Spare Me: Kennedy Was An Embarrassment

I am already sick of, as Roger Kimball puts its, all the sanctimonious pap over Ted Kennedy. If I hear or read "lion of the Senate" one more time I am going to puke. Kennedy was a reprehensible figure - a womanizer, a drunk, a manslaughterer, and, perhaps most galling to me, a mediocrity who lorded over the rest of us from within his protective shell of power. His caddish, misogynistic ways have been well-chronicled. His disgraceful attack on Judge Bork has long since proven to be "willfully false and remarkably coarse" and has done more to poison the tone and squash reasoned debate in politics than anything in the last 30 years. Furthermore it takes a special type of loathsome elitist to impose financial and legal burdens on the rest of us, all the while hiding behind his family's wealth and power. Kenndy was unaccountable to the laws that the rest of us have to live by and he was unburdened by the taxes that he imposed on the rest of us - Kennedy money is locked up safely in legacy trusts, shielded from taxes, for the preservation of the Kennedy clan's aristocratic lifestyle.

Ted Kennedy was the antithesis of what the founders had in mind when they envisioned popular representation. They created a system whereby intelligent and accomplished citizens would take time out of a productive life to represent our voice in the government as a bulwark against the rise of tyranny, most likely in the form of an executive with an outsized cult of personality, and then return to private life. Ted Kennedy was never accomplished or productive. Nor was he temporary. We've had forty-seven years of Senatorial tyranny of a man forged from a life devoid of character and lived without a basic standard of virtue. He was and is an embarrassment to our nation and the people of Massachusetts who put him in office again and again. I wish his soul repose and his family grace in their grief, but let's spare the phony political hagiographies.

UPDATE: Similar sentiments, more eloquently put.