Good Riddance

I was intending no comment on the death of Ted Kennedy based on the axiom that if you can't say something nice about the dead say nothing at all. But after seeing all the awful hero-worship from the left (and even expressions of great respect from some on the right) I felt the same queasy churning that I felt after the death of the creepy little pedophile and its resulting hero-fest. So I feel I need to post this little obit put together by Van Helsing to remind folks what an odious toad the 'Great Man' actually was.

While the media sniffles and wipes its tears, the rest of us can secretly heave a sigh of relief that we are finally rid of Ted Kennedy. Everyone knows that he was a left-wing ideologue who cheated on college exams and left a young girl to die in his car after he drunkenly drove it into the drink. Most remember that he did what he could to undermine our troops' morale and lend succor to the enemy during wartime. A few know that he was an eco-hypocrite, who dumped diesel fuel into the ocean and wouldn't allow windmills to be built if on clear days he might be able to see them from his mansion, even while steadfastly suppressing domestic drilling. But hardly anyone seems aware that Red Ted was quite literally a traitor, who worked directly with the USSR's communist dictatorship to undermine Ronald Reagan's successful anti-Soviet policies.

Here's a Moonbattery piece from October 20, 2006:

Although it's incomprehensible that Democrats would effectively side with an enemy devoted to destroying us, as they have done whenever they thought they could get away with it during the War on Terror, it is not unprecedented. As political science professor Paul Kengor points out in his new book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, a willingness to side with our country's enemies to inflict damage on a Republican president was also on display during the Reagan Era.

The same Ted Kennedy who rants and rails against W's attempts to defend us from terrorists arguably crossed the line from useful idiocy into outright treason when he offered to assist Soviet dictator Yuri Andropov in developing a public relations strategy to counter Reagan's foreign policy — the foreign policy that was to defeat the Soviet menace without a shot being fired.

Senator John Tunney (D-CA) traveled to Moscow on Kennedy's behalf to negotiate a secret partnership with Andropov, Kengor reveals. Tunney has acknowledged that he had played intermediary for Kennedy, and that he made 15 separate trips to Moscow. Chappaquiddick Ted told Tunney to reach out to "confidential contacts" to get the word to Andropov, who had enough nuclear missiles pointed at us to blow up the planet, that he wanted to work with him against the President.

Kennedy proposed that the dictator appeal directly to the American people in a series of television interviews, evidently intended to undermine support for Reagan's strong stand against communism. As Kengor notes of Kennedy:

He hoped to counter Reagan's polices, and by extension hurt his re-election prospects.

Fortunately, Andropov died before Kennedy's attempt to form a partnership got off the ground. But maybe the rise of Islamic terrorism is affording Ted chances to make new friends.

And let's not forget Ted's lying and scurrilous attack on Robert Bork.

Anticipating the nomination of Bork or someone like him to fill Powell's seat, Kennedy aide Jeffrey Blattner had written a statement denouncing the nomination. Immediately following the announcement of Bork's nomination on July 1, 1987, Senator Kennedy took to the floor of the Senate to make the statement Blattner had written:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at 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 the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is -- and is often the only -- protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy....

Alluding to Bork's execution as Solicitor General of Nixon's order to fire Archibald Cox, Kennedy contintued:

President Reagan is still our president. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of American. No justice would be better than this injustice.

New York Times reporter Ethan Bronner (then of the Boston Globe) tells the story of Kennedy's statement denouncing Bork in Battle for Justice: How the Bork Nomination Shook America. In the book Bronner comments harshly on Kennedy's statement, though Bronner's comments do not exhaust the statement's falsity:

Kennedy's was an altogether startling statment. He had shamelessly twisted Bork's world view -- "rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids" was an Orwellian reference to Bork's criticism of the exclusionary rule, through which judges exclude illegally obtained evidence, and Bork had never suggested he opposed the teaching of evolution...

Bronner shows that Kennedy's false charges against Bork did not derive from some mistake or misinterpretation, but were rather the deliberate acts of a powerful man for whom the ends justified the means:

Kennedy did distort Bork's record, but his statement was not the act of a desperate man. This was a confident and seasoned poliltician, who knew how to combine passion and pragmatism in the Senate. Unlike the vast majority of those who were to oppose Bork, Kennedy believed from the beginning that the nomination would be defeated and that the loss would prove decisive in judicial politics.