Kennedy's Legacy? The Culture of Death.

Universal healthcare was Kennedy's crusade. A terrible idea for any government, and like all terrible ideas, its roots are in the best of ideas: man's moral duty to his fellow man. But Marxism was rooted in the same noble idea, at least ostensibly, and it's nothing if not hell on earth. So common is this sense that there is a cliche for it: "The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

The man would never be president, but he was still one of the most powerful men in America. He was never to be the resident of the White House, but he influenced it. And he had a crusade. Suddenly, the wife of a president -- Hillary Clinton -- took up the crusade. Did Kennedy, wielding his tremendous power, offer her something to make his dream, his crusade, a reality? Did he offer to make her president? Was he that powerful?

And when she failed, and he backed Obama, did he anoint the Young Nobody from Illinois -- the man least likely to be president of anything -- his proxy to make his dream of universal healthcare a reality? And all the other pro-abortion Catholics in the administration, were those not also Kennedy proxies? And was the hurry to get the draconian legislation passed, as Ted Kennedy was diagnosed with terminal cancer, a coincidence? Is there any such thing as a coincidence, where power is at work?

Ted Kennedy, we learned, "loved to joke about Chappaquiddick." Imagine that. It was on Chappaquiddick Island that a young, spoiled scion of a powerful family took a young girl out for ride one night, drove his car off a low bridge over shallow water, and left her to drown in it (it is said that she actually suffocated). He joked about that.

To be able to joke about such a thing -- a death of young girl, at the hands of a spoiled rich kid who intended to be the president of the United States some day, and therefore might have had a motive, under certain circumstances, if he were chillingly pragmatic -- is it not a mark of contempt for human life?

This brings us back to the Crusade for Universal Health Care. The sum and substance of this effort is a bill also marked with contempt for human life, with its scientific terms and formulas and arguments about who is most productive and who is not, and who will be denied medical care and who will not. Just reading anything by Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, the intellectual firepower behind the "complete lives system" -- a "system" designed to prioritize medical care according to cost to the government, not individual need -- is a chilling experience that would be unbelievable if it weren't right there in black and white.

Kennedy's Crusade -- yes, it's even been suggested that it be renamed from "ObamaCare" to "KennedyCare" -- what was its animating spirit? Was it that fearful master, the tormented conscience? Or was it merely ambition, focusing on the closest thing to the presidential power that was almost his destiny? Or was it both? Was he trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his country and the Church, and at the same time prove that he was "presidential" after all?

Whatever it was, it has departed. That contempt for human life that made Kennedy laugh, and which was the defining characteristic of his life's work, no longer animates him.

Bury government healthcare, and the culture of death, with Ted Kennedy.