HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

A featureless and ugly museum has opened in Boston, next door to John Kennedy’s featureless and ugly presidential library.  It is the brain-child of the late President Kennedy’s late baby brother, Senator-for-life Edward Moore Kennedy, known to Americans with varying degrees of affection as Teddy Kennedy.  The museum, The Edward M. Kennedy Institute, is supposed to be about the U.S. Senate but is really a center for Leftist hagiography of Teddy, just as the library next door is a center for Leftist hagiography of Jack.

Despite the rose-tinted cult that keeps the memories of John and Robert Kennedy alive, Ted Kennedy is by far the most important of the Kennedys given his longevity in the Senate — 47 years — and the plethora of nation-wrecking legislation he helped force down America’s collective throat.  The 1965 immigration “reform” that has become the catalyst for the nation’s destruction is a prime example, forced through as it was by Emanuel Celler, Philip Hart and Jacob Javits with young Teddy as primary pitchman disingenuously conjuring his recently assassinated brother’s shade as moral blackmail to support that reckless and unnecessary leap in the dark.

But there are good reasons why Ted Kennedy was never president, and reasons why even the Democratic Party would never nominate him as its candidate.  To put it politely, the man was a social outrage.  Americans of a certain age are probably familiar with several of Teddy’s shenanigans, but one word will do: Chappaquiddick.

Nevertheless, Teddy now has his monument in Boston, probably at taxpayer expense.  That is a sign of national decay in itself.

But a stronger indicator of America’s national decay is that the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., saw fit to appear to honor this deceased charlatan, and chose to utter these priceless words about the Chappaquiddick Submariner, a man legendary for lowering the tone of American public life, upholding this national disgrace as an example for today’s politicians to emulate:

President Barack Obama summoned today’s quarrelsome political leaders on Monday to emulate the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in the pursuit of compromise, and said a new institute that bears the longtime Massachusetts senator’s name can be as much an antidote to political cynicism as the man once was.

“What if we carried ourselves more like Ted Kennedy? What if we were to follow his example a little bit harder?” the president asked a crowd of family, former aides and political dignitaries of both parties under a tent in raw weather just outside the doors of the Edward M. Kennedy Institute.

“To his harshest critics who saw him as nothing more than a partisan lightning rod, that might sound foolish,” the president added. “But there are Republicans here for a reason.”

And, indeed, to their shame there were Republicans there, if no conservatives.  Those Republicans were eager to honor their buddy — and doesn’t it say all we need to know about the Republican Party that these men were the viciously partisan Democrat Kennedy’s buddies?:

Among them were former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, who is on the institute’s board of directors, and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who said he recalled how much he enjoyed fighting with the Massachusetts colleague in the Senate.

“It’s getting harder to find someone who loves a good fight as much as he did,” said McCain, who has spoken less highly of tea party-aligned members of his own party with whom he has had differences. “The place hasn’t been the same without him.”

I would be inclined to say thank God for that, but Kennedy’s departure has led to no change for the better in the U.S. Senate on either side of the aisle.  McCain, for example, is still cluttering up the place, as big a jackass as ever, even after his laughable pratfall of a failed presidential campaign.  And when were McCain’s legislative “fights” with Kennedy anything but bipartisan shadowboxing to gull the rubes?

The AP story highlighted yet another example of Edward Kennedy’s baleful influence on America, no doubt unintentionally:

Vice President Joe Biden said Kennedy “treated me like a little brother” when Biden first arrived in 1973, helping him land choice committee assignments not generally available to freshmen senators. He said Kennedy introduced him around the Senate and was a master at generating trust and mutual respect.

“All politics is personal,” Biden said. “No one in my life understood that better than Ted Kennedy.”

Senator Kennedy’s widow spoke of how:

“[Kennedy] believed in the majesty of the place and its ability to inspire,” she said. She said he wanted visitors to feel “politics is a noble profession, even if it’s messy, even if it’s hard.”

I can think of few U.S. senators who did more to sully the “majesty of the place” than Ted Kennedy and few more compelling examples of how politics is anything but a noble profession.  Well, though he appears better-behaved in his off time, there is Charles Schumer…

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