Wrong on So Much and The Man Who Killed National Health Care
Who is this one man?
Ted Kennedy:
More Kennedy foul balls:Jacoby's summary of Kennedy's foreign policy legacy is startling:
Abroad, he failed to take seriously the stakes in the Cold War. “Today, with the exception of East Germany, Russia has no more satellites,’’ he wrote in 1968, the year Soviet tanks invaded Czechoslovakia. He hailed Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet dictator, as “a warm individual . . . completely committed to peace.’’ He fought to cut off aid to South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1975 - aid that might have prevented a communist bloodbath. In recent years he was willing to consign millions to Saddam Hussein’s tyranny, opposing not only the 2003 liberation of Iraq but even the 1991 campaign to undo the occupation of Kuwait.On domestic affairs, Kennedy used most of his influence promoting ways to spend other people's money. While Kennedy has been hailed this week for his courage, in politics, being a big spender is courageous only to the extent of sometimes exposing one to being voted out of office, which would have caused no meals to be missed in Kennedy's household. As for the issue with which he is most closely associated, in 1971 he missed a chance to provide health insurance to virtually all Americans when he opposed President Nixon's national health insurance plan. His subsequent efforts amounted to de facto acts of expiation for failing as a young man to exhibit the bipartisan temperament for which he being so fulsomely if selectively praised today. The thing is, 38 years ago, he actually could've pulled it off. So whose fault is it that 43 million Americans remain uninsured?
The episode of which Robinson reminds us had been revealed many years earlier and was largely ignored by the media at the time, perhaps because the fall of the Soviet Union obviated the salience of a senator’s by then eight-year-old attempt to undercut the foreign policy of a democratically elected president. But the brazenness of this act galls nonetheless, not least because it is so discordant with the behavior of Ted’s brothers, staunch anti-Communists both. As we contemplate the legacy of Ted Kennedy this week, this event should certainly rank highly in our collective assessment.