Grandpa Gets Jiggy With It

Let's say you're a fresh, youngish, hot empty suit with a pretentious Harvard law degree and and sense of raging ambition that you dress up with urban cool with help from a self-important talk show diva from Memphis who funds women's prisons masquerading as girl's schools and a pompous British poofter who claims to be both conservative and Roman Catholic but is actually neither. Let's also say that you want the top job in the land (no--not the chairmanship of Google), and your sanctimonious piss-ant of a campaign manager has decided to create a cult of personality based on you being an avatar of "change and civility and bipartisanship" (although to be honest, if you are bipartisan, then Larry Flynt is a spirit warrior for Jesus...because, of course girl on girl photoshoost in Hustler is the way to eternal salvation). What do you do to get yourself over that goal line and insure that your so-far hidden narcissism and your creepy religious-culty philosophical movement gets to do the Dance of Joy from coast to coast and border to border?

You enlist a man who has served in the Senate for 45 years and has the facial complexion of someone who looks like they were bitten by a rottweiler (50 years of booze will do that to you). Oh, hi Senator Kennedy--you're looking quite well for a rotund, boozy, 76 year old, sir. Here's a highball.

It seems a wee bit odd that someone who has been packaged by his sanctimonious campaign manager (David Axelrod--a man with a soft spot for self-righteous politicians) and pantingly eager accomplices in the media as a "transformational candidate" would seek out the endorsement of a family that was one of the most naked political machines in 20th century America. I could have sworn that Hillary-haters in general (and certain British poofters specifically) were saying that the Clintons are a dynasty, and they must be kept from the White House. Can some of you then explain to me why you go to one dynasty to kill off another? Maybe I'm a bit stupid, but doesn't "bringing us together" politics mean that you don't employ the politics you say you are attempting to eliminate?

I love the fact that Frau Schlossberg said that the Senator from Illinois is a politician just like her father, because it says two things to me. First, it tells me that the Senator from Illinois will come within hours of getting this nation into a nuclear exchange with another country, since the Frau's pops did just that. Did I mention that had JFK's bumbling performance succeeded, then none of us we be here right now? Oops--I guess I forgot. The second thing is that she is see her father through the gauzy lens that Jackie Onassis created for him--in the cold light of hindsight, Jack Kennedy knew how to work glamour for the cameras, could deliver a decent speech, and that was pretty much it. He had no big legislative achievements he managed to get Congress to sign on to--those belonged to Lyndon. JFK may have started some of those things rolling, but what matters is who carried the ball into the end zone, and Kennedy was a corpse by the time of the Civil Rights Act of '64, the Great Society, and the moon landing. In today's Democratic Party, JFK would be to the right of Hillary Clinton. You know who that would make him? Joe Lieberman.....and unacceptable to what is supposedly the base of the party.

Again, though, maybe there is some logic behind the endorsement. The offspring of the true visionary in the Kennedy family (AKA Bobby's kids) did NOT endorse the magazine cover. Perhaps, just perhaps, Bobby Kennedy taught his kids a valuable lesson--words are beautiful, and they can in fact be inspiring, but at the end of the day, the question is "what did you do today?" and not "what did you say today?" The children of Jack have never been known as doers--then again, they were allowed to believe they were fabulous, and when you are fabulous, you never have to do things...you simply have to breathe and walk. Bobby's kids--doers. They understand that to change society, you lead by example. The Army has an expression: "Lead from the front". Jack and Jackie's spawn never have, and neither has the Senator from Illinois...it's the fab leading the fab. Ted, Caroline, and the legion of other Obama-ites don't really want government to work--they just want it to sound polite. A government that is polite and clecnched-teeth Episcopalian is a government that ultimately accomplishes nothing. To lead from the front, you have to be a leader of conviction who puts their money, their sweat, and their time where their mouth is. Barack Obama doesn't have that kind of spine.

Just a thought...