Out at dinner tonight, the subject of Ted Kennedy came up and I realized that he’s pretty douchie and useless as an American politician.
Throughout the years I always thought he was a pretty cool dude, seemed happy and decent enough and his critics always seemed over the line to me.
I never understood wtf Sean Hannity was whining about when I’d listen to him on the radio bring up Ted friggin Kennedy as an attack target. I could never understand how the hell this dude could be thought of as so relevant by people like Hannity. Likewise with Limbaugh, who would often refer to him as “the swimmer” (though I haven’t heard him make such references in a few years) and show Photoshopped pictures of the senator in a snorkel mask on his website (referring to that one time when he killed a girl he was having an affair with by driving off a bridge into 8 feet of water, drunk, one night and then leaving the scene to let her drown to death and only coming forward after police found the body). I always had a “dude. come on. it was a long ass time ago, give the guy a fkking break” about it. But now… not so much.
It was back a few months when Kennedy suggested a Portugese water dog for the Obama’s new pet when I realized my attitude on the “swimmer” jokes were starting to shift. Then I found out that Kennedy has one of the dogs himself and its named Splash and my WTF couldn’t be held back. Notsomuch because if you kill a girl by drowning that you then should never be able to have water-related things in your life and maintain decency, but because the hateful lefty fringe hippies would make exactly that rule if Kennedy was a Republican. That kind of double standard is just annoying.
Speaking of double standards: Kennedy is demonstrating his non-principalled political hackery douchiness, that bothers me notsomuch because it exists – cuz duh, politics – but because he is not called out and ridiculed by the mainstream watchdogs (paging John Stewart). 
Seriously though, check this out: Kennedy wants his home state Legislature to take back a law it passed 2004 – at his urging – that stripped away the governor’s longstanding power to temporarily fill a Senate vacancy. He urged the change in law because the other Massechesettes senator was John Kerry and he was running for president at the time, which meant that if he won, he would obviously leave the senate and the governor would appoint his replacement. The problem with that was that Republican Mitt Romney was governor; and Kennedy didn’t want him to appoint a republican, so naturally he lobbied state Democrats to change the law so that Romney couldn’t name Kerry’s successor.
They followed his advice with gusto. When the final vote took place, the Boston Globe reported, “hooting and hollering broke out on the usually staid House floor,’’ and House Speaker Thomas Finneran acknowledged candidly: “It’s a political deal. It’s very raw politics.’’
It still is. Now that Massachusetts has a Democratic governor, Kennedy is lobbying to restore the gubernatorial power to name an interim appointee. That would guarantee Democrats in Washington two reliable Senate votes from Massachusetts, even if Kennedy isn’t there to cast one of them.
Ridiculous. Kennedy needs to GO. Not from the earth, (he has brain cancer and should live and be well for many more years – just not in the United States government), but from the frigging senate. He’s useless. He does nothing positive. He’s just a political bullying hack and should be consistant for once and LEAVE.
If Kennedy is sincere – if his chief concern is that Massachusetts not be left for months without the services of a full-time senator – then he should do the right thing right now: He should resign.
For well over a year, Massachusetts has not had the “two voices . . . and two votes in the Senate’’ that Kennedy says its voters are entitled to. Sickness has kept him away from Capitol Hill for most of the last 15 months. He has missed all but a handful of the 270 roll-calls taken in the Senate so far this year. Through no fault of his own, he is unable to carry out the job he was reelected to in 2006. As a matter of integrity, he should bow out and allow his constituents to choose a replacement.
There’s a reason Mayor Quimby, the lying, cheating, philandering, corrupt, career politician from the Simpsons has a Boston accent – he is a Kennedy parody. And we don’t need any Mayor freakin Quimbys in our real life government.
Ted Kennedy sucks and should go away from public “service” and enjoy retirement in the private sector while he struggles with his unfortunate disease.
UPDATE: While I was writing this blog, Ted Kennedy succumbed to the deterioration his brain cancer was taking and died at the age of 77.
