Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Lion of the Senate Dies

Staying up way too late as I too often do, I checked the tube, as I often do before I finally retire for the night, and learned that Senator Edward Kennedy has passed away. I can't remember the last time I agreed with the man, if ever I did, and I've often thought that his time was passed and he should have retired. But for good or otherwise, one cannot pretend he didn't have some kind of impact on the political climate in this country. He has served for a long time and as a rich dude, he didn't have to. So I give him at least that much, that he did serve his country in a manner he felt he should. For that I say, may he rest in peace.

10 comments:

Mark said...

The best thing Ted Kennedy ever did for America (besides die) was change many Liberals, including me into Conservatives.

After he murdered Mary Jo and got away with it, I lost respect for the Legislature.

Marshal Art said...

I believe a charge of murder requires some malice aforethought. At best, the details surrounding the Kopeckni situation are about as murky as the bottom of the Chappaquidick. All one can say for sure is that Teddy's decision making under stress was exceptionally poor, worse indeed than was getting behind the wheel that night, and as a result, a woman died. There are lesser charges that fit the situation much better, none of which leaves Ted without sufficient guilt and responsibility.

So rather than dwell on what we cannot know for sure, we can instead focus on what we do know for sure.

Jim said...

Marshall, thanks for your respectful post. Chappaquidick was a dark time for Kennedy and of course the victim's family. But the man bounced back and had a tremendous career, agree with him or not.

Some people can't wait 24 hours to bash the departed as Mark demonstrates and as I've already seen on his blog.

Some people have no class.

Feodor said...

Ronald Reagan Speaks Out Against Socialized Medicine is a 1961 LP recorded by Ronald Reagan where Reagan criticized Social Security for supplanting private savings and warned that subsidized medicine would curtail Americans freedom and that "pretty soon your son won't decide when he's in school, where he will go or what he will do for a living. He will wait for the government to tell him... one of these days we are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children, what it once was like in America when men were free."

[The best thoughts you guys have to offer are simply rehashed ad material for the last fifty years. Not a new thought, not even an old thought, among you. Just ad copy offering "paranoia", fifty years old.]

Kennedy on healthcare reform (the basis of his opposition to Carter, who, to him, was moving too slow on providing health care as a right for our poorest citizens:

"What we have in the United States is not so much a health-care system as a disease-care system... And this is the cause of my life: new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American — north, south, east, west, young, old — will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege.”
_________

And then this from Kennedy, for you guys who have bleak hearts:

"The more our feelings diverge, the more deeply felt they are, the greater is our obligation to grant the sincerity and essential decency of our fellow citizens on the other side... I hope for an America where neither “fundamentalist” nor “humanist” will be a dirty word, but a fair description of the different ways in which people of good will look at life and into their own souls.

Mark said...

You are buying into Teddy's story. Think about this: Mary Jo was having an affair with Ted. She got pregnant. She threatened to go public. He sent her already dead body inside a driver less car into the Chappaquiddick.

That's just one possibility, but more believable, given Teddy's predilections than his silly "forgot to report it" story.

Mark said...

Teddy Kennedy had no class. How does one mourn a monster?

Mark said...

Jim, if class means you speak dishonestly about a dead miscreant then, yes, I have no class.

Maybe now you'll stop posting your innanities on my blog.

Feodor said...

A beautiful picture of Mark's understanding of Christ's redemption.

Mark said...

Hey, Feodor. Go to whatever you moral relativist false teachers call Hell.

Feodor said...

Knowing how much you like Shakespeare, Mark (although you could use a class or two to understand what you are reading):

"Yet here, Laertes! Aboard, aboard for shame! The wind sits in the shoulder of your sail, and you are stayed for. There ... my blessing with thee! And these few precepts in thy memory look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any un-proportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar. Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel; but do not dull thy palm with entertainment of each new-hatched, unfledged comrade. Beware of entrance to a quarrel but, being in, bear't that the opposed may beware of thee. Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice; take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment."


"Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."
_______________

Or, you could try to understand the signs of your increasing anger which your friends and foes alike see in you and get right with God by getting right with your children whom you've alienated.

Or whatever your problem is.

This would be your way out of the hell you are currently in.