Posted on 08/26/2009 7:13:53 AM PDT by 84rules
Susan Donaldson James of ABC News nails the true Ted Kennedy legacy:
The Real Ted Kennedy Legacy
84rules
August 26, 2009
You can tell a lot about people by the heroes they have. Mine was Ronald Reagan...
bttt
I’m not sure...for some reason I’m thinking that was Patrick Leahy who said that.
If a lifelong love affair with womanizing, adultery and alcoholism is a legacy, then it belongs to the Kennedys. And they’re supposed to be a model for other Catholic families? Hah!
I suggest FReepers in the area go to THAT bridge and hold a party to celebrate the removal from America of one of its more destructive politicians and an infamous “hit and run”, oops, make that “drown & run” driver.
fooled me
I believe it was also stated in the book about Chappaquidick that Kenedy didn’t have a valid drivers license and the State of Taxachusetts managed to come up with one that was backdated.
Isn’t Teddy the one who is responsible for the phrase “Borking” after the hearingd? He did say women would die in back alleys from abortions if Judge Bork was on the Supreme Court.
I bet caroline or one of his kids are moving back to Mass. even as we speak to declare residency for his seat, unless his wife got a deathbed promise.
They may have the jump on us, but it's time we get behind whomever the GOP of Massa chooses, and work to get them elected.
Why do you think they wanted to change the law back to an appointment by the governor...They know they'll have difficulty achieving their goal. If a primary...look for crossover votes.
I wonder if Romney will go for the seat. Is he still a MA resident? Maybe he’ll get to show us how he’ll “out-liberal Ted.”
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy....”
You right, could be VERY interesting.
Thanks for the quote. That’s the one I was thinking about. He could ruin a person and their career with the best of ‘em, and without one iota of shame.
I think Leahy was too busy leaking classified information to the enemy via the media.
No, even us heretical Lutherans understand that they represent one of the weaknesses of that other faith, that money talks and opens doors.
I would hazard a guess that the antics of the Kennedy Family has been of great embarrassment to a vast preponderance of Roman Catholics who try very hard to live by the rules.
Remember, JFK was the first Catholic President. There was a very significant anti-Catholic bias that was carried over from Europe and from the experiences leading up to and through the Reformation.
People make a big deal about race relations and resentment about blacks in positions of power, but there were just as strong a feelings about the Irish and Italians due to their Roman Catholic faith.
These biases are based on the excesses of the pre-Reformation Catholic Church and fears and resentments do die hard. The Kennedys, unfortunately, with their favored treatment by the church, just reopen the wounds and resentment of the European Aristocracy. Something most of our ancestors came to America to escape.
Earlier posts said he was no longer a resident of the state....Wonder if any of his sons are?
Kennedy Legacy - http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/1/30/124842.shtml?s=lh
Former Democratic Chief Counsel: Ted Kennedy Disgraced Himself
Jerry Zeifman
Monday, Jan. 30, 2006 (Newsmax.com)
In my view (as a Democrat and former chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee), Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., has disgraced himself and our party by misusing his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to achieve self-serving partisan ends.
Kennedy was the architect of an unprecedented tactic: using filibusters to polarize the Senate along party lines thus denying the confirmation of qualified conservative judges. In Bush’s first term the Senate Democrats used that tactic successfully against at least 10 nominees for judgeships on circuit courts.
Fortunately, Kennedy has failed in his partisan attempt to deny Judge Alito a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court.
This occurred largely because Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska formed a non-partisan coalition of seven Democrats and seven Republicans to oppose filibusters, except in extraordinary cases.
Filibusters first arose after the Civil War as a means of defeating legislation intended to foster desegregation. They were an anathema to those of us who joined Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington in 1963.
Fifteen years later during the Clinton administration filibusters were presumably also abhorrent to Senator Kennedy, who then wanted to outlaw them entirely. On Jan. 28, 1998, he argued: “ The president and the Senate do not always agree [on judicial nominations]. But we should resolve these disagreements by voting ‘yes’ or ‘no.’” Three years later Kennedy put politics above principle and became a champion of the filibuster. He also threatened to boycott any work of the Senate that was not essential for national security if a Republican majority was trying to outlaw filibusters by amending the Senate rules.
Subsequently, in a badgering cross-examination of Judge Alito, Kennedy tried to portray him as an undercover enemy of equal rights for women and minorities.
For me, Kennedy’s effort to impugn Judge Alito’s integrity was reminiscent of Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, who tarred his victims with the brush of guilt by association. Kennedy’s charge against Alito was based on the fact that 34 years ago, while a reserve officer in the Army, he joined a Princeton alumni group that opposed the banning of ROTC programs from the university’s campus. Some members of the group (other than Alito) wanted Princeton to continue its traditional policy of denying admission to women.
They also opposed affirmative action programs based on quotas. (Quota-bases programs were subsequently prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court.)
On Jan. 17, NewsMax reported a story that most of the liberal media ignored: Kennedy had admitted his own membership in the Owl Club, which does not allow women, and was banned from the Harvard campus. He had paid dues to the all-male club ever since his student days.
Faced with evidence of his hypocrisy, Kennedy said, “I am going to get out of it as fast as I can.”
Aside from the Senator’s association with an all-male club there is other more substantial evidence of flaws in Kennedy’s character: Kennedy had been expelled from Harvard for paying a friend to take a Spanish exam for him.
He also has a history of mistreating women. In July 1969, with Mary Jo Kopechne (his date for the night at a drinking party) beside him in his car, Kennedy drove off the side of a bridge on Cape Cod at Chappaquiddick on Cape Cod.
When the car began to submerge in water the Senator escaped. Mary Jo remained in the car and drowned.
At that time Joan Kennedy, the Senator’s wife, was pregnant. Traumatized by the scandal and by her husband’s philandering, she had a miscarriage. She then started to drink her way into alcoholism. Eventually she went into psychiatric treatment and divorced Kennedy.
To counter the bad reputation he acquired among women because of the Chappaquiddick scandal and his mistreatment of his wife, the Senator pandered to pro-choice feminists – causing his pro-life detractor to quip, “Libertine men always favor abortion.”
At the Senate’s confirmation hearings Kennedy metaphorically picked up the pro-abortion gauntlet and hoped to deliver Judge Alito’s head on a political platter to Washington’s most radical feminist groups and other major contributors of campaign money to the Democratic Party.
Finally, anyone interested in the flaws in Kennedy’s character should read “The Senator: My Ten Years With Ted Kennedy,” by Richard Burke. The author describes how he tried to save the Senator from his personal excesses.
He also provides a behind-the-scenes account of Kennedy’s 1980 unsuccessful primary race against then President Jimmy Carter; which hopelessly polarized the Democratic Party - and helped Ronald Reagan move into the White House.
During my own career on Capitol Hill I once told House Speaker “Tip” O’Neill in confidence: “I have a low opinion of Senator Kennedy.” He replied discreetly: “The Kennedys are not real Democrats. They have their own party.” [Editor’s Note: Get the bestselling book about Ted Kennedy’s hypocrisy — Click Here.]
Jerry Zeifman is former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee and a lifelong Democrat. He is also author of “Without Honor: Crimes of Camelot and the Impeachment of President Nixon.” He is currently hoping to publish “The Dissident Democrat: a Political Memoir.”
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