Ellen Goodman, Boston Globe

February 2, 2008

Ellen Goodman

The Boston Globe

135 Morrissey Boulevard

Boston, MA 02125

RE: Why I know you are not a Catholic – A poke in the eye take on your typical “non-malodorous fecal matter” hagiography on the Kennedy louts.

Ms. Goodman.

I know it is the season of ‘change’ but it is a centuries old tradition in the Roman Catholic Church that someone has to die before he can be declared a Saint. It will be a while before Liberation Theology gets to that one.

Further, there is an adversarial process involving a person known as the “devil’s advocate”. His job is to present evidence why the chosen one should not become a saint. Mary Jo Kopechne is still dead. I guess that means that Ted the Tosspot still can’t walk on water.

My Saturday morning ritual, one steeped in ancient lore, I make supplications to the Gods to both increase and speed up Global Warming. It involves animal sacrifice, a

lesson well learned from the Greeks. [As an aside I add that I have finally found a good use for manatees.]

Some 13 centuries after Christ walked the earth there was an upward spike in temperatures in Europe. Unlike this year’s version of Luddites, modern American Liberals all, good things happen when the temperatures rise. More land becomes arable. People eat better. They become smarter. We got the Renaissance.

It’s been more than 13 centuries since the peace loving Mohammed walked around the desert. Maybe it’s time for a WOG Dante. It couldn’t hurt. I wonder how “Half way through my journey I found myself in the dark wood of error” sounds in Fuzz-Wuzzy?

Your column disturbed the harmonic convergence of my supplications to the Gods. Its only saving grace was that it contains all of the head up your ass, gravity defying, “My favorite color is plaid”, “May I have some more ‘rainbow stew’, please”?, and thank God for all those conveniently located memory holes down into which we can toss those troubling facts questioning persiflage laden ca-ca nostrums of modern American Liberalism.

Your first paragraph attributes “wryness” to Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the former Lieutenant Governor of Maryland. Impossible. The woman is dumber than a pallet of snow tires. Blue crabs in the Chesapeake cheered when she was elected. It was a toss-up between them and oysters for dumbest citizen of Maryland. She made it a 3 way race. You may wish to view the video tape of her after the Baltimore Ravens won the Super Bowl. Keep her away from sharp instruments and heavy machinery. If you were to ask her what color an orange is you would have to make it multiple choice.

You talk about Teddy, AKA Senator Suet, as if his shadow need but pass over the halt and the lame and they’ll be headlining next week on “Dancing with the Stars”.

Not so. Not so.

The man is a moral slag heap.

“We all get to pick and choose the

pieces of history

that please our current appetite.”

The Miami Herald

Today

You

Clio is deeply offended.

What you describe may make for interesting viewing in the same way that afternoon TV is interesting. It’s like having meringue for your entrée followed by whipped cream. Nourishing they’re not.

Herodotus, Thucydides, and Gibbon will shortly be storming the Boston Globe, the last refuge of Dunderheads, with vengeance as their aim. Your unpardonable sin, the watchword of modern American Liberalism, is “eclectic indignation”. That, plus your disdain for the “permanent things”, makes you a creature of feelings rather than a creature of thoughts.

You seem to have forgotten, most conveniently, that John Kennedy ran in 1960 on 2 basic issues.

#1 – The missile gap

#2 – The economy

As to #1 and, lest we forget, the President was Eisenhower. He led 10,000,000 in battle in Europe. 11 months and 2 days after he landed in France Germany surrendered. All he had to say was that he would “go to Korea” when he was running in 1952 and the Gomers in North Korea and their handlers in Moscow decided that the game wasn’t worth it.

Is it conceivable that he would let his country slide into peril?

As to #2 Kennedy’s solution to the economy was to cut taxes. That he benefited his father who was paying taxes at a 90% rate may have been a conflict of interest there is no doubt. The other side of the coin is that it worked. Many, many poor people benefited by taking part in the greatest anti-poverty program of all time: a job. In case you haven’t noticed it works every time it is tried.

His inaugural address told the world that we would “pay any price and bear any burden in defense of liberty”. He told us in the campaign that Quemoy and Matsu were defensible because “any place is defensible if free men so choose”. You may wish to Google Quemoy and Matsu.

It is good that children “remember with advantages” a dead parent. Before he became the 20^th century’s Saint Francis of Assisi his first job as an attorney was as Counsel to Senator McCarthy. That was Joseph of Wisconsin, not Eugene of Minnesota. The firs thing he did as Attorney General, a job for which he had no qualifications, was to wire tap and bug Martin Luther King afternoon romps to the cheating side of town.

Perhaps you, as a big media person, could find out, now that the 20^th century is past, if any of these nasty snots ever went to a public school or ever had an honest to goodness show up at a time certain and let someone know that you are there job? If any of them ever had job find out if they ever belonged to a union.

It is an inconvenient truth but facts are hard things.

Camelot and Utopia had one thing in common.

Neither was here.