"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit in segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of million of citizens." -- Sen. Edward Kennedy, floor of the U.S. Senate, 1987.
I'm all for remembering a man's good qualities upon his death. But not at the price of ignoring—and denying—history. Yet that's just what David Shuster did during today's 4 PM hour on MSNBC when he claimed that Kennedy "didn't dabble in small personal attacks." This of the man who invented the dark political art form of "borking."
DAVID SHUSTER: Ted Kennedy, unlike so many politicians of this day, he didn't dabble in the small stuff, the petty personal attacks: that was not him. And again that's why I think so many people are feeling so sad, not only for the loss of him but for the loss perhaps of a political era.
I suppose you might argue that, technically speaking, Shuster was right. Kennedy's leading of the assault on Robert Bork wasn't a "petty" personal attack." It was a huge, and hugely unfair, one.
Note: Scott Whitlock earlier noted another example of the MSM perpetrating the fiction about Kennedy eschewing hardball politics.
