ext_110475 ([identity profile] barking-iguana.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] yesthattom 2003-12-11 07:09 pm (UTC)

Kennedy?!

I agree with everything you said, except, I think, "Ted Kennedy -- long the wisest liberal head on the Hill"

Has he really changed that much? I know he's not the embarassment he was in the late '70s and most of the '80s* -- stopping the booze has clearly been good for him. I don't pay nearly as much attention as I used to. So if you tell me he (even if it really is someone on his top-notch staff acting through him) is now unusally wise, I'll have to take your claim seriously. But all I've noticed is that he's become farily adept at using his celebrity status for good ends.


* One great speech (that he didn't write) delivered at the 1980 convention doesn't excuse a decade of claiming the mantle of 'Mr. Liberal' without the showing the faintest clue of the moral reasons behind moral liberalism. No one, not Reagan, not Buckley, not Rupert Murdoch, Newt Gingrich, nor anyone else, has done more to give the impression that liberalism is nothing more than a collection of greedy special interests. Because to Kennedy, that's all it was. He was happy to serve as the spokesman for those interests, but at least in those days he was intellectually and morally a carpetbagger serving a constituency for which he had no affinity.

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