Vivek’s Masterclass: Staying Professional In The Face Of Hostility

Two of my comments on THE BREAKFAST CLUB’S interview of Vivek Ramaswamy follow the video — with some additional context to the six cults studied:

RPT’s Master Class on Racist Democrats!

After hearing Ramaswamy say on the Breakfast Club, “…if there are human beings, and not god, living in a nation…” (8:05 mark) – I assume many around the show and fans think they are in fact gods. Literally. Here I refer to the Five-Percent Nation and the Nation of Islam, and the subsequent racist black nationalist New Age UFO cult and anti-Semitic history and the creation of the “devil” on the Greek island of Patmos over 6,000 years ago, an evil [big-headed] scientist, Yakub. I assume these influences, even music, is large in this audience. For instance, here are hip-hop “influencers” that are members [or were during the height of their career] of this black nationalist – racist – cult and the subsequent “Afrocentrist” history that sets up failure in fighting “the Devil” – the white man – rather than a self, which a healthy religion does:

Rakim – member of the influential duo Eric B. & Rakim; Big Daddy Kane; Lakim Shabazz; Nas; Wu-Tang Clan – Ghostface Killah and Raekwon have deep ties to the 5%’ers, as do the following: Gang Starr; MF Doom; Jay Electronica; Busta Rhymes (Raised a Five Percenter, he has since converted to traditional Islam); Black Thought – Lead MC of the Philadelphia-based hip hop group The Roots; Ras Kass; Jus Allah – Member of the underground rap duo Jedi Mind Tricks; Cormega; Allah Mathematics – Hip hop producer and DJ for the Wu-Tang Clan; Erykah Badu – Her Grammy Award-winning song “On & On” features teachings of the Five Percent Nation [my favorite is Tyron]; Pete Rock & CL Smooth; Jadakiss; Jay-Z;TDK, Xcel, Raz Fresco, World’s Famous Supreme Team DJ Crew, Brand Nubian, Poor Righteous Teachers (a group whose very name comes from Five Percent teachings), 6orn, Estee Nack, Carmelo Anthony (NBA), L.L. Cool J, Kanye West, Jay Electronica, Queen Latifah, — just to name a few.

And I say this after studied [in-depth] 6 major racist cults [religious and secular].

After watching the appearances of Larry Elder and Vivek Ramaswamy on this show, the complete lack of understanding of facts and an honest contemplation of a countering viewpoint stands out. Rather, they simply malign with racism and false history. I can see from the comments below/above that there is an already large [and growing] group of observers and thinkers that likewise show the depravity of thought on The Breakfast Club. Bravo to the commonsense commenters 👏👏👏👏👏

ADDED INFO-THE BIG “SIX”

CHRISTIAN IDENTITY (C.I.) | While in jail for my 3rd time for a decade old warrant, I was privileged to lead a young C.I. man to the Lord… he threw all his racist pamphlets from that “church” away while in Pitchess Detention Center, North – long story. It has its roots in British Israelism.

KU KLUX KLAN (KKK) | 5-to-8k members per SPLC – both the Aryan Brotherhood (a racist prison gang not much different than the BGF), the largest white power groups, and the KKK are socialists. Leftists politically. One study found that there were “4,467 total victims of lynching from 1883 to 1941. Of these victims, 4,027 were men, 99 were women, and 341 were of unidentified gender (although likely male); 3,265 were Black, 1,082 were white, 71 were Mexican or of Mexican descent, 38 were American Indian, 10 were Chinese, and 1 was Japanese.” (They were most probably ALL Republicans.)

NATION OF ISLAM (NOI) | A racist black nationalist New Age UFO cult and anti-Semitic group currently led by Louise Farrakhan – after his UFO visit, the Little Messiah. They believe they are gods who participated in the creation of this world and that over 6,000 years ago, an evil [big-headed] scientist created the devil on the Greek island of Patmos. (The “devil” is the white population, which will be enslaved or culled by black gods returning in UFOs: 

SEE Farrakhan’s Bats*#t-Crazy UFO Sermon

FIVE-PERCENTERS: NATIONS OF GODS AND EARTH | 5-Percenter Nation is a splinter group founded by Allah the Father (formerly Clarence 13X) who left NOI. They use “science” and “math” to communicate deeper “truths” of existence – for lack of space.

The many Black Hebrew Israelites [racist] groups

BLACK LIBERATION THEOLOGY | while I have studied its South American Marxist roots (and connection to Pope Francis), mainly my interest lies in its Black Liberation Theology. I ordered 4 books many years ago from the Akibba bookstore (the Afrocentric bookstore of Obama’s church of 20-years, Trinity United Church of Christ — now totally revamped with the Rev. Wright gone): 1. A Black Theology of Liberation, by James Cone; 2. Black Theology & Black Power, by James Cone; 3. Is God a White Racist? A Preamble to Black Theology, by William R. Jones; and 4. (a book I enjoyed somewhat), The Black Christ, by Kelly Brown Douglas. I was surprised to find the amount of racism I did.

Here are three quotes from James Cone’s main thesis:

QUOTES FROM BOOK PURCHASED VIA OBAMA’ CHURCH:

  • “The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.62
  • “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.64

“The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” – Adolf Hitler | Mein Kampf

  • “There is no place in black theology for a colorless God in a society where human beings suffer precisely because of their color. The black theologian must reject y conception of God which stifles black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples” ~ James Cone,  A Black Theology of Liberation, p.63
  • “Christianity is not alien to Black Power, Christianity is Black Power” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.38
  • “In contrast to this racist view of God, black theology proclaims God’s blackness. Those who want to know who God is and what God is doing must know who black persons are and what they are doing” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.65

“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord” – Adolf Hitler | Mein Kampf

  • “These new theologians of the Third World argue that Christians [liberation theology accepting Christians] should not shun violence but should initiate it” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.32
  • “It is important to make a further distinction here among black hatred, black racism, and Black Power. Black hatred is the black man’s strong aversion to white society. No black man living in white America can escape it” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.14
  • “It is this fact that makes all white churches anti-Christian in their essence. To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!” ~ James Cone, Black Theology & Black Power, p.151
  • “It [black liberation theology] is dangerous because the true prophet of the gospel of God must become both “anti-Christian” and “unpatriotic.”…. Because whiteness by its very nature is against blackness, the black prophet is a prophet of national doom. He proclaims the end of the American Way” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.55-56

“The [Nazi party] should not become a constable of public opinion, but must dominate it. It must not become a servant of the masses, but their master!” – Adolf Hitler | Mein Kampf

This influence from Liberation Theology is a main driver to the whole “white privilege” lie we see today.

These cults are typically led by a leader who tells the people how to vote. Also note that in 2008 three-of-the-four largest supremacist groups asked their followers to vote for Obama. And the one who didn’t tell his people to vote for Obama says voting is a waste of time and that he doesn’t vote — so, essentially, of the largest 4 that told their supports to go out and…:

📢. . .VOTE FOR A BLACK MAN:
  • Tom Metzger: Director, White Aryan Resistance;
  • Ron Edwards: Imperial Wizard, Imperial Klans of America;
  • Erich Gliebe: Chairman, National Alliance; Career Highlights;
  • Rocky Suhayda: Chairman, American Nazi Party.

… is💯% (Or, if you wish, 3/4ers with 1/4 abstaining)

BONUS: California’s KKK Grand Dragon Endorsed Hillary

BONUS: Florida NAZI Leader of Blood Tribe: Anti-Capitalist and Pro-Biden

BONUS: Richard Spencer Admit Being A Socialist (not “Alt-Right” but “Alt-Left)

I note this myth that racist cults are “right leaning” in a comment to a friend:

  • Most of those people typically vote Democrat. Even if they wrote Trump in (who is not a conservative — he is a populist — and why 34% of Bernie Sanders voters said they will vote Trump over Hillary) they along with almost the entirety of the racist cults in America vote Democrat down ticket from there. Why, I sum up why in my post, and it is why the driver that killed that woman was involved in Occupy Wall Street (Gay Patriot h-t)…. [QUOTE from my site]

A RECAP from a large refutation of the idea that the KKK and others vote Republican for clarity on the reasoning racist/nationalists cults vote Democrat (RPT):

  • They are typically socialist in their political views, and thus support the welfare state for personal financial reasons (poor) and ideological reasoning (socialist); or for the reason that it is a way of controlling minorities (racist reasoning). A modern plantation so-to-speak; There is a shared hatred for Israel and supporting of groups wanting to exterminate the Jews (Palestinians for instance).

Again, there are about 5-to-8,000 KKK members nationwide, of which a few hundred were there. All Republicans denounce that. But no Democrat has really denounced the NAZI style church Obama went to for 20-years — see HERE and HERE.

While most Democrats publicly support BLM, who has followers that have killed people and the co-founder of on BLM radio called for lynching and hanging of white people and cops. In other places they have called for genocide, and the many other examples I could give… like this via my YouTube (to the right):

Remember, REPUBLICANSvoted for these acts at 100% or slightly less… Democrats voted against them 100% or slightly less:

  • Civil Rights Act 1866,
  • Reconstruction Act of 1867,
  • Freedman Bureau Extension Act of 1866,
  • Enforcement Act of 1870,
  • Force Act of 1871,
  • Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871,
  • Civil Rights Act of 1875,
  • Civil Rights Act of 1957,
  • Civil Rights Act of 1960,
  • 1964 Civil Rights Act,
  • 1965 Voting Rights Acts,
  • 1972 Equal Employment Opportunity Act

And — lest these quotes are lost to history:

  • BILL CLINTON: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,”
  • JOSEPH BIDEN: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” continuing he said, “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
  • DAN RATHER: “but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”

Democrats even chose a racist to be the keynote speaker at the 2012 Convention: JULIAN CASTRO is a member of La Raza… the group Cesar Chavez (founder of the founder of the United Farm Workers [UFW]) said was a supremacist group:

When I wrote a few months ago about the origins of “la raza” as a racial-surpremacist concept (developed in the ’20s and ’30s on the idea of the biological superiority of mestizos), Janet Murguia, head of the National Council of La Raza, pointed and sputtered over at the Huffington Post.

Well, while reading a memoir/history of the immigration-reform movement by retired historian Otis Graham (who’s on my board), I find out that even Cesar Chavez rejected the “la raza” idea as inherently racist. Graham quoted a 1969 New Yorkerprofile by Peter Matthiessen:

“I hear more and more Mexicans talking about la raza—to build up their pride, you know,” Chavez told me. “Some people don’t look at it as racism, but when you say ’la raza,’ you are saying an anti-gringo thing, and it won’t stop there. Today it’s anti-gringo, tomorrow it will be anti-Negro, and the day after it will be anti-Filipino, anti-Puerto Rican. And then it will be anti-poor-Mexican, and anti-darker-skinned Mexican. … La raza is a very dangerous concept. I speak very strongly against it among the chicanos.”

And in Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution, his 1970 biography, Matthiessen talked to Chavez deputy Leroy Chatfield:

“That’s one of the reasons he is so upset about la raza. The same Mexicans that ten years ago were talking about themselves as Spaniards are coming on real strong these days as Mexicans. Everyone should be proud of what they are, of course, but race is only skin-deep. It’s phony and it comes out of frustration; the la raza people are not secure. They look upon Cesar as their ‘dumb Mexican’ leader; he’s become their saint. But he doesn’t want any part of it. He said to me just the other day, ‘Can’t they understand that that’s just the way Hitler started?’ A few months ago the Ford Foundation funded a la raza group and Cesar really told them off. The foundation liked the outfit’s sense of pride or something, and Cesar tried to explain to them what the origin of the word was, that it’s related to Hitler’s concept.”

In 1968, the Ford Foundation started the Southwest Council of La Raza, presumably the “outfit” Chatfield was referring to, which five years later changed its name to the National Council of La Raza.

(NATIONAL REVIEW)

Not only that, but Julian Castro’s mother is involved deeply in the MEChA movement. That is the group that wants Mexico to take back the portion lost in the Mexican-American war. These guys/gals ACTUALLY show up in brown shirts.

International Business Times points this connection out:

  • Castro is the son of Maria “Rosie” Castro, a Chicano political activist who helped establish the Chicano political party La Raza Unida in the 1970s.

Charles Johnson puts the nail in the radical’s coffin:

“[My mother] sees political activism as an opportunity to change people’s lives for the better. Perhaps that is because of her outspoken nature or because Chicanos in the early 1970s (and, of course, for many years before) had no other option. To make themselves heard Chicanos needed the opportunity that the political system provided. In any event, my mother’s fervor for activism affected the first years of my life, as it touches it today.

Castro wrote fondly of those early days and basked in the slogans of the day. “‘Viva La Raza!’ ‘Black and Brown United!’ ‘Accept me for who I am—Chicano.’ These and many other powerful slogans rang in my ears like war cries.” These war cries, Castro believes, advanced the interests of their political community. He sees her rabble-rousing as the cause for Latino successes, not the individual successes of those hard-working men and women who persevered despite some wrinkles in the American meritocracy.

[My mother] insisted that things were changing because of political activism, participation in the system. Maria del Rosario Castro has never held a political office. Her name is seldom mentioned in a San Antonio newspaper. However, today, years later, I read the newspapers, and I see that more Valdezes are sitting on school boards, that a greater number of Garcias are now doctors, lawyers, engineers, and, of course, teachers. And I look around me and see a few other brown faces in the crowd at [Stanford]. I also see in me a product of my mother’s diligence and her friends’ hard work. Twenty years ago I would not have been here…. My opportunities are not the gift of the majority; they are the result of a lifetime of struggle and commitment by a determined minority. My mother is one of these persons. And each year I realize more and more how much easier my life has been made by the toil of past generations. I wonder what form my service will take, since I am expected by those who know my mother to continue the family tradition. [Emphasis Castro’s]

[….]

Rosie named her first son, Julian, for his father whom she never married, and her second, who arrived a minute later, for the character in the 1967 Chicano anti-gringo movement poem, “I Am Joaquin.” She is particularly proud that they were born on Mexico’s Independence Day. And she was a fan of the Aztlan aspirations of La Raza Unida. Those aspirations were deeply radical. “As far as we got was simply to take over control in those [Texas] communities where we were the majority,” one of its founders, Jose Angel Gutierrez, told the Toronto paper. “We did think of carving out a geographic territory where we could have our own weight, and our own leverage could then be felt nation-wide.”

Removing all doubt, Gutierrez repeated himself often. “What we hoped to do back then was to create a nation within a nation,” he told the Denver Post in 2001. Gutierrez bemoaned the loss of that separatist vision among activists, but predicted that Latinos will “soon take over politically.” (“Brothers in Chicano Movement to Reunite,” Denver Post, August 16, 2001).

Gutierrez made clear his hatred for “the gringo” when he led the Mexican-American Youth Organization, the precursor to La Raza Unida. According to the Houston Chronicle, he “was denounced by many elected officials as militant and un-American.” And anti-American he was. “We have got to eliminate the gringo, and what I mean by that is if the worst comes to worst, we have got to kill him,” Gutierrez told a San Antonio audience in 1969. At around that time, Rosie Castro eagerly joined his cause, becoming the first chairwoman of the Bexar County Raza Unida Party. There’s no evidence of her distancing herself from Gutierrez’s comments, even today. Gutierrez even dedicated a chapter in one of his books to Ms. Castro.

…read more…

WHAT IS THE POINT!?

The BREAKFAST CLUB has it all backwards. All the hosts of the show – show their ignorance to history and facts surrounding the Democrat Party. They should be swarming to vote Republican, for the Grand Ol’ Party’s history and freedom goals!

How the Media Handles Left/Right Sex Scandals | Larry Elder

(ORIGINALLY POSTED IN NOVEMBER OF 2011)

This was most likely grabbed by me in November of 2011. I just came across it in my files and it made me search out and reproduce the [I think] full QG article by Michael Kelly titled: “Ted Kennedy on the Rocks: A Sober Look At The Senator.” (Posted underneath the audio.) I almost didn’t upload this, but I wanted to connect it to the GQ article on my site. The graphics in the upper left that “fade-in-and-out” are the old pictures from the original VIMEO upload. To wit 》》My Vimeo account was terminated many years ago; this is a recovered audio/video from it. (Note: a short WaPo article is after this very long GQ article.)

Here is a related example I use often:

It was loyalty to that extreme agenda that accounts for Democrats holding back their ire during a far worse underage homosexual scandal: that of Gerry Studds, a Democratic Massachusetts congressman, for more than two decades.

According to the 1983 House ethics committee report, one congressional page allegedly traveled to Europe with Studds and testified that he took him to his apartment in Georgetown three or four times and that there was sexual activity between them each time. The two later took a 2 1/2-week trip together out of the country, according to the page, and “engaged in sexual activity every two or three days.”

According to the ethics panel’s report, “the relationship may have begun when the page was 16…. At that time, Rep. Studds was 36 years old.” What’s more, the underage page had told Studds that he would have preferred not to engage in sexual activity with him. “I mentioned that to him,” the former page testified.

The report added that “two other former pages, both male,” stated under oath that Studds made sexual advances to them. “One was 16 or 17” at the time of the alleged incident, “the other was 17.”

Studds never apologized, and when he was censured by his colleagues, he defiantly stood in the House well looking up at Speaker Tip O’Neill, hands casually folded behind his back. Afterward, Studds not only remained in Congress for more than a decade; the House Democratic leadership allowed him to rise in the congressional ranks and for years hold a full committee chairmanship.

Some of Studds’ Democratic colleagues even voted against the slap on the wrist of censure. Then-Rep. Parren Mitchell of Maryland, for instance, complained of the “absolute humiliation and degradation” Studds had already suffered and said censure would “cannibalize him.”

When Studds returned home to his district, an August 1983 editorial — in the liberal Washington Post of all places — asked with astonishment, “What is it exactly, or even inexactly, that those Massachusetts Democrats were so loudly cheering when they gave Rep. Gerry Studds three standing ovations last weekend? What accounts for this extraordinary response to a man just censured for having taken sexual advantage of a youthful congressional page?”

Why were Democrats cheering? Maybe the answer lies in the causes they support and the ideological company they keep.

(Democrats Are Lecturing ME About Ethics and Trump!? Please)

Ted Kennedy on the Rocks: A Sober Look At The Senator | Michael Kelly (GQ | AR15)

(see also: NEWSBUSTERS | REAL CLEAR POLITICS | DAILY WIRE)

(AR15 COMMENT: It’s long, but damn…homie had another 19 years of boozin’ and screwin’ to go.)

  • When GQ sent Michael Kelly to profile one of America’s most powerful men, Kelly was a young writer, and unknown. But after three months of reporting, thousands of pages of research, and over seventy interviews with everyone in Washington, from congressmen to waiters on Capitol Hill, he filed this famous portrait of Edward M. Kennedy, remarkable not only for its courage in exposing a senator’s vices but also for the balance of its tone. GQ has published many celebrated political articles over the years—profiles of George W. Bush and Colin Powell, interviews with John Kerry and Chuck Hagel, to name a few—but this one may well be the best. Michael Kelly went on to cover the Gulf War for this magazine and to edit The New Republic and The Atlantic Monthly in turn. Tragically, in 2003, his Humvee crashed under enemy fire in Iraq.

GQ, February 1990

Edward Moore Kennedy works harder than most people think, and this morning he is working very hard at a simple but crucial task. He is trying to face the day. It is 9:30 A.M, September 26, and Kennedy is in Room 138 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building to introduce a bill to lure new and better teachers. This kind of thing is ice cream and cake for any practiced politician, a simple piece of business that will provoke few tough questions and at least a few approving editorials. But for Kennedy it seems a great challenge, and no fun at all. He hastens tonelessly through his prepared statement like a court stenographer reading back testimony to the judge. He passes off most of the perfunctory and easy questions to the other politicians and education-Establishment figures joining him, and he stares into space as the other men do the job. When he goes to the podium to introduce his fellow speakers, he walks with a nervous, cautious shuffle, like Steve McQueen after he’s been let out of solitary in Papillon. When he holds out the piece of white paper to read the introductions of men he’s known for decades, it flutters and shakes in the still air.

Up close, the face is a shock. The skin has gone from red roses to gin blossoms. The tracery of burst capillaries shines faintly through the scaly scarlet patches that cover the bloated, mottled cheeks. The nose that was once straight and narrow is now swollen and bulbous, with open pores and a bump of what looks like scar tissue near the tip. Deep corrugations crease the forehead and angle from the nostrils and the downturned corners of the mouth. The Chiclet teeth are the color of old piano keys. The eyes have yellowed too, and they are so bloodshot, it looks as if he’s been weeping.

Edward Kennedy was once the handsomest of the handsome Kennedy boys, with a proudly jutting chin, a Nelson Eddy jaw and Cupid’s-bow lips under a thatch of chestnut hair. When he is dieting and on the wagon, there is a glimpse of that still, which makes it all the harder to see him as he more often is. There is a great desire to remember him as we remember his brothers. The Dorian Grays of Hyannis Port, John and Robert, have perpetual youth and beauty and style, and their faces are mirrors of all that is better and classier and richer than us. Ted is the reality, the 57-year-old living picture of a man who has feasted on too much for too long with too little restraint, the visible proof that nothing exceeds like excess.

After the press conference, as reporters hustle around Kennedy for follow-up questions, it becomes clear that something is especially wrong today with his left eye, which he has been poking and rubbing. He has lost a contact lens. Motioning for room, he slowly searches the floor. A reporter spots the lens and scoops it up with a forefinger. Kennedy takes out a contacts case and screws it open so the reporter can drop in the lens. But there is a problem. The senator’s right hand is shaking so violently that he cannot hold the case steady. The reporter hovers his finger over the case, trying to coordinate the path of the lens with that of the case—but the case is all over the map, jiggling up, down, left, right. For a second, Kennedy gets it steady and the reporter swoops in—but there goes the hand again, and the case is off, jogging to the right and the left for another few agonizing seconds before Kennedy stills his hand and the reporter drops the lens home, safe. The senator slowly screws the top back on, to the evident relief of a young aide who stands at his elbow, clutching the boss’s bottle of Visine.

I grew up on Capitol Hill, the son of Kennedy Democrats and the child of an age shaped by Kennedy myths, and I remember playing on the Capitol grounds one fall day, watching the young Senator Kennedy stride importantly by. He seemed a great man: tall, broad-shouldered, with a big, deep chest that stuck out like the prow of a ship as he rushed forward. The man in front of me now seems, as the writer Henry Fairlie described him a few years ago, a “husk,” dried up and hollowed out.

But as I watch, a startling thing happens. With a heave of the chest, a deep-lunged breath, a squaring of the shoulders, Kennedy abruptly pulls himself together, becoming suddenly full of himself once more. As reporters press, he expounds on his bill with knowledge and enthusiasm. The Excellence in Teaching Act of 1989 would establish a new National Teaching Corps, like the old LBJ model Reagan killed in 1981, by giving scholarships to students who sign for four-or five-year teaching hitches. Kennedy has spent his political career pushing the religion of the Great Society and he remains devout, even if it often seems these days that he’s no longer preaching to masses of the converted but to two old ladies there for vespers and a guy looting the poor box.

“By God, this is exciting,” Kennedy says, talking fast and sure, jabbing his finger at a reporter. “What we can do with this bill, we can go into inner-city neighborhoods, we can go into places where there is very little hope, and we can say to the young people ‘Become a teacher! Here is an option for your life! Here is a mission for you!’ ”

In his autumn years, Senator Edward M. Kennedy is a man of parts. Sometimes, especially in the mornings, he seems as weak and fluttery as a butterfly. Sometimes, especially in the evenings, he seems a Senator Bedfellow figure, an aging Irish boyo clutching a bottle and diddling a blonde. But he is also a man who can rise above that caricature to stature: the leading voice of what is left of the Left in American politics, a lawmaker of great and probably increasing power, the self-appointed tribune of the disenfranchised, the patriarch of America’s most famous political family and the world’s most conspicuous Democrat. He is in obvious ways tragic. His three brothers and one of his sisters died violently, two by public murder. His cruel marriage ended in divorce, with his wife a recovering alcoholic. He suffers still from a back broken in a near-fatal airplane crash. His elder son lost a leg and almost his life to cancer.

The parts of his life collide with each other like bumper cars, the Teddy of the tabloids giving a boozy shove to the senior senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the sordid tragedies of his unprivate private life darkening the face of the public man.

The Kennedy brothers always perpetuated their own glorious images, but over the years the last brother has built an image—not glorious at all—of his very own. For his hard public drinking, his obsessive public womanizing and his frequent boorishness, he has become a late-century legend, Teddy the Terrible, the Kennedy Untrammeled. In Washington, it sometimes seems as if everyone knows someone who has slept with Kennedy, been invited to sleep with Kennedy, seen Kennedy drunk, been insulted by Kennedy. At Desirée, a private Georgetown club where well-heeled fat men mingle with society brats and party girls, Kennedy is known as a thrice-a-month habitué and remembered by at least one fellow customer for the time he made a scene with his overenthusiasm for a runway model during a club fashion show. In a downtown office, a former congressional page tells of her surprise meeting with Kennedy three years ago. She was 16 then. It was evening and she and her 16-year-old page, an attractive blonde, were walking down the Capitol steps on their way home from work when Kennedy’s limo pulled up and the senator opened the door. In the backseat stood a bottle of wine on ice. Leaning his graying head out the door, the senator popped the question: Would one of the girls care to join him for dinner? No? How about the other? The girls said no thanks and the senator zoomed off. Kennedy, the formal page said, made no overt sexual overtures and was “very careful to make it seem like nothing out of the ordinary.” It is possible that Kennedy did not know that the girls were underage or that they were pages and, as such, were under the protection of Congress, which serves in loco parentis. Nevertheless, the former page said she did find Kennedy’s invitation surprising. “He didn’t even know me,” she says. “I knew this kind of stuff happened, but I didn’t expect it to happen to me.”

A former mid-level Kennedy staffer, bitterly disillusioned, recalls with disgust one (now ex-) high-ranking aide as “a pimp…whose real position was to procure women for Kennedy.” The fellow did have a legitimate job, she says, but also openly bragged of his prowess at getting attractive and beddable dates for his boss. The former staffer also recalls attending a party at Kennedy’s McLean, Virginia, mansion and finding it “sleazy and weird” to see that senator had apparently established as his live-in girlfriend a young woman known to the staff as the T-Shirt Girl, a New Englander who had previously sold tees at a beach resort and who had reportedly met the senator through his son Teddy junior. A waiter at La Colline, a French restaurant near the senator’s office, remembers a drunken Kennedy and a fellow senator recently staging a late-night scene out of The Three Musketeers, grabbing long-stalked gladiolus from a vase in the front hall and fencing “just like D’Artagnan.” At the same restaurant in 1985, Kennedy and drinking buddy Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut did a “Mexican hat dance” on their own framed photographs. According to The Washingtonian magazine, which broke the story, “Kennedy spotted Dodd’s framed photo [on the wall] and shouted ‘Who’s this guy?’ Laughing, he grabbed the photo from the wall and threw it on the ground, breaking the glass in the frame. Dodd, not to be outdone, located Kennedy’s photo and returned the favor.” A new Kennedy photo adorns the wall today, inscribed with “Laissez les bons temps rouler—Let the good times roll.”

Lobbyist John Aycoth recalls a recent afternoon meeting he arranged between Kennedy and several of Aycoth’s potential clients, representatives of an African government. Aycoth says Kennedy “was incredibly rude” and “was drunk…stumbling and slurring his words and red in the face and smelling of alcohol.” One of the visiting dignitaries—a Kennedy devotee who had called on JFK at the White House—presented the senator with a necklace to give to his mother for her forthcoming ninety-ninth birthday. Kennedy’s appreciation? “When we were walking out, he just pitched it on the desk, right in front of them,” says Aycoth. “Didn’t open it. Didn’t say thanks. Nothing.” (After my talk with Aycoth, his associate, former Delaware Congressman Tom Evans, who was also at the meeting, called to say nervously that he had heard what Aycoth had said and that while the account of rude behavior is true, in his opinion Kennedy had been “perfectly sober.”)

Kennedy regularly finds himself in unseemly scenes. One East Coast playboy recalls an incident a few years ago in a popular Palm Beach bar when “a definitely drunk” Kennedy shoved him against the bar and spilled his beer as the senator rushed out the door with a blonde so young, the man at first mistook Kennedy for an angry father come to take home an underage daughter. Dropping in for a 2 A.M. drink in the Manhattan bar American Trash in January 1989, Kennedy reportedly got into a shouting match with an obnoxious (and possibly intoxicated) off-duty bouncer, which climaxed with the senator’s throwing his drink in the other fellow’s face. Unkind Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr writes of Kennedy as “Fat Boy” and says it isn’t really considered summer in Cape Cod until the senator drives on the sidewalk for the first time. Reporters wonder at his behavior. “He really will do anything at all,” says veteran Washington gossip columnist Diana McLelan, “I think he’s mad.” Says Bill Thomas, writer of the “Heard on the Hill” column for Roll Call, the well-regarded newspaper of Capitol Hill, “He’s off the reservation…out of control…He has no compunctions whatsoever.” Thomas likens Kennedy and Dodd to “two guys in a fraternity who have been loosed upon the world.”

Perhaps this seems unfair. From all available evidence, God created our elected officials to drink and screw around. Arrogance, too, is common. So is sexual recklessness (witness Gary Hart, Robert Bauman and Barney Frank); power dements as well as corrupts. But Kennedy’s behavior stands out. The two most infamous Terrible Teddy stories make the point. Both take place at Washington’s La Brasserie, where Kennedy is a favorite customer.

Brasserie I: In December 1985, just before he announced he would run for president in 1988, Kennedy allegedly manhandled a pretty young woman employed as a Brasserie waitress. The woman, Carla Gaviglio, declined to be quoted in this article, but says the following account, a similar version of which first appeared in Penthouse last year, is full and accurate:

It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.

As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.

Eyewitness Betty Loh told me that Kennedy had “three or four” cocktails in his first half hour at the restaurant and wine with dinner. When she walked into the room after Gaviglio had gone in, she says, “what I saw was Senator Kennedy on top of Carla, who was on top of Senator Dodd’s lap, and the tablecloth was sort of slid off the table ‘cause the table was knocked over—not completely, but just on Senator Dodd’s lap a little bit, and of course the glasses and the candlesticks were totally spilled and everything. And right when I walked in, Senator Kelly jumped off…and he leaped up, composed himself and got up. And Carla jumped up and ran out of the room.”

According to Loh, Kennedy “was sort of leaning” on Gaviglio, “not really straddling but sort of off-balance so it was like he might have accidentally fallen…He was partially on and off…pushing himself off her to get up.” Dodd, she adds, “said ‘It’s not my fault.’ ” Kennedy said something similar and added, jokingly, “Makes you wonder about the leaders of this country.”

Giving Kennedy the benefit of the doubt, it’s quite possible he did not intend an assault but meant to be funny, in a repulsive, boozehead way. Drunks are notoriously poor judges of distance, including the distance between fun and assault.

Brasserie II: On September 25, 1987, Kennedy and a young blonde woman—identified by several sources as a congressional lobbyist—allegedly got carried away at a wine-fueled lunch in a private room upstairs and succumbed to the temptations of the carpet, where they were surprised in a state of semi-undress and wholehearted passion by waitress Frauke Morgan. The room, located next to the restrooms, is secured only by a flimsy accordion door, which could not be fully closed. Morgan declined to be interviewed for this story or to comment on or refute the accounts of other sources.

However, waitress Virginia Hurt, who says Morgan described the scene to her shortly after witnessing it, recalls, “He was on the floor with his pants down on top of the woman, and he saw her and she just kind of backed away and closed the door. The girl didn’t see Frauke. So Frauke went downstairs and told the manager and [another waitress] overheard.”

A waitress to whom Morgan spoke just after the incident says, “She told me…she went up to offer them coffee and when she opened the door…there they were on the floor.” Morgan said explicitly, the other waitress goes on, that Kennedy had his pants down and his date “had her dress up,” and the two “ ‘were screwing on the floor.’ ”

Says another waitress to whom Morgan immediately related the episode, “She said she had walked in to ask them if they needed anything else before she gave them the check, and she just sort of found Senator Kennedy on top of this [woman] on the floor and they were sort of half under the table and half out.”

A copy of La Brasserie’s reservation list for that day shows that a luncheon table for two in the back room was reserved for Kennedy. A copy of the check, signed “Edward M. Kennedy,” shows he was billed for two bottles of Chardonnay.

Kennedy’s friends, family and aides are a little skittish about questions on any of this. I asked the senator’s nephew Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy II if the man portrayed so scandalously in gossip columns and tabloids was the Ted Kennedy that he knew. “Hey! Hey,” said Joe in alarm. “I got—I can’t—I, uh, have really no comment on that…There’s no answer I can give you that isn’t going to be explosive, that’s all.” Recovering slightly, he added, “You know, Teddy’s a grown man and he can do whatever he wants.”

When I asked Utah Senator Orrin Hatch—a conservative Republican who nevertheless works closely and likes Kennedy—if he thought his colleague had a drinking problem, I got a similarly telling response. “I wouldn’t comment on that. I wouldn’t comment on that. All I can say is that I consider him a friend,” said Hatch. “I have found [him to be] a vulnerable human being who has a very good side to him. I think he has some bad sides too, but there is a good side to him that I choose to look at.”

Kennedy’s staffers do what they can to suppress unflattering reports. In researching this article (three months, more than seventy interviews, fifteen books, a couple thousand pages of news reports and speeches), I asked for an interview with the senator. After a long, elaborate quizzing by his press secretary, Paul Donovan, and deputy press secretary, Melody Miller, about the nature of the article and the questions I might ask, Kennedy decided to stick to a blanket policy of not doing interviews with “life-style magazines.” Donovan explained: “Frankly he doesn’t do interviews with life-style magazines because they tend to ask life-style questions.”

I later asked Donovan if he or the senator would like to comment on or deny reports of heavy drinking or unusual behavior by Kennedy, and to comment specifically on the accounts of Kennedy’s behavior with the congressional page, the Brasserie waitress and the luncheon date on the floor. Donovan said Kennedy would stick to his standard reply: “It has been and remains his policy never to comment on this sort of endless gossip and speculation.” Donovan did say that the “slight tremor” in Kennedy’s hands is attributable not to drinking but to an inherited medical condition that worsens with age. (Brasserie co-owner Campet also declined to comment on either story involving his restaurant. Asked if he would care to deny the incidents, Campet said, “Did you hear me, sir? I have absolutely no comment.” Dodd’s press secretary did not return numerous phone calls.)

There is not, really, much else that Donovan can say. Kennedy’s personal life has always been a press secretary’s nightmare. During his twenty-two-year marriage, his extramarital affairs were numerous and barely hidden. “He was philandering from the moment he was married,” recalls old Kennedy-family associate Dick Tuck. “Not one-night stands, but not much more than that. Kind of affairs of convenience…I think most normal people might have more than one affair [during a marriage] but not every week, like Teddy. He was always chasing, looking for the conquest.”

Of odd and reckless behavior, there are many examples, including Kennedy’s photographed 1982 nude promenade on the public sands of Palm Beach, reportedly in the presence of several old ladies. The columnist Taki, chronicler of Europe’s idle rich, still calls Kennedy “a boorish and uncivilized philistine” because of an incident in the mid-Seventies. At the time, Taki was a UPI reporter in Athens and a well-known playboy. One day, he got a call from Kennedy’s staffers, who asked him to “round up two dates, American girls preferably,” for the senator and his nephew Joe during their brief visit to the Greek capital. Taki says he showed up at the Hotel Grande Bretagne, where the Kennedys were staying, with his girlfriend and dates for the Kennedys. “Teddy was…pretty much drunk,” says Taki. “In fact, he was really out of it.” Taki says he and the others left the senator and his date, a proper young Connecticut woman who was “very, very impressed with the Kennedys,” at the hotel while they went nightclubbing. Back home later than night, Taki was awakened by Kennedy’s hysterical date. Taki says the drink-befuddled young woman became frightened when she “saw Ted Kennedy coming naked at her,” and adds, “that would scare me too, and I would like to say I am a pretty brave man.”

Biographers first note obvious public drunkenness in the terrible aftermath of Bobby’s murder. In April 1969, flying back from a congressional trip to inspect the living conditions of poor Indians in Alaska, a hard-drinking Kennedy pelted aides and reporters with pillows, ranged up and down the aisles chanting “Es-ki-mo power” and rambled incoherently about Bobby’s assassination, saying, “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby…”

Three months later, on July 18, came the defining moment of Kennedy’s life, when he drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge on the island of Chappaquiddick, sending young Kennedy staffer Mary Jo Kopechne to her death and drowning his chances of ever getting to the White House. This much-explored accident is worth mentioning because the factors surrounding it are the same ones so apparent before and so apparent still in Kennedy’s personal life: a childish belief that the rules of human behavior do not apply to himself, a casual willingness to place himself in a compromising positions with an attractive young woman and, most probably, a reckless use of alcohol.

Kennedy has never told anything close to the whole story of Chappaquiddick, the details of which were covered up by Kennedy associates with the help of compliant local authorities, but he has denied that he was driving drunk, or on his way to an assignation when he turned down the deserted dirt road to Dike Bridge. No writer who has seriously studied the events of the night—and there have been many—has believed him. Leo Damore, whose 1988 book, Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up, is the most thorough examination of the accident, offers strong evidence that Kennedy was probably drunk behind the wheel and probably on his way to a tryst (not, as he claimed, to the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard). Indeed, it is otherwise difficult to explain the actions Kennedy himself called “irrational and indefensible and inexcusable and inexplicable”: leaving the party alone with Kopechne and without his driver; failing to notice that the had taken a ninety-degree turn that led down a very bumpy dirt road away from the smooth asphalt road that led to the ferry; never calling the police for help in rescuing the trapped drying Kopechne but relying solely and clandestinely on his two closest aides; and failing to report the accident until after it was discovered ten hours later.

There have been many theories advanced to explain Kennedy’s behavior, all of which make much of the extraordinarily competitive and amoral atmosphere (especially as far as the treatment of women was concerned) in which the Kennedy boys were raised. As Garry Wills makes clear in his elegant The Kennedy Imprisonment, Ted Kennedy was born and bred to act like the last of the Regency rakes: to be a boor when it pleases him, to take what he wants, to treat women as score-markers in the game of sport-fucking and to revel in high-stakes risks. Joseph Kennedy Sr. flaunted his affairs in front of his wife and children, made crude passes at his sons’ dates and well past his middle years was still chasing doxies. John Kennedy’s mad womanizing—frolicking with nudettes in the White House swimming pool, banging a call girl in Lincoln’s bed, carrying on barely secret affairs with admitted mobster girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner, with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield—was beyond anything Teddy has ever done or, for that matter, anything anybody has ever done. Neither Joe nor Jack was punished by church, state or wife for such behavior and the late-born Teddy, coming into the family when its adult behavior patterns were already mythologized, presumably figured that neither the rules of decency nor of retribution applied to a Kennedy. The boy grew to manhood without learning how to be an adult. His drinking suggests nothing so much as a frat boy on a toot. His actions with women seem to be more evidence, as writer Suzannah Lessard put it in 1979, of “a severe case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed.”

Kennedy’s only real grown-up job has been serving as a U.S. senator, and the greatest men’s club in the world became his second family, giving him the same kinds of special privileges and protections as his first. Michael Barone, coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics, sees Kennedy as a victim of environmentally induced inertia. “In the old days, you could get away with this stuff,” says Barone. “The senator would be at his desk and there would be a pair of high heels sticking out from underneath and you weren’t supposed to notice it. Maybe Ted Kennedy didn’t realize times have changed.”

But arrested development doesn’t explain why Kennedy seems to be getting worse as he gets older. According to a theory currently popular in Washington, such incidents at Brasserie I and II are evidence that Kennedy, freed at last by the knowledge that he will never be president, is simply giving his natural inclinations full vent. In the opinion of Roll Call’s Thomas, “He’s beyond caring about anything since he knows he’s not going to be president…He’s what Kennedys always were, and [as] the only thing that kept them under control was the ambition for higher office…he’s no longer under control.” Says another Washington reporter, “He seems to be going through a second adolescence…I think he realizes his day in the sun is over. Whereas he might have made a pretense of being a good family man years ago, he doesn’t have to pretend anymore…He figures he is never going to run for president again. He has no great ambition beyond being the once almost prince.” In short, with nothing left to lose politically (he’d have to hit the pope and pee on the Irish flag to lose his Senate seat) and long inured to ridicule, he has become the Kennedy Untrammeled, Unbound.

All the theories, however, still leave you wondering. Neither family history nor generational attitudes nor a lifetime as one of the privileged elite nor the liberation of renouncing the presidency fully explain Kennedy’s behavior, although all play a part.

A longtime associate of Kennedy’s thinks the full explanation must take into account one other factor. He says, “The problem with Kennedy theories is that people are looking for psychological Rosetta stones when the answer is a far more common malady. If you forget he’s a Kennedy, it’s textbook, it’s just textbook.”

This man, who asked that he not be identified, is a recovering alcoholic who spoke because he believes Kennedy needs help. He thinks Kennedy’s episodes of disgraceful behavior are due to the simple fact that he periodically drowns his few, faint natural inhibitions in a sea of booze. “He’s what we call in the trade a binge drinker,” says this man, who says he has seen Kennedy drunk enough to lapse into baby talk with his young dates. “We are talking serious binge drinking, really pouring it down.” He adds, “There is an extensive conspiracy effort” among Kennedy’s close friends “to make him face up to the fact that he’s got a problem…There are occasional plots of confrontation and one thing or another to shake some sense into him. The conversation is far more than idle and it involves just about anyone you can think of who has been exceptionally close to him, especially in the last five or six years.” There have been, he says, “hints dropped here and there. You put a hook in the water and see if he bites.”

This man, who has known the senator for many years, says Kennedy goes for relatively long periods without drinking “and then, every once in a while, ka-boom”—a binge triggered by the breakup of a brief affair or a break in work. Is drinking the sole explanation for his behavior? Obviously, no. Lots of men, including some of his fellow senators, got tanked pretty regularly and don’t end up on the floor of a restaurant. A cosseted upbringing, a juvenile nature, a powerful sexual greed, the liberation of putting aside the White House, the arrogance of vanity inherent to a Kennedy, the tragedies of his life—they all play a big part too. But periodic excessive drinking does seem to be the catalyst that brings those forces together and releases them.

Certainly, the anecdotal evidence relating to Kennedy’s drinking suggests relatively long periods of sobriety interrupted by bouts of excessive drinking. Younger son Patrick says his father “has the most disciplined life of anybody I know as far as the seriousness with which he takes his work.” There are “other times,” says Patrick, when he is less disciplined, but “those represent such an infinitesimal part of who my dad is that I get disturbed when people get a misunderstanding of it.” Many who speak of his drinking talk of his ability to hold great amounts of liquor and his discipline about exactly when he drinks. “He can control when he drinks,” says long-time associate Milton Gwirtzman. “He never drinks when he’s working.” Former legislative aide Thomas Susman says he has never seen Kennedy drink except socially at night, and he adds, “I have been at his house as early as six in the morning and he’s up. He may have been slosh-faced until four [but] he’s never staggered in, he’s never had trouble getting started, he’s never had to have a little hair of the dog before he could work…”

On the other hand, eyewitness reports of heavy drinking are plentiful. Washington Times editor John Podhoretz recalls seeing Kennedy, at La Brasserie in 1986, drink a bottle and a half of wine by himself in twenty-five minutes. A recent dinner guest at Kennedy’s home recalls with similar amazement Kennedy’s guzzling three screwdrivers in one twenty-minutes period. “I was chugging to keep up with him,” the guest says. “I’ve drunk with the best of them, and he’s the best I’ve ever seen.”

A former La Brasserie waitress calls Kennedy and Dodd “drinkers’ drinkers” whose demands led management to put a makeshift bar near their habitual table. “They drank so much you couldn’t get to the [regular] bar fast enough,” she relates. In a “standard evening,” she says, each man would knock off half to three quarters of a bottle of hard liquor, then switch to wine or champagne, and sometimes then to after-dinner drinks: “They would [sometimes] stay at the restaurant till three o’clock in the morning, just drinking and drinking. By the time they got up, they could hardly stand.”

A woman in her mid-twenties who dated Kennedy steadily a few years ago also describes the senator as largely controlled, occasionally drunk. It was true, she says, that “when you go out with Chris Dodd, go out with the boys, you do get drunk and so on.” But Kennedy drank little when he was with her, and the couple would often spend the evening by the fire at the senator’s home, reading books or talking. The Ted Kennedy she knew was not the Bad Boy of La Brasserie but “a golden retriever,” a “romanticist” who let her have the last bite of his dessert at night and kissed her good-bye on the forehead in the morning. Yet it is hard to believe that this picture is wholly accurate. At the time this woman was dating Kennedy, she was a fixture on the nightclub scene and a heavy partyer.

But even giving the woman the benefit of the doubt and assuming that she and Kennedy did pass many quiet, contented evenings together, I question whether it would have been that fascinating for the 57-year-old senator to sit cozily around the fire, engaged in conversation with a woman who says that she developed a crush on him largely because they both had “blue eyes and fair hair” and who was surprised to learn that her ex-boyfriend had been the subject of several biographies. I wonder whether Kennedy is even really enjoying any of this anymore.

As the former girlfriend and I were finishing up our talk, she told me of a big party to which she was going that night. “It’s going to be reeelly, reeelly great!” she said. “They’re going to have these drinks called sharks, which are reeelly, reeely fun. You have this plastic shark in your glass and you also have a plastic mermaid and you push the shark and the mermaid together and then pour some red stuff over the mermaid that looks like blood.”

“Grenadine?” I said.

“I think so,” she said.

At what age does it stop being fun and start being hell on earth to spend your evenings with someone who gets reeelly, reeelly excited about novelty cocktails?

The recovering alcoholic quoted earlier thinks Kennedy has passed that point: “He is a very unhappy man personally. He’s very unhappy and lonely [because of] his inability to find someone after his marriage fell apart…Getting laid has long since ceased being fun.”

Fun? A Boston reporter recalls seeing Kennedy on a morning after: “I had to cover him taking part in the Hands Across America thing on Boston Common and, Christ, it was like someone had poured Jack Daniel’s in his hair. It was like he was shpritzing Jack Daniel’s. And he’s holding hands with these two 50-year-old ladies, and it was just really pathetic. You look at the guy and you think, My God, he must be dying for a drink. You think, He’s really killing himself.”

Fun? “He has the kind of personal wealth where he can do just about anything he wants to do,” says Orrin Hatch. “But I wouldn’t trade life with him for ten seconds. I’d rather be poor and in the condition that I’m in than trade with Ted.”

The better part of Ted Kennedy’s life is found, as it is with so many men, in his work and in his children. When Teddy came to the Senate in 1962, inheriting the seat his big brother John had vacated when he was elected president, he was conspicuously only in his youth and inexperience. Twenty-eight years later, his is the fifth-ranking member and the liberal leader of what remains, despite all its current confusion, the most important legislative body in the world.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Congress watcher, Norman Ornstein, only goes a little beyond others when he declares that “Kennedy is going to go down as one of the most significant senators in history, in terms of concrete things accomplished and things put on the agenda that will get accomplished in years to come.” Illinois Democrat Paul Simon calls his colleague one of the “three or four shapers of what happens in the Senate,” and adds, “in terms of moving the agenda of the Senate, I can’t think of anybody who has had a greater impact.” Republican hatch calls Kennedy “the most powerful, effective liberal in the Senate” and says history will view him as “one of the all-time-great senators.”

Even a partial listing of the major bills in whose passage Kennedy has played a part is impressive. Whether you admire them or not, these are the measures that transformed—mostly liberalized—America in our time: the first Immigration Reform Act; the Voting Rights Act and its extensions; the Freedom of Information Act; the Gun Control Act; the Campaign Financing Reform law; the Comprehensive Selective Service Reform Act; the Eighteen-Year-Old Vote law; the Occupational Safety and Health Act; the War on Cancer bills; the recodification of federal criminal laws; the Bilingual Education Act; the Fair Housing Acts; the Age Discrimination Act; the Airline and Trucking Deregulation bills; the Job Training Partnership Act; the South African sanctions; and the Grove City Civil Rights Restoration Act.

Far more than either of his brothers, who were lackluster senators, Kennedy, over the past three decades, has been responsible for changes in the complexion of this country and in the lives of its citizens. He has been an ally of blacks, American Indians, the poor, the sick, the aged, the mentally ill, starving refugees worldwide and immigrants. He has been an outspoken liberal, unafraid to take the controversial positions—on issues such as busing, abortion, gun control, the Vietnam War (late but forcefully), the nuclear freeze and capital punishment—that other senators clearly avoided.

Since Kennedy assumed the chairmanship of the Labor and Human Resources Committee in 1986, upon the Democrats’ regaining control of the Senate, his power has grown markedly and he is now, by all accounts, in the prime of his career. He has become not only the most consistent counterforce to the long-running Republican administrations in pushing for government activism in health, education, labor and science, but has also become adept at building Republican-Democrat, Right-Left coalitions that can ensure passage of compromise domestic-policy legislation. Hatch, for instance, says he “came to the Senate to fight Ted Kennedy.” Yet, because Hatch likes him and trusts him—and because with Kennedy behind it, a bill automatically receives serious attention—he now often joins Kennedy in sponsoring relatively uncontroversial measures.

Kennedy has abandoned the costly Utopian reforms he pushed in the Seventies—such as government-financed universal health insurance and welfare payments that guaranteed an income above the poverty level for all—and now focuses on less-budget-busting programs. He is increasingly successful and increasingly prolific. The 100th Congress (1987-1988) was the best period he or almost any senator has ever had: Kennedy moved more than twenty major pieces of his own legislation through the Senate, including a comprehensive plan to assure medical care, support services and discrimination protection for people with AIDS.

A great part of his legislative strength comes from the fact that he likes his colleagues and they like him. A clubman at heart and endowed with a youngest son’s natural deference, he is as uncommonly decent toward his peers as he is uncommonly indecent toward his lesser. Senator Joseph Biden, the Delaware Democrat who chairs the Judiciary Committee, says he will never forget the way Kennedy treated him during the seven months in 1988 that Biden was recovering from a brain aneurysm. “He would call my home and speak to my wife and offer to make contacts with doctors he thought were good,” Biden recalls. “Once, he got on the train and came to the house in Wilmington, sat up here all day with me, talking. He brought a gift, too—a lovely engraving of an Irish stag.” Much more importantly, says Biden, Kennedy did not take advantage of his associate’s illness and reassert his authority over the Judiciary Committee, which Kennedy had previously chaired.

Another great strength is his staff—the best and probably the hardest-working on Capitol Hill—which numbers about a hundred people, including committee staffers. Kennedy depends heavily on four or five top advisers, while dozens of mid-level staffers work under great pressure to keep churning out the bills. His public appearances are carefully scripted and stage-managed. For committee hearings, Kennedy’s staff provides him with big black briefing books that can run to more than a hundred pages, with an opening statement, detailed questions, background on the issues involved and bios of the speakers he will hear. Moreover, Kennedy has continued his brother John’s habit of gathering experts from Harvard and elsewhere for informal briefings, holding frequent “issues dinners” at his home. No senator has ever had greater access to a wider range of paid and free counsel.

But no matter how excellent it may be, staff work can take you only so far. Much of what Kennedy does every day he must do himself, no matter how he feels in the morning. And you can’t look at his labors without being impressed by his willingness to stick to the tedious daily tilling of the legislative field. Take congressional hearings. Please. As chairman of the Labor and Human Resources Committee and of the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration and Refugee Affairs, and as a member of the Armed Services Committee and of the Joint Economic Committee, Kennedy must chair or attend a couple hundred hearings a year. And while some of them are fascinating, a great many more are dull morality plays. Even more so than life itself, congressional hearings are not one damn thing after another but the same damn thing over and over again. Still, unlike many senators, who are content to make only brief appearances at these hearings, Kennedy often plays an active role even in the hearings that he does not chair.

“He does work at being a senator,” says Michael Barone of The Almanac of American Politics. “And that’s impressive. He could easily sink in a life of alcoholism and do-nothingism. He doesn’t have to do anything to get elected.”

There are times, however, when patience and collegiality do not meet the occasion. When it comes to a clear-cut Left-versus-Right fight, says Hatch, Kennedy “will murder you, he’ll roll right over you…He’ll trample you in the ground and then he’ll grind his heel in you.”

Robert Bork still has Kennedy’s heel marks on his forehead. Forty-five minutes after President Reagan nominated Bork for a Supreme Court seat in 1987, Kennedy was on the floor of the Senate and on the attack: “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 would break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids…”

It was, in the words of Kennedy’s former aide Thomas Susman, “outrageous…pretty tough and pretty early on and pretty judgmental and very aggressive.” Bork recently told me with still-hot bitterness, “There was not a line in that speech that was accurate…It was a series of untruths. I didn’t want police breaking down your door. I didn’t want evolution banned from public schools. I didn’t want to force women to have back-alley abortions. The whole thing was false.”

Even Judiciary Committee Chairman Biden, Kennedy’s close ally and coleader of the stop-Bork forces, says Kennedy’s speech was “technically accurate but unfair” and that it “drew lines in ways that were starker than reality.” Biden says he wouldn’t have made such a speech. But, he admits, he is glad Kennedy did. Both he and ranking Republican committee-member Hatch say that without that speech, and without Kennedy’s aggressive personal lobbying against Bork with hundreds of civil-rights leaders and liberal activists around the country, the candidate probably would have been confirmed.

Kennedy’s role in the Bork fight stems from and illustrates his overarching position in American politics. In a rare moment of irritation with the American Civil Liberties Union, the senator once said, “The ACLU thinks that it defines liberalism in the country. I define liberalism in this country.” He was exaggerating only a little. In the religion of liberalism, Kennedy is the guardian of orthodoxy. He is the voice of the interest groups that define the Democratic Party; the black activists, the trade unions, the feminists, the environmentalists, the teachers’ unions and the perennial progressives.

Kennedy is strong and unswerving in his beliefs because they are personal, rooted not in theory but in an emotional commitment to government activism—a continuation and expansion of the leftward direction in which his brother Robert had been heading before his murder. Milton Gwirtzman, who wrote speeches for both Bobby and Ted, says the latter does not have “an articulated set of principles” that rises to the level of an ideology. “There’s no such thing as ‘Kennedy’s thoughts,’ ” says Gwirtzman. “It’s reactions, gut instincts. And they’ve been bent occasionally, but they have always remained the same.”

The world, however, has changed. For all of Kennedy’s achievements as a senator, there is a strong sense of anachronism about him as a politician. Alvin From, executive director of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, among other critics, says Kennedy’s “soft, cuddly liberalism, his politics of entitlement,” have achieved a viselike grip on the mind of the Democratic Party. And perhaps that is true; as one Democratic National Committee insider says, “It’s not as if we’re all sitting around thinking we’ve got to do more for [Kennedy’s] cause. It’s just that everyone [on the committee] thinks the same way he does.”

But while Kennedy’s politics maybe influential in the party hierarchy, the party hierarchy isn’t influential with the voters—or even with other elected Democratic officials. Says former party chairman John White, “It’s the dilemma of Teddy Kennedy and it’s the dilemma of the party.”

“Kennedy is always invited to speak at the convention, always make a speech in prime time, but when it comes to the general-election campaign, if you bring Kennedy to Texas, you send him down to Rio Grande Valley to speak to the Hispanics,” says political reporter Jack Germond. “If you bring him to Florida, you send him to Miami to talk to the blacks. He is always used exclusively to talk to special interests. And not all of that is related to Chappaquiddick; its is related to issues.”

Patrick Kennedy says his father gets depressed about feeling left out in the cold as the political climate shifts. “He genuinely gets sick when the country doesn’t go in the right direction in his view,” says Patrick. “He gets upset because, you know, he’s trying to change it and he just feels as if he’s run up against the wall sometimes.”

There is a solution available, of course. Kennedy could escape dinosaur status by doing what the oldest male Kennedy is supposed to do—run for president. A lot of people, including many of the aides and advisers close to Kennedy, say he is content in the Senate. But Patrick and his cousin Michael Kennedy, Bobby’s fourth son, say Ted would, in fact, very much like to run for president again. “I think he still says, you know, I could be a better president than these other jokers,” Michael says. “I mean, who else is on the horizon, particularly on the Democratic side?” He says his uncle knows that Chappaquiddick remains “the first question out of the box, so that would make very difficult for him to run on a national level” but that Ted holds out hope that there will come a “backlash” against the reporting of “this personal stuff” that is so damaging to him and thinks “therefore, I’ll be able to run in 1998, or whatever.”

My own guess is that Kennedy does still harbor presidential dreams of varying degrees of seriousness, depending on his mood (he has apparently never accepted Chappaquiddick as the career killer that it was; he seriously considered running in 1984 and 1988, despite the fact that the voters had made their feelings brutally clear in 1980), but ultimately he won’t run. It’s time to sink gracefully into the tar pits; the next chance goes to the next generation.

In the end, dynasty is everything. Joseph Kennedy Sr. is the only man in history who ever consciously set out to make one of his sons the President of the United States of America—and succeeded. The father taught his children that that goal could be won. They have never let it be forgot. To the Kennedys, the White House is the once and future home. It is Ted’s duty to help make sure one of them gets it back. There are twenty-eight members in the up-and-coming generation of Kennedys, and they are coming up fast. Joe II, elected twice to the House, makes no secret of his hopes to step higher. Michael, who succeeded Joe as the head of a Boston-based nonprofit company that sells fuel at a discount to the poor, did not make an expected run for state office last year but says he “would not be averse to serving in politics” in the relatively near future. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, Michael and Joe’s sister, lost in her 1986 bid for a Maryland congressional seat but plans to run again. In New York, crown prince and teen heartthrob John F. Kennedy Jr. is being groomed for a big job—if he can ever pass the bar exam.

And, of course, there are Ted’s own sons. Ted junior, 28, harbors ambitions in Massachusetts. And Patrick, a sweet-natured 22-year-old senior at Providence College, was elected to the Rhode Island Legislature in 1988, despite opposition to his candidacy even within the Democratic camp. After all, Jack Skeffington, the man who had held the seat for nine years, had lived in the blue-collar Ninth District all his life, was backed by the state Democratic Party and was a Kennedy supporter as well. Some raised eyebrows over the fact that young Patrick’s expenditures were the greatest in the history of the state to win one of the $300-per-year jobs: $87,694, or $66 for each of the 1,324 votes he won. And, some people said, the emphasis on the fact that Patrick was a Kennedy was a little naked, what with the kid’s dad and mom and brother and sister and cousins John, Joe and Michael posing for snapshots with everybody at the polling booths on Election Day.

But let them say what they want. They said the same kind of stuff about Teddy twenty-eight years ago, when the family gave him his first job. The family is the thing. The family is everything. No man is a failure if he does right by his children. And even if the senator was a lousy husband, he is, by all accounts, a caring father. Sitting in his district office in Providence, Patrick—a fair, fragile-looking young man, gentle like his mother and with a shy, skinny kid’s way about him—talks about his father. His voice is as soft and as loving as a puppy. “I don’t think I can ever be as giving a person as he has been to me,” he says. “He’s the most important person in my life.” On the wall of Ted Kennedy’s Senate office, prominent among all the pictures of his famous brothers, hangs one of himself and Patrick taken the day Patrick won his seat in the state legislature. Patrick has inscribed on it “To my dad, my friend and my hero.”

“Ted Kennedy never was born to be president or wanted it terribly,” says Milton Gwirtzman. “I think the reason he ran has to do with something his father once said to him: ‘If there’s a piece of cake on the plate, take it. Eat it.’ ”

The last Kennedy had so few choices, really. He was born to be the baby of the family, not the patriarch; the fourth brother, not the only one; the also-Kennedy, not the President Kennedy. When he was a chubby-cheeked little boy, the family was packed with grown-ups. They all went away. Joseph junior died when Teddy was 12. Kathleen died when he was 16. Jack died when he was 31. Bobby died when he was 36. The king himself, Joe senior, died when he was 37.

“To be truly human,” Ted Kennedy once said, “is to shape your own world.” And he has, far more than most men dream of, done just that. He has made laws. He has been at the front of sweeping change, improving the lives of many people. He has helped perpetuate a dynasty. The truth is, however, the world shapes us far more than we shape it. The truth is, the forces of the world—the rules of primogeniture, the warp of genetics and the woof of environment, the killing power of bullets and the grip of alcohol—shaped Ted Kennedy and shape him still. It is the sad irony of his life that while he has wrought his will on the world at large he remains unable still to control his own life. He started out in this world dangling from strings held by his father and his brothers. They’re gone now, but Teddy dangles still, dancing to the echoes of an old and tired tune.

Carrie Fisher on her blind date with Chris Dodd
WASHINGTON POST

Carrie Fisher waited until her sixth book, “Shockaholic,” to share the tale of her infamous blind date with Chris Dodd.

It was 1985 when the “Star Wars” actress, shooting a mini-series in Baltimore, was set up with the junior senator from Connecticut. “Not a handsome man,” writes Fisher, “but he was far from unattractive.” They ended up at a fancy restaurant in Georgetown, where they were joined in a private room by Dodd’s drinking buddy, Ted Kennedy, his date and an unnamed couple from McLean.

The liquor flowed but Fisher, fresh from her first stint in rehab, was sober and subdued. Suddenly, Kennedy turned to her and asked, “So, do you think you’ll be having sex with Chris at the end of your date?”

Dodd looked at her with “an unusual grin hanging on his very flushed face,” writes Fisher. That probably won’t happen, she told them. Why? demanded Kennedy. “I’d have to be truly loaded to just fall into bed with someone I’ve only very recently met,” she explained. “Even if that someone is a Democrat.”
Fisher saw Dodd a few more times; when he ran for president he described their relationship as a “courtship.” “Is that what they call sleeping together a few times?” she writes. Dodd, now head of the MPAA, had no comment.

Pardon Me? | Trump VS….

Trump didn’t even make the top ten in the oldest newspaper in America’s history list of controversial pardons.

  • HEAVY has a state-by-state list of Obama’s pardons and commutations/clemencies.
  • And of course Slick Willy’s list via SOAPBOXIE and the SPECTATOR.

PEW RESEARCH has some numbers:

Despite a burst of pardons and commutations in his last hours in office, Donald Trump used his executive clemency power less frequently than nearly every other president since the turn of the 20th century, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Justice Department data.

Trump granted 237 acts of clemency during his four years in the White House, including 143 pardons and 94 commutations. Only two other presidents since 1900 – George W. and George H.W. Bush – granted fewer acts of clemency than Trump.

His predecessor, Barack Obama, granted clemency 1,927 times over the course of eight years in office, the highest total of any president going back to Harry Truman. Obama’s total was skewed heavily toward commutations (1,715) instead of pardons (212).

Yeah. Trump stands head n shoulders above almost all the rest.

LIE: Mass Shootings “Tripled” After Assault Weapons Ban Ended

Jesse Watters: “Can you guess who’s running these places? Democrats. Democrats want to disarm you during the crime wave they created”

The FEDERALIST notes:

The following photographs illustrate the point. Here is a pre-“ban” AR-15. On the end of its barrel is a two-inch-long attachment that reduces smoke and flash, and underneath its A-frame front sight is another attachment called a bayonet lug.

Now here is what the 730,000 AR-15s made during the ban looked like.

BREITBART notes the WaPo article Watters mentions above:

….Setting aside the question of what an “assault weapon” is, Biden’s claim has been fact-checked by the Washington Post — hardly a conservative outlet — and found to be lacking.

The Post fact-checked the statement, “When we passed the assault weapons ban, mass shootings went down. When the law expired, mass shootings tripled.” The Post reported:

Biden claimed that mass shooting deaths tripled after the law expired. He appears to be relying on a study of mass shooting data from 1981 to 2017, published in 2019 in the Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery by a team led by Charles DiMaggio, a professor of surgery at New York University’s Langone Medical Center. That group found that an assault weapons ban would have prevented 314 out of 448, or 70 percent, of the mass shooting deaths during the years when the ban was not in effect. But the data used in that study has come under attack by some analysts.

[….]

The new mass-shooting database shows that there were 31 mass shootings in the decade before the 1994 law, 31 in the 10 years the law was in force (Sept. 13, 1994 to Sept. 12, 2004) and 47 in the 10 years after it expired. As noted, some of that increase stems from population growth.

Earlier, the Post gave “Three Pinocchios” to the claim that the end of the assault weapons ban led to a rise in mass shootings. It has since revised that conclusion, given new data. “The body of research now increasingly suggests the 1994 law was effective in reducing mass-shooting deaths,” the Post concluded. Still, it left the claim “unrated,” because the evidence is inconclusive.

The claim mass shootings “tripled” after the end of the ban is based on one study, and is speculative at best…..

Here is FACT CHECK .ORG for one example:

….President Joe Biden claims the 10-year assault weapons ban that he helped shepherd through the Senate as part of the 1994 crime bill “brought down these mass killings.” But the raw numbers, when adjusted for population and other factors, aren’t so clear on that.

There is, however, growing evidence that bans on large-capacity magazines, in particular, might reduce the number of those killed and injured in mass public shootings.

A day after the Boulder, Colorado, mass shooting, in which 10 people were killed by a gunman in a grocery store on March 22, Biden spoke in support of two House-approved bills that would expand background checks to include private sales. Biden also returned to another campaign promise on gun control: to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

“We can ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in this country, once again,” Biden said. “I got that done when I was a senator. It passed. It was a law for the longest time and it brought down these mass killings. We should do it again.”

Biden is referring to his work as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee when he sponsored and largely shepherded the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law in 1994. That law, among other things, included an “assault weapons” ban, which prohibited the sale of certain semiautomatic firearms and large-capacity magazines that could accommodate 10 rounds or more. (Existing weapons on the banned list were “grandfathered,” meaning people could keep them.) A sunset provision, however, meant that the ban expired in 10 years, in 2004.

We wrote about this issue eight years ago, when the gun debate was again raging in Congress. At the time, we found that a three-part study funded by the Department of Justice concluded that the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.”

We wrote:

FactCheck.org, Feb. 1, 2013: The final report concluded the ban’s success in reducing crimes committed with banned guns was “mixed.” Gun crimes involving assault weapons declined. However, that decline was “offset throughout at least the late 1990s by steady or rising use of other guns equipped with [large-capacity magazines].”

Ultimately, the research concluded that it was “premature to make definitive assessments of the ban’s impact on gun crime,” largely because the law’s grandfathering of millions of pre-ban assault weapons and large-capacity magazines “ensured that the effects of the law would occur only gradually” and were “still unfolding” when the ban expired in 2004.

Recent Research 

Some things haven’t changed much since then. A RAND review of gun studies, updated in 2020, concluded there is “inconclusive evidence for the effect of assault weapon bans on mass shootings.”

“We don’t think there are great studies available yet to state the effectiveness of assault weapons bans,” Andrew Morral, a RAND senior behavioral scientist who led the project, told FactCheck.org in a phone interview. “That’s not to say they aren’t effective. The research we reviewed doesn’t provide compelling evidence one way or the other.”…..

TUCKER

‘Disarming You Is The Point’: Tucker Slams Biden’s Gun Control Speech


MORE LIES THE MSM FEEDS US


(See more at NEWSBUSTERS)

AMMOLAND joins the fray:

Here are the three big TRUTHS the left is lying about.

  • 78% of mass shooting do NOT use an “Assault Rifle”
  • As a Percentage of the population, whites, and Hispanics are the LEAST likely to do a mass shooting.
  • Gun Control laws have NO effect on mass shootings.

Only 15 of the 67 events involved an “AR patterned” firearm; they are used in less than 22% of mass shootings. Only 22% of all mass shooting used AR style rifles.

2018 Excoriated a Bit (RALLY FOR OUR RIGHTS):

…..For the sake of this investigation, we used the definition put forth by the Congressional Research Service.  The CRS’s website explains that it “works exclusively for the United States congress, providing policy and legal analysis to committees and members of both members of the house and senate, regardless of party affiliation.” The website further explains that the CRS  is a “shared staff to congressional committees and members of congress. CRS experts assist at every stage of the legislative process.” 

DEFINITION USED:

Finally we come to the Congressional Research Service’s definition: “The incident takes place in a public area involving four or more deaths—not including the gunman, the shooter selects victims indiscriminately, the violence in these incidents are not a means to an end.”  It should be noted that CRS breaks up shootings involving four or more individuals as public, familial, and felony (robbery, gang activity, etc).  This is because the motives behind each vary greatly.

To put it simply, congress uses the CRS’s research to develop policy and create laws.

THE LIE

Now that we’re “armed” with the facts we need, lets dissect the statistics being pushed by the media.

The stats used in the news sources cited above stating there have been 307 mass shootings thus far in 2018 are from the Gun Violence Archive.  Okay, let’s look a little deeper into the GVA. The mission statement on their website states it is a “non-profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun related violence in the United States.”

We dug into the website’s “mass shooting” report for 2018. We filtered the list by lowest deaths to highest. Immediately 11 out of the 13 pages were disqualified, as there were between 0 and 3 deaths per incident. That means right away, 287 incidents out of 307 do not qualify as a mass shooting by definition. In fact, 155 of these incidents resulted in zero deaths.  This is unbelievable.

That leaves only two pages to dig through. The most common theme with the remaining list of incidents is that they were primarily either family or domestic violence related. Using the definition used by the CRS, that removes all but six shootings that actually count as a public mass shooting. Yes folks, there have only been SIX mass shootings this year in the United States – not 307.

Here are the six qualifying incidents:

  • February 14, 2018, Broward County Florida (Parkland), 17 dead, 17 injured.
  • April 22, 2018, Antioch, Tennessee, 4 dead, 3 injured.
  • May 18, 2018, Santa Fe Texas, 10 dead, 13 injured.
  • June 28, 2018 Annapolis, Maryland, 5 dead, two injured.
  • October 27, 2018, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 11 dead, 7 injured.
  • November 7, 2018, Thousand Oaks, California, 13 dead, 2 injured.

Six mass shootings compared to 307 is a substantial difference. The media easily plays off the ignorance of the public, taking advantage of the fact that there is not a universal definition of “mass shooting”, and blowing up an issue that, although very tragic, is only part of a larger picture of violent crime, most of which does not involve firearms…..


🧵 THREAD 🧵


And a noteworthy TWITTER THREAD discussing the idea that the United States leads the world in gun violence:

[….]

Oval Office “Decorum” (Bill Clinton)

Dammmmm Greg went there! (ACE OF SPADES hat-tip) Last night Bill Clinton lectured Trump about proper Oval Office decorum. “Decorum” comes from the Latin, meaning “the proper manner of decorating an intern’s face.”

The Popularity of Black Lives Matter

“What does BLM even mean?” ~ The Sage

(It’s “more popular” because people fear being called racist if they don’t genuflect before this political organization) Black Lives Matter may be the single most powerful political party in the United States.

July 2016:

This group is a racist, political cult. Many of it’s people are into the Nation of Islam’s teachings, wrapped up in the Black Panthers [new or old] bow. Their leaders have said that if you are white, just being white makes you racist. The leader of BLM have taken trips to support the Palestinian’s in their anti-Semitism, anti-gay freedoms, etc.

BLM activists and leaders consistently call for a race war, the killing of police officers, and the like, all geared towards white people. And yet Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Bernie Sanders… as well as many Democrat Senators and Representatives and left-leaning groups continue to support and defend them.

Even the BLM radio show has called for a race war and an “open season” on white officers.

One of the best conversations on this topic can be found at the RUBIN REPORT.

(This video is isolated from a MARK LEVIN UPLOAD OF MINE)

MORE

An oldie but goodie canned response:

  • BILL CLINTON: “A few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee,”
  • JOSEPH BIDEN: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” continuing he said, “I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
  • DAN RATHER: “but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.”

Since almost ALL of the Dixiecrats stayed Dixiecrats (only 3-of the 26 Dixicrats ever switched sides, often times 20-years later*), and the KKK type Democrats died of old age or finished their terms in Congress (or actually applied the Bible to their ignorance and changed their ways)… we have a new style of “racism” on the left replacing leftist racist ideology.

For instance: We have a President that went to a church [for 20-years… what if Bush had gone to a similar church?] that sold books in its book store entitled: “A Black Theology of Liberation,” or, “A Black Theology of Liberation.” These books have some quotes I AM SURE you care deeply about since you are against racist ideology:

  • “The goal of black theology is the destruction of everything white, so that blacks can be liberated from alien gods” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.62
  • “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.64

And here is Hitler in Mein Kampf: “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” In this same church bookstore, you could walk in and buy sermons by LOUISE FARRAKHAN.

Remember he is the guy who preaches that the white man was created on the Island of Cyprus 6,600 years ago by a mad scientist Yakub. He teaches that a UFO will put up an invisible wall around America and kill all the white people with fire who reside in that invisible “air wall”. He also teaches that he [Farrakhan was taken up to a UFO and told by ELIJAH MUHAMMAD and Jesus] that he was the “little Messiah”. This same guy was placed on the front cover of the churches magazine 3-times (once with Elijah Muhammad). AND, he was brought in and received a lifetime achievement award at the church. Even Farrakhan’s ex-aid said Obama and Farrakhan’s ties are [were] close.

DEMOCRATS chose a racist to be the keynote speaker at the 2012 Convention.JULIAN CASTRO is a member of La Raza the group CESAR CHAVEZ (founder of the founder of the United Farm Workers [UFW]) said was a SUPREMACIST GROUP. Not only that, but CASTRO’S MOTHER is involved deeply in the MEChA movement. That is the group that wants Mexico to take back the portion lost in the Mexican-American war. These guys/gals ACTUALLY show up in brown shirts.

Many Democrats in the House have open ties to the New Black Panthers as wellCYNTHIA MCKINNEY in fact, when she was in Congress, had them for security.So if you are truly interested in racist ideology, do not worry about all the old and gone Democrats who were racist. Or that DAVID DUKE endorses current Democrats running for office or other leaders in the current KKK vote en large for Democrats —TODAY.

BY ALL MEANS, speak out against it (new Democrats) instead of old Democrats.

* The strategy of the State’s Rights Democratic Party failed. Truman was elected and civil rights moved forward with support from both Republicans and Democrats. This begs an answer to the question: So where did the Dixiecrats go? Contrary to legend, it makes no sense for them to join with the Republican Party whose history is replete with civil rights achievements. The answer is, they returned to the Democrat party and rejoined others such as George Wallace, Orval Faubus, Lester Maddox, and Ross Barnett. Interestingly, of the 26 known Dixiecrats (5 governors and 21 senators) only three ever became republicans: Strom Thurmond [20-years later], Jesse Helms and Mills E. Godwind, Jr. The segregationists in the Senate, on the other hand, would return to their party and fight against the Civil Rights acts of 1957, 1960 and 1964. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower proffered the first two Acts. (URBAN LEGENDS)

(Did you guys/gals comment on this when it happened? So in St Louis they beat up a black man who was handing out buttons and flags as a protest against the runaway out of control federal government. President Obama has said that the “tea party patriots” who have questioned his plan for the takeover of health care by the government are using “mob tactics.” Here is a quick video of Moveon.org, SEIU, and DNC using “mob tactics.” — The Democrat Carnahan packed the event and attempted to prevent the opposition from attending. As the video below reveals, ACORN and SEIU activists also received preferential treatment at the stage-managed event):

The Housing Crisis of 2008 Revisited

THOMAS SOWELL UPDATE

Thomas Sowell discusses how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of the economics and politics of the housing boom and bust.

This is an older topic that was freshly visited by the Sage of South Central (Larry Elder) because of a caller calling him disingenuous. I edit his segment on it — directly below — and add links to many resources for further study. Enjoy, and please, pass along to Democrat friends and family that have a skewed view of this ~ blaming corporations, banks, or Wall Street.

The line-up of video used in the above Larry Elder audio is as follows:

  1. Bill Clinton vs. Barney Frank on Freddie/Fannie
  2. Flashback » Maxine Waters And Dems Defend Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac
  3. How Housing Policy Caused the Financial Crisis
  4. Timeline shows Bush, McCain warning Dems of financial and housing crisis; meltdown

Here is some of the resources I have previously posted on my site — bringing them to one place for the furtherance of putting liberals in their place.

  • AEI Scholar Peter J. Wallison Talks Housing Crisis ~ Larry Elder interviews Peter J. Wallison, a lawyer and the Arthur F. Burns Fellow in Financial Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He specializes in financial markets deregulation.

This is a good montage proving what is being attributed to the Democrats:housing-bubble

Larry Elder on his FACEBOOK notes some of these articles, so I will as well:

  1. This is Not George Bush’s Financial Crisis: Democrats Cannot Evade Responsibility For Much Longer
  2. “Hidden in Plain Sight” ~ Q&A with Peter Wallison on the 2008 financial crisis and why it might happen again

The following are very similar in substance (much of the video used at least). However, it is commented on and reordered a bit to make varying points that differ substantially:

  1. The Financial Crisis: Lets Go to the Video Tape…
  2. Democrats block regulation contributing to the 2008 housing financial crisis

This is merely a caller into the Michael Medved explaining succinctly the issue: Best Call of the Week. Likewise, here is a 30-second rebuttal by Larry Elder of the issue on his radio show: A Quick Rebuff to Freddie Fannie Charge. And finally here is Judge Andrew Napolitano’s speaking to the issue:

I hope this helps people settle old conversations.


Thomas Sowell asks three questions of the left with a claim that it is rare that the answers are readily available. This video frames the housing market crash from 2008 and challenges those on both the Right and Left. When a social policy is adopted and becomes a top priority – asking honest questions is the only way of ensuring you remain objective. The radical left today appears to run into difficulty when those same questions are asked. I certainly don’t agree with all of Sowell’s positions on every topic, but the questions are worthy of being asked.


How the democrats caused the financial crisis: starring Bill Clinton’s HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo. From Carter through Obama… banks didn’t want to be seen as racist, and ACORN w/ Obama pushing for more “affirmative action loans,” caused the Housing crisis.

Here is more from Moonbattery:

Old news, Democrats will scoff. But if you’re like me and lost the equivalent of years of work in the 2008 meltdown, you might still be interested in who was responsible. The truth is coming to light:

In a just-released book, former FCIC [Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission] member Peter Wallison says that a Democratic Congress worked with the commission’s Democratic chairman to whitewash the government’s central role in the mortgage debacle. The conspiracy helped protect some of the Democrats’ biggest stars from scrutiny and accountability while helping justify the biggest government takeover of the financial sector since the New Deal.

Wallison’s sobering, trenchantly written “Hidden in Plain Sight: What Really Caused the World’s Worst Financial Crisis and Why It Could Happen Again” reveals that the Democrat-led panel buried key data proving that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and other federal agencies pushed the housing market over the subprime cliff. The final FCIC report put the blame squarely on Wall Street.

In 2009, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed her California pal Phil Angelides, a long-time Democrat operative, to lead the commission. The fix seemed to be in, and Wallison’s account of the inner workings of the 10-member body confirms it.

See IBD for details on how the phony $10 million probe came up with the predetermined verdict that free enterprise caused the collapse, which in reality was the result of the federal government inflicting Affirmative Action on the mortgage industry.

(Read It All)

Here is a response from a friend on FaceBook:

  • Happened almost 8 years into George W”s watch after controlling both Houses from 95-07. Hogwash and you know it!

My Response (edited):

…He (Bush and the Republicans) tried multiple times to change the now apparent issue…. 17-times to be exact:

2007 August: President Bush emphatically calls on Congress to pass a reform package for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, saying “first things first when it comes to those two institutions. Congress needs to get them reformed, get them streamlined, get them focused, and then I will consider other options.” (President George W. Bush, Press Conference, the White House, 8/9/07)

August: Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Chairman Christopher Dodd ignores the President’s warnings and calls on him to “immediately reconsider his ill-advised” position. (Eric Dash, “Fannie Mae’s Offer To Help Ease Credit Squeeze Is Rejected, As Critics Complain Of Opportunism,” The New York Times, 8/11/07)

[….]

September: Democrats in Congress forget their previous objections to GSE reforms, as Senator Dodd questions “why weren’t we doing more, why did we wait almost a year before there were any significant steps taken to try to deal with this problem? … I have a lot of questions about where was the administration over the last eight years.” (Dawn Kopecki, “Fannie Mae, Freddie ‘House Of Cards’ Prompts Takeover,” Bloomberg, 9/9/08)

Conservative-Republican ideals ~ [if] allowed to be implemented into law would have stopped this. And as Clinton clearly stated:

And as other video from committee meetings show, the first being Republicans bringing to light the issue:

As well as Democrats BLOCKING legislation that Republicans were trying to impose to stop the failure:

Senate Impeachment Is A Political Process (Schumer v. Schumer)

  • “It’s her duty to turn it over. It’s not some mechanism she can control,” – House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (WASHINGTON TIMES)

Like a previous post[s], the Democrats try to control Nature (by legislating Climate Control) and Nature (by saying gender does not exist through legislation). They also wish to control the Constitutional process the Founders clearly laid before us. And in doing so, they (the Democrats) are blowing previous agreed upon rules and their own conduct out of the water — thus proving — Senator McConnell’s understanding (not disproving) that this is a political process:

In the 1999 video clip, Schumer told Larry King:  “We have a pre-opinion [before the trial starts]. This is not a criminal trial, but this is something that the Founding Fathers decided to put in a body that was susceptible to the whims of politics.”

King replied: “So therefore, anybody…can have a pre-opinion; it’s not a jury box.”

Schumer replied that the Senate impeachment trial is “not like a jury box [because] people will call us and lobby us. It’s quite different than a jury. We’re also the judge.”

In other words, Schumer admits that Senators like him can be lobbied and harangued to vote a certain way on impeachment — regardless of whether the burden of proof is met. Why? Because impeachment is a political (not a legal) process.

(BIZPAC)

One comment from my YouTube:

  • How can you tell if a POLITICIAN IS LYING??……… “WHEN THEY START SPEAKING!” DRAIN THE SWAMP! (Deplorable Vet in Tennessee)

Media Predicts Economic Doom for Trump (Patterns)

With economic pundits predicting disaster over the horizon for the Trump economy, Larry decides to compare the doom and gloom to the months prior to the 1992 presidential election, which propelled Bill Clinton to the presidency. Just what were the pundits saying leading up to that election, and what were they saying directly afterwards? How does this parallel the leadup to 2020? Larry answers all these questions and more. He also gives us a peak into a lucrative career path he decided to pass up, despite his obvious talent.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Rewrites Economic History

This is an old media created reality that is often repeated by Lefties. How this is still pushed today — to me — is jaw dropping.

And “The Sage” has written well about this:

‘Honest’ PBS Clinton Documentary Lies About the Economy

….In the first hour, the [PBS] documentary stumbled out of the gate. If it were a racehorse, they’d have to put it down. The whopper we get hit with right away and again and again is this: Clinton inherited a recession — not an economy that long ago came out of a recession. Never mind that 1993 — 19 years ago — is within the living memory of many Americans. Yet we are repeatedly told that Clinton entered office under a full-on economic meltdown.

The narrator says: “Heading into the fall [of l992] with the economy still faltering.”

The narrator later says, “As Clinton took office in the winter of 1993, the economic crisis that had propelled him into office showed few signs of abating.”

Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin adds: “We had had a recession. We had high unemployment. And it was a lot of uncertainty about whether the United States was going to get on its feet again or whether we could be in for a prolonged period of real difficulty. So he came into a very difficult environment.”

Journalist Joe Klein describes Clinton’s first budget battle, in the late summer of ’93, as a gamble “in the midst of a recession.”

And midway through the piece, the narrator informs us that “by the fall of 1994, the economy was growing again.”

This is simply extraordinary, mind-boggling.

Whether Bill Clinton was a good president, whether he deserves the credit for balanced budgets and projected surpluses or whether he should have been impeached are matters about which reasonable people can and do disagree. But whether Bill Clinton entered office “in the midst of a recession” and whether, in the fall of ’92 and the winter of ’93, the economy was “still faltering” and “showed few signs of abating” — these are matters of fact.

The National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge, Mass., is the official keeper of the U.S. business cycle. It defines a recession as “a period of diminishing [economic] activity.” It tracks when recessions begin (a “peak” — the month when a period of economic growth ends and a downturn begins) and when recessions end (a “trough” — the month when the downturn bottoms out and the economy begins to grow again).

Bill Clinton entered office in January 1993. According to the NBER, did he inherit a recession? Not even close. The recession began in July 1990 and ended eight months later, in March 1991 — a full 19 months before Clinton was even elected.

Let’s be charitable. Perhaps the documentary used a different definition of recession. True, some experts use another standard: two consecutive quarters of negative economic growth. But during Bush-41’s last year in office — 1992, the year voters elected Clinton — the economy grew every quarter, averaging 3.2 percent.

But today, nearly two decades after the fact, the PBS narrator solemnly states that “as Clinton took office in the winter of 1993, the economic crisis that had propelled him into office showed few signs of abating” — even though the economy was then on its 22nd consecutive month of positive growth!

Really? “In the winter of 1993…the economic crisis…showed few signs of abating”? Jan. 29, 1993, seven days after Clinton took office, The New York Times wrote, “U.S. Says Economy Grew at Fast Pace in Fourth Quarter: The economy grew at a faster-than-expected annual rate of 3.8 percent in the final quarter of 1992, the strongest performance in four years, the Commerce Department reported today.”

The confusion is understandable. Many in the media suffer from CRAP — Clinton Recession Amnesia Problem. CRAP spares few victims. Take MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, who once said she knows little about economics and, bless her, seems determined to prove it. In January 2009, the month President Obama took office, Maddow said: “Clinton took the oath during an economic downturn [emphasis added], but that was a romper room compared to today’s down-crash.”

In October 1992, as President George Herbert Walker Bush ran for re-election against Bill Clinton, the economy was 18 months into a recovery. But as Investor’s Business Daily noted, 90 percent of the newspaper stories on the economy were negative. Yet the following month, when Clinton defeated Bush-41, suddenly only 14 percent of economic news stories were negative!

Given the media recitation of the false history of the state of the 1992/1993 economy — when Clinton entered office — why expect PBS to get it right?…….

My previous post regarding the PBS “Documentary”


In a great example of how the media guides it’s listeners down a path full of narratives they [said media] wish were true… we find in a touted “honest” Clinton documentary many lies and missteps (Clinton | American Experience). Larry Elder is in his element here as he excoriates the depths of this false narrative. His article is a must read for those interested in this. Near the back-half of the audio Larry offers other media silence on issues surrounding Democrats. They [Democrats] apparently have a no fly zone in regard to honest reporting.

Clinton Foundation Investigation Update (John Solomon)

This is from the Hannity Radio Show as well as Sean’s Fox News Show.

John Solomon has broken two stories that are Yuge!

Some funny comments via my Facebook:

  • Remember the name Andrew Kessel. When he shoots himself 3 times in the back of his head, this is why.
  • While also drowning himself, while driving a car into the only 2″ creek in a 400 mile radius.

More from ZERO HEDGE. (BTW, I am not a fan of Zero Hedge… too much conspiracy stuff. But this story is on the money as it uses good sources):

The CFO of the Clinton Foundation, thinking he was “meeting an old professional acquaintance,” admitted to investigators that the charity had widespread problems with governance, accounting and conflicts of interest, and that Bill Clinton has been commingling business and personal expenses for a long time, reports The Hill’s John Solomon [“Feds received whistleblower evidence in 2017 alleging Clinton Foundation wrongdoing” — https://tinyurl.com/ydy8kzvx).

Clinton Foundation CFO Andrew Kessel made the admissions to investigators from MDA Analytics LLC – a firm run by “accomplished ex-federal criminal investigators,” who have been probing the Clinton Foundation for some time.

Kessel told MDA “There is no controlling Bill Clinton. He does whatever he wants and runs up incredible expenses with foundation funds, according to MDA’s account of the interview. “Bill Clinton mixes and matches his personal business with that of the foundation. Many people within the foundation have tried to caution him about this but he does not listen, and there really is no talking to him.”

MDA compiled Kessel’s statements, as well as over 6,000 pages of evidence from a whistleblower they had been working with separately, and which they filed secretly over a year ago with the FBI and IRS. MDA has alleged that the Clinton Foundation engaged in illegal activities, and may owe millions in unpaid taxes and penalties.

In addition to the IRS, the firm’s partners have had contact with prosecutors in the main Justice Department in Washington and FBI agents in Little Rock, Ark. And last week, a federal prosecutor suddenly asked for documents from their private investigation.

[…]

The memo also claims Kessel confirmed to the private investigators that private lawyers reviewed the foundation’s practices — once in 2008 and the other in 2011 — and each found widespread problems with governance, accounting and conflicts of interest.

“I have addressed it before and, let me tell you, I know where all the bodies are buried in this place,” the memo alleges Kessel said.

[…]

The 48-page submission, dated Aug. 11, 2017, supports its claims with 95 exhibits, including internal legal reviews that the foundation conducted on itself in 2008 and 2011.

(THE HILL)