Kennedy Senate seat brings issue of American royalty into play

by Kay B. Day

Statue of Liberty photo snapped from the window of the plane as we headed to NYC. [Kay B. Day]The United States was formed to throw off the mantle of monarchy, yet we have established an internal monarchy in spite of ourselves. With the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), all eyes are on a replacement.

Kennedy, despite controversy over his direct actions contributing to a young woman’s death at Chappaquiddick, stayed in politics long enough to push statist policies integral to many of our fiscal and social problems today. Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, a Democrat, announced on Monday a special election for January to determine Kennedy’s successor. But Patrick, in a blatant political maneuver, wants to appoint an interim appointment and to do that he needs state law changed. Again.

Democrats already changed the law, in 2004, to accommodate Sen. John Kerry. Dems didn’t want Gov. Mitt Romney, a Republican, to be able to appoint Kerry’s successor when he ran for president.

That the people of Massachusetts have apparently decided to entrust major power to a single family says much about their political values system. It’s useful to note Seymour Hersh’s account of patriarch Joe Kennedy’s successful push for Jack Kennedy into Congress. The younger Kennedy sought the seat his grandfather had held. In the classic, ‘The Dark Side of Camelot,’ Hersh wrote about Kennedy’s chief campaign adviser, Joseph L. Kane, describing the adviser as, “a hard-nosed Boston political operative.”

Hersh continued,

“Kane’s political theory was very simple…It takes three things to win: the first is money and the second is money and the third is money. One primary rival was paid $7,500 to ‘stay in or get out,’ depending on how the race was going. Yet another rival was neutralized when Kane paid to have someone with the same name enter the primary, inevitably confusing voters and splitting the vote.” [pg.42]

With bills like HR 2454, Waxman-Markey (aka Cap and Tax), and healthcare legislation like HR 3200 looming, Patrick quite naturally would like to serve the statist agenda by hand-picking an interim senator. A cursory viewing of the monumental coverage given Kennedy’s death by all major networks showed Democrats and Republicans praising a politician many of us did not admire. Somewhere in the back of my mind as I watched a praise-Kennedy moment the phrase, ‘The King is dead,’ loomed. I imagined the political players lining up, the back room deals, the desperation of a party hoping to maintain absolute control of the ever-expanding federal government. I told myself I am lucky I don’t live in Massachusetts. Then I remembered my Florida senators, neither of whom has represented fiscal conservative interests.

Florida’s governor just appointed a senator to replace Mel Martinez (R). The Orlando Sentinel described George LeMieux as Crist’s “closest and most loyal adviser and political guru. Lemieux ran Crist's 2006 campaign for governor.” Crist faces challenger Marco Rubio in the GOP primary to determine who will run against a Democrat for the seat in 2010.

Families like the Gores, the Dodds, the Clintons, the Bushes and others have established virtual royalty within the American political system, and the practice has led us to an oppressive centralization of government today. The latest loss of freedom relates to garage sales. The Kansas City Star advises those eager moms hoping to make a few bucks on used items, “You could be breaking a new federal law. As part of a campaign called Resale Roundup, the federal government is cracking down on the secondhand sales of dangerous and defective products.”

Whatever happened to, “Let the buyer beware?” Whatever happened to personal responsibility?

We can imagine the startled expression on a young mother's face as Homeland Security sweeps her garage sale.

Pundits, many sympathetic to the power of the Democratic Party, often sneer when they see protesters with signs stating, “Take our country back.” Government and media have fornicated, so to speak, for as long as the nation and media have existed, but over the last decade, media has served the statist party in a manner relative to third world countries where dictators control all expression.

I can’t ignore the irony in our current political climate. In a free nation of people who sacrificed lives and treasure to create a country where people hold unprecedented freedoms, where we threw off the yoke of monarchy, we have come full circle. We have created our own monarchy, a monarchy that has thrown a blanket of repression on the free market, and we will pay a present and future price for the errors of our ways.