Ah, Teddy, We Hardly Knew Ye

Senator Kennedy's Op-Ed piece in yesterday's Washington Post regarding the nomination of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court is a remarkable exercise in distortion, innuendo and outright lying. Ed Whelan disassembles the Senator's dissembling and concludes:

In sum, the only questions of credibility, fairness and decency raised by Kennedy’s op-ed (if indeed these questions are still open ones in anyone’s mind) are whether Kennedy can credibly, fairly, and decently assess Judge Alito’s manifest and compelling qualifications for the Supreme Court.

I must confess that I was put in mind of the closing speech delivered by the profoundly odd John Randolph at the impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase. John Quincy Adams described it thusly:

. . . without order, connection, or argument; consisting altogether of the most hackneyed commonplaces of popular declamations, mingled up with panegyrics and invectives upon persons, with a few well-expressed ideas, a few striking figures, much distortion of face and contortion of body, tears, groans, and sobs, with occasional pauses for recollection, and continual complaints of having lost his notes.

Read Kennedy's silliness for yourself.

At about the same time Kennedy's column was being written by Heaven-only-knows who, the Senator himself was meeting with reporters. After announcing that Judge Alito was anti-black, anti-women, and somehow committed to "monarchial tyranny," he explained:

This nominee was influenced by the Goldwater presidency. The Goldwater battles of those times were the battles against the civil rights laws.

The Tedster apparently later acknowledged that the good judge had been only 14 years old at the time of the 1964 presidential election. But Dana Milbank's report in the Washington Post doesn't reveal whether Teddy ever circled back around to confess that Goldwater was defeated in the 1964 election by the peace candidate, Lyndon Johnson. While Kennedy's privileged life has always left him with only a tentative grasp of reality, even those of us forced by circumstance to attend public school never learned about the Goldwater administration.

The Senator’s Op Ed is HERE, Ed Whelan’s piece is HERE, and Dana Milbank’s remarkable report is HERE.