A powerfully creepy, chilling moment towards the end of the 1974 masterpiece, "Chinatown"...
Nicholson's gumshoe character Jake Gittes confronts the affably evil robber baron Noah Cross...John Huston should have won an Oscar for his depiction of unflappably affable monstrosity incarnate...There's an exchange at 2:07 that could have come out of the New Testament or Dostoevsky, when Gittes and the audience realize that Noah Cross is Lucifer in a Panama hat...
From his press conference of August 20, 1963...President John F. Kennedy on the basic idea at the core of "affirmative action"...racial quotas...
"...I don't think we can undo the past...I don't think quotas are a good idea. I think it is a mistake to assign quotas on the basis of religion, or race, or color, or nationality. I think we'd get into a good deal of trouble...We ought not to begin the quota system...not hard and fast quotas."
JFK had PT-109...Ted had Chappaquiddick...End of story...
The G.O.P. will win back control of the U.S. House of Representatives. John "Man Tan" Boehner will be the Speaker of the House come January 3, 2011.
From his press conference of March 21, 1962...
"There is always inequity in life. Some men are killed in a war and some men are wounded, and some men never leave the country, and some men are stationed in the Antarctic and some are stationed in San Francisco. It's very hard in the military or personal life to assure complete equality. Life is unfair..."
President John F. Kennedy
Used by Bobby Kennedy in his 1968 presidential campaign, actually first uttered by devout Stalinist George Bernard Shaw...
"Some men see things as they are and ask why, I dream of things that never were, and ask why not."
A more clear and obnoxious encapsulation of the Utopian liberal mindset, you will not find...
What does more damage to a society...the hypocrisy of conservatives, or the hypocrisy of liberals?
"California has been the slate on which liberalism boldly writes its recipe for decline---high taxes, heavy regulation, subservience to public employees unions, and environmentalism that is simultaneously apocalyptic and chiliastic."
"...California's calamitous present---creative accounting as a rickety bridge to the next budget crisis, coming soon---might prefigure the nation's future..."
"Republicans are a shriveling tribe: Their registration is at a record low 31.1 percent, and they do not have a majority of registered voters in any of California's 53 congressional districts. Democrats have a registration majority in 20 districts, and a statewide registration advantage of more than 2 million and growing."
-George F. Will
One of the more annoying aspects of the week's assorted encomiums to The Lion of Limousine Leftism is the assertion that The Squire of Hyannisport "achieved far more" than either of his elder assassinated brothers.
Well.
If one defines achievement as the expansion and nourishment of the elephantine welfare state, then sure, Ted Kennedy achieved much more than either Jack or Bobby. Ted Kennedy did more than anybody else in his family to try and turn the U.S. into a Scandinavian-style socialist state. There was no appetite for government largesse, no complaint or claim of victimization that he would not endeavor mightily to sate and salve with somebody else's money. Ted Kennedy was the very personification of Thatcher's quip that " a socialist is somebody who's extremely compassionate with other people's money." But in the liberal mind, such redistributive behavior constitutes monumental heroism.
I would merely point out in defense of the elder Kennedy who actually occupied The White House that Ted's "achievements" pale in comparison to the following achievements of JFK...
1. He saved the world from nuclear war...TWICE...first in 1961, then again in 1962...
Ponder that for a moment...you're all walking around breathing because of how JFK handled unprecedented and unrepeated nuclear confrontations in the summer of 1961 and the autumn of 1962...Teddy would never have gotten to set up all of his ineffective and expensive programs for various derelicts if we all got blown up in the early 1960s...
2. JFK prevented the Communists from winning the Cold War in the early 1960s...
Jonah Goldberg has this keen observation on the public policy career of The Lion of Limousine Liberalism...
"...one of the great ironies of Ted Kennedy's career...He was the chief beneficiary of an inheritance from a brother whose views he didn't share."
