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Susan Estrich worked for a number of years on the staff of Senator Ted Kennedy. Of course, she has some warm memories about working for him. However, in contrast to the almost uncritical lionization of Kennedy by such outlets as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times as well as by Evan Thomas of Newsweek, Estrich was able to look at her former boss, warts and all, in a surprisingly frank remembrance in her column. She did not attempt to bury his faults as you can see in this critique of his speaking style: The first time I wrote...

Ted is dead. My self-imposed 24 hour grace period, which the left would never give to George W. Bush or any other conservative, has ended. I was willing to leave Ted Kennedy be and let his family mourn on the day of his death. I will not sit back and let the media lionize his life. It is time to take the Ted to the (wood) shed. Not only was he a bad person, but he managed to make everybody around him worse. I will not let Chappaquiddick go. Liberals who chant that “Bush lied, people died,” apparently do not...

With Sen. Ted Kennedy dead at 77, the political iconographers on Wednesday were working feverishly, like alchemists over a fire. The Kennedy legacy has always been about American royalty and the appetites of kings and the use of myth, and that myth was always Camelot, those shining knights and the idealistic boy who drew the sword from the stone. With the death of the Massachusetts Democrat, finally, mercifully, let's let Camelot go. The iconographers on the political right, including some who call themselves Christians, were busy damning his soul to hell for walking away from that crash at Chappaquiddick 40...

You’d think President Bill Clinton would reminisce about Teddy during his visit in San Diego, wouldn’t you? That’s what we thought when we headed over to the San Diego Convention Center to hear Clinton speak at the National Business Travel Convention. But no go. President Clinton spoke about his role helping to free the journalists in North Korea, swine flu, and even talked about health care but made no mention of the "greatest Senator of our time" passing early Wednesday morning. Perhaps it was too close to his heart to mention. Perhaps the president known for being able to...

HYANNIS PORT, Mass. – Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's body will travel more than 70 miles from his Cape Cod home to Boston to lie in repose in a presidential library he helped develop in tribute to one of his slain brothers. Family members will attend a private Mass at Kennedy's Hyannis Port compound at noon Thursday, and the motorcade is scheduled to leave around an hour later. It will pass sites that were significant to the senator on the way to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, where his body will lie in repose until Friday, a Senate...

Ted Kennedy’s polarizing political legacy was on full display on Wednesday as some U.S. conservatives showed little restraint in their hostility for the veteran liberal senator who died late Tuesday. Conservative talk radio hosts blasted away at the policies of Kennedy, a towering figure in the Democratic Party and a standard bearer of liberal causes who died at age 77 after a lengthy battle with brain cancer.Nationally syndicated talk show host Rush Limbaugh said the political left was “exploiting his death and his legacy” to advance Obama's agenda for healthcare reform, which was also one of Kennedy’s signature issues.“The greatest...

WASHINGTON - Ted Kennedy often said his biggest political mistake was turning down a health care deal with Richard Nixon, and Kennedy's old lament had Democrats yesterday thinking again about compromise on reform. Kennedy said he turned down the universal health coverage plan offered by the Republican President in the early 1970s because it wasn't everything he wanted it to be. He later realized it was a missed opportunity to make major progress toward his goal.

The real-life Mayor Quimby and America’s answer to Boris Yeltsin, Senator Edward “Ted”, “Teddy”, “Somebody Tell That Drunk Guy To Put Some Clothes On and Get Out of My Restaurant”, Kennedy is dead. Edward Moore Kennedy’s place in the hierarchy of great Kennedy men might have been foreshadowed at his birth when his father chose to name him after the family chauffeur, and he most likely would not have risen as fast in politics or remained out of incarceration for as long had he not been to the oyster house born. That said, what he lacked in the ability to...

...evidence from the inquest suggested that she survived for hours due to a air pocket. If only Teddy would have called the police, had called for any kind of help, she might have survived...

Forty years ago last month, Sen Kennedy drove his car off Dyke Bridge in Chappaquiddick after a day's sailing and hard drinking with a group of married friends and young women who had worked on his brother Robert's presidential campaign. As the car turned over and sank in Pocha Pond, a tidal lagoon, its driver managed to swim to the surface, leaving his 28-year-old companion, Mary Jo Kopechne, to drown in the car.

Just before his death Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass) asked the Massachusetts governor and lawmakers to change the law back to what it once was so that an interim replacement could be appointed as a replacement for his seat in the Senate if he was unable to continue serving. The law was changed in 2004. At that time, Massachusetts had a Republican governor, Mitt Romney, who would have had the right appoint a replacement to serve an interim appointment when a vacancy occurred.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009; 4:31 PM Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the political patriarch who died late Tuesday after a 15-month battle with brain cancer, will be buried Saturday at Arlington National Cemetery, close to the famed gravesites of his slain brothers. As tributes poured in Wednesday from across the country and the world, Washington mourned the Massachusetts Democrat whose outsize personality and political skills continued to drive the health-care debate even in his final days. Flags were ordered flown at half-staff at the U.S. Capitol, the White House and federal buildings. Across the Potomac River at the nation's military cemetery,...

Here it is the predicted and obligatory forgiveness redemption motif for Christians. Kennedy has earned salvation, he didn't need G_d's son he just needed to be for the media cause de jour. Fallows would have us accept, "A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life -- the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick -- but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul. And his big, open heart. A powerful, brave, often-wounded animal at last brought down." I didn't hate Kennedy I...

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit in 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 government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of million of citizens." -- Sen. Edward Kennedy, floor of the U.S. Senate, 1987. I'm all for remembering a man's good qualities upon his death. But not at the price of ignoring—and denying—history. Yet that's just...

Boston's two largest talk radio stations have responded to Ted Kennedy's passing by dumping their usual conservative programming and replacing it with local liberal supporters of the late senator. WRKO-AM withheld its standard midmorning and early afternoon lineup of Laura Ingraham and Rush Limbaugh, replacing it with a special show hosted by convicted felon / former House Speaker Tom Finneran, a Democrat best known for circumventing a voter-approved cut in the state income tax. Known as "Tommy Taxes" for that legislative maneuver, Finneran is normally heard in morning drive. A choked-up Finneran told listeners that Kennedy's passing was much more...

CHILMARK, Mass. (AP) — A grieving President Barack Obama paid tribute to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy Wednesday, calling him a colleague, counselor and friend who etched his place in history as a "singular figure" on the American political landscape.

Ailing Senator Robert Byrd, one of only two to have served longer than Kennedy, suggests in an emotional statement renaming the pending health care legislation for the late Massachusetts Senator: "In his honor and as a tribute to his commitment to his ideals, let us stop the shouting and name calling and have a civilized debate on health care reform which I hope, when legislation has been signed into law, will bear his name for his commitment to insuring the health of every American."

Politics, these days, never waits, and already a conservative talking point is emerging to counter the the hope on the left that Kennedy's death will advance his cause of health care reform. Conservative blogger Instapundit suggests that Kennedy's death will provoke "a Wellstone memorial on steroids," referring to the sense in Minnesota in 2002 that the Democratic Party inappropriately used the late Sen. Paul Wellstone's funeral to advance former Vice President Walter Mondale's campaign to replace him. Hot Air's Allahpundit makes the same case, and the comparison is currently starting to course around the conservative blogosphere. It would seem odd...

8/26/09 - Rush Limbaugh discusses how Senator Kennedy's struggle with brain cancer was/is the antithesis of the government-run health care proposal to which the current administration will now try ...

Here is a video montage of clips from some of the most memorable of Sen. Ted Kennedy's speeches throughout his long career. (Watch Video)