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David Harsanyi updates one of life’s important dictums; “Nobody’s life, liberty or property is safe while congress is in session.”
…You know what Americans could really use these days? A high-quality, five-tiered, color-coded warning-system to caution us about the threat level coming out of Washington. As one of those clueless, frothing-at-the-mouth, slack-jawed yokel extremists, I know I certainly could use a color scheme to help me get a handle on such a complex issue.
• Code Green is easy. A low risk of economic attack. The default color code for those wondrous days when Congress is on recess and the president is enjoying Martha’s Vineyard, Camp David or a Broadway play. We can home in on First Pets and swoon over Barack Obama’s extraordinary reading list. Isn’t he brilliant? …
• Code Yellow. Significant threat of economic attack. Elected officials hunker down and pretend to write legislation that’s already been authored by crony capitalists and progressive agenda groups.
Meanwhile, lesser elected officials take brilliantly ambiguous positions on legislation they will never read while waiting for literature they will intensely examine: namely, poll numbers.
The White House starts doling out treats and threats. The general populace hears words like “public option” and “death panels” for the first time. …
Kimberly A. Strassel recaps the liberal demonization of the CIA.
President Barack Obama fought hard for the former California congressman during his uncertain February confirmation fight. That’s about the last thing the president has done for his spy chief. Quite the opposite: If the latest flap over CIA interrogations shows anything, it’s that Mr. Panetta has officially become the president’s designated fall guy. …
…Reversing prior promises not to prosecute CIA officials who “acted in good faith,” Mr. Holder appointed a special counsel with the ability to prosecute officials who acted in good faith. This was paired with release of a 2004 CIA report that the administration spun as more proof of agency incompetence. As a finishing touch, the White House yanked the interrogation program out of Mr. Panetta’s hands, relocating it with the FBI. With friends like these . . .
If Mr. Panetta has learned one lesson on the job, it’s that he’s alone. In the wake of the Pelosi blow-up, he took a stab at reconciliation with Democrats, trekking to Capitol Hill to tell the intelligence committees about a previously undisclosed (though hardly shocking) CIA idea for killing al Qaeda brass. His repayment was a letter, leaked to the press, from House Intelligence Chair Silvestre Reyes, claiming the new briefing simply proved the CIA had indeed previously lied to Congress. …
Most of what has appeared in the media on Kennedy has been vapid. Pickings was going to ignore the whole thing, but The Corner at National Review had many good items you might not see elsewhere, which after all, is why we blog.
Kathryn Jean Lopez has a profound thought to start us off.
Rev. Robert A. Sirico of The Acton Institute has a hilarious story and comments on Kennedy and Catholicism.
Many will speak and write of the legacy of Ted Kennedy in the days ahead. For me, as an East Coast “ethnic” grandchild of immigrants, Kennedy’s death symbolizes several cogent moments in Catholic America.
It marks the passing of a generation that thought that being Catholic, Democratic, and pro–New Deal were synonymous. We now live in an age where many Catholic Americans are very happy to be described as pro-market and are suspicious of New Deal–like solutions — as, of course, they are entitled to be in a way that they are not on, for example, life issues. Senator Kennedy had it exactly the wrong way around.
Kennedy’s death also brings the Church face-to-face once again with the fact that there is a massive problem of basic Catholic education — catechesis — among the faithful. So many Catholics — even some clergy — make an absolute out of prudential issues such as economic policy, while relativizing absolutes, such as abortion, euthanasia, and marriage. This is done in the face of clear, binding teachings from John Paul the Great, who said that no other right is safe unless the right to life is protected, or, as Pope Benedict wrote recently in Caritas in Veritate, that life issues must be central to Catholic social teaching. …
Charles Krauthammer addresses Kennedy’s political extremism.
And he was the titular and the de facto head of American liberalism as an ideology. And trying to look at it as a future historian might, I think they might say that his political life marks and heavily influenced the trajectory of American liberalism.
In a sense, they might conclude that he was one of its champions, but he took it too far. He overshot.
I will give you two examples. Civil rights: He and his brother Bobby were early, dedicated, and sincere champions — courageous — of civil rights. But Teddy took it into affirmative action and reverse discrimination, which were more highly problematic.
Secondly was in the social safety net. He was a strong supporter of Social Security, extending it to the disabled, and [of] Medicare, children’s health. But he took it way into the Great Society which created a whole culture of dependency which ironically had to be undone by a moderate Democrat, President Clinton.
Rich Lowry received this e-mail about Kennedy:
It has always seemed to me that the modern era of “the politics of personal destruction” began not with right-wing hatred for Bill Clinton but with the Teddy Kennedy-led character assassination of Robert Bork.
Now from an unlikely source comes support for that view — at least as far as judicial nominations are concerned. In an online article, the New Yorker’s legal man, Jeffrey Toobin, concedes that Kennedy’s attack on Bork was “crude and exaggerated.” And, Toobin adds that his passion in that episode “has defined Supreme Court fights ever since.”
I wish that some of the GOP senators who were so charmed by Kennedy’s clubbish good humor in their private corridors would give a little more attention to the damage that this man’s public conduct did. . . .
Andy McCarthy wonders if attaching Kennedy’s name to ObamaCare will really help.
… Why does ObamaCare necessarily need a person’s name attached to it, anyway? Why can’t they just call it, say, a “Man-Caused Disaster”? Or maybe a “domestic contingency operation” — or, better, “a domestic contingency to prevent you from getting an operation”?
Mark Hemingway comments on a Carl M. Cannon article.
Carl M. Cannon has a terrific and thoughtful column on Ted Kennedy’s failings that really must be read. He does his best to acknowledge Kennedy was a generous man and competent politician, but ultimately Cannon says he’s concerned that many are trying to whitewash his profound failings…
…Further, Cannon makes the salient point that the actual facts involved in the Chappaquiddick rarely enter the debate over Kennedy because they are so indefensible and uncomfortable for liberals. He goes into the whole incident in detail:
“Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone. When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner’s inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity. …”
A post that suggests Kennedy’s coattails did little to help Obama beat Clinton is next.
Mark Steyn closes this section with his weekly column from the Orange County Register.
We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.
In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:
“Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life …”
That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was … a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:
“Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? …
… The senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.
Back to the living, David Warren contrasts Western political maneuverings with Gaddafi’s candor.
…The lie — that the release of Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi had nothing to do with direct negotiations between Brown and Gaddafi (and others) last month — has not washed with anyone. To update my Sunday column, it would now appear that Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, was the naive character left finding excuses for a deal already cut well over his head. …
…There is a kind of candour in Gaddafi’s behaviour that becomes almost attractive in comparison with western business calculations. For the Libyan master terrorist, oil money is important, but only as a means to ends that have nothing to do with economic development. Gaddafi’s plain talk, thanking Brown, Prince Andrew, and even our Queen for springing his murderous operative, rings with truth — confirmed by a glance at the grovelling “Dear Moammar” letter Brown sent him.
Similarly, Gaddafi’s open boasting about, for instance, the impending Muslim demographic takeover of Europe, shines with candour in comparison to western essays in political correctness. Like Lenin, Hitler, and every other totalitarian on whom he has modeled himself, Gaddafi long ago realized there was no need to hide his intentions. The “sophistication” of the west is such that if you openly state, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we hang them,” our diplomatists will go to work explaining this away, while organizing another trade mission. …
The Washington Post editors take up the school voucher issue.
President Obama reportedly has a hefty reading list while vacationing this week, but we would like to offer two additions, both hot off the presses. One is an article by the education expert who studied the D.C. voucher program; the second is a study on school safety in the city’s public and private schools. Read together, they might cause the president to rethink his administration’s wrong-headed decision to shut down the voucher program to new students.
He should start with Patrick J. Wolf’s article in the new issue of Education Next. Mr. Wolf, a professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas, is the principal investigator of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which allows low-income children to attend private schools. He was unequivocal in his findings: “The D.C. voucher program has proven to be the most effective education policy evaluated by the federal government’s official education research arm so far.” Equally adamant was his opinion that vouchers paid off for the students lucky enough to win them: “On average, participating low-income students are performing better in reading because the federal government decided to launch an experimental school choice program in our nation’s capital.” …
Jillian Melchior in the WSJ discusses the benefits of community colleges.
…One of the biggest misperceptions is that a community-college education is inherently second-rate. While the overall goals are often utilitarian, students who seek deeper learning may well find instructors who are willing to accommodate them and who have the time to do it, thanks to small class sizes—on average, fewer than 30 students, according to student-loan giant Sallie Mae. I knew drama instructors who gave private acting lessons to students, unpaid, and music teachers who worked overtime with kids who couldn’t read notes but wanted to join the choir. Friends who attended other community colleges reported the same level of faculty attention. Often, because students are so varied, community colleges cultivate instructors flexible enough to teach according to the needs of individual students.
Even the Government Accountability Office acknowledged community colleges’ impressive array in its report “Community Colleges and One-Stop Centers Collaborate to Meet 21st Century Workforce Needs,” issued last year. “With generally low tuition and unrestrictive admissions policies that emphasize open enrollment,” the report said, community colleges “serve individuals ranging from those earning their first educational credential to midcareer professionals seeking to upgrade their skills or reenter the workforce.” About 11.5 million students were taking community-college classes in January 2008, according to the latest data from the American Association of Community Colleges. …