Into the Drink Again

Ted Kennedy has passed a point of no return in the minds of many sane people.

John F. Kennedy's presidency is hard to evaluate because it was so brief, but he is best known for the soaring rhetoric of his 1961 Inaugural Address:

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

This much we pledge--and more.

Kennedy's brother Ted, whose 15,423 days of service make him the second most senior U.S. senator, is best known for driving off a bridge and leaving a young woman to drown. His attitude toward America's role in the world is the opposite of his brother's; it's best summed up as an inversion of FDR: We have nothing to offer but fear itself.

Here he is yesterday at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies:

The war in Iraq has become a war against the American occupation. . . . The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution. . . . The first step is to confront our own mistakes. . . . No matter how many times the Administration denies it, there is no question they misled the nation and led us into a quagmire in Iraq. . . . As in Vietnam, truth was the first casualty of this war. . . . As a result of our actions in Iraq, our respect and credibility around the world have reached all-time lows. . . . Never in our history has there been a more powerful, more painful example of the saying that those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it. . . . The nations in the Middle East are independent, except for Iraq, which began the 20th century under Ottoman occupation and is now beginning the 21st century under American occupation.

And on and on and on. That last sentence we quoted is really something when you realize that the 21st century began more than four years ago, when Iraq was under Baathist occupation.

Glenn Reynolds points out the Ted Kennedy is not alone on The Left:

Various lefty readers email to say that Ward Churchill is not the authentic face of the Left.

I wish I agreed with that. But, sadly, he is its very image today.

When Ted Kennedy can make an absurd and borderline-traitorous speech on the war, when Michael Moore shares a VIP box with the last Democratic President but one, when Barbara Boxer endorses a Democratic consultant/blogger whose view of American casualties in Iraq is "screw 'em," well, this is the authentic face of the Left. Or what remains of it.

There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn't a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

Irrational times indeed.