An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.”
Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings?
Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution.”
To suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.
We now have surpassed Dan Rather’s Fake but Accurate Bush memos.
Ted Kennedy is now Honorable but Flawed.