You wonder why anyone picks on Bush for speaking gaffes. The acceptable parameters are truly mind-boggling.
Ted Kennedy, Senate Boor
Posted 10/15/2003
By Jason Maoz, Senior Editor
Sen. Ted Kennedy, a man whose behavior was once described by Time magazine
as that of “a drunken, overage frat-house boor,” has decided that the war in Iraq
was nothing more than one giant scam. Kennedy told the Associated Press last
month that “There was no imminent threat. This was made up in Texas,
announced in January to the Republican leadership that war was going to take
place and was going to be good politically. This whole thing was a fraud.”
Kennedy also accused the administration of spreading money appropriated
for the war effort “all around to these political leaders in all parts of the world,
bribing them to send in troops.” Naturally, Kennedy offered not a shred of
evidence for his accusation, nor did he name any of those “political leaders in all
parts of the world” who supposedly were on the receiving end of the alleged
bribes.
We know Kennedy doesn’t think much of George W. Bush. So whom does he
admire? “Al Sharpton,” Kennedy bellowed at a recent Congressional Black
Caucus event, “has brought a new energy, a new insight in the issues that are
facing this country....[H]e is educating America about what this country is really
about and what it needs to do and what its future should be....We are a better
country because Al Sharpton is in the mix and on the list and trying to make an
important difference in our nation.”
That would be Al Sharpton of Tawana Brawley fame; Al Sharpton, who at
the time of the 1991 Crown Heights riots called the Jews of Crown Heights
“diamond merchants” and ranted, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin
their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”
The very same Al Sharpton who referred to a Jewish merchant being
picketed by black protesters in Harlem as “some white interloper” not long
before one of the protestors went into the store, shot three whites and a
Pakistani and then set fire to the establishment; among the dead were five
Hispanics and a black security guard the protestors had taunted as a “cracker
lover.”
The Al Sharpton, who in 1994 elevated the public discourse with the
following historical tidbit that must be read slowly and savored for its profound
insight and literary elegance, and that has been preserved for posterity by Bill
Crawford in his book Democrats Do the Dumbest Things:
“White folks was in caves while we was building empires. We taught
philosophy and astrology(sic) and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek
homos ever got around to it.”
Kennedy, of course, is no slouch himself in the stupid remarks department.
Who can forget his response to a rather simple question, posed by TV newsman
Roger Mudd in November 1979, as he prepared to challenge President Jimmy
Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination — a response derided
even by liberal commentators as “not articulate or even coherent” (Mary
McGrory) and “stumbling, inarticulate, unconvincing” (Anthony Lewis)?
Mudd: “Why do you want to be president?”
Kennedy: “Well, I’m — were I to — to make the announcement and — to
run, the reasons that I would run is because I have a great belief in this country,
that it is — has more natural resources than any nation in the world, has the
greatest educated population in the world, the greatest capacity for innovation
in the world, and the greatest political system in the world. And yet, I see at the
current time that most of the industrial nations of the world are exceeding us
in terms of productivity, are doing better than us in terms of meeting the
problems of inflation, that they`re dealing with their problems of energy and
their problems of unemployment....And the energies and the resourcefulness of
this nation, I think, should be focused on these problems in a way that brings a
sense of restoration in this country by its people to — in dealing with the
problems that we face — primarily the issues on the economy, the problems of
inflation, and the problems of energy. And I would basically feel that — that it`s
imperative for this country to either move forward, that it can`t stand still, or
otherwise it moves back.” |
