If you've been wondering how Ted Kennedy's diagnosis of a malignant brain cancer is going to shake up the Senate, Professor Pitney has the low-down.
Kennedy’s absence cuts the Democratic margin and sidelines one of the party’s best negotiators, said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.
“It’s a significant blow,” Pitney said. “It’s a problem for the Senate Democrats because their margin is so narrow. And Ted Kennedy counts a lot, not only because of his vote but because of his stature.”
What stature?
What about Kennedy are Democrats proud of?
For the spirit of disclosure, I must say a few words about Kennedy and me. Ted Kennedy and I have somethings in common. (And no, it isn't a brain tumor.)
We both graduated from Milton Academy, a far left-wing preparatory school, we both hail from the Bay State, and we both love the Boston Red Sox.
Other than that, we have very little in common.
Let's look at his legacy now that he's been diagnosed with brain cancer and his career is effectively over.
- He supports the murder of the unborn, even though he says he's a Roman Catholic.
- He supports defining marriage by judicial fiat instead of by vote.
- He wants to keep people defenseless by taking away their guns, their last real vote.
- He is against drilling in Alaska, but has fought plans to build wind turbines near his mansion on the Cape.
- He sullied the good names of Judges Bork, Souter (yes, really), Thomas, and Estrada and brought us a new word - "to bork."
- He has fought for minimum wage laws that ironically have made more people poor by denying them entry-level jobs.
- He worked with our President to bring about the feckless "No Child Left Behind" bill which did just that by making what should be a local issue into a federal concern. There simply is no federal power for education. (Yes, there shouldn't be a Federal Department of Education. Don't like it? Amend the Constitution!)
- He favors federal funding of education, the net effect of which raises the costs of education for all of us in private or public colleges.
- He gave us the anchor baby and wanted illegal immigrants to be part of the greater welfare state and doesn't support voter identification at the polls. Coincidence?
(Okay, I'm with you Professor Rossum on repealing the Seventeenth Amendment..)
Before he came to the Senate, he established his character.
Kennedy cheated on a Spanish test and got booted out of Harvard. (Si Se Puede) Instead of being permanently expelled, he had his daddy pull a few strings and make it so he served in Paris while most of his countrymen were serving in Korea. Daddy got him readmitted to Harvard and onto University of Virginia Law School.
Lest I forget, Kennedy murdered (okay more like manslaughtered) Mary Jo Kopechne and should have done the time in prison for which he was convicted, instead he ran for president and lost to Jimmy Carter! He got the best speech that money could buy and even dragged his dead brothers into his mess by saying that the Kennedy family was "cursed." (Kennedy received a two month suspended sentence which he never served.) Because of financial settlements transfered to the Kopechne family we may never know the truth, which is sad because we deserve to really know the truth about our elected officials.
I agree with Professor Pitney. He is extremely effective at advocating for his positions, however misguided. Of course Kennedy, an inherited millionaire, never bears any of the monetary or human cost for his social engineering.
Whereas Joe died fighting the Nazis his father coddled, his brother John died after some silly leftist shot him, and his other brother Robert died when a Christian fundamentalist terminated him, Kennedy outlived them all. Given that he lost horribly to Carter, he also may have inadvertently given us Ronald Reagan. (Thanks, Ted!)
I know I initially said that I wouldn't shed a tear when he shuffles off, I'm prompted to reconsider. Upon further review, it isn't moral to celebrate others' misfortunes, even if they are as crooked as Ted Kennedy. To suggest that even his life doesn't have worth is to concede a utilitarian calculus for human life -- something I'm unwilling to concede even for the worst human beings. I had a lesser moment of wishing ill on someone who I very much wish never got into public office.
Still, knowing that he's enjoying the best possible care, I cannot help but think of Mary Jo Kopechne, who flirted with the Kennedys and ended up drowning.
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20 comments:
you're a sick fuck.
Ok, first off, get your facts right--he chose not to run for President because of the whole incident.
And pulling strings in school? Don't even get me started on how your beloved George Bush pulled strings at Yale.
Fighting against wind turbines being built near his homes? Most likely due to the fact that in some cases it can be damaging to birds in that area. It's a primary reason for many environmental advocates.
And about the whole Mary Jo incident, I'm sure, in the heat of the moment, you would have heroically gone and rescued her...even if the car had sunk. I wouldn't talk unless you've been put in that situation.
Be careful about being so judgemental. After all, there are certain Republicans that molest their pages, and have affairs with other men, and they are married.. Sound familiar? I hope so. I wouldn't dare to guess what else they've done that hasn't been caught.
But to talk about celebrating someone's death, is low, Charles, even for you.
But hey, remember this article, and if you someday have a malignant brain tumor, we'll be sure to dig out your skeletons and rub them in your face. After all, I'm certain you haven't made mistakes now, and will manage to be some sort of entity between now and the future.
Try and have some class in how you refer to anyone, no matter your personal feelings on the matter. I think the primary reason is why bring any of that up? The Kennedy family has been through quite a bit of tragedy already.
Charles,
I suppose you need not follow the concept of innocent until proven guilty?
We ought to consider this a bias-related incident against a democrat. Expect a campus-wide email in the morning.
I'm glad Nadler practices what he preaches. I'm sure it is very "classy" to threaten rubbing old dirt in someone's face if they ever receive a terminal diagnosis.
Get over Charles. Anonymous is right, he is a sick fuck, but he knows what he's talking about and he consistently brings forth legitimate and powerful arguments.
It is right for a conservative to call into question the accomplishments of the liberal lion. It is right to remember Chappaquiddick as we prosecute other crimes by self-absorbed, all-powerful politicians.
Charles says ridiculous things to get PC police like Nadler to read. Enough of the "judgemental" crap. Take his sensationalism for what it is and try to refute his demolition of liberalism with some ideas of your own.
Robert, I'm pretty sure liberal ideas are still standing. The day that a longstanding political ideology is "demolished" by a collegiate blog isn't for at least another year or so when the Democrats recapture and subsequently sully the good name of the White House.
Charles, it's not particularly worth addressing all of the ideologies you rattled off rapid-fire; I'm more concerned that all of those things, including the murder of the unborn, are deemed not as bad as cheating on a Spanish test and going to Paris.
I mean, heaven's whiskers, you've practically written Planned Parenthood's new slogan:
"Abortion: Not as bad as cheating on a test."
Ultimately though, I'm going to offer (once again) a tepid sort of agreement. You shouldn't mourn anybody who has no positive impact on your life and you don't particularly have any respect for simply because they're famous. Celebrating anybody's death, however, seems a little bit callous.
Then again, if Ted Kennedy had just been aborted by minimum-wage parents too poor to afford him we wouldn't have these problems.
Does that count as a Catch-22?
No one is less a fan of Ted Kennedy than I, but he's still a human being. I don't want him to die or suffer any more than anyone else.
When I was your age, I would have made similar remarks, so I'm not coming down on you. Just consider the whole "there but for the grace of God go I" thing.
Thank you, citizenx. I don't know that Charles does the best job of the "demolition of liberalism".
I just believe that on either side, you can do damage without saying that you would have a party for one's death.
Anyways...
I just find it interesting that he would probably find some redeeming aspect in another conservative figure, i.e Mark Foley, etc.
The fact of the matter is, no one really knows what happened with the incident involving Mary Jo's death.
Supports the murder of the unborn...so, in that mind, all of us who don't support Charles' view of pro-life are murderers...
It is an argument riddled with Charles' bias, because we know that Judge Bork, for instance, was an avid pro-lifer, who threatened to reverse Roe v. Wade if nominated to the Supreme Court. Though his rejection is controversial, it isn't hard to see where Charles stands on the issue.
Wants to keep people defenseless by taking away their guns--Right, because obviously, without AK-47s and semiautomatics the human race is essentially defenseless.
And I won't get into the whole school issue. How many politicians do we know that have pulled strings to get out of trouble in college, get through college, avoid the draft, etc? Don't act like it's one corrupt politician.
It's more about his stature as a Kennedy, one of the more enduring political families in the nation, and his ability to negotiate across party lines more than most democrats.
And yes, while you might not care for his passing, you could be a little less callous, Charles.
I will still shed a tear for Ted Kennedy, even though his politics (and personal life) is abhorent for the very reasons Charles mentioned. Charles's time might even be better suited attacking that other great Massachuesettsan Barney Frank for running his homosexual prostitution ring out of his very own house! (about the one thing one could do to be a worse human being than Ted Kennedy).
I have no problem saying that I dislike all of the Kennedy family and the stain that they represent in American life. They are an aristocracy and like with all aristocracies, this one will finally be gone once Teddy shuffles off.
I have a huge problem with the kind of deference we've given that family. They rose to power bootlegging and selling alcohol.
Kennedy's party machine probably stole the election of 1960 when it played all sorts of games with the Chicago vote.
So I ask you again. Name an accomplishment of Ted Kennedy's.
As for the whole Foley, Craig, et al. controversies, I must say the following.
If you sexually assault a child, you go to prison. I don't care what party you are. But as a matter of fact, I have tended to notice that Democrat sex scandals often involve actual sex -- Spitzer, the mayors of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Barney Frank, Bill Clinton, J.F.K. etc -- while Republican sex scandals seem to involve just text messages or weird bathroom behavior. Of course the same side of the political spectrum that once said that oral sex isn't sex would have us believe that sending very disgusting text messages to under-aged boys is the coming of the Apocalypse.
You tend to notice what you want to notice, CJ. Otherwise those pretty little peepers of yours might have caught a gander at the Republican governor of your very own adoptive state.
It's not even a recent thing: Garfield, Harding, Eisenhower, hell, even Reagan all had to deal with allegations relating to actual sex.
What about Parker Bena? Ankeney?
CJ, people like sex. And powerful people are often in a position to influence others to have sex with them, and many of them abuse that privilege on both sides. As horrifying as it sounds - politicians having sex!* - it happens a lot.
Ho hum.
*This revulsion of course excludes any foxy politicians, like Fred Thompson. Rawwwr. Let's do the wattle waltz.
And that's a pretty convoluted closing argument. The disgustingness of the text messages has less to do with their designation as "sex" or "not sex" - does that even matter? - and more to do with the fact that they were exploitive of a child. Say what you want about her mental faculties (or qualifications as an author), but Lewsinsky wasn't a baby, just an adult with baby fat.
And portending Apocalyptic doom is more of a Republican thing anyway, I think.
Ultimately, though, hating somebody because they're part of some nominal aristocracy is quite as silly as revering them for it. And you should be careful about that "aristocracy as stain" talk. We're just about due for another Red Scare.
"Republican sex scandals seem to involve just text messages or weird bathroom behavior"
Really? Let's see who I can think of....
Ted Haggard, Glenn Murphy, Bob Allen (with racism as a bonus!), David Vitter, Richard Curtis, John Bolton, Rudy Guiliani, Jeff Gannon, Jack Ryan, Bill O'Reilly (not sex, but close enough), Strom Thurmond, the Governator (he's 28, she's 16... wait isn't that statutory rape?), Jim Bakker, Newt Gingrich, Vito Fossella....
I think it's fine to attack him for his position on abortion, I'm actually with you there, but taking pleasure in his pain and suffering robs you of your humanity and is perhaps the the least-Christian thing you can do in this scenario. It's despicable and disgusting. You should be ashamed of yourself. Take potshots at people for their opinions, call the TSL sex columnist a prostitute (I laughed at that post by the way), but getting pleasure out of someone's death borders on sadism. Also, I'm not sure how you see fit to make light out of two of the most traumatic moments in US history.
You'll have to forgive him for wanting the courts to grant equal treatment under the law with regards to marriage. I too wish that he would see the light and just let judges ignore their sworn duties and ignore the Constitution like Bork wanted to.
Your entire diatribe is riddled with inaccuracies and ridiculous, unfounded assertions, like federal funding raises education costs. Must we simply assume that this is true? Show me numbers, because looking at it from where I stand: if the Fed pays less, I pay more. Maybe it's more complicated, but it seems like a fairly straightforward equation.
All in all, for someone who has some metal acuity, this was a shameful addition to your collection of rants. Even Republicans on the Hill in DC were distraught when they heard the news. Maybe it's time you looked inside yourself to see if you really are as cold and cruel as you seem in this post, or if you were simply going for shock value. Because if it's the former, then I pity you.
I'm glad you've re-thought this thing. I would only add that Sirhan Sirhan was not a fundamentalist Christian. He was a Rosicrucian. That's a cult.
Bravo Charles! You said what needed to be said. It's sad to know of Teddy's cancer, but America would have been a better place if it was he, not Mary Jo, who sank to the bottom.
You know Charles, for someone who claims to be very good with facts, you're wrong about the 1960 election. Check your (and every other JFK hater's) math-- he won with 303 electoral votes, and even without the questionable votes in Illinois would have squeaked out a 276-246-11 (Harry Byrd won Alabama) win in the electoral college. Sorry that the facts don't quite line up this time.
Greg,
I'm afraid you are the one who is guilty of being mistaken on this one.
Here is the blog post by Peter Robinson upon which I made my question.
I have reposted the entire bit here.
What We Really Know About Who Really Won in 1960 [Peter Robinson]
Lots of readers of this happy Corner have emailed me on the subject. What have I learned? That we cannot say for certain that in 1960 Richard Nixon, and not John Kennedy, carried the popular vote. What can we say? That, no matter how thoroughly we examine the electoral records, we will never know for certain who did win the 1960 popular vote.
A thorough explanation from Fred Schwarz of American Heritage magazine:
In every state but three in 1960, you had a choice between Kennedy and Nixon (sometimes with a few minor-party candidates), and popular votes were counted as usual. In Louisiana and Mississippi, there was a three-way race: Kennedy, Nixon, or "uncommitted." In Louisiana, Kennedy won, and in Mississippi, "uncommitted" won—but in both cases, people could vote for Kennedy (or Nixon) if they wanted, and their votes were recorded as Kennedy (or Nixon) votes. So there was no funny business in either of those states.
The problem occurs in Alabama. There, only two slates of electors were on the ballot (again excluding minor parties): One uncommitted and one for Nixon. "Uncommitted" won by 324,000 to 238,000, and of Alabama's 11 electors, 6 voted for Byrd and 5 for Kennedy. So technically, Rakove [the Stanford history professor] is right—these 324,000 votes are usually counted as Kennedy votes, when in fact they were "uncommitted" votes. And since Kennedy won the election by only 120,000, you can call him a minority president.
Of course, if you want to be super technical, in Alabama and many other states, no one voted for either candidate but rather for electors for that candidate. Yes, this is an exceedingly minor quibble, and if the 11 Alabama electors had cast their votes for Kennedy, no one would object to counting the popular votes as Kennedy votes too. If only one elector had defected, as happened in Oklahoma, they would still have been counted as Kennedy votes. But since 6 of the Alabama electors voted for Byrd [the Virginia Dixiecrat], the question arises as to who should get credit for the 324,000 popular votes.
If you want to boost JFK's total, you call them Kennedy votes and say the 6 electors were faithless, like the Oklahoma guy. If you want to boost Nixon, you say the "uncommitted" votes were for nobody and the Nixon votes were for Nixon. This would leave Nixon with a popular-vote majority of about 200,000….But you can still make a plausible case for counting those votes as Kennedy votes. And if you object that Kennedy's name did not appear on the ballot in Alabama, well, neither did Nixon's. So to be consistent, you would have to take away his 238,000 votes, and Kennedy squeaks ahead again.
And a nice summary statement by Professor Matt Franck, chairman of the department of political science at Radford University:
Now the margin for Kennedy nationally has long been said to have been about 113,000 votes nationally (the Clerk of the House gave him a margin of 119,000 in April 1961, but the lower figure is accepted today). What we would have to know in order to say that Kennedy actually received fewer votes nationwide than Nixon—and we simply cannot know it—is that at least 113,000 Alabama voters, or more than one-third of those voting Democratic, went to the polls and pulled the lever for the entire slate of eleven Democratic presidential electors while thinking "I want Byrd" (or at least "I don't want Kennedy") rather than "I want Kennedy."
Since Alabama then, as now, used the winner-take-all method of allocating electors to candidates—the party winning the popular-vote plurality having all its electors seated in the college—there was only one way for either Kennedy voters or Byrd voters to get even one electoral vote out of the eleven the state had to cast, and that was to vote for the whole party ticket of electors, whether any presidential candidate's name was on the ballot or not.
We know only that the six Alabama electors who had made no pledge to Kennedy voted for Byrd—probably their intent all along….Is it possible that more than 113,000 Alabama Democratic voters wanted Byrd over Kennedy? Yes. Do we know that for sure? No way….
As you can see from Robinson, the issue boils down to Alabama.
Most Democrats make the argument post-2000 that we ought to abolish the electoral college and decide the presidency by the popular vote. If we do that, then it is very likely that Nixon won.
The Democrats ended up getting the electoral votes of the Diexiecrat, which shows us that those racists were in fact more inclined to side with the Democrats than the GOP.
While many people, regardless of their political affiliation, may quibble with the electoral college, it has been and will be the law of the land until there's a Constitutional Amendment (or some other creative ways around it that seem similarly unlikely). That post is very interesting, but I don't care at all about the popular vote. I was just noting that no matter how many dead people voted in Chicago, Kennedy would have been president. That directly contradicts your claim that "Kennedy's party machine probably stole the election of 1960 when it played all sorts of games with the Chicago vote." The games played with the Chicago vote had ABSOLUTELY no impact on the outcome of the electoral college, the only measure of election that matters. If you want to argue that some of the games in Chicago plus some of the games in Texas plus some of the games in Alabama won him the election, then you have a legitimate argument because that's enough votes to swing it to Nixon. But Illinois by itself was not.
A liberal is one who cannot see Kennedy's life of errors.
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