Aquarian Weekly 9/2/09 REALITY CHECK

EDWARD MOORE KENNEDY — 1932 – 2009

It is a good thing Ted Kennedy is Irish Catholic. He is going to heaven. That’s how it works. No matter what kind of sham your life is, what type of negligent homicide you’re guilty of, scores of hypocrisy you’ve dabbled in, and the fraudulent legacy you leave behind, the slate is clean. They bring a priest in, throw some incense on you and you’re fast-tracked to the pearly gates. And if there’s something akin to the heaven the Kennedy’s believe in, then Mary Jo Kopechne will be waiting there to greet him; the beautiful, young Boiler Room Girl with bouncy blonde locks and a dazzling New England smile standing across from the ravaged, wrinkled, cancer-ridden shell of the man who left her to drown in a dark inlet at Chappaquiddick 40 years ago.

And if there is a God, she will kick him squarely in the testicles. Twice.

It is a heartwarming story worthy of Revelation; the part of the Holy Bible where it all comes to pass — the shit rain, the seven-headed beasts, bottomless chasms, and the torture of the unrepentant. Humanity, in a phrase, is “kicked in the testicles”. Twice.

It is a book Ted Kennedy knew well. Every Kennedy knew Revelation backwards and forwards. Mother Rose insisted on it. She made them read it aloud every night before cookies and milk, later admitting it was a veiled attempt to wipe away the terrible iniquities of her husband, the racist bootlegger, who after visiting 1930s’ Germany framed the Jewish slaughter in Europe this way: “They brought it on themselves.” Later, the patriarch became a master at fixing elections, buying off laws, and hosting Senator Joseph McCarthy and his loving family up at Martha’s Vineyard for weekend detentes on how to “strip Commie Jew bastards of their rights”.

But despite the insanity of their parents and the ill-gotten fortune they would exploit to power, three of the four Kennedy boys became victims; the eldest, Joseph Jr. in World War II, and Jack and Robert to assassins’ bullets two decades later. Not baby, boy, Ted. He was a survivor. He was the one Kennedy that understood the lessons of Revelation. The Big Bad Senator had to look out for Number One. And this philosophy served him well for 47 years of public service.

Edward M. Kennedy was the genetic run-off of America’s Royal Family; a boorish toad of a man with the scruples of a desperate crack addict and the brains of a dung beetle. Everything he stood for or achieved was bought for him, handed down from the crimes of greater men and far more accomplished cretins. He was a failure and a geek and caused so much family embarrassment he was repeatedly sent on beer runs during the famous shirtless Kennedy football games. He was booted from Harvard as a dumb ass jock and stumbled into the Senate in a cesspool’s sludge of nepotism.

Edward M. Kennedy was the genetic run-off of America’s Royal Family; a boorish toad of a man with the scruples of a desperate crack addict and the brains of a dung beetle. Everything he stood for or achieved was bought for him, handed down from the crimes of greater men and far more accomplished cretins.

His professional career consisted of manic bluster on inconsistent drivel, including flip-flopping on abortion whenever it benefited him. He personally screwed two Democratic presidential candidates by stringing the party along like a coquettish debutante; leaving the doomed George McGovern to choose a shock-treatment patient for vice president during a cantankerous convention the Kennedy Camp ignited. Four years later, Kennedy blew his best chance at the White House when his shameless behavior of six years earlier — leaving a girl to die on a drunken night of lunacy with his pregnant wife convalescing at home — forced him to back out. Four years hence, he and his cronies haunted the weakened incumbent in a nasty primary race, all-but sealing the fate of an embattled Jimmy Carter. Minutes before the death rattle, Kennedy ignored party diplomacy and snubbed the president on the convention stage, symbolically hoarding his delegates and creating what later would become the Reagan Democrats.

Kennedy wasn’t even a decent drunk; surpassed by his first wife, Virginia Joan Bennett’s Herculean consumption of barbiturates and vodka. Mrs. Kennedy’s lasting comment on living with Teddy was she eventually had to check into several rehab stints after trying to drive her car off a cliff in a botched escape scheme. But escape she did in 1978, separating from Kennedy, but inconceivably remaining married to aid his botched1980 presidential run before divorcing him outright the next year.

Even from the grave Teddy remains a survivor. Just this week, on his deathbed, Kennedy lobbied to strike a 2004 law he championed to let the naming of his successor fall into the hands of the governor rather than the previous law, which handed it over to a special election, a process that could drag on for months and leave a crucial Democratic seat open for the eventual vote on Health Care Reform; his lifelong political objective.

It was a seamy, partisan, almost mean-spirited move, but summed up what Ted Kennedy, like any servable political survivor excels at. And no one clinging to this ragged democracy should begrudge him. Ted’s problem was that he could never keep his mouth shut when the other side pulled the same treacherous chicanery. He flew into a rage upon the pardoning of Richard Nixon in 1974, only four years after his Chappaquiddick fiasco, mustering the gall to comment, “Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law? Or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?”

Kennedy’s spectacular exercise in hypocrisy was also on display during his vocal attacks on Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork in 1986 and Clarence Thomas in 1991, the latter of which he had to slink away due to its “sexual harassment” theme, something the Kennedy boys, and most assuredly Teddy Boy turned into an art form. In fact, only weeks before the hearings, the senator’s nephew, William Kennedy Smith was arrested on rape charges, allegedly meeting the victim at a bar with his soused uncle.

I am proud to say in the wake of his passing, having thrown words down for public consumption over 20 years and in this space for a dozen now, I have never, ever written a single positive thing about Ted Kennedy.

Until now.

He was no Jesse Helms.

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Aquarian Weekly 7/11/01 REALITY CHECK

SONG OF THE BLOATED HYENA

Georgetown, hero of many, enemy of more, has been silent since the GOP took November and ran with majority numbers into Washington. He has refused to answer calls to scoop the inside dirt on the tax cut fight, the gasoline hikes, the sagging economic burdens, the president’s Euro-tour, James Jeffords defection, the looming Supreme Court nominations and the plunging poll numbers for the man he once dubbed Captain Shoe-In on North Beach, San Francisco two summers ago. The silence is over.

jc: Why do I bother giving you valuable print space?

GT: Because this cheap column needs me. People love the real deal, not some satirical thousand-word literary masturbation. You should be sweeping the stalls in Grand Central Station with the kind of garbage you spew in this space. Did I hear right? Did you write that Bob Franks tried to pick your wife up in a bar in Jersey in some drunken stupor?

jc: That’s one way to interpret that.

GT: The only way.

jc: Never mind. How do you like these poll numbers on Bush after only five months? Did he get caught in some Paula Poundstone mishap? What do you figure…twenty to thirty percent by Christmas and a Mussolini burning by next June?

Right now the perception around town, and I think the polls reflect this, is that Bush is all talk and no action. His ability to communicate any message to the public is for shit.

GT: What did you expect? Economy is shit and Jeffords fucked us good. Now everything is bogged down up there. You think by ramrodding that patient’s bill of rights through the senate is going to help matters?

jc: Is he going to veto it?

GT: My best guess now is no. I don’t know anything concrete from anyone who’s talking, but I can tell you this: Not one soul with any say or cash in the party has one iota of confidence in that happening. I know one thing; we drew big money to shut McCain up last summer so Junior could skid through that primary, and it wasn’t so he could fist-fuck us on this Ted Kennedy bullshit. He cried like a five year-old after South Carolina and when the bank opened up he promised a whole lot. But those same people will have a great deal to say come November 2002.

jc: What else is riding on the mid-term elections right now?

GT: This goddamn tax cut. If that doesn’t jumpstart Christmas, shit will fly.

jc: What about the Supreme Court?

GT: Don’t go there, not yet. If anything, we’re looking at senate hearings up the ass. I was playing darts with that pinhead Shumer two weekends ago, and he’s giving me loads of grief about partisan philosophy and political ideology. And I’m not even worried about him. He’s dry. What about those other drunken psychos?

jc: It’s a booze thing?

GT: Shumer’s got it on good word that Hillary alone will jam up anything approaching a Bork or Sessions or Clarence Thomas. Circus Maximus times twenty on this one.

jc: Is that some kind of cryptic reference to Hillary’s drinking problem?

GT: What the fuck are you talking about?

jc: Never mind. So what about Bush’s campaign boasts about nominating a “strict constructionist” or bust?

GT: Yes, and he’s also a reformist.

jc: Should I bring up school vouchers now?

GT: That was never going to happen. People like their kids to remain stupid. Makes them feel superior to someone.

jc: So, what do you make of these pathetic poll numbers? It can’t be all economy.

GT: Listen, the man lost the popular vote, which doesn’t mean a hill of beans in the constitution, but this has always been a country of public perception. Bush was on daddy’s payroll when he crushed Dukakis and he land-slided Texas. What does this kid know about squeaking by? So he starts in like the new fat man in town, the pimp daddy strutting around Washington with his Gingrich smirk and no one in the party is willing to tell this guy he barely has a mandate to change the color of the drapes in the oval office. It’s been like Elvis’ final years over there.

jc: First you’re telling me the man has no balls, now you’re saying they’re too big?

GT: He’s got the attitude, believe me, but I don’t think he can put it into action. Perception is everything. Right now the perception around town, and I think the polls reflect this, is that Bush is all talk and no action. His ability to communicate any message to the public is for shit.

jc: He did get some semblance of tax cut through there.

GT: Politically that will be his albatross because he sold it as a necessity for the economic slump, not the money owed from a surplus. He sold the latter to congress, but the former to the people. Zogby isn’t polling congress. The people see the imp before the progressor. Secondly, the tax cut ostensibly cost us the senate when Bush crossed Jeffords on some Vermont things. You see Vermont is close to the vest when it comes to its political promises. Jeffords owed more to his constituency than he did to the party, or for that matter, the rest of the country. I see it as similar to Giuliani snubbing your boy up there.

jc: George Pataki.

GT: Yes, Pataki. You still on the outs with him?

jc: It doesn’t matter anymore.

GT: You’re out of New York politics now?

jc: We’ve only got limited space here.

GT: Oh, there’s a story there.

jc: Why do Europeans hate the Bush’s?

GT: Fuck Europe. The only thing that matters right now is how Vladimir Putin sees Chinese nuclear weapon progress and how this administration handles the way China will come strong in the next few years. Everything else is bullshit; the Middle East and this Palestinian crap, the oil stuff etc. You were right on about China last year. I read that crazed junk you wrote about the spy ring. That was good. But that’s changing fast and the whole mess will be a key to the legacy for whoever is holding the office by 2005.

jc: We all enjoyed the semantics parade when the spy plane went down.

GT: That’s the last compliment you’re getting from me. And don’t print it. You’re going to print it, right?

jc: Who’s going to win this Jersey gubernatorial race?

GT: Not McGreevey. He couldn’t beat Whitman, and no one wanted her to win.

jc: But Schundler received no party support during the primary.

GT: Gubernatorial primaries? Is there a more meaningless endeavor?

jc: Editing and writing the transcripts of these conversations for one.

GT: Hey, do you think Gore still thinks he won?

jc: Give me a quick prediction.

GT: Gary Condit will step down before this hits the newsstands.

jc: Do you think he knows where that woman is?

GT: Let’s just end this by saying he should step down.

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Aquarian Weekly 6/15/11 REALITY CHECK

WEINERGATE The Continuing Saga of Congressional Dipshits

I’m not sure a middle-aged man whose penchant for taking lewd photos of his body and sharing them with college students, and thus, through the magic of Twitter, the entire planet, can reasonably continue to present himself or his ideas, arguments and principles in a serious light. But I am quite sure that same man can continue to be a United States Representative.

Unless there has been a crime committed, then the Democratic Party, unleashing its well-worn bully routine and predictably running for cover as have Republicans in dozens of recent offenses, has no right to ask a man to resign a post honored him by the electorate. And thus once again we are confronted with the abject unconstitutional element of a two-party system that cherishes political expediency above the tenets of democracy.

Anthony Weiner, New York congressman, is the latest in the long line of “Did weird shit – lied about weird shit for awhile – copped to weird shit in a tearful press conference when it looked like the lying could not quite make the weird shit go away”. His case only differs in that he has been one of the most contentious, pompous, overly dramatic, and self-promoting assholes congress has produced in some time. And folks, that’s saying a whole lot there. In other words Weiner, who in 2005 ran for mayor of NYC would have run again in 2009 if the current mayor hadn’t proclaimed himself king, had designs on becoming something of a political star in the realm of a Sarah Palin or Eliot Spitzer.

Yeah, Spitzer and Palin, both disgraced quitters of governor gigs and raging hypocrites (Spitzer made his bones attacking prostitution while being a high-paying consumer of prostitutes, and Palin has perpetually railed about the evils of federal government subsidies when under her watch Alaska was rife with federal government subsidies) currently cull sizable cable television salaries.

So looks like Weiner can still be a congressman and most assuredly a TV personality, but then again, who can honestly ever take this guy seriously any longer?

Well, there is a man running for president right now who cheated on two wives, the last one while she was in a hospital dying of cancer, at the same time having the balls to be a prominent moralizer during the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal.

Could a John Edwards comeback be far behind?

Never mind that; if I may borrow a line from our good friends at The Daily Show – please Google new presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s name right now.

We’ll wait.

Hell, anyone with half a brain knows Weiner cannot sincerely continue to show up to a very public, civic gig and represent his district and his party with this load of feces upon him. His next move should be to quietly step down due to distractions and an undo amount of pressure on his family life and whatever blah-blah-blah the busted usually roll out like the guy who propositioned his employees by e-mail or the guy who picked up men in airport bathrooms or the guy who stuck shirtless photos of himself on Craig’s List after the other guy who did the crazy stupid thing that lead to his also quietly stepping down.

You pick an example, man. The names all seem to meld into the other.

This laundry list of systematic goofiness is what anyone, even those without the requisite potty mouth, would call a FUCK UP, or if you will, a monumental error in judgment or the very least a glaringly fanatical display of stupidity.

But let us reiterate that thus far there is no evidence Weiner has broken any law. And if code of conduct is the only issue here then it needs to be stated that being sneaky, underhanded and lying to the press is not all completely legal but actually a congressional staple. In fact, covering up embarrassing personal issues is aggressively encouraged among the congressional elite. The senate holds annual award ceremonies for the best and the brightest. Ted Kennedy and Strom Thrumond routinely took home a bevy of trophies.

If nothing else, Wiener kicked ass in every one of those departments.

Sure, this insipid idea that he simply “made poor choices” or that those of us not suffering from delusions should consider this a “mistake” is nose-diving into Charlie Rangel territory here. Rangel, the last New York congressman disgraced by scandal, believed in an alternate universe of his making that embezzlement was a “mistake”. A mistake is forgetting to pick up bread when it was on the grocery list or flubbing the name of a relative at a holiday party. It is certainly in no way a reasonable vehicle in describing the sharing of self-portraits of one’s cock over the Internet. And it is hardly an apt description for telling everyone your account was hacked by a Right Wing blogger and then not being sure it was your cock in the first place. This laundry list of systematic goofiness is what anyone, even those without the requisite potty mouth, would call a FUCK UP, or if you will, a monumental error in judgment or the very least a glaringly fanatical display of stupidity.

I would think any man not sure what his penis looks like and/or has such low expectations of the collective intelligence of people who could believe such nonsense needs to seriously reevaluate his self worth.

But all that existential shit must ultimately be his choice, and not those who wish to shove his stank into the corner to keep it off them.

Admittedly, a yawning credibility gap is the only reason this space felt the burning need to repeatedly state in the late-nineties that Bill Clinton was better off being an ex-president sooner than later. The Lewinsky case was never about sex or even perjury for us; it was about having someone hold the most powerful post in the free world and not only turning the Oval Office into a Bourbon St. massage parlor, but abusing power, influence and age to seduce his intern there. Then, scold us for having the audacity to call him on it.

But, hey, dumbness and arrogance are also not crimes.

Look, no one should give half a fart if Weiner lied to his wife or if he likes to take photos of his junk and throw it around the Twitter universe. God bless him. But he of all people, who frames his political arguments around common sense and intellect over sappy emotion and cold facts over-indulgent claptrap and has the unmitigated gall to demean the reasoning, common sense and intellect of his opponents (the way he dressed down a CNN producer as if he were a school kid) has to know he’s officially cut off his credibility oxygen. This would be like an abject business failure whose run ragged all over law and decency to amass pseudo empires with other people’s money and then passing himself off as a super mogul, like, say, Donald Trump.

So in the spirit of Spitzer and Palin and Trump, or hell, even Arnold Schwarzenegger, this space chooses to support Weiner’s right to his job and his hilariously deviant behavior and would like to officially recommend he pitch a network show.

He’s got star potential.

Weiner in 2016!

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Aquarian Weekly 4/6/11 REALITY CHECK

COUNTDOWN TO COMPROMISE How Congress Stretches Credibility And Avoids 2011 Government Shutdown

By the time this goes to press, we’re looking at eight days until a “continuing resolution” deadline for the legislative branch to send a bill to the White House or run the risk of a third federal government shutdown of the past sixteen years. Unlike the infamous hissy-fit mid-’90s’ Newt Gingrich/Contract with America variety, the country is mired in at best a stagnant economic recovery and embroiled in three — count ’em! — three military conflicts, the most recent now ratcheted up to something between Viet Nam circa 1955 “advisers” entry level or a pre-Iran/Contra illegal weapons trade smell test. As the Central Intelligence Agency vets the disjointed Libyan mob our nation contemplates arming, the fiscal battle of Capitol Hill has reached its nexus.

The Republicans proposal of $32 billion in cuts to fund the government, the brainchild of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan, has risen slightly in a behind the scenes wrangling to a reportedly $33 billion, which the Vice President recently leaked as “the number” most likely to slake Senate Republicans and to a large degree Speaker of the House John Boehner, who has from the very beginning has astutely striven to not become the Ghost of Gingrich while outwardly appearing religiously conservative. This spectacularly difficult juggling act will hopefully for his more reasoned Republican colleagues disallow the Democrats the political Hail Mary it needs to dismantle last November’s GOP congressional gains.

But, alas, as promised, the TEA Party caucus in the House is not screwing around. It plans on pushing a fairly steep $61.5 billion in cuts, and as of the final day of March, held rallies in front of the Capitol to prove it won’t be backing down, and, according to incendiary rhetoric from hardliners like Representatives Mike Pence from Indiana, Minnesota’s Michelle Bachman, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint and Joe Walsh from Illinois, if it ends in a stalemate that halts the running of the federal government, so be it.

Whether this queers Boehner’s two-faced political chicanery or the Vice President’s so-called “deal” and sinks Republicans into a public relations nightmare has yet to play out. Luckily Boehner has his sidekick, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in reserve to push hard against any kind of compromise, while at the same time working out a compromise. And compromise is sure to come; making it less likely that there will be a shutdown or its subsequent political fallout. No matter the outcome, the Speaker can continue to look responsibly legislative; claiming a measure of victory as his party upped the Ryan cut proposals by $1 billion, while Cantor remains unflinchingly hardcore.

No matter the outcome, the Speaker can continue to look responsibly legislative; claiming a measure of victory as his party upped the Ryan cut proposals by $1 billion, while Cantor remains unflinchingly hardcore.

The pit bull of this dynamic duo was on full display this week as Cantor went off the rails telling the press that if the Senate does not act, which it has not in 40-plus days, then the House’s current “continuing resolution” bill will become “the law of the land”. Now, Cantor is no Michelle Bachman. In fact, he appears to have a fair grip on reality and has used that grip at times quite deftly, especially during the contentious Health Care debate, as he sounded like the most sober and genuinely concerned opponent of key elements of the bill, while refraining from the embarrassing “death panels” or “socialism” hyperbole, which bogged down his congressional brethren. So the best estimate from that evidence is that he must know what every eighth-grader not on mescaline should know; that a bill cannot be a law unless passed through the Senate and signed by a president of the United States. Yet there was Cantor late Wednesday afternoon bellowing to a phalanx of national reporters that the House’s current resolution would magically be transformed into law as a consequence of the Senate’s inertia.

The only plausible explanation for Cantor’s silliness is by making a spectacle of himself he shines a pre-deal light on some portion of Republicans who either have to vote for the less-than-devouring budget cuts while holding their collective nose or throw some dissenting votes against it to regain traction on the Right. Like most congressional grandstanding, it is a show, but in this political climate and with larger battles to come, not the least of which the national budget and the debt ceiling deadline, we get a stellar performance worthy of the late Ted Kennedy at his thespian best.

The Democrats have their own scheme; allow the Republicans to fuck up again. Worked out great for Bill Clinton in ’96 when, with able assistance from excrement monger Dick Morris, the president used the “Republicans are going to kill your grandmother” to reclaim the White House. But hand-sitters like New York Senator Chuck Schumer couldn’t care less if this president survives the next two years, as long as the next two weeks gloss over Democratic congressional overreaches of the previous two years. He and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid expect to let the House bill spin in the wind, get the in fighting to spill over into the cable news quagmire, and reap a political windfall.

Meanwhile, as mentioned, the word is that the Senate has already agreed in principle to move forward on the $33 billion resolution. And so now Democrats can feign disappointment and Republicans can fake a red-faced result of being the victims of an end-around. But it will be a small price to pay for moving the fight down the line to other issues, when the Democrats will cry responsibility and the TEA Party will have to stand and be counted or be mocked for a fringe noise-machine like the 2006 anti-war movement, duly ignored by Nancy Pelosi and the 110th congress.

The guess here is that it will be around $33 billion in cuts by week’s end with the ousting of pennies-on-the-dollar anti-Left riders like Public Broadcasting and Planned Parenthood, sending the spin-doctors to the microphones and test the measure of the shrink-the-government set. Now, cue the yawning.

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Aquarian Weekly 1/27/10 REALITY CHECK

MR. BROWN GOES TO WASHINGTON How The Bluest State Threw Up The Red Stop Light On Health Care

Politics, like comedy, need not apologize. It just is. The victor has his story and the loser, the excuses. It is the way of The Vote. This has never been more evident than what transpired in Massachusetts over the nine days from mid-January to this past Tuesday in a Special Election to replace a senate seat someone with the name Kennedy had owned since 1952.

The general consensus among pundits and reactionaries is that The Cradle of Liberty spoke loudly against the current atmosphere in Washington DC, including whatever incoherent monstrosity now stands as a Health Care Bill in the House. The election results, as abruptly surprising as they were, while always being a referendum on national politics by rule, is never as clear a national message as advertised. But, just as what you find funny does not make it comedy, does it fail to be comedy when you do not laugh.

It just is.

Before those crucial nine days unfolded you couldn’t have picked the victor, Scott Philip Brown, a little known and relatively benign anti-tax, fairly socially liberal Republican state senator out of a line-up. By around January 13, Brown trailed his opponent, the state’s attorney general, Martha Coakley by a respectable but hardly noteworthy 15 to 18 points. In a solidly Blue State boasting its own progressive health care system, where people for decades voted overwhelmingly for a Liberal Lion of dubious moral construct that also happened to be a particularly staunch proponent of a national health care system, the idea that a populist anti-Democrat uprising was a-comin’ is a myth.

After all the Right Wing chest-pumping and end-zone dances subsided, the exit polls clearly showed an alarming exodus of Independents, 60 percent of which make up the true Massachusetts electorate, a majority of whom before some major gaffs and haughty rhetoric from Brown’s opponent were hardly galvanized by his truck-driving, regular-guy approach. The best you can say for the decisive Independent vote was much of it may have emerged from boredom after their beloved Patriots were unexpectedly booted from NFL play-off contention.

In those vital days between the Shoo-in and Toss-out, the Democratic candidate treated the campaign as everyone else beyond her opponent did, as if the election was an irritating weigh station to her seat. It apparently did not matter to Ms. Coakley or her staff that openly mocking the Red Sox, which comes in slightly ahead of Catholicism in religious fervor up there, or publicly complaining that it was too chilly to campaign was bad mojo in a hyper-provincial state loaded with insecure pride-mongers. Ted Kennedy, despite his shenanigans, knew how to make Bostonians and beyond feel like they were running the federal government. There is a reason why a drunken lout with a sense of familial entitlement won every election every time, whether drowning a woman or with a Republican in the governor’s chair.

Many exit polls revealed that it was the stagnation and incompetence of government not National Health Care that drove the Brown vote. What a truck-driving nudist and a half-baked lawyer do in Beantown should have no bearing.

In her last televised debate performance, Coakley sounded like a grim mutation of Caroline Kennedy and Sarah Palin when she seemed unsure if the United States had a continued military presence in Afghanistan. Then as the national spotlight began to shine on her shrinking lead, with millions of dollars pouring in from a suddenly giddy Republican National Committee and the president’s last-minute doomed-on-arrival rescue mission, she desperately went Dukakis in the saddest attempt to appear like she wasn’t a detached intellectual snob.

Only then did the prospect begin to take hold that National Health Care was in jeopardy. Brown and his staff, who had primarily run an Independent campaign, steering clear of the still-damaged Republican brand, smartly rammed home a populace message, taking the Ted Kennedy formula of reminding the otherwise apathetic voter that the world would be glued to and changed by the results, giving them succor for their hometown penis-envy by becoming The Story. Evidence of this is that not since 1990 had such an election drawn as many participants, and just like the record numbers that put Barack Obama in office in 2008 was later championed by Democrats, so did the Republicans rightfully paint their enthusiasm with an ideological brush.

But let’s face it, no one saw this coming, nor did anyone have any idea less than two weeks prior that it would be a national story, never mind a referendum or uprising. Anyone who said they did lies. When most of the country was caught up in the human and political implications of the Haiti earthquake or whether the House Majority leader was a racist, dummy or an old, inarticulate coot, the rumblings in what is generally considered the most liberal of states, was ignored.

The fact is the Democrats were hot and heavy on this Health Care thing from the get-go, even before Arlen Specter and Al Franken gave them a “Filibuster Proof” majority, just as the Democrats were hot and heavy on ending the Iraq occupation in ’06. That a one-state special election can crush federal legislation is media-generated, political party pabulum. If you cannot pass a bill with 59 Senators, a stranglehold on the House and a sitting president after one solid year of The Push, you either don’t want to or have no capacity to do so. Many exit polls revealed that it was the stagnation and incompetence of government not National Health Care that drove the Brown vote. What a truck-driving nudist and a half-baked lawyer do in Beantown should have no bearing.

Shame on the losers – and to the winners goes the bending of truths.

Irony of ironies, the Democrats brought this on themselves long before Teddy went belly-up. Thinking John Kerry, another gangbuster lifer senator from the state, was about to take the White House in 2004 and Republican governor Mitt Romney would appoint his replacement; they pushed hard for a “Special Election” to decide the post. And now, before his body is cold and a lifetime memory of fighting for national health care dwindles, a Republican newbie rides south to the nation’s capitol to warm the Kennedy seat.

Thus, what was at best the longest shot in federal legislation since the privatization of Social Security now appears to be what this space long predicted – dead. The Democrats Dog & Pony Show on Health Care, which as stated here and among friends and colleagues for years was always a pipe dream worthy of Lewis Carroll but made manifestly impossible in the feeble hands of self-flagellating procrastinators, is now fading fast. No one really wanted a national Health Care bill in Washington. If they did, if this president did, they would have used the most dominant congressional majority in a century to do it.

That’s either hilarious or tragic.

Or it just is.

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