Ted Kennedy is Relevant

Until some adults (excepting Zel Miller, of course) stand up to the disgraceful venom Ted Kennedy and others are spewing Ted Kennedy’s vitriol will remain as a reminder of how depraved the Democratic Party is. If someone were issuing such non-stop slanders in the Republican Party I hope conservatives and Republicans would denounce him. Democrats just do not discipline their own, whether it’s Ted Kennedy or Barbara Boxer. They can’t. They’d lose faith with their base. Which tells you that their problem is intrinsic.

Why do I bring this up now? Well, Ted Kennedy unleashed another tirade against President Bush yesterday.

He is obviously unchastened by the glorious Iraqi elections. His words, delivered in his Harvard speech just days before the elections, have already been discredited by the overwhelming turnout of Iraqi voters at risk of death.

According to this news report, Kennedy said that the elections could increase the violence in Iraq. He’s really keeping his eye on the ball, isn’t he? From the story:

“Sunday’s election is not a cure for the violence and instability,” said Kennedy, D-Mass., in remarks prepared for delivery at the University of Massachusetts-Boston. “Unless the Sunni and all the other communities in Iraq believe they have a stake in the outcome and a genuine role in drafting the new Iraqi constitution, the election could lead to greater alienation, greater escalation, and greater death for us and for the Iraqis.”

Sounds to me like Kennedy is trying to deliver a primer in divisive politics, exporting his brand of partisanship into the burgeoning Iraqi democracy. Here he is lobbying on behalf of people he argues are going to feel disenfranchised. Well, why doesn’t this blowhard mind his own business? Let the people of Iraq express their own grievances. Democracy doesn’t guaranty equal representation for minorities. But what a convenient jumping off point for the Senator.

Here’s more from the story:

And [Kennedy] complained that although Bush mentioned terror 27 times in his State of the Union address, he never mentioned the man who launched the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

“What world is he living in?” Kennedy said. “He started a war we never should have fought. He stopped fighting a war we hadn’t won, and left our greatest enemy in the world still at large, planning his next 9/11.”

This all sounds cute, Teddy, but the real world awaits your entry. As we’ve mentioned countless times, the claim that our troops were taken off the task of pursuing Osama bin Laden to be transferred to Iraq, is just factually dead-wrong. We have never abandoned hot pursuit of bin Laden. But hot pursuit doesn’t guaranty capture. We’re all over Iraq now, are we not? And we still haven’t been able to snare Zarqawi. But we did win the war in Afghanistan, by the way. Maybe someone should get Ted a computer and Internet connection so he can update his material. The Democrats myopic obsession with Osama bin Laden, to the exclusion of everything else in the War on Terror, is one of the best items of evidence proving their unfitness for command in this war.

Are Democrats embarrassed by this reckless man? Are they going to take him to the woodshed? Or does he still have a lifetime pass immunizing him from the basic rules of civility that govern human behavior? Until they do, he’ll remain relevant as a symbol of what his party has become.