The Old Bull

Spent the morning in Serramonte getting the car "serviced," which meant some serious downtime in the waiting room listening to Ted Kennedy's funeral mass. Ugh. Paris may have been worth a Mass, but not this guy. Still, it's hard to come to grips with the realization that we won't have Ted Kennedy to kick around anymore. It's hard to think of who will take his place in conservatives hearts as the progressive we love to hate. He was in the Senate for 47 years, and virtually every day of those 47 years he was somewhere making a speech, giving an interview, shaking hands, and generally kicking ass for progressive causes. You don't have to admire the guy to take note of his influence and his ubiquity. Of course, you could also say he embraced progressive causes because they offered him safety. As long as he advocated for The Cause, no one would call him out for his many personal failings.

At the end of NBC's "coverage" of the Mass, they played a montage of sound-bites from some of his speeches over some maudlin music. A true retrospective would have included his notoriously partisan jeremiads like "Robert Bork's America," "Where Was George?" and "Abu-Ghraib Is Under New Management." But, no, NBC was only interested in inspirational stuff. Things reached a peak with his "Dream Shall Never Die" speech, which must be the Left's equivalent of Reagan's "shining city on a hill." Hearing it again you can't help being moved just a little, especially knowing that it was given after a losing campaign for a presidency once seen as Ted's to lose.

Of course, that speech is given anew every year, in a sense. The Left's verities - that there is an enduring cause, that there is work that never ends - are unchanging and indeed are the root of their appeal. In fact, Kennedy gave just such a speech at last year's Democratic Convention. To understand Ted Kennedy is to understand American liberalism as practiced in the second half of the 20th century. Many eras have come to an end this year, but Ted Kennedy's death marks the end of an epoch.