ORRIN LOVES TEDDY | 1999-08-14
When the Democrats control the United States Senate, Teddy Kennedy (Democrat -- Massachusetts) is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. When Republicans control the Senate, Kennedy is the Ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and the Chairman is Orrin Hatch (Respectable -- Utah).
In 1994, Republicans won the Senate and Orrin Hatch became Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Last year, there was an important bill pending before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Chairman Hatch asked Strom Thurmond what amendments he planned to offer in Committee. Strom replied, "Hell, Orrin, I might as well tell Teddy Kennedy directly as tell you." Orrin gives Teddy anything he wants. National Review had a lead article last year about Hatch's infatuation with Teddy. In a later issue, National Review quoted a POEM Hatch had written to Kennedy. It used language that no heterosexual male should address to another.
What happened was this: When Republicans won control of the Senate in 1994, Teddy Kennedy lost the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee to Hatch. Kennedy decided he had better get in good with Hatch, so he said some nice things to Hatch about how smart and reasonable he was.
Poor little Orrin couldn't believe that a KENNEDY suddenly admired him! He went absolutely nuts.
Poor little pencil-neck Orrin Hatch is a Mormon with an inferiority complex the size of Texas. He is from a poor working class family in Pennsylvania and represents a small Western state. To little Orrin, a KENNEDY, an Easterner and a liberal icon, is very nearly a god.
Little Orrin is an extreme example, but the phenomenon is familiar. We see pathetic little Southern Crawlers who live for some sign of approval from an eastern liberal. In my club, there is a Southern Crawler who tries desperately to get everybody to notice that he reads the New York Times. Every one of us knows a dozen people like him.
Liberalism has totally discredited itself. Liberals have never advocated anything that actually WORKS. The fact that liberalism is still taken seriously is entirely the result of the pathetic servility of little people like Orrin Hatch.
Lake High had his usual penetrating explanation of why there is so much liberalism among newly affluent people in Columbia, South Carolina. As Lake points out, if you scratch a monied liberal in Columbia, you will find a person who is about one generation removed from white trash. His only concern is to prove that he is not a right wing redneck.
By now, with leftism so totally discredited, the only people who feel it necessary to take leftism seriously do so to deal with their own psychological problems. I suggest that we tell them so. The more often we tell them that, the better (See February 6 article, "The Left Repeats, So We Lose").