RSS Feed MenuI know exactly the hour when my opinion of Sen. Ted Kennedy permanently changed. I had remained very angry at the Massachusetts liberal for many years since his 1987 speech so unjustly vilifying the great conservative jurist Robert Bork:
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, children could not be taught about evolution.
For 15 years thereafter I could hardly bear to hear his name spoken. Nor was my temper much improved by his rough handling of another great conservative legalist, Theodore Olson, at Olson’s confirmation hearings as solicitor general. I was always ready to laugh at the harsh jokes conservatives told about the senator’s legendarily self-indulgent personal life. It seemed a fair judgment on an unfair man.
Then came 9/11. Among the murdered was the brave and brilliant Barbara Olson. Ted asked some friends to help with the deluge of messages of condolence, and my wife Danielle volunteered for the job. Among the letters: a lengthy handwritten note by the senator so elegant and decent, so eloquent and (fascinatingly) written in so beautiful a hand as to revolutionize one’s opinion of the man who wrote it. It did not dishonor by ignoring or denying the political differences between the two families. It fully acknowledged them – and through them expressed a deeper human awareness of shared mortality, pain, and grief. Not all chapters of his life revealed it equally, but the senator was a big soul, and in his last years, he lived his bigness fully. He knew and he expressed the sorrow of human life, a sorrow so memorably captured by his brother Robert in a passage of poetry quoted upon hearing of the murder of Martin Luther King, and engraved thereby in the American political memory forever:
Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.
Rest in peace, leader of the liberals.
sinz54 // Aug 27, 2009 at 9:33 am
Just one more point about the Bork nomination:
I’m not a strict Constitutional originalist like Bork. I see no way that black Americans could have had their civil rights restored to them in the 1950s and 1960s without the action of the Federal Government overruling the segregationism of state and local governments in the Deep South.
But just what are the powers of the Federal Government versus the states and localities where issues of individual rights are concerned has always been a difficult issue; there have been scores of Supreme Court rulings on it. For liberals to debate conservatives on this before the TV cameras during the Bork hearings would have been a great teaching movement for Americans.
Instead, liberal politicians like Kennedy chose demagoguery and smear tactics–perhaps because they didn’t think they could convince the public on the basis of their arguments.
Just as they’re doing now, with the health care issue. It’s been amusing to hear liberals at town hall meetings complaining that conservatives aren’t interested in debating with them–when they never wanted ANY debate in the first place. They wanted ObamaCare rammed through Congress in just 4 months with virtually no public debate whatsoever.
Only after the Town Hall protesters stopped ObamaCare in its tracks, and the public and politicians began to REALLY debate ObamaCare openly, are liberals wringing their hands.
Noli Irritare Leones » Blog Archive » And they, since they Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. // Aug 27, 2009 at 10:54 am
[...] columnist David Frum’s story about how his opinion of Teddy Kennedy was changed by the grace Kennedy showed toward his political foe Theodore Olson, in the wake of Olson’s wife’s death in 9/11, the personal touch he showed, [...]
Observer // Aug 27, 2009 at 11:28 am
The correct measure of the centre would be to include 2 and 3, surely? Staying at home in 2008 seems like it would have been a perfectly scrupulous and conservative way to have protested the GOP’s newfound sourness without compromising one’s principles.
joedee1969 // Aug 27, 2009 at 12:13 pm
ireign, GOP did lose its way and the people who want to take it back want to distance themselves from the talk radio Glenn Beck right. A lot of us don’t relate to these bomb throwers anymore and feel they are harming us more than anything. I like this site because it is not all right-wing insanity but ground conservatives who know there is a role for government. There are very few sites that are more down the middle of the road and not on the fringe. There are very few writers that stand up to the crazy way right.David and writers like C. Rich are a breath of fresh air to me. They seem to have a brain and won’t drink the kool-aid from conservatives but focus on what is right by it. The problem is as soon as you say something about Rush or Sean or any of them , people say your not conservative and David and a few others don’t live in fear.
Churl // Aug 27, 2009 at 1:10 pm
joedee1969, I thought that Rush Limbaugh was the Talk Radio Satan Incarnate. How did he lose his position to Glenn Beck?
joedee1969 // Aug 28, 2009 at 10:58 am
Good question Churl. I heard Fox is paying Glenn 30 million a year.
Weekend Opinionator: Kennedy, Bork and the Politics of Judicial Destruction - The Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com // Aug 28, 2009 at 7:43 pm
[...] seems, are willing to split the difference on such questions. Somewhat surprisingly, the person who made the strongest effort at it was David Frum, the Bush speechwriter of “axis-of-evil” fame who now runs the site New [...]