The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tell us something ugly about American public life.

There may be many things wrong with the United States but only a blind fool who hasn't been paying attention for the last twenty years would hold up Europe as the alternative.

Freedom is messy. In free societies, people will fall through the cracks - drink too much, eat too much, buy unaffordable homes, fail to make prudent provision for health care, and much else. But the price of being relieved of all those tiresome choices by a benign paternal government is far too high. Big Government is the small option: it's the guarantee of smaller freedom, smaller homes, smaller cars, smaller opportunities, smaller lives.

Once you accept you're a child in the government nursery, why shouldn't Nanny tell you what to do?

Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states' rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days.

We are the source of our problems not mysterious sinister foreigners overseas.

"Moderate" Republicans such as Arnold Schwarzenegger like to boast that they're fiscal conservatives and social liberals. But the social liberalism always ends up burying the fiscal conservatism.