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FrankRep
08-27-2009, 09:12 AM
Evaluating Sen. Ted Kennedy's Real Legacy (http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/1745)


Jack Kenny | The New American (http://www.thenewamerican.com/)
27 August 2009


The moment Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died, the gushing tributes started pouring in from both sides of the political aisle, many of them no doubt scripted beforehand and held in waiting for the opportune time to pay tribute to the fallen hero.

He was "the greatest senator of our time," said President Barack Obama, while vacationing on Martha's Vineyard, not far from the site of the senator's enduring scandal. He was "the last lion of the Senate," said Sen. John McCain, who co-sponsored a liberal immigration reform bill with Kennedy. "Ted Kennedy was an iconic, larger than life United States Senator, whose influence cannot be overstated," chimed in Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah.

But his influence, while considerable, can be and has already been overstated. Several reviews of the senator's lengthy career note that at a pivotal moment in last year's Democratic presidential primaries, Ted Kennedy, along with JFK's daughter Caroline and others of the celebrated Kennedy clan, endorsed Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton. Yet eight days later Clinton defeated Obama in Kennedy's home state of Massachusetts. Even among voters in the Bay State, where he was elected to the Senate nine times, Kennedy's influence could be overstated.

When he ran for president in 1980, Kennedy lost to Jimmy Carter in neighboring New Hampshire, where the Massachusetts senator was thought to have the "home field advantage." Though he entered the fray as the apparent favorite against the increasingly unpopular president of his own party, Kennedy failed to gain traction in the early primaries in a campaign flawed by his rambling, unfocused rhetoric and his inability to make clear his differences on policy or principle with Carter. He won late primaries in New York and California but was unable to overcome Carter's early lead. His campaign gave Carter the opportunity to fulfill what was arguably his most memorable campaign promise. The President had told reporters that if Kennedy entered the race, "I'll whip his ---"

In its lengthy obituary the New York Times notes that Kennedy, during his 46 years in the Senate, left his mark on laws regarding civil rights, health care, education, voting rights and labor. But it named only one specific piece of landmark legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act, the education bill President George W. Bush had made the centerpiece of his domestic agenda. It is a bipartisan legislation that has left partisans on both right and the left unhappy: the right resents further intrusion of the federal government into local education, while the left complains the measure is chronically underfunded.

Though he worked long and hard to establish a national program of health care for all (He called it "the cause of my life"), that effort has yet to succeed, despite the fact that during Kennedy's long career he has often been part of substantial Democratic majorities. If national health care is enacted this year, it will pass in his absence, however much his colleagues pay tribute to his leadership and inspiration.

"He will be a president who refuses to be trapped in the patterns of the past," Kennedy said in endorsing Obama last year. But Kennedy himself appeared trapped in the "patterns of the past," patterns established in the New Deal/Great Society zeal for expanding the size and scope of the federal government. To Kennedy, every human problem cried out for a new program, funded by billions of federal dollars. The fact that crises in housing, education, health care and few score other matters have only grown more acute as federal involvement has increased fazed him not a bit. He carried his liberal faith with him to the end.

His Catholic faith proved far more flexible. Kennedy was in only one Senate race that was even remotely close. In 1994, the year of the "tsunami" that swept Republicans into majorities in both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years, Kennedy was in a tough battle with Mitt Romney, who would later become governor of Massachusetts. One day, seemingly out of the blue, Kennedy announced his opinion that it was about time the Catholic Church started ordaining women priests, despite the church's constant teaching that Christ established a male priesthood for all time. His motive became clear a short time later when he challenged Romney concerning the role of women in the Mormon Church, of which Romney is a member. It was about as cynical a maneuver as one can find in politics, making a political football of religious doctrines and practices in order to gain a temporary political advantage. And it was remarkably inconsistent with the one doctrine Kennedy truly cherished, that of a "separation of church and state" that permitted him to be "personally opposed" to abortion as a matter of faith and morals, while legislating to protect, promote and subsidize abortion as a matter of political expediency.

Kennedy was not always "pro-choice," to use the politically expedient euphemism for politicians who defend the killing of innocent life. In 1971, he wrote to a constituent: "Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain rights which must be recognized, the right to be born, the right to love (sic), the right to grow old."

Then came the Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision, the rising tide of militant feminism and emergence of a powerful abortion lobby that could fill the party coffers while attracting new liberal voters. Kennedy, like other formerly pro-life politicians, had an "epiphany" on the subject. He opposed any restrictions on even partial-birth abortions, supported experiments on human embryos in stem cell research and is going to his grave with a 100 percent rating from the grateful National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League. It is one of the curious contradictions of liberalism: Kennedy's vaunted compassion could be aroused on behalf of a worker employed at the minimum wage or a child not enrolled in a Head Start program. But not for a child being butchered in the womb.

"He was a tireless advocate for women's equality," Nancy Keenan, president, and Andrea Miller, executive director, of NARAL Pro-choice America said in a joint statement this morning. Yes, Kennedy was good on "women's issues." So good, it hardly seemed to matter that he left one woman in a car at the bottom of a pond and consulted with his lawyer and political advisors before reporting the incident to police, some nine hours after it occurred. At a time when members of the House and Senate publicly worry about young people being influenced by sports heroes on steroids, we now have senators and representatives tripping over one another in the rush to pay tribute to this sordid "role model" for aspiring politicians.

We get the kind of culture we celebrate. When Kennedy returned to the Senate after the Chappaquiddick event, then-Sen. Majority Leader Mike Mansfield spotted him standing in the doorway of the Senate chamber.

"Come in, Ted," Mansfield said. "You're right back where you belong." Unfortunately, that says as much or more about the U.S. Senate as it does about Ted Kennedy.


SOURCE:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/1745

FrankRep
08-31-2009, 09:58 AM
What Ted Kennedy Taught His Followers (http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/1775)


Gregory A. Hession J.D. | The New American (http://www.thenewamerican.com/)
31 August 2009


The recently reposed Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy (D-Mass.) left a legacy of federal legislation that has brought moral and financial ruin to millions of the poor whom he claimed to champion. His more lasting legacy may be an army of powerful government acolytes whom he infused with his brand of Marxist political beliefs, and who are bent on emulating their mentor in eliminating our few remaining natural rights.
For example, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) stated, "Ted Kennedy's dream was the one for which the Founding Fathers fought and for which his brothers sought to realize.”

But what could be a clearer betrayal of the beliefs of the Founders than the policies championed by Ted Kennedy? The founders fought to lift the chains of a tyranical foreign government from our body politic. Their dream was to establish a government that allowed freedom, individual responsibility, limited government, and decentralized authority.

Senator Kennedy’s dream, by contrast, was to to re-shackle us with a massive, smothering, high-taxing, and regulating central government. His dream has nearly come to fruition, but it would have been anathema to the Founding Fathers. Surely the Senate majority leader has a better understanding of history than to actually believe what he said. Rather, he learned the rhetoric of Kennedy socialism, namely how to disguise it as traditional patriotism.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) reflected a similar sentiment when she effused, "No one has done more than Senator Kennedy to educate our children, care for our seniors and ensure equality for all Americans. Ted Kennedy's dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year because of his leadership and his inspiration."

To a Marxist, these public expenditures and social control by government would inspire admiration and hallelujahs. To anyone who took an oath to uphold the Constitution, such as Pelosi, it should be seen as a treasonous betrayal of the sacred trust bequeathed by our Founders.

Peloisi's statement that Senator Kennedy has done more than anyone to care for others is insulting to those millions of our citizens who have invested their lives in actually educating children, in actually caring for seniors, in actually living lives of equinimity toward all regardless of differences, and actually providing healthcare for patients. To Pelosi, extorting tax money from these persons to pay others to do the work, is the sine qua non of service, rather than actually doing something for someone.

In a eulogy delivered at Senator Kennedy's funeral, President Barack Obama showed that he also had learned much from the master: “Ted Kennedy's life's work was not to champion those with wealth or power or special connections. It was to give a voice to those who were not heard; to add a rung to the ladder of opportunity; to make real the dream of our founding.”

The president, like Senator Reid, invokes the Founders and puts false words in their mouths. He asserts that their dream of limited government was really a vision of giant, unconstrained government, big enough to give something to everyone. Can you imagine Locke and Montesquieu, Paine and Henry, Adams and Jefferson believing that the government programs championed by Senator Kennedy should be the means by which citizens should access the "ladder of opportunity" in life?

Given Kennedy's fanatic support for all forms of abortion, rather than "give a voice to those who were not heard," he ensured that the voices of millions of children would be snuffed out and never heard.

Socialism was the real Kennedy dream, not helping people. A recent article by Joseph Farah, editor at WorldNetDaily, cites an exchange in the Senate between Kennedy and the free-market economist Milton Friedman, where Friedman states, “Senator, socialism has not worked in 6,000 years of recorded history. Why won’t you give up on it?”

Kennedy arrogantly roared back, “It hasn’t worked in 6,000 years because it didn’t have me to run it!”

Even the malapropism-prone Boston Mayor (http://www.mumblesmenino.us/), Thomas M. Menino, who recently reminisced about the senator during the time of his passing, echoed the same lesson that he had learned from the senator, albeit disguised in Hizzoner’s unique mode of expression. Quotes are verbatim:



He really knew how to deliver for us, you know, when Clinton was, uh, president, uh, the cops bill I mean he did a tremendous job in reduce crime in Boston to the point that, uh, some people have made, 33 homicides one year in Boston.

We hosted some breakfast to raise ’em revenues, uh, for that and I think it’s gonna be a great learning place for, uh, young people in the future and I’m really proud to be a very small part of that and, uh, it was Kennedy, Sen. Kennedy’s vision once again to make sure he left something so young people could learn from his experience and learn about what the U.S. Senate is all about.


Innocuous as it may sound, the ideas mangled by Mayor Menino are the same detestable ones expressed more eloquently by the members of Congress and the president — government will give you what you need in life. That is assuming, of course, that the same government does not pay a doctor to kill you first.

Senator Reid, Speaker Pelosi, President Obama, and Mayor Menino are apt pupils of Senator Kennedy. They have absorbed the lessons of camouflaging the rhetoric of socialism with the cloak of the noble ideas of the founders.

They have embraced his ethos of death. They have avidly pursued the dream of Karl Marx, while deceitfully disguising it as helping people. These politicians never laud a deceased person who actually ascribes to the beliefs of the Founders.


SOURCE:
http://www.thenewamerican.com/index.php/usnews/politics/1775

Matt Collins
08-31-2009, 10:09 AM
I want to see how many times he violated the Constitution. That's what matters.

Brian4Liberty
08-31-2009, 02:13 PM
If I remember the trial correctly, old Ted was walking around the house drunk that night in his underwear, with a drink in his hand, looking for available companions...



Ted Kennedy and South Florida -- the party's over (http://weblogs.sun-sentinel.com/news/columnists/mayo/blog/2009/08/ted_kennedy_and_south_florida.html)
> Posted by Michael Mayo on August 26, 2009 11:02 AM

Ted Kennedy is being remembered today as a political giant from a dynastic family, and he deserves all the tributes he gets for his leadership and ideals.

But when you think of Kennedy and South Florida, the image that sticks is of a raucous 1991 Easter weekend night out with his nephew, William Kennedy Smith.

The March night began at the Au Bar in Palm Beach, continued at the Kennedy family compound on the island, and ultimately ended up in a courtroom with the sensational rape trial of his nephew that became a media circus.

The William Kennedy Smith case was billed as the trial of the century (this was before O.J. Simpson), with live television coverage obscuring the face of the accuser with a big blue blob and making a star of Miami defense attorney Roy Black.

Smith was acquitted of sexual assault, helped in part by his uncle’s testimony at the December 1991 trial.

But the episode was a family embarrassment, one that the Chappaquiddick-stained Ted Kennedy could ill afford. It led to Kennedy finally sobering up and settling down.

Here’s how his Wikipedia entry puts it: “While not directly implicated in the case, Kennedy became the frequent butt of jokes on The Tonight Show and other late-night television programs. Time magazine said Kennedy was being perceived as a ‘Palm Beach boozer, lout and tabloid grotesque’ while Newsweek said Kennedy was ‘the living symbol of the family flaws.’ ”



December 2, 1991
Kennedy cousin rape trial begins (http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history.do?action=Article&id=1207)

Opening testimony takes place in the highly publicized rape trial of William Kennedy Smith, a nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of Jean Kennedy Smith, the president’s sister and a former ambassador to Ireland. Smith, then a 30-year-old medical student at Georgetown University, was accused of sexually assaulting a 29-year-old Florida woman in the early hours of March 30, 1991, at the Kennedy family’s Palm Beach compound.

On the night of March 29, Smith went out in Palm Beach with his uncle, Senator Ted Kennedy, and cousin, Patrick Kennedy. They ended up at a night spot called Au Bar, where Smith met the accuser, who later accompanied him back to the Kennedy estate. Smith and the woman went for a walk on the beach, during which time Smith allegedly tackled and raped her. Taking the stand in his own defense in court, Smith testified he had sex with the woman but that it was consensual. At the trial, Judge Mary E. Lupo barred prosecutors from presenting testimony from three other women who claimed Smith had assaulted them.

acptulsa
08-31-2009, 02:18 PM
Socialism was the real Kennedy dream, not helping people. A recent article by Joseph Farah, editor at WorldNetDaily, cites an exchange in the Senate between Kennedy and the free-market economist Milton Friedman, where Friedman states, “Senator, socialism has not worked in 6,000 years of recorded history. Why won’t you give up on it?”

Kennedy arrogantly roared back, “It hasn’t worked in 6,000 years because it didn’t have me to run it!”

Well, that settles it. Now, can we lay the whole goofy assed notion to rest with him?