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The Heyday of Kennedyism
 I’m
not sure if I ever actually met Sam Alito
at Princeton. It’s hard to recognize a guy when the last time you saw
him he was wearing a sheet.
Just
kidding!  Strike
that remark from the record!
I wasn’t an alumnus, but I
used to live near Princeton and I hung out with several friends in the offices
of the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, a rather ineffectual conservative
outfit now exposed by Ted Kennedy as a “reprehensible group.”
Well, Ted himself was born into a reprehensible group, which he has never
repudiated, namely, the Kennedy family. The real scandal is that they have
never repudiated him, either. In that flock, the black sheep is the bellwether.
Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong used to
hold the record for unconscious irony, but by now I think Ted has broken it. A
full generation after Chappaquiddick, he’s still expressing shock over
other people’s pasts. Dwelling in a glass house, he has made a career
of throwing bricks, which his colleagues are too polite to toss back at him.
Unlike Joe McCarthy, he has always made wild charges with complete
impunity. Can’t someone at least give him a breathalyzer test?
The “heyday of
McCarthyism” lasted only five years. The heyday of Kennedyism, still
active, is nearly two decades old, if you date it from his 1987 smear of
Robert Bork. But it’s really much older, because Kennedyism
didn’t start with Ted. Freestyle accusations of bigotry against
political opponents have been a hallowed liberal tradition since the era of
Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman.
Judge Alito, it must be said, failed
to prove he wasn’t a bigot; but then, nobody can prove he isn’t
a bigot to liberals’ satisfaction. That’s the whole idea of
bigotry charges: they are meant to be unfalsifiable, like Soviet charges of
“anti-Soviet activities.” Once you are accused, you’ve
already been convicted. There are few acquittals.
![[Breaker quote for The Heyday of Kennedyism: We're still in it.]](2006breakers/060112.gif) Since
the charges can’t be disproved, there is no
penalty for making false accusations. The burden of proof is on the accused,
not the accuser, and besides, the charges are never really defined, so how
could they be refuted anyway? If somebody accuses you of murder, he has
to produce a corpse, for openers. But if he accuses you of
“sexism” or “homophobia,” nobody is even quite
sure what he means, except maybe that he doesn’t like your political
opinions and wants to stigmatize you.
Such charges —
sexism, homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism,
and the generic all-purpose hate and bigotry
— are what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “bogus
predicates.” They sound as if they mean something, but they have no
specifiable content. The listener is invited to fill them out with his own
emotional associations. Murder implies that someone has killed
someone else. What does bigotry imply?
If liberals were honest,
they’d define their words precisely enough that we could meaningfully
distinguish between true and false charges, and they’d censure those
who made false charges. When McCarthy spoke of “card-carrying
Communists,” he made the ultimately fatal mistake of making
meaningful charges; and when he couldn’t back them up, he was
ruined.
That’s the difference
between the brief McCarthy era and the too-long Kennedy era. Can you even
imagine liberal opinion demanding that Ted Kennedy put up or shut up? The
U.S. Senate virtually censured McCarthy. Kennedy can rail on with the full
assurance that his colleagues will never do that to him, even with a
Republican majority.
Kennedy’s abysmal personal
character inspired one wag to quip that “his religion is so private he
won’t even impose it on himself.” He has every reason to invent
synthetic ideological sins to divert attention from his own concrete moral
deficiencies, which might be gently described as contemptible. No wonder he
makes it his pastime to savage other men’s reputations, as if making
them look bad could make him look good.
Even now Ted is allowed by his
party to wear the ill-fitting courtesy halo he supposedly inherited from his
murdered brothers. He is still allowed to pose as a spokesman for women,
minorities, the poor, civil liberties, and all the other sacred progressive
causes.
There’s not much point in
dwelling on the irony of all this; it ceased being funny a long time ago.
He’s the aging superstar in a sport whose only object is to commit
fouls against the other side.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2006 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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