Teddy Kennedy addresses Alito Nomination on blog

[Gerryatrics]

A Special Message from Sen. Edward Kennedy


Barring a miracle, Samuel Alito will be confirmed to the Supreme Court of the United States this Tuesday. Roe v. Wade will be repealed, and the clock will effectively be turned back 50 years to a time when women were herded like cattle into back alley abortion clinics and beaten with the King James Bible until they miscarried. Affirmative Action will be scrapped. Blacks will be thrown back into chains. Cub Scouts will go from door to door, spreading their message of hate and intolerance. There will be a bug in every telephone, a nativity scene in every park, and a heterosexual in every Showtime drama series. Dr. King's dream of justice and equality will succomb to George Bush’s Great American Nightmare.

I’ve tried pleading with congressional Republicans. I’ve tried threatening them with a filibuster. I’ve even tried rolling around on the floor of the Senate until I got my way. Unfortunately, the close-minded conservatives who control Congress will simply not respond to reason. Therefore, I have no choice but to appeal to their primitive, apelike instinct for protecting the lives of children over the rights of the mother.

For every vote cast this Tuesday in favor of confirming Judge Alito, I, Senator Edward Kennedy, will eat one small child.

I’m sorry it has come to this, but desperate times call for drastic measures. The children have already been picked at random from elementary and middle school rosters across the country, and the smorgasbord will commence promptly after Tuesday’s vote. Unless senate Republicans join Democrats in their courageous stand against Alito’s confirmation, I’ll be having little Lindsay Allen of Portsmouth, New Hampshire glazed with a light Bernaise sauce and garnished with fresh parsley for dinner that very evening. Wednesday’s breakfast menu will include a Denver-style omelette prepared with Colorado fifth-grader Jeremy Stevens, and for lunch I’ll be flying to Pennsylvania for a Philly Cheese Steak ala Christy Caldwell. Young Kyoshi Matsuri of San Francisco, I have a gallon of wasabi with your name on it for Thursday, and then it’s off to Hawaii for an Alana Hokuikekai luau.

I assure you that I take no pleasure from performing this terrible task. I have several wonderful grandchildren whom I love dearly, but I wouldn’t hesitate to toss ‘em into the deep fryer and serve them up with a side of coleslaw to protect a woman’s right to choose. Thankfully, none of their names were drawn, but I might do it anyway just to prove I mean business. When Clarence Thomas was confirmed in 1991, I ate an entire girl’s softball team. Ever try to pass a catcher’s mitt through your colon? It’s not a pretty picture, but it illustrates the lengths I will go to save our democracy from raving extremists like Samuel Alito.

If the Taliban-wing of the Republican Party is as “pro-life” as they claim to be, then they will vote their conscience this Tuesday. If not, they’ll have no one to blame for little Tina Draper of Portland, Oregon’s flambé fate but themselves.

Thank you for your time, and thank you, Mr. Chomstein, for the opportunity to use your little corner of the Blogodome as a venue for this important message.

Sen. Edward Kennedy

http://blamebush.typepad.com/blamebush/2006/01/a_special_messa.html

[Oh, Gee!!]

For every vote cast this Tuesday in favor of confirming Judge Alito, I, Senator Edward Kennedy, will eat one small child.

funniest line :lol :lol ever :lol :lol

[xrayzebra]

You mean you missed his little statement: "The founding Fathers were wrong".
Yeah, you would!

[Oh, Gee!!]

You mean you missed his little statement: "The founding Fathers were wrong".
Yeah, you would!


just let us enjoy a joke without your crotchety comments

[xrayzebra]

And then you have this article about the illustrious Kennedy.


Reprinted from NewsMax.com

Former Democratic Chief Counsel: Ted Kennedy Disgraced Himself
Jerry Zeifman
Monday, Jan. 30, 2006
In my view (as a Democrat and former chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee), Senator Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., has disgraced himself and our party by misusing his position on the Senate Judiciary Committee to achieve self-serving partisan ends.

Kennedy was the architect of an unprecedented tactic: using filibusters to polarize the Senate along party lines thus denying the confirmation of qualified conservative judges. In Bush's first term the Senate Democrats used that tactic successfully against at least 10 nominees for judgeships on circuit courts.

Fortunately, Kennedy has failed in his partisan attempt to deny Judge Alito a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. [Editor's Note: Get the bestselling book about Ted Kennedy's hypocrisy -- Click Here.]

This occurred largely because Democratic Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska formed a non-partisan coalition of seven Democrats and seven Republicans to oppose filibusters, except in extraordinary cases.



Story continues below:



Filibusters first arose after the Civil War as a means of defeating legislation intended to foster desegregation. They were an anathema to those of us who joined Martin Luther King's famous March on Washington in 1963.

Fifteen years later during the Clinton administration filibusters were presumably also abhorrent to Senator Kennedy, who then wanted to outlaw them entirely. On Jan. 28, 1998, he argued: " The president and the Senate do not always agree [on judicial nominations]. But we should resolve these disagreements by voting "yes" or "no." Three years later Kennedy put politics above principle and became a champion of the filibuster. He also threatened to boycott any work of the Senate that was not essential for national security if a Republican majority was trying to outlaw filibusters by amending the Senate rules.


Subsequently, in a badgering cross-examination of Judge Alito, Kennedy tried to portray him as an undercover enemy of equal rights for women and minorities.


For me, Kennedy's effort to impugn Judge Alito's integrity was reminiscent of Republican Senator Joe McCarthy, who tarred his victims with the brush of guilt by association. Kennedy's charge against Alito was based on the fact that 34 years ago, while a reserve officer in the Army, he joined a Princeton alumni group that opposed the banning of ROTC programs from the university's campus. Some members of the group (other than Alito) wanted Princeton to continue its traditional policy of denying admission to women.


They also opposed affirmative action programs based on quotas. (Quota-bases programs were subsequently prohibited by the U.S. Supreme Court.)



On Jan. 17, NewsMax reported a story that most of the liberal media ignored: Kennedy had admitted his own membership in the Owl Club, which does not allow women, and was banned from the Harvard campus. He had paid dues to the all-male club ever since his student days.


Faced with evidence of his hypocrisy, Kennedy said, "I am going to get out of it as fast as I can."


Aside from the Senator's association with an all-male club there is other more substantial evidence of flaws in Kennedy's character: Kennedy had been expelled from Harvard for paying a friend to take a Spanish exam for him.


He also has a history of mistreating women. In July 1969, with Mary Jo Kopechne (his date for the night at a drinking party) beside him in his car, Kennedy drove off the side of a bridge on Cape Cod at Chappaquiddick on Cape Cod.



When the car began to submerge in water the Senator escaped. Mary Jo remained in the car and drowned.


At that time Joan Kennedy, the Senator's wife, was pregnant. Traumatized by the scandal and by her husband's philandering, she had a miscarriage. She then started to drink her way into alcoholism. Eventually she went into psychiatric treatment and divorced Kennedy.


To counter the bad reputation he acquired among women because of the Chappaquiddick scandal and his mistreatment of his wife, the Senator pandered to pro-choice feminists – causing his pro-life detractor to quip, "Libertine men always favor abortion."


At the Senate's confirmation hearings Kennedy metaphorically picked up the pro-abortion gauntlet and hoped to deliver Judge Alito's head on a political platter to Washington's most radical feminist groups and other major contributors of campaign money to the Democratic Party.


Finally, anyone interested in the flaws in Kennedy's character should read "The Senator: My Ten Years With Ted Kennedy," by Richard Burke. The author describes how he tried to save the Senator from his personal excesses.


He also provides a behind-the-scenes account of Kennedy's 1980 unsuccessful primary race against then President Jimmy Carter; which hopelessly polarized the Democratic Party - and helped Ronald Reagan move into the White House.


During my own career on Capitol Hill I once told House Speaker "Tip" O'Neill in confidence: "I have a low opinion of Senator Kennedy." He replied discreetly: "The Kennedys are not real Democrats. They have their own party." [Editor's Note: Get the bestselling book about Ted Kennedy's hypocrisy -- Click Here.]



Jerry Zeifman is former chief counsel of the House Judiciary Committee and a lifelong Democrat. He is also author of "Without Honor: Crimes of Camelot and the Impeachment of President Nixon." He is currently hoping to publish "The Dissident Democrat: a Political Memoir." (Send comments to [email protected].)

[Yonivore]

Who saw his incoherent rant on C-Span yesterday? Jeeze!

[Peter]

They call this representative government?