The Obligatory Post About Ted Kennedy

I'm a huge fan on the movie "Shattered Glass", a film in which journalist Michael Kelly is portrayed as a brilliant editor for The New Republic magazine. After leaving TNR, Kelly went on to edit several other news and opinion journals and was eventually killed while covering the war in Iraq.
I immediately bought a copy of "Things Worth Fighting For", a collection of Kelly's collected journalism pieces. One of my favorites in the book is this gem, which was originally published in GQ. The link is much shorter than the original. I hope you'll go there and get back to me. It's pure, undiluted greatness.

Next, imagine if GW Bush had done this....





But, as Shakespeare said (or maybe it was Christopher Marlowe), the evil that men do lives after them, the good is oft interred with their bones. Here's Nick Gillespie, of Reason magazine on Kennedy's major accomplishment:

There is, buried deep within Kennedy's legislative legacy, a different set of policies worth exhuming and examining, precisely because they were truly a break with the normal way of doing business in Washington. During the 1970s, Kennedy was instrumental in deregulating the interstate trucking industry and airline ticket prices, two innovations that have vastly improved the quality of life in America even as—or more precisely, because—they pushed power out of D.C. and into the pocketbooks of everyday Americans. We are incalculably richer and better off because something like actual prices replaced regulatory fiat in trucking and flying. Because they do not fit the Ted Kennedy narrative preferred by his admirers and detractors alike, these accomplishments rarely get mentioned in stories about the late senator. But they are exactly the sort of legislation that we should be celebrating in his honor, and using as a model in today's debates about health care, education, and virtually every aspect of government action.



So at least he deregulated the trucking industry. I owe him a big one.

Here's a picture of him coming out of the swimming pool, shortly after killing somebody.

Multiple coats of high gloss Whitening to Instapundit for the collections of links.