Lest anyone think that the title is referring to the corrupt, but hopefully-soon-to-be-ex-Senator from New Jersey, no.

Apparently Teddy Kennedy stopped sandwiching waitresses long enough to bloviate on the Senate floor against continuing the war (I say continuing, Ted, because it never really ended, since he’s gone back on every jot and tittle of the peace agreement that he signed in 1991, and we’ve been bombing him with some regularity ever since, including just the past couple of days).

I just heard excerpts of it, but apparently, if we go in, it really will be the Mother Of All Battles this time for sure. It will be street by street, house to house fighting, and we’ll lose a battalion of troops every day. There will be oceans of Yankee blood flowing across the desert, and shrieks of agony such as have never assaulted the ears of the world, as we fight all the untold legions of brave, staunch and determined defenders of the Supreme Leader, Beloved Torturer And Gasser Of His People, Saddam Hussein.

It being his first language, he delivered the speech in English, but I’m convinced that it would have been more poetic and appropriate if he’d left it in the original Arabic.

Assuming, just for the sake of argument, that there’s anything at all to any of this absurd lunacy, what in the world has happened to the Kennedys? What happened to the notion of “bear any burden, pay any price” so eloquently stated in his brother’s inaugural address?

The warbloggerwatchers like to call anyone who hasn’t served in the military, yet sadly recognize the need for war, “chickenhawks.” Is there some converse to that bizarre notion? If someone like Ted Kennedy calls for peace, does it require that he has never squeezed his thick, pasty white thighs into a size XXX set of camos? Is it his lack of military experience that so qualifies him to screech hysterically and querulously about the brave Iraqi army (the one that was surrendering to Italian journalists just a few short years ago), before whom our men and women in the military should apparently tremble? If so, then perhaps the Kennedys are indeed the ones to whom we should look for military guidance. Has any member of the Kennedy clan served in the military, this side of WWII?

I’d like to say that it’s time for the torch to be passed to a new generation of Kennedys, but judging by the disaster that is the Kathleen Kennedy Townsend campaign, I suspect that it’s going to have to skip a generation or three before it finds anything worthy of its predecessors.

The good thing about this, of course, is that it continues to expose the widening fissure between the new San Francisco Democrats (as exemplified by the latest incarnation of Albert Gore, Jr.) and those members of the Democratic party who are concerned about defending their nation, and maintaining some semblance of political influence. Bloviate on, in whatever language you want, Ted.