First, the Gods laugh last: Kennedy’s Death Raises Issues of Succession - NYTimes.com

But the effort to find a quick replacement for Mr. Kennedy may prove complicated. In the week before his death, reaction in Boston to his request ranged from muted to hostile. The state’s Democrats found themselves in the awkward position of being asked to reverse their own 2004 initiative calling for special elections in such instances.

Until that year, Massachusetts law had called for the governor to appoint a temporary replacement if a Senate seat became vacant. But when Senator John Kerry, a Democrat, was running for president in 2004, the Democrat-controlled State Legislature wanted to deny the governor at the time — Mitt Romney, a Republican — the power to name a successor if Mr. Kerry won. The resulting law requires a special election within 145 to 160 days after the vacancy occurs.

Kennedy, of course, was a prime mover behind the 2004 change, which was done for reasons of naked political advantage.

So, where does this leave us?

Well, the Mass legislature will be under a lot of pressure, but if they don’t make it unavoidably clear just what a pack of self-serving gibbons they really are, we’ll be well into the run up to the 2010 elections - somewhere in January of next year - before a successor to Kennedy is able to take office, and there is at least an outside chance that successor might be a Republican of some sort.

By then, Obama will also be well into trying to cram amnesty for illegal aliens and cap-and-tax down the Senate’s throat as well as socialized medicine. Many Senators will not want to face their electorates after voting for these things.

So for the next few months, everything rests on the GOP’s willingness to remain united in voting “no” on Obama’s programs. No compromises, no “negotiated settlements,” and especially, no crossover votes from RINO senators like Olympia Snowe or any of the other of the Gang of Traitors currently working on passing some form of socialized medicine in concert with their true Democrat conspirators.

We must terrify them. We must make them believe that even if they aren’t running next year, they will become pariahs in their own party, friendless, fundless, and shunned, stripped of honors, powers, and committee positions if they break ranks.

In the meantime, the Democrats (and the media) will try to pass socialized medicine on Teddy Kennedy’s corpse, much as they rammed through the Great Society’s socialist programs on the body of John F. Kennedy. They will make an attempt to deify Kennedy, turn him into a shining figure worthy of memorializing with the passage of “his most favored cause, socialized medicine.”

So, while I would normally just sigh with relief and let him go, for Ted Kennedy I’m going to make an exception. I will fight the Democrats’ attempts to build him into a mythical figure by pointing out the truth - that he was a cowardly, drunken, murderous, scheming, socialist, opportunistic scumbag and a disgrace to the memory of his elder brothers, both of whom, for all their faults, were far, far better men than he was or ever would be.

He no more deserves a memorial than any other smarmy, drunken loser. You wouldn’t want your sons to grow up to be like him. So why would you build a pedestal for him to stagger up onto? Especially when it won’t even be Kennedy’s name on the memorial - it will be Obama’s.

UPDATE: Already, every MSM channel I look at, and every MSM editorial I read, is deep into the process of lionizing Kennedy, of turning him into a plaster saint. So I see no reason to wait to combat this purely political process out of some misplaced notion of “respect for the dead.”

The left is doing everything it can to politicize his death, from Obama with this morning’s maudlin “Ode to Teddy,” to carefully selected MSM interviews with socialist Democrats like California’s George Miller, who is already blubbering about Saint Teddy’s “great concern for the health care of Americans,” or somesuch. So I’m off to look for interviews with Mary Jo Kopechne’s family to see what their opinon of “Saint Teddy” might be.

You remember Mary Jo, don’t you? She’s the young woman Teddy left to die a slow death by drowning in a shrinking bubble of air in the submerged automobile that Teddy, while blind drunk, drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick.

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