Archive for August, 2009
Chicago Vocabulary Lesson of the Day: What's an "Obama-hater"?
You might find this interesting. We just ran into our friend Emily, someone who we met after the election and who we’ve never talked politics with. She was a bartender at an event one of us produced a few months ago, and we assumed she was a liberal O-bot (because of how she dresses, the neighborhood she lives in, and everything else that typically screams LIBERAL in this town).
Well, we were talking today and she told us that she was bartending at a restaurant she works at and she carded two young black guys who came in, and who started trouble from the moment they walked through the door. Emily could tell they were underaged, so she pressed for the ID and one of them said, “Oh, you dumb white bitch, you’re just hasseling us ’cause you’re an Obama-hater.”
Emily told them that, no, she was hasseling them because they were jerks, appeared underaged, and that it was City, State, and Federal law to hassel minors in bars.
They left in a huff and puff, with more shouts of “white bitch” and something about it being “the Black House now, bitch”.
We’d never heard the term “Obama-hater” before, but apparently it’s working its way through the slang process here in Chicago. It’s race-baiting, essentially, where a year or two ago the teens would have said, “You just won’t serve us because we’re black”, but now they invoke Dr. Utopia’s name as shorthand.
We could analyze this for paragraphs, but won’t, though it is interesting on a lot of levels: is it an attempt to legitimize their race-baiting, Henry Gates style, by using the POTUS’ name…is it an attempt to try to bully someone, because they act like they have the might of the White (or Black) House behind them…just how much damage will this nonsense do to Dr. Utopia, in the long run, as more and more people hear the “Obama-hater” bit and start to get sick of all the race-baiting done by Dr. Utopia’s most ardent supporters and friends in this the post-racial Golden Age of Hope, Change, and Rainbow Singing Unicorns?
Emily has a Master’s degree in public policy and, until about 8 months ago, used to have a high-paying job at a consulting firm. She hasn’t been able to find work despite looking, applying, and interviewing every day. Back to bartending (for the first time since grad school), just to be able to pay her rent and keep a roof over her head, Emily told us “I’m still waiting for all the things Obama promised us. I didn’t vote, because I didn’t like Obama and I would never vote Republican, but I wanted Hillary Clinton to be president because she keeps her word and doesn’t promise things she can’t deliver. But, if you ask where all the promises are, where is all the hope and why things haven’t gotten better, you get called a racist for trying to hold this man to everything he lied about on the campaign trail”.
When we don’t seek out stories like this…when people just out of the blue say this stuff to us…we realize the White House is in bigger trouble than any of us can probably imagine. ESPECIALLY if young black thugs and their emulators take this “Obama-hater” crap nationwide, and Middle America catches wind of it.
The Henry Gates/stupid police business got people to wakeup, and to remember the antics of another close friend of the Utopias, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Dr. Utopia needs to be careful there aren’t any more of these episodes…because a backlash could certainly come.
Emily said, “You know, people like that make me think I might actually vote Republican next time if it’s not someone too terrible just to teach those punks a lesson and kick Obama out of the White House”.
Hope for that change!
If you aren't paying attention to what Sarah Palin is up to on Facebook, then you're a damn fool
Here she goes again! Another ninja star expertly flung at the loony left via Facebook. H/t to Conservatives4Palin, one of our favorite sites, for keeping us always updated on Sarah Palin’s latest Facebook messages.
This time, Palin’s asking all of her Facebook friends, all 900,000 and counting, to watch Glenn Beck and help counter the loony left’s assault on him.
We’ve never watched Beck, and got rid of our cable and TVs in early summer, but we’re going to make it a point to read Beck’s webpage and watch his show at friends’ houses whenever possible — because Sarah Palin asked us to, and because Beck’s under assault for speaking the TRUTH. He is the latest victim of Alinsky methods employed by the left to take down any critics of the current administration.
Supporting Beck, regardless of it you personally like him or not, is important because in doing so you are also supporting everyone who will follow him…people who might otherwise be too afraid of the left’s Alinsky attacks to speak the truth, absent a strong public showing of support for Beck’s efforts to strike back at the left and MSM propaganda machine.
Sarah Palin is quietly, deliberately, and strategically mobilizing her supporters…in a way that only the leader of a real political movement can do. If she keeps this up, and her influence continues to grow while the left continues to degrade and malign her, the MSM is in for a huge surprise at some point — because the woman who is ridiculed and looked down upon from so many ivory towers will be the force that shakes said towers to their liberal foundations.
Can regular people really afford to shop at Whole Foods?
Here’s something we want your help with, if there’s a Whole Foods near you.
Ever since liberals started attacking Whole Foods, our opinion of the store has flipped 180 degrees. Previously, we thought of it as a wonderful, but Dr. Utopia-styled place, filled with great products that were beyond our reach…as eating organic never seemed to fit within our budgets. “Whole Foods” was code for all that beyond-our-reach, limousine-liberal, arugula-flavored nonsense the people with real lives, real problems, and inconsistent paychecks can’t afford to make daily parts of their lives.
But, once the Daily Kos crowd set their sites on Whole Foods, we started looking into the chain, its CEO, and how it does business.
Great Merciful Zeus, if there’s a more responsible and better company in America, we’d love to hear about it.
Whole Foods is a store that DESERVES every dollar we can afford to spend there.
So, we’re wondering if a regular, normal family really can afford to do its grocery shopping at Whole Foods. We’d love to give our money to a place that’s not beholden to the unions, to a place that supports its community and treats its workers well, a place that encourages small businesses by buying from small purveyors instead of the mega-foods-factory-system.
But, can we swing it? Most of us here are single, so it’s alien for us to think of buying for a family of 4. We need help figuring out what a family like that spends on groceries on a week. The next step would be to go to Whole Foods and price out what we could get there for that amount, and what sacrifices we’d have to make since (1) Whole Foods doesn’t carry a lot of products we’re used to (like Coke, junk food, etc) (2) Whole Foods is more expensive than the Jewel or Dominick’s here in Chicago.
Our thought is that by cutting out all the junk food we normally buy, and by buying less meat and more vegetables and fruits, we can probably eat better for about the same money if we really put the effort into getting to know how Whole Foods works and what we need to buy there.
We are all about eating better, breaking bad habits, and making our money go farther.
If we can pull this off, and if we can really make the money aspect work, we’d love to shop exclusively at Whole Foods from now on just to stick it to the liberal loons.
If we can do this, maybe the rest of you can too.
But, we need to start by figuring out what to look for when we go to Whole Foods with our calcultors and notepads. Can you fill us in on what you typically spend for X-number of people at your house for food in a week? What do you normally buy? What would be the MAXIMUM you could afford to spend on groceries in a month? Do you shop at Whole Foods curently? If so, can you fill us in on your grocery lists?
It would be fun and interesting if this Whole Foods boycott really blew up in the Left’s face and suddenly a whole new market for arugula opened up in people who never, ever would have shopped there until the liberals said not to.
UPDATE: This project has certainly gotten a great response from all of you out there. Here’s how we think we’re going to proceed. We’re going to make a typical shopping list for one of us, for one week, and try to keep that to about $30. We are going to test three stores here in Chicago very close to one another to see what we can get for $30 there, and if we can get anything on the list. The food will need to last for 7 days. The caveat is that none of us here eat three meals a day at home, the way most families do. We said before a lot of us get meals at work, either at meetings or at events we’re invited to or for functions we event-managed. So, our shopping list will be lighter than most people’s most likely. We also very, very rarely eat any red meat. If we make meat at home, it’s either pre-prepared or it’s something really simple like chicken. We eat a lot of vegetables, but mainly eat stuff we know is bad for us, with lots of preservatives, like frozen pizzas and Stouffer’s Lean Cuisines. This is what we talk about when we say “junk food”. We don’t typically ever buy chips and snacks unless we have people coming over to watch TV or something. Normally, if we want something sweet, we bake cupcakes or brownies (and we decorate them as Hillary cupcakes, still, with her smiling face on them because she always makes us happy).
Tonight we are going to think about a good shopping list using the tips people are contributing. We will post that, and see if anyone has any suggestions on how we can make it better (FYI, none of us eat any kind of seafood, and we only like eggs when they are hidden in something like cake. Aside from that, we’re not picky eaters…and tend towards classic American comfort foods, barbeque, and Asian stir fry dishes).
Then, we will take that list to Whole Foods, to the Jewel, and to Treasure Island (three stores within blocks of one another, right here in Boystown). We figure it’s fair to compare these three stores, because they are so close to each other and serve the same community. Things will, of course, be cheaper in the suburbs, but we don’t have a car to go out there. Everything for us needs to be walking distance from Buzzquarters.
We will totally geek-out with this…and will write down the price for each item, and the total. Maybe you could do this experiment where you are located too, if you have a Whole Foods and two other stores to compare prices with. Maybe you could shop the same list we’re using and write down the prices by you and we can get a bigger data pool going on this, so the stats we come up with can be looked at with geographic comparisons as well. Friday or Saturday feel like they will be good days for us to hit stores.
The only thing about this experiment that we don’t like is that we do want Whole Foods to win — and we have to note our bias. We really, really want to start shopping there for food, because we want to support a good company like Whole Foods. BUT, we will try our best to be as fair and objective as possible with the experiment.
If some of you out there do this too, it can help us keep our data bias-free, since you will help us prove our trends without our vested interests.
This is exciting…looking forward to getting that list done and going price-comparing!
UPDATE #2: Here’s the shopping list we’re going to use, give or take. We’re going to hit Whole Foods first, and see how much we can get of this, and then will hit the Jewel and Treasure Island. It’s loose, because we have never used a shopping list before and usually just buy things at whim in the store…so this experiment is good not just for determining if regular people can indeed shop at Whole Foods, but good also for teaching us a new skill, which is shopping to a list made under a budget.
Shopping List for a Week:
Cottage cheese
Bread
Cereal
Oatmeal
Vegetables (any kind, but prefer broccoli, carrots, cucumbers, or green beans)
Fruit (pears, apples, peaches, tomatoes, or plums)
Chicken
Yogurt
TREATS IF MONEY IS LEFTOVER: sorbet, frozen pizza, soda pop
We don’t have any paper products or cleaning supplies up there as we buy those once or twice a year in bulk using a friend’s Costco card, on a rare trip to the suburbs for us. The shopping list is just what we’d eat in a week. We have all the spices and sauces and things at home already, so we don’t need to buy those for many, many months. When we cook, we usually just grill a chicken breast in the oven or in a pan with some herbs and spice and then serve that on a plate with a little salad of different chopped vegetables, or a compote of fresh fruits. We usually drink water with meals, or if there’s wine or beer in the house, we have that (one of the perks of event-planning is that clients often give us some of the extra alcohol to take home, which means we haven’t bought wine or beer in as long as we can remember).
Breakfast is usually a bowl of instant oatmeal or some cottage cheese with fruit. We buy the plain cottage cheese and then add our own fruit, instead of the kind that already has fruit in it. We like adding dried bananas or other fruits to the cottage cheese, mixing it up, and then letting it sit a little while…and the fruit seems to rehydrate. We do that whenever we find a good deal on the dried stuff…since it’s sometimes hard to eat a bunch of bananas before they go bad.
The snack we love most is pizza. There are some days, when work is tough, that we just dream about coming home and putting a frozen pie in the oven and then devouring it, Oprah-style, right there in the kitchen, not even bothering to sit down or get out plates. So, the most expensive thing we buy are frozen pizzas…and that’s the first thing we cut in our budget…but it remains our favorite treat. If we want something sweet when working on the computer or reading, we like sorbet…and know Whole Foods has some interesting flavors, like hibiscus and pomegranate and tangerine. Coca-Cola’s probably our biggest vice…love that battery acid, rots your teeth taste. Whole Foods does not sell Coke, and we don’t care for Whole Foods’ sodas…so this might be a way for us to cut back on the sodas at home. At work, there’s always Cokes sitting out for meetings, so we will get our fix there. At home, we can stick to water, sometimes mixed with a little fruit juice for extra taste.
Something is definitely going on behind the scenes: no public appointments for Hillary Clinton today either
Something weird is happening — it’s been a long time since Hillary Clinton had any official public appointments scheduled. We check every day on the State Department’s website and it usually lists who she’s having meetings with, where she’s traveling, and what days it’s her turn to breakfast with Joe Biden (where only she can keep him from eating all the Boo Berry, the rarest of all General Mills’ monster cereals).
Either this week she’s been prepping for Ted Kennedy’s passing, which people knew was coming very soon the last few days, or she’s preparing, as rumors state, for Chelsea’s wedding this weekend. There’s probably a third thing that none of us can think of.
Supposedly, President Clinton has an event in Toronto this weekend, which would rule out a Chelsea wedding at Ted Danson’s house.
But, it really does feel like something big is going on that’s keeping Hillary Clinton from her usual schedule.
Any thoughts out there?
UPDATE: Weirder still, the State Department didn’t even bother to put up a blank NO PUBLIC APPOINTMENTS notice like it usually does. Doing some research, the only news Clinton’s making today is in relation to efforts to mediate the dispute on where Quadaffi will stay when he visits New York (he wants to sleep in a tent in Central Park, or in a tent at an estate Libya owns in New Jersey, but no one wants him to sleep in a tent anywhere near them…maybe Oprah, close personal friend to the POTUS, could lend him one of her dresses and he can sleep in that…with the whole Libyan delegation…and, being Oprah’s, it would probably be so full of hot air Quadaffi would be toasty warm on even the most chilly late August night…would probably smell like farts, though, once again, being Oprah’s).
UPDATE #2: Some people have said Hillary Clinton was in Chappaqua, New York yesterday…at home with President Clinton. This could be wedding-prep for Chelsea, or it could be just vacation/family time. But, what’s strange about that is vacations for high profile people are typically announced in the media…and there was no announcement of Hillary Clinton going on vacation this week. So, we wonder what’s up.
How do you remember people when they die?
This summer has seen a great many high-profile deaths, with the usual morbid fanfare in the MSM. Farrah Fawcett. Michael Jackson. Robert Novak. And now, Ted Kennedy. It seems odd lumping an “angel”, albeit of the Charlie’s variety, in with that lot of toads, but poor Farrah didn’t catch many breaks towards the end.
When you are a celebrated person of any sort, and you die in this country, you are guaranteed nonstop press coverage and glossy-paged commemorative editions of People magazine to trumpet your fame and convince people of how much everyone loved you…thoroughly ignoring all of your mistakes, or your downright evil nature if need be. Did you have inappropriate relationships with young, minor boys? No worries, since you were the self-proclaimed “King of Pop”, and your music really was genius, no matter what you did with children. Hit someone with your car and then speed happily away? No worries, since you were a Washington columnist the MSM liked, no matter how many CIA agents you outed or other terrible things you did. Drown a woman in your Oldsmobile and then go on to grow fat off the public trust for the next 40 years? You’re a Kennedy, champ, and Kennedys can do as they please, self-styled royal family that they are.
But, none of the pomp and circumstance devoted to these celebrity deaths is real. All those commemorative editions are destined for the landfill. Sure, these people have obelisks raised in their honor, or pyramids and fake Greek temples assembled in their names somewhere in Washington, as the case may be, but ultimately school children dragged there on class trips will ask, “Who the heck was that?” while staring up at your bulbous face, cast in bronze, good for little else than a convenient perch for pigeons and other birds to befoul.
We do something different, something more personal for the people we know who die. The people we really loved. The people who meant something to us. Sometimes these are famous people, if that person touched us in some way…but 99% of the time these are people you would have never heard of.
This summer, our good friend Lionel Baxter (as played by Joseph Gordon Levitt in the clip above, which captures pretty accurately Lionel’s impact on those around him) lost his battle with prostate cancer. It’s still hard for us to talk about, as he was a dear friend, and so full of life it’s impossible, still, to accept he’s gone. He was like the Maglite flashlight he always had on his key ring — a beam so bright we never could believe it came from such a small package — that little thing was so intense it could light up a whole, dark room…could practically light up the whole street at night…and that’s who Lionel was and what Lionel did…he walked into a room and got everyone beaming…cut through the dark, or the gloom, and shined so bright. And talk about a movie star smile…those pearly whites of his would blind you, always laughing and joking and smiling about something.
There won’t ever be another Lionel Baxter, we’re sure of that.
But, we’ve been trying to make a point to see that some of Lionel carries on, now that he’s gone.
None of us here are as gregarious as Lionel, and none of us have his talent for walking into a group of strangers and leaving with a dozen new friends. We’re very sedate compared to Lionel…reserved…more at home writing essays on the internet than leading a parade through town, singing and dancing, and raising the roof. THAT was Lionel.
But, we’ve found ourselves trying our best to fill some of Lionel’s niche these days. When we come to an event, and the mood is low and people aren’t mingling and having fun, we pull a little Lionel out and work the room the way he did. We’re nowhere near as good at this as he was, but we’re trying. He left big shoes to fill.
Lionel also did a lot of volunteer work, especially with people who have AIDS. One of the things he did was to go to their homes and clean for them, since these people, mainly gay men, aren’t able to do that for themselves anymore. These are people who are a few months away from needing full-time hospice care and can’t do things like dust or mop the floors or take care of their apartments. So, Lionel volunteered three days or so a week, getting down on his hands and knees to scrub floors, to clean out dirty refridgerators, to polish and clean and make people who are very sick feel like they were living in a Ritz-Carlton, being taken care of. It was hard, hard, hard work, but Lionel did it right up until he was too sick himself with cancer that he couldn’t even take care of himself anymore, let alone others.
So, we’re taking over some of Lionel’s old volunteer work. We will not try to pretend it’s fun. Some of the volunteer projects we do are glamorous and interesting and exciting, raising money at parties or working a charity car wash or whatever. Cleaning a sick person’s bathroom is as far removed from glamour as Cleveland is from Beverly Hills, 90210.
But, it needs to be done. Lionel’s not here to do it. Someone needs to step up and fill that niche.
All of us in this life do good and do bad. Lionel was not a saint. He would have been the first to tell you that. But, he didn’t have as much bad in him as most people, and had more good in him than anyone else we know. He was Catholic, so we believe Lionel’s up there in the Heaven he always thought about, singing and dancing and having the absolute time of his after life. His soul is certainly in good hands, entrusted to a loving God he believed in, who we imagine is thrilled to have His wonderful child home safe and sound and healed.
Meanwhile, down here in Boystown we’re trying to keep Lionel’s spirit alive, one toilet brush and magic eraser at a time. No man who is loved is ever a failure, no matter how little money he has in the world. No one is ever forgotten who lives on in the hearts of those who cared for him. No one is ever gone who inspires others to soldier on, taking their positions on the side of right.
We realize, now that he’s gone, what a quiet and marvelous leader Lionel was. In death, he didn’t receive big newspaper tributes or obelisks raised in his honor, Kennedy-style, but Lionel has inspired a large group of us to kick things up to the next level in our lives in terms of what we do to take care of others. With our Big Bro Lionel gone, we need to grow up a little more and be that kind of leader, collectively, for the younger guys who will follow us. And someday, if we do our jobs right, many years from now those guys we haven’t met yet will be inspired to take our places, too.
Lionel always said he was inspired by his grandmother, who gave so much of herself, and she was inspired by her Auntie, who was the heart and soul of her small Arkansas hometown. Lionel didn’t have any kids to pass this on to, but he had more friends than we can count, and to some degree or another, we all find ourselves following in Lionel’s goodness today.
And this isn’t something that’s going to just go away and be forgotten…this is for keeps. Unlike all the fanfare for celebrities that people will forget about in a few months, we aren’t about to forget Lionel, or forget what he meant to us and to so many, or forget about the very real, daily impact he had on people’s lives just by volunteering to spend his free time cleaning for them.
So, this is how we remember good people when they die: we say goodbye to their souls, but we cling tenaciously to their spirits, keeping as much of their goodness alive in us as we possibly can. We lost a personal hero in Lionel to a vile and nasty disease…but that cancer is gone and buried, but the good Lionel did can live on forever in us, should we always choose to make that so.
Death doesn’t ever have to be the end, not when someone is truly worth remembering.
MARY JO KOPECHNE'S MURDERER IS DEAD — Ted Kennedy's wealth and power fail him at 77. AT LAST he'll answer to the God he sometimes claimed to believe in.
You’re going to hear nonstop tribute to the glories of the Kennedy Family for the next several weeks. If you thought the fuss made over Michael Jackson was outrageous, ill-deserved, and myopic in its deliberate ignoring of the seedier side of Jackson’s life, then you are in for a real treat with the MSM’s treatment of Ted Kennedy. They will lionize him as, literally, “The Great Lion of the Senate”. They will remind us how much the Kennedy Family believes it is America’s royal family. We can already hear the chisels and hammers being sharpened to build a pyramid or collonade somewhere in Ted Kennedy’s honor.
And, in our opinion, everywhere anything named after Ted Kennedy is built, three feet away there should be a Mary Jo Kopechne Memorial Garden.
When they put Ted Kennedy in the Capitol Rotunda to be honored as some sort of modern demigod, passing through that marble vestibule like it’s the airport to Olympus, we’d love to see hundreds of people file past that flag-draped coffin wearing Mary Jo Kopechne’s photo on their tee shirts, stamped with NEVER FORGET MARY JO” on them.
The route of procession to Arlington, where we assume Ted Kennedy will be buried with his brothers and America’s Queen, Jackie, should be filled with Mary Jo Kopeche’s smiling face on posters as large as people can hold them.
NEVER FORGET MARY JO.
A wealthy murderer is no more today. A man who snuffed out a young life, but because of who he was, who his brothers were, and who his family is he never had to face consequences for that. The voters of Massachusetts kept re-electing this man, never removing him from the power he coveted so much to punish him in that way, either. Ted Kennedy avoided owning up to what happened that night and never gave the Kopechne family the peace of mind they deserved by being a man and taking responsibility for what he had done…for serving his time in prison for Mary Jo’s death, and then becoming a productive and better citizen after his release. If Ted Kennedy had done THAT, we would be eulogizing him today like nobody’s business.
But, he didn’t.
Instead, Ted Kennedy chose to remain the wealthy, corpulent spider, pulling on the silky strings of power, always moving legistlation and tax dollars to whatever would help his family most, with everyone else in Massachusetts and the rest of the nation mere after thoughts. Even when he was too incapacitated several months ago and was clearly unable to do his job, he refused to let go, refused to do what was right, refused to step down so Massachusetts could have an actual Senator working for them.
Ted Kennedy was a selfish man. He was an indecent and sick man. He was a lying, murdering, consciousless man.
He was a spider.
And he is dead today.
To borrow from Bette Davis via Madlibs, we’ll let you fill in this last bit however you like: “You should never say bad things about the dead, you should only say good. Ted Kennedy is dead. (FILL IN THIS BLANK)”.
Wednesday Open Thread, August 26th 2009
What’s on your mind this Wednesday?
Here’s a good take on Ted Kennedy’s death, via The Anchoress, who is kinder to him than we ever could (or in our opinion, should) be. Nowhere in this piece does she call Kennedy a spider, which is amazing to us, because we have a better chance of winning an Olympic swimming medal than of ever writing an arachnid-free remembrance of Edward Moore Kennedy.
More details of Ted Kennedy’s funeral emerging, via Weekly World News, “America’s only reliable news source”.
Here’s another good take, from a wonderful writer named Rosita, whose work we always enjoy. She does a good job of imagining Mary Jo Kopechne at last having a chance to confront Kennedy.
BREAKING NEWS: AFTER TODAY'S OBAMA SPEECH MUSLIM HOSPITALS IN U.S. ANNOUNCE PLAN TO CARE FOR ALL UNINSURED AMERICANS
After being inspired by our President’s beautiful tribute to Ramadan today, in which Americans are again reminded of all of the great contributions of Muslims, in particular their community service in the US…..
…ALL Muslim hospitals, in the US, have agreed to provide care to ALL of Americas indigent….
…Health care problem solved….
I can’t wait for Obama’s sukkot tribute…..I’m sure the Jewish people will be inspired to provide sukkah tents for all of America’s homeless….
UPDATE: There are no muslim hospitals…..back to the townhall meetings.
Tuesday Open Thread, August 25th 2009
What’s on your mind this Tuesday?
More calls for Ted Kennedy to resign
The calls for Ted Kennedy to resign are growing.
He has spent little time actually working the last 15 months, missing most of the 270 roll call votes because he’s been too sick with brain cancer to serve his constituents. Kennedy has repeatedly said the Massachusetts deserves two votes in the Senate, with two Senators working hard for them. Kennedy, through no fault of his own in this case, is not able to do his job. If he really believed in that “two votes” business, and really wanted Massachusetts to have proper representation, then he’d resign so a new Senator could be elected in a special election to fulfill the duties Kennedy’s unable to fulfill.
Senator Kennedy’s remaining time on the mortal plane should be spent with the family members and friends who love him, as he prepares to answer to whatever higher power he believes in for the murder of Mary Jo Kopechne back in 1969. While we wish Kennedy was not suffering so much with this brain tumor, and after losing so many friends to cancer this summer we wish no one on Earth, no matter what they did, ever had to suffer with this awful disease, we can’t think of Kennedy without thinking of Kopechne. Because no matter how much time he spent in the Senate, even when he wasn’t actually there doing his job, and all the legislation he was involved in, good or bad, his real legacy to us will always be what he did to that poor young woman on that bridge in his Oldsmobile that night in 1969.
Mary Jo Kopechne deserved better than that.
The people of Massachusetts deserve better than having only John Kerry in the Senate to represent them.
Democracy deserves better than Ted Kennedy trying to manipulate the legal process to change Massachusetts law back to Governor-appointed replacements instead of allowing the special-election-replacements law Kennedy himself forced through in 2004 to go into effect upon his vacated the Senate seat. Kennedy’s behaving like an old, bloated spider pulling his silk strings one last time to draw one last juicy morsel into his gaping maw. He is one insect that should not get that last prize…one elected official, unable to do the job he’s paid to do with taxpayer money, who needs to climb down from his well-worn web and retire so that Massachusetts can elect a champion it deserves.
