ALITO HEARINGS SYMBOLIZE KENNEDY's DOWNFALL

Peggy Noonan has a WSJ piece that rhapsodizes a bit about Joe Biden and his whimsical verbosity wandering the landscape in search of a thought. Unlike Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, who believes Joe’s nutty sort of everyman humor deprives him of the gravitas Cohen believes is required to run for President.

Cohen’s article is humorous, but Noonan actually hits some sort of paydirt when she notices that Joe Biden is unlike some of the other Democrats on the Committee:

In this, in the hearings, Biden is unlike Ted Kennedy in that he doesn't seem driven by some obscure malice--"Uh, I, uh, cannot, uh, remembuh why I hate you, Judge Alioto, but there, uh, must be a good reason and I will, um, damn well find it." When he peers over his glasses at Judge Alito he is like an old woman who's unfortunately senile and quite sure the teapot on the stove is plotting against her. Mr. Biden is also unlike Chuck Schumer in that he doesn't ask questions with an air of, "With this one I'm going to trap you and leave you flailing like a bug in a bug zapper--we're going to hear your last little crackling buzz any minute now!"

Reading Noonan's paragraph above, I was suddenly struck by the memory, when she mentions Kennedy, of the grade school bully when I was in the third or fourth grade of Christ King School in Wauwatosa, WI. He was a fellow named Reilly who was an eighth grader with a college football player’s build and body, and he would wale the living daylights out of anyone who looked at him crossways. Reilly had that pugilistic Irish punk demeanor of Sean Penn, who blames Bush for not allowing him to give up smoking, and Reilly terrorized the playground more or less on a daily basis and the nuns could not or would not do anything about him.

Maybe Reilly and Teddy share an Irish bully gene, one that fellow Irishman Biden obviously lacks. Teddy’s oldest brother, war hero Joe, was reputed to be very much a bully in his Harvard days. Perhaps it came with being from the second generation of Irish students at Harvard [Teddy’s poppa Joe was the first and had to behave well and fit in] who could shrug off the WASPs' closet snobbery with superior athletic prowess in and out of the boxing ring.

I should mention here that my sister-in-law worked for Teddy as a Legislative Assistant long ago and has told my wife that Teddy has long had to work from cue cards very closely, as he is not at all the sharpest tool in the Kennedy-brother shed. He does have difficulty conducting civil discourse and verges on being insultingly clueless when asked to explain himself or what he is trying to say.

Strange that this Senator since 1962 has done so much damage to the Democratic Party‘s Ascendancy he inherited while his brother was President and another brother Attorney General and even more dominant after the country voted overwhelmingly for Johnson in the mid-60s.

Since then, Kennedy has single-mindedly engaged in a decades-long samurai-suicide rite of self destruction both politically and personally. His chronic drinking resulted in a young woman’s death in one of his philandering expeditions---he tried to get a family friend to take the rap before fessing up---and this massive personal indiscretion was followed by a gigantic POLITICAL indiscretion when he ran for President against a sitting first-term Democrat in 1980.

Liberals have a forgetfulness gene which helps explain their obscure loyalty to the fellow who almost single-handedly accomplished the advent of Ronald Reagan to the American Presidency and began the long process of the Democrats' degeneration into a minority party in Congress. Only the MSM’s bizarre touting of the eccentric Ross Perot’s off-again, on-again campaign in ‘92 boosted Clinton into the White House. Clinton was a fluke delaying the inevitable downfall of the Democrats that Teddy started decades earlier when he lost the Senate Majority Leader job through political hamhandedness. JFK was a leader, Bobby may have become a leader, but the Benjamin of that brood lacks that essential leadership quality: moral authority.

But now is the Gotterdaemmerung of the Democrats as they watch their long-term strategy of judicial activism centering on their Supreme Court majority at last fade into the past.
Alito will be the fifth sitting Catholic SCOTUS member and perhaps no single person deserves more credit for this newly acquired Republican dominance in all three branches of US government than Teddy Kennedy, who made Reagan President in 1980 and now cannot stop Alito from gaining the Supreme Court.

If Kennedy had a conscience or any moral character, he would be ashamed of himself.