The accolades continue to pour in for the late Senator Ted Kennedy, most of them focusing on how well he got along with politicians of all political persuasions.  Adoring MSM commentators focus on such bipartisan legislative successes as the "No Child Left Behind" Act of 2001 and the "Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization" Act of 2003, two of the more recent bills cosponsored by Kennedy with colleagues from across the aisle.

I'll say again that I don't wish to speak ill of the dead, but we need to inject some reality into this discussion.  This is the same Ted Kennedy who, in a hyper-partisan move in 1987, invented the term "borking" to describe the process whereby a party holding the majority of Senate votes uses half-truths or even lies to smear the reputation of a qualified Supreme Court nominee proposed by a President of the opposite party.  Kennedy's target for this campaign was one Judge Robert Bork, a distinguished jurist nominated by President Reagan to be an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court.  Bork, as an advocate of "original intent," which means that judges use the founding fathers' intended meaning which is embedded in the Constitution to make their decisions, was adamantly opposed to the judicial activism of the courts over the preceding, at the time, 30 years.  He believed that legislating is for legislators and not judges, and that courts had embarked on a course of action since the late 1950s which was circumventing the will of the majority of voters.

Kennedy, of course, as an activist liberal himself, was having none of this.  In a nationally-televised speech, he uttered the following scurrilous statement about Bork's record and intentions:

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is - and is often the only - protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy... President Reagan is still our President. But he should not be able to reach out from the muck of Irangate, reach into the muck of Watergate and impose his reactionary vision of the Constitution on the Supreme Court and the next generation of Americans. No justice would be better than this injustice."  Conservatives were, I believe, so stunned by these calumnies that they were slow to respond with the truth, and so an outstanding legal mind was lost to the Supreme Court.

And speaking of hyper-partisanship, as recently as 2004, when junior Massachusetts Senator John Kerry was the Democrats' nominee for President, Kennedy led the fight to change the law in the first place to require an election in the event of a Senate vacancy.  He and his fellow state Democrats did this to prevent then-Governor Mitt Romney, a Republican, from directly appointing a senator in the event of a vacancy due to Kerry's election as President. At the time, he argued that for the governor to make the appointment would violate voter sovereignty.  Now, however, with Democrat Deval Patrick serving as Governor of Massachusetts, Kennedy sent a letter just prior to his death suggesting the law be changed to allow the Governor to appoint an interim U.S. senator rather than wait up to five months for a special election.

Of course, Patrick will appoint a good Democrat - one sympathetic to the "need" for government intervention in the free market - which could be vital to President Barack Obama's attempt to socialize the $2.5 trillion healthcare sector if it enables Senate Democrats to reach a 60-seat majority and block any Republican maneuvers to stall its legislation.  This hypocritical move was seen for what it was by virtually everyone, even Massachusetts Democrats, and is unlikely to succeed.  Still, it shows Kennedy for what he really was:  cooperative when he needed assistance from across the aisle to enact his liberal programs, even settling for part of them when necessary, but a partisan bully when his side controlled the legislative process.  It's unfortunate and probably telling that many Republicans were so anxious to work with him to undermine their own principles, but be that as it may, let's at least deal with the truth.