P.M. Carpenter

When a Titan of any practiced art dies, brooding declarations of an "end of an era" often proceed in a rather overdone way. But, not so in the case of Edward M. Kennedy. They are, to our great misfortune, all too true.

As political historian Robert Caro, author of the opulent LBJ biography, Master of the Senate, told the NY Times with a dramatic sense of irretrievable loss: "Ted Kennedy was a senator out of another, very different, Senate era: an era in which senators who believed in great causes stood at their desks, year after year and decade after decade, fighting for those causes, and educating the country about them" -- an era, added Caro, that at least identified with the incomparable age of Webster and Clay and Calhoun; an era, he finally noted, "that seems all but lost today."

I was eager to overlook this latest contemptibility from the right: there's so much of it, it's impossible to keep up, and besides, one's passable mental health requires frequent vacations from pseudoconservatism's mounting, not to mention virtually interchangeable, offensiveness.

But then, yesterday, I went and did a foolish thing: I peeked at a Politico piece all too suggestively, seductively titled, "Not all Kennedy critics hold fire," the despicable contents of which only refueled my disgust at the previous day's briefest of "research."

One of the many fascinating dimensions of the health-care debate has been the strained diplomatic relations between President Obama and grassroots progressives, a precisely unknowable but undoubtedly significant percentage of whom have by now advanced, even, from strained relations to manifest hostilities.

Not that fascinating, you say? Well, it is when considering an additional dimension of this rift: moderate conservative voices, such as the NY Times' Ross Douthat, seem to sympathetically comprehend the political realities hovering over health-care reform better than many progressive voices, such as the NY Times' Paul Krugman. And in my opinion, that -- and not any real policy differences -- is one underlying cause of the Obama-progressive rift.

It was about three years ago and I was driving somewhere in the Midwest, passing the time by listening to some despicable talk-radio host musing despicably about Ted Kennedy. Why was he even permitted to serve in the Senate? the host wanted to know. How could his colleagues tolerate shaking his hand or even being in this drunken killer's presence?

I exaggerate not. That, nearly 40 years after Chappaquiddick, was the kind of prattle that obsessively convulsed the far right. The talk-radio host's listeners soon chimed in; all had a merry and quite satisfying time.

I briefly wondered if their merriment wasn't some sort of psychological compensation for having one of their own in the White House at the time, a former drunk who by then had heedlessly managed the senseless slaughter of about 4,000 Americans in some vast overseas desert, but I doubted their capacity for ever connecting so much as two dots.

Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's big-media guy and thus, many think, conflicted host of CNN's "Reliable Sources," was in a terrible funk yesterday.

It's these "death panels," you see, which his colleagues in mainstream journalism have tried mightily to debunk -- "telling Sarah Palin, in effect, you've got to quit making things up," as Kurtz characterized the showdown -- "but it didn't matter. The story refused to die." The sorry result: Last week, nearly half of all respondents in an NBC News poll believed in the very real possibility of euthanizing Star Chambers with Aunt Bessie in their sights.

Here's a short passage that maybe helps to explain why: "Even when [news organizations] report the facts," wrote Kurtz, "they have had trouble influencing public opinion."

Did you catch that? Even when they report the facts, as though reporting the facts has become some sort of noble, experimental enterprise within the otherwise (ab)normal course of mainstream journalism, for which Kurtz expected, I guess, awe-inspired applause and instant civic snap-to-it-ness.

Most every competent history written on the straitjacket of our catastrophic involvement in South Vietnam has stressed one strapping contribution over others: We simply allowed ourselves to be sucked into the muck, little by little; it was less a matter of conscious descent and "situational awareness" than blind bureaucratic incrementalism, adding a little here and a little more there -- that little extra something the previous administration had failed to add -- always with a kind of ignorant confidence that that could complete the job, but never from a wholesale, blank-slate reassessment.

In short, as prisoners of a blinkered worldview, we poured good after bad. And yesterday, CNN's "State of the Union" was like a flashback -- a real bad trip. Host John King played for our ambassador to Afghanistan, retired Lieutenant General Karl Eikenberry, a video clapboard of previous interviews in which the general was bursting with optimism and good cheer.

Adam Brandon, a spokesman for the dirty-monied FreedomWorks, has a grand old time of historical interpretation when rationalizing his organization's human puppetry of contemporary town hall protests:

"You go back to the original Boston Tea Party, and I find it highly unlikely that you had 50 guys dress up like Indians, show up at a boat, bring the right tools, and then leave in an orderly fashion without any kind of organization," he said.

He's right. The original tea party was indeed an organized, though not very "orderly," affair. But what he omitted is that the Boston Tea Party was fomented by elite smugglers involved in the black market, who not surprisingly objected to a competitive cut in British taxes on imported tea -- not, as most American schoolchildren are taught to believe, an increase -- and executed by impressionable rabble-rousers so intoxicated on sponsored rum that more than a few were lights-out before they could finish their happy vandalism.

In short, the Boston Tea Party was this budding nation's first "corporate" con job of the dupe-able masses, which the well-funded and manipulative likes of FreedomWorks carries on.

I'm sure, at some point and probably numerous ones in the past, you've been asked a simple question by a small child about politics, a question about some term the child has just heard on the news, say, "the House." Is that like our house? the child inquires.

You smartly determine to keep your answer short and blissfully relevant to your auditor's level of comprehension; yet before long, you find yourself swimming in a hopeless explanatory morass of representative democracy; redistricting; the importance of state legislatures and political control of the state house -- oh Christ, another one?; the underlying corruption of corporate contributions and the urgency of public finance; and maybe even Speaker "Uncle" Joe Cannon's insufferable tyranny that, praise be, came to a rebellious end early last century.

The child, of course, wandered dazedly to the kitchen at "representative demo...." You screwed it up, big time; you forgot the essential component of "KISS," despite your initial determination to stay the course of short and simple.

"I really reject the notion that the American people oppose [health-care reform] because somebody" -- I liked that, a lone "somebody" -- "on the Republican side has deliberately spread misinformation about the plan," said the Senate's minority whip, Jon Kyl, on Tuesday.

That was amusing enough. But he went on to add, "In this democracy, there is no way voters can be fooled to this extent."

When I first read that addendum, I naturally thought he was referencing electoral gullibility, which is, after all, a GOP specialty, since the GOP is to electoral enlightenment what subtropical botany is to post-expressionist art.

Yet is soon occurred to me that Sen. Kyl, like a criminal returning to the scene of the crime, was, out of some deeply insecure and twisted need, actually referring to his original statement: in effect, "There's no way anyone is going to believe that I believe what I just said."

Uh-oh. They, the Republicans, God love 'em, have gone and poked the bear.

In most Democratic administrations this sort of public admonition would be standard operating procedure, but for Obama's young team, it's a seismic breakthrough: "The (m-f-ing) Republican leadership," charged chief of staff Rahm Emanuel yesterday, "has made a strategic decision that defeating President Obama's health care proposal is more important for their (m-f-ing) political goals than solving the (m-f-ing) health insurance problems that Americans face every (m-f-ing) day."

Ah, "a return to normalcy," as Warren G. Harding once neologistically put it: in this case, the White House and Congressional Dems on one side, the GOP on the other, with no pretensions of bipartisan cooperation or common purpose, because, simply, there isn't any. There hasn't been all along.