who was ever raised in Brooklyn is perfectly prepared to live in a diverse society; naught but harmony reigns in the boroughs.

This sort of fatuous moralizing can be found at the heart of most anti-suburban tracts, and it’s why I distrust the general idea. There are millions of Americans living happy lives in affluent comfort,never troubled by the aroma of cabbage wafting in from a neighbor’s window, never knowing the communal experience of being awakened at 4 AM by a siren and knowing that everyone else in the building is up as well, and this fact just galls some people. All that space . . . all that room . . . all those things! It just can’t be right.

In the authors’ “Eight Steps of Regional Planning,” the first step is: “Admit that growth will occur.”

Yes, friends, bite down and swallow hard: growth will occur. Admit it. In the future we can institute a one-child policy, but not yet. Think I’m exaggerating? I just discovered the title of chapter 11 in this book: “What is to be done.” Surely they know who made that phrase famous. Surely they know the author of that particular tract. You don’t sling that phrase around unless you’re confident the audience will appreciate the reference.

Maybe the authors were big Diane Watson fans.

As Ed Morrissey writes, “This is a curious re-election strategy, especially for a Representative who made her name by bird-dogging her former Congressman at his town-hall forums”:

Consistency isn’t Carol Shea-Porter’s strong suit, apparently, as she demonstrates in this clip from the meeting she finally held with constituents after dodging them for most of the month. When one of her constituents challenges the presence of union enforcers in the crowd, Shea-Porter asks for police intervention:

embedded by Embedded Video

YouTube Direkt

I’ve watched this video a couple of times, and I still can’t figure out why the police took this man out of the room. He was actually less disruptive than the woman behind him. He challenged Shea-Porter on the appearance of SEIU protesters in the room, one of whom got up and disrupted his question. When the first man then challenged the residency of the SEIU rep, police swooped in and removed him.

According to Now Hampshire, they removed the man because he didn’t get a Golden Ticket to allow him to speak at the meeting:

In four short years Carol Shea-Porter has evolved from a rabble-rousing, town hall disrupting anti-war activist who once had to be forcibly removed from a President George Bush event in Portsmouth to a Member of Congress who instructed armed security guards to remove a frustrated voter from her own town hall event in Manchester on Saturday.

In the appended video, Shea-Porter can be seen instructing security to remove a man for standing to ask a question without a ticket. Shea-Porter previously held a lottery to determine who could ask questions. She can also be heard taunting the man on his way out by saying, “I do hope the movie theater can be a little quieter for you.”

Now Hampshire also reports that the man they removed is Carl Tomanelli — a retired policeman.

Whoops. Now there’s a smart move by the congresswoman — if I was her opponent, I’d get Mr. Tomanelli in my commercials ASAP.

And speaking of TV, Smitty, Stacy McCain’s co-blogger writes:

I have seen the face of elitism on the right, and it is John Batchelor.

In the PJTV segment linked, John Batchelor has a point: the egalitarian mindset is at odds with the elitist mindset. The modern GOP elitist mindset is as wrong now as when the Founding Fathers rejected The British Parliament’s elitist mindset.

“I’m not going to pretend there is anything genuine about [the Tea Party Movement].
This is about people putting their faces on TV.”

Anything, Mr. Batchelor? Anything? I’ve attended three Tea Parties in the greater DC area.

The media are sparse, except insofar as they’re cherry-picking shots for blatant propaganda pieces. Typically, when someone builds an arugment around an absolute assertion such as “there is nothing genuine about the Tea Party Movement” my first reaction is that this is not in fact a dialogue or anything resembling an attempt to discuss a point. It’s a rant.

This is about people putting their faces on TV? That would be news to this couple, whom I photographed as I was driving away from the San Jose Tea Party on July 5th:

They actually did wind up in a video — but only because I was out there shooting footage myself; I don’t recall seeing any trucks from ABC, NBC, CBS or their local affiliates in the neighborhood while I was there.

Just touched up my Friday night post on Mad Men and Penn Station with a minor rewrite, and a new Photoshop of Don Draper standing in the old Penn Station.

Ronald Bailey of Reason tries to make sense of “Ezra Klein’s Confusion Over ‘Rationing’”; elsewhere, Stacy McCain spots CNN’s Elliott McLaughlin not knowing what the word “refute” means:

This paragraph by CNN’s Elliott McLaughlin has a glaringly bad word choice:

In his national address, Kennedy said he was driving Kopechne to a ferry landing because she was tired. He denied “widely circulated suspicions of immoral conduct” and also refuted reports that he was “driving under the influence of liquor.”

Kennedy “refuted” nothing. I understand McLaughlin’s reluctance to use “denied” twice in the same sentence, but “refuted” means to disprove.

Multiple witnesses confirmed that Ted Kennedy had been drinking heavily all day that Saturday. Supplies for the regatta party — attended by six married men and six single women, incidentally — included three half-gallons of vodka, four fifths of scotch, two bottles of rum and two cases of beer. And then there is the rather telling circumstantial evidence that Ted drove off the freaking bridge.

On that night, Kennedy was drunk as a skunk, high as a kite, three sheets to the wind. He was hammered, wasted, soused, tanked, blotto, sloshed. He was, in a word, intoxicated.

I’d go so far as to say he was driving while intoxicated, except that rolling an Oldsmobile off a bridge is not really what most folks down home would call “driving.”

Nothing he said in his subsequent speech “refuted” the fact that Teddy was drunk, nor will it ever.

Or as Scott Johnson of Power Line dubs it, “Ted Kennedy’s Checkers Speech.”

For Eleanor Clift, (who also wrote, or perhaps her editor at Newsweek, the above title) the ends obviously justify the means:

For some women, reverence for Kennedy stopped with Chappaquiddick. The rest of us have a very different view: Kennedy had the gift of time to make amends, and we were the beneficiaries of that.

And speaking of all the senator’s women, here’s Huffpo contributor Melissa Lafsky:

…It doesn’t automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.

(Emphasis via Guy Benson at NRO’s Media Blog.) And via Newsbusters, here’s Andrea Mitchell:

MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell on Friday used an interview with former Vice President Dan Quayle to gratuitously highlight Lloyd Bentsen’s famous 1988 slam, “You’re no Jack Kennedy.” Although Quayle appeared on “Andrea Mitchell Reports” to share his reflections on the passing of Ted Kennedy, the cable anchor sniped, “One of your toughest moments was during the debate with Lloyd Benson when you compared yourself to John F. Kennedy…”

As though Quayle was unfamiliar with what happened 21 years ago at the vice presidential debate, Mitchell recounted, “And Lloyd Bentsen memorably said, you know, ‘I knew John Kennedy. I served with John Kennedy and you are no John Kennedy.’ What happened after that?”

What happened four years later, when it no longer would aid Bentsen and Michael Dukakis, the man who nominated him, is that fellow GE-employee Tom Brokaw, of all people pointed out that it was a lie:

“At the Kennedy Library, just outside Boston, they went through all the files. They couldn’t see much evidence Lloyd Bentsen knew John Kennedy very well. But it certainly was an effective campaign ploy for him.”

Of course — because people like Brokaw, Mitchell, and Clift were asleep at the wheel of the Oldsmobile, just as willing to obfuscate for whichever Democrat was seeking the White House, rather than reporting facts.

By the way, at some point, likely within the next decade or so, the left will have to go out and defend, not to mention whitewash — if you’ll pardon the obvious pun — the record of Sen.  Robert Byrd (D-KKK) when he passes away (he’s currently 91). That should be fascinating to watch as well. A post on Byrd and Teddy Kennedy from earlier this week on the Website of England’s leftwing Guardian, while not directly mentioning Byrd’s past, has a curious pun/immense Freudian slip within it:

By the way, in case you think Ted’s comment is overstatement, I remind you that JFK’s win in the West Virginia primary in 1960 was the crucial win on his way to the nomination. So the clan was deeply indebted to the state’s voters. We’ll save the question of how much money the Kennedys spread around the state for another day.

For an additional sneak preview of the obfuscations (forgotten deliberately and otherwise) to come, check out this post by the Rhetorican.

Update: All the Senator’s Men are quite a cast as well. Craig Crawford, MSNBC contributor and co-author of Listen Up, Mr. President with Helen Thomas tweeted the following missives today:

My guess is that in 50 years more people will visit Ted Kennedy’s grave than Pope Benedict’s, and for good reason. The Vatican just blew it.

* * *

How could the Pope not personally respond to Ted’s amazing letter? What a jerk! Ted wins the moment. He’s the one in God’s hands now.

* * *

Ted Kennedy turned out to be a bigger man than the Pope.

You stay classy, GE!

More: The eponymously named blogger at Snark And Boobs — who does not qualify for this post’s title — asks, “What Would Jesus Do? Promote Liberal Policy, Using a Child at a Funeral, Natch!”

More: At the Washington Times, Kerry Picket adds, along with accompanying radio audio, “Kennedy biographer Klein: Kennedy and Obama were not that close”:

STEVE MALZBERG: This relationship between Obama and Ted Kennedy led Chris Matthews, wacko of all wackos in my view, to say that he’s now the next, he’s the last brother. Obama’s the last brother.

ED KLEIN: Yeah, I, I heard that. Yeah.

MALZBERG: What do you think of that? What was their relationship, and what do you think of that description of it?

KLEIN: Makes me want to puke. To tell you the truth.

MALZBERG: Why, why, why?

KLEIN: Because it’s so patently untrue, number one. And number two, they weren’t, they weren’t that close. They, there was a political meeting of the minds, but a lot of the backing for Obama was Kennedy’s paying the Clintons back for stealing the Democratic Party and bringing it to the center rather than to the left.

MALZBERG: So you’re saying this is fiction basically the close kinship between Teddy and Barack Obama?

KLEIN: Listen, I think Barack Obama’s very grateful, very grateful for what Ted Kennedy did. I mean, after all, it certainly helped. But I don’t think they ever had a very close relationship. They had a political relationship which Teddy said, “Look, I’ll back you but you better make healthcare your first priority when you become president.” That was the deal.

Besides, as I noted last year in an early Silicon Graffiti video, after and endless succession of would-be “Next JFKs”, Obama was simply the latest example of This Year’s Model.

In the Wall Street Journal, Joseph Finder lists his five favorite political conspiracy books. Number one is Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here:

A charismatic Democratic senator who speaks in “noble but slippery ­abstractions” is elected president, in a groundswell of cultish adoration, by a nation on the brink of economic ­disaster. Promising to restore ­America’s greatness, he promptly ­announces a government seizure of the big banks and insurance ­companies. He strong-arms the ­Congress into amending the Constitution to give him unlimited emergency powers. He throws his ­enemies into concentration camps. With scarcely any resistance, the country has ­become a fascist dictatorship. No black helicopters here, though. Sinclair Lewis’s dystopian ­political satire, now largely forgotten except for its ironic title, was a ­mammoth best seller in 1935, during the depths of the ­Depression and the rise of fascism in Europe. His president, Berzelius (“Buzz”) Windrip, is a ruthless phony with the “earthy sense of humor of a Mark Twain”; one of the few who dare oppose him openly is a rural ­newspaper editor who is forced to go on the run.

A Democratic president and his staffers openly attacking media figures who don’t support his agenda? Surely that can’t happen here…

(H/T: IP)

Update: The text of It Can’t Happen Here is available online, as part of Project Gutenberg.

First up, George Will profiles Tom Campbell, a potential GOP successor to Gov. Schwarzenegger in Sacramento:

The most ominous domestic event of the 1970s was the collapse of self-government in New York City, which before being put into receivership by the state was liberalism’s laboratory. Since then, California has been the slate on which liberalism boldly writes its recipe for decline — high taxes, heavy regulation, subservience to public employees unions and environmentalism that is simultaneously apocalyptic and chiliastic.

Because California’s calamitous present — creative accounting as a rickety bridge to the next budget crisis, coming soon — might prefigure the nation’s future, next year’s gubernatorial election is portentous. An especially intriguing candidate in a colorful field is Tom Campbell. Colorful he is not. “Talk softly and carry a small calculator” could be his motto. What glitter, however, are his résumé and agenda.

* * *

Campbell’s two rivals for the Republican nomination — former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman and another tech entrepreneur, Steve Poizner, currently California’s insurance commissioner — are rich. Campbell is a professor. Whoever wins the nomination, he says, will quickly become flush with funds. Yes, but you cannot steal first base in politics either. How can he be nominated?

Like this, he says: Gray Davis, a professional politician of modest means, won the Democratic nomination in 1998 when two rich opponents nullified each other with media bombardments. Republicans are a shriveling tribe: Their registration is at a record low, 31.1 percent, and they do not have a majority of registered voters in any of California’s 53 congressional districts. Democrats have a registration majority in 20 districts, and a statewide registration advantage of more than 2 million and growing. But the fastest-growing cohort of voters are independents who can vote in either party’s primary. Campbell believes he is energizing them inexpensively by buying lists of likely voters (those who have voted in four of the past five elections), inviting 150,000 to call in to an enormous conference call, and discussing issues for 90 minutes with the 20,000 who do.

If nominated, Campbell will face either the once-exotic but still canny Jerry Brown, who will be 72 and perhaps familiar to a fault, or Gavin Newsom, 41, San Francisco’s dashing and evidently delusional mayor, whose campaign suggests that the bankrupt state’s biggest problem is its denial of same-sex marriage. If Campbell is nominated, he can win, but if Californians were sufficiently rational to nominate him, their state would not be shambolic.

Exactly. Meanwhile, self-proclaimed “former RINO” Jazz Shaw writes that in that equally shambolic parenthesis state on the opposite coast, “New York State of Mind Still Not Republican.”

Yes, just keep what you’re doing, New York. It’ll work eventually! In a related post over at Commentary, Jennifer Rubin explores the disconnect between the media-political complex and the rest of America and concludes:

If you have a sense that both the mainstream media and the Obama team are operating in a parallel universe you are right. The White House and Democratic Congress would rather risk the wrath of the voters and send the economy diving back for a double-dip recession with the imposition of tax hikes than set about seriously curtailing spending, including entitlements. Well, they won, we’ve been told. Let’s see if they have the nerve to use their power to pass the largest tax hike in history—before we’ve climbed out of the recession. You think voters are angry now—wait until the tax-hike town halls get going.

Hey, it’s either that or kick out the wealthy, as California’s Democrat Rep. Diane Watson proposes:

It was just mentioned to me by our esteemed speaker, “Did anyone say anything about the Cuban health system?”

And lemme tell ya, before you say “Oh, it’s a commu–”, you need to go down there and see what Fidel Castro put in place. And I want you to know, now, you can think whatever you want to about Fidel Castro, but he was one of the brightest leaders I have ever met. [APPLAUSE]

And you know, the Cuban revolution that kicked out the wealthy, Che Guevara did that, and then, after they took over, they went out among the population to find someone who could lead this new nation, and they found…well, just leave it there (laughs), an attorney by the name of Fidel Castro…

Of course, lots of California residents are way ahead of her.

Rut-roh, looks like Officer Wesley Cheeks, Jr., or President Obama’s Internet Czar have gotten to subversive radical rightwing cartoonist Chris Muir’s Day By Day site…

While Chris is vacationing at one of the many fine, relaxing, Al Gore Memorial Digital Brown Shirt Re-Education Camps, you can get a sense of his doubleplus ungood crimethink thought patterns by viewing my recent interview with him on your two-way telescreen:

(Hat Tip: Morrissey, E, 655321.)

The latest edition of PJM Political is now online at PJM HQ:

• Steve and Ed look back at the late Sen. Ted Kennedy’s ability to cross the aisle to help pass legislation, and his surprising role in transportation deregulation in the late 1970s.
• Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit.com interviews Radley Balko of Reason magazine on wrong door SWAT raids and the injustice of the justice system.
• James Lileks on a new Mideast peace proposal announced by England’s Guardian.
• Ed Driscoll interviews Steven F. Hayward about The Conservative Counterrevolution: 1980-1989, the recently released second volume of his Age of Reagan series.
• Produced by Ed Driscoll.

Tune in here to listen!

As Mark Steyn writes, “We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its ‘mainstream’ media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists”:

In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

“Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …”

That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

“Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. 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?

My favorite bit of old media hagiography so far is the angle that Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune hits upon: “How wall-to-wall Chappaquiddick would have changed history — for the worse”:

Of course every network would have had special logos featuring bridges, water, wrecked cars or portraits of the main players. And each would have had a snappy title for their non-stop coverage:

“The Bridge Too Far,” “Tragedy on the Vineyard,” “Teddy in Trouble,” “Camelot Submerged” and so on.

If we’d had insatiable 24/7 cable news networks in July 1969, the accident on Chappaquiddick Island in which a passenger in a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy drowned would likely have dominated the national consciousness for months.

Special programs every night devoted to nothing but pundits bickering over the depths of the 37-year-old Kennedy’s responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, 28.

Town-hall-style chat shows every afternoon in which ordinary Americans issued their verdicts and sentences before the evidence was in.

Probing interviews every morning with experts offering their views on whether Kopechne would have survived had Kennedy quickly gone for help.

* * *

Chappaquiddick was a big story anyway and badly damaged the reputation of the man then seen as the surviving prince and heir apparent of American politics.

But, as DuMont said, there were just three broadcast networks in 1969 offering half-hour newscasts that seldom dwelled for long on any one story. Technological limitations made live remote broadcasting very cumbersome.

“And most talk radio was local and fluffy” under fairness-doctrine restrictions, DuMont said. “So you didn’t have nationally syndicated partisan hosts banging the drum day in and day out saying Kennedy had to go.”

And perhaps therefore, he didn’t go. The following year Massachusetts voters resoundingly re-elected him to the Senate. Though the Chappaquiddick scandal probably kept him out of the White House, it never cost him the seat he held until his death this week at age 77.

This thought experiment invites a question to which there is no nonpartisan answer: Was it just as well that we didn’t — couldn’t — have a media feeding frenzy over Chappaquiddick in 1969? Would the nation have been better off if Kennedy had been shamed into private life?

Or, as I believe, is the nation — particularly our disabled and disadvantaged residents — better off for the 40 years of service he was able to render after that terrible night?

The momentary satisfaction of destroying Ted Kennedy for his failings would have had a significant price. Something to keep in mind when the next fallen figure, Democrat or Republican, stumbles into the heat lamp.

Oh sure — let’s watch how the Trib pulls its punches the next time a plumber or beauty contest winner utters a politically incorrect phrase, or proffers a question to a candidate that the gatekeepers of the overculture would rather not be asked.

Much like the legacy journalists who lamented the rise of the Blogosphere, Zorn is apparently someone — at least in this case — who longs for an era in which there was less news and opinion; when there were only three commercial networks and they couldn’t devote wall-to-wall coverage to a story. When a politician, provided his ideology was the same as the vast number of journalists, could get away with anything. But what a story the gatekeepers tried to keep submerged even today, as Daniel J. Flynn describes the incident, in a must-read American Spectator article:

After finishing ninth in a field of 31 in a regatta, Kennedy spent a Saturday partying with six unmarried women and a group of married men. Pounding rum and cokes, Kennedy absconded from the booze barbecue with Mary Jo Kopechne, whom he drove to her death off a narrow, unlit bridge without guardrails. For almost ten hours, the senator dried out, called numerous acquaintances, and tried to get his cousin to go along with a cover story that Kopechne had been alone at the wheel — but did nothing to alert authorities to his party companion’s plight. Political fixers fixed him with a neck brace, produced a renewed driver’s license for the unlicensed senator, and released incomplete phone records — exposed by the New York Times a decade later — that erased the calls he made between the time of the accident and the time of his reporting it. Characteristic of the treatment he had received his whole life, Kennedy avoided jail and overwhelmingly won reelection the next year. His mother responded by initially disinheriting Ted’s cousin, her orphaned nephew, who refused to go along with her son’s subterfuge.Like his previous mistakes, the accident did nothing to alter Kennedy’s misbehavior. Here, caught in broad daylight in the marital act on the floor of a posh Washington restaurant. There, waking his son and nephew to carouse the Palm Beach bars on Good Friday — leading to accusations of a rape occurring within earshot of the senator. Whereas assassinations and World War II kept his older brothers forever young, Ted’s reckless behavior made him the Peter Pan of the Senate. Though his jet-black hair turned snow white, and his football physique transformed into a Fritos physique, Ted Kennedy remained in suspended adolescence for most of his 47 years in the elected office.

Insulated by the consequences of his behavior, Kennedy was also shielded from the consequences of his policies. He was the champion of busing who kept his own children far from the public schools; an advocate of publicly funded campaigns who bankrolled his political career with his family’s shadowy financing; an icon of feminists who used women like Kleenex, serially harassed members of the opposite sex, and spent ten hours attempting to rescue his political career as he denied the young women suffocating in an air pocket in his Oldsmobile professional rescue attempts; and the primary booster of socialized medicine who assembled a dream team of neurosurgeons to consult on his treatment for brain cancer. The proverbial limousine liberal was made real in Trustfund Ted.

Particularly galling to Senator Kennedy’s amazed antagonists was the manner in which those that he wronged rewarded rather than punished their transgressor. Edward McCormack’s family chose Kennedy to deliver a eulogy at his funeral. In anticipation of the 1976 race for the presidency, Joe and Gwen Kopechne offered that they would cast their votes for Kennedy should he run. More than a half century after expelling Ted Kennedy, Harvard awarded him an honorary degree and celebrated him at The Game, where Harvard Stadium’s confused spectators were left wondering how Ted Kennedy ’54 could have caught a touchdown pass in the 1955 Harvard-Yale game.

“My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life,” Ted eulogized slain brother Bobby in 1969. More than four decades later, Ted Kennedy’s conservative detractors are wondering why the senator’s admirers aren’t heeding such advice.

Long before the legacy media made it obvious that they were deeply in the tank for Barack Obama, first as a candidate, then as president, they were almost as baldly obsessed with keeping Senator Kennedy’s record as spotless as it could possibly be. Even in the 21st century, you still see a journalist trotting the hoary old trope that “The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable”, from journalism’s more wild-and-woolly days, generally attributed to another Chicago newspaper man, Finley Peter Dunne.

That myth also died on July 18, 1969. Only there were less media around back then to report its demise.

Update: Jennifer Rubin adds:

An apt summary of Ted Kennedy by Bill Kristol: “He continued to advocate policies that had long-ago been proven — in my view — not to work, and the one thing, again, beside his personal life, the one thing I really would not forgive him for was the speech denouncing Robert Bork totally unfairly. He was entitled to oppose Robert Bork when he was nominated to the Supreme Court, but this famous speech in which he made it seem as if Bob Bork was in favor of segregating blacks and discriminating against people was really not — a low-point in popular American politics.” Another low point was his personal attacks on now Justice Sam Alito. Kennedy was in a class by himself when it came to judicial nominees.

As Jonah Goldberg wrote a couple of years ago, Teddy’s rapaciousness did much to shape today’s DC.