Completely agree with this – particularly how can you please everyone. Kennedy was heavliy liberal – but was passionate about improving our country..

…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 omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

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What say you, Mike R? Would you sacrifice your sister or your wife to lord Poseidon if it would deliver another 47 years of liberal service to the U.S. Senate, the way these ghoulish writers at the Huffington Post would?

Tell the truth. Most people are neither saints nor villains. That’s what makes them interesting.

Teddy had a hell of a life. He wasn’t a cardboard cut-out, he was good and bad, reckless and prudent, brave and cowardly. Like all people. But with a more interesting job and family and history than most people.

I am not really down with the mainstream media penchant for lionizing and whitewashing, it makes for tedious viewing. Yet it makes sense when you figure that they probably have some sense of propriety in not offending family and friends. So we can all safely tolerate the focusing on the positive.

But when it comes to the minor media, blogs, and twitter for example, I’ve got zero problem with folks speaking their mind and speaking the truth as they see it. It’s the logical place for the antidote to the mainstream whitewash.

Kennedy was what he was, a very flawed figure personally, an insider horsetrading pol of longstanding and with much accumulated power. Power which he used often in a highly partisan way without 2nd thoughts. He achieved much, yet there’s plenty of room for debate as to whether those achievements were all good. And he personally helped thousands of people from Massachusetts. I think it’s hard to argue that his legislative heart was not in the right place, even if you dislike and disagree with some of the results.

I’m not in favor of meanspiritedness but I’ve seen enough of it when hated figures on the right die that it doesn’t surprise me to see the mirror image now when it’s a left winger hated by the right who died.

The political elite’s civility is degrading and the degradation is accelerating. Breitbart isn’t helping but this is just a symptom of a much deeper, bipartisan disease.

That said, this wasn’t about speaking the truth it was about spreading partisan propaganda. Breitbart’s an idiot.

Like the former porch monkey of a one-time souvenir stand counter boy has any kind of grasp of the intelligent. Or human decency, for that matter.

Please don’t waste any more bandwidth on this sack. The Donk is a much more intelligent place than that.

Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com