I’m getting tired of hearing all these Senators from both parties talking about what a great guy, what a charmer Ted Kennedy was. I don’t think I’d be able to be that friendly with someone who, regardless of his politics, essentially murdered a young woman with whom he had probably been philandering, got away with it, and joked about it. You know, there was another Ted who everyone thought was charming, too. His last name was Bundy.

[Late Sunday afternoon update]

Mark Steyn has some related thoughts:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

Read all.

[Bumped]

At the WaPo.

I’m going to be blunt. People who attempt to claim that “torture” doesn’t work simply make themselves look like illogical fools. There may be arguments against it, but that’s an idiotic one. And the people who make it never explain what will work in its place against people like this.

[Sunday morning update]

Stephen Hayes has more.

A good point:

Underestimation explains the success of many politicians. Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush come to mind. Overestimation is the mother of failure, and it may help explain President Obama’s sagging popularity right now.

Yes, though the sagging popularity will also lower future expectations.

…and the CIA:

1. Given that you were aware of the conduct for which CIA interrogators are now being investigated and possibly prosecuted, and you at least tacitly approved of such conduct, will you ask President Obama to pardon the interrogators?

2. Since you were aware of what the CIA interrogators were doing yet remained silent, are you at all complicit in their conduct?

Speaker Pelosi, assuming that you reject the IG’s report (and Leon Panetta’s assertion that the CIA told congress the truth in 2002) please respond to the following:

1. When you discovered that you were lied to in September 2002, did you confront Director Tenet? If not, why not?

2. Were the CIA personnel who lied to you in September 2002 fired and prosecuted? If not, why not?

3. When you discovered that you were lied to in September 2002 did you insist upon Congressional hearings? If not, why not?

There are more. But don’t expect the press to ask them. They’re only a watchdog when it’s a Republican in office. With Dems, they’re lapdogs.

Just in case you were wondering why they have trouble getting audiences, or at least large educated, intelligent ones.

How nuts do you have to be to think that Oswald and Sirhan were “right wingers”?

…or is it just a lover’s spat?

…a large element of the Obama-press rift is attributable to disappointment and frustration. The media is not simply covering Obama’s sinking ship of state, they are panicking about it.

But there are other factors at work. For starters, Obama isn’t very nice to the media. It may sound petty, but his obvious and frequent contempt for what they do must be irksome to reporters who fancy themselves to be indispensable elements in the Obama revolution. He spits his disdain for the “24-hour news cycle.” The press is told to buzz off — there is no news to be had on his Martha’s Vineyard vacation (before the eye-popping decision to name a special prosecutor to go after CIA operatives). And for all the promises to be “transparent,” this White House, and Robert Gibbs specifically, seems to be one of the least forthcoming in recent memory.

In short, the Obama team has shown the media little respect — and the press corps has begun to bristle at the high-handed treatment.

I’ll take it seriously when I start seeing some serious questions from the WH press corps (you know, on things like this, or this (who needs Chavez when we have the US State Department?)), and actually doing analysis of the legislation and reporting on the issues, instead of the horse race. Like the Obama White House itself, they too remain in campaign mode.