According to the Drudge Report, today Senator Kennedy, in endorsing Senator Obama for president, said this:

Through Barack, I believe we will move beyond the politics of fear and personal destruction and unite our country with the politics of common purpose.

These are very nice sentiments by Senator Kennedy. I, too, hope we move beyond the “politics of fear and personal destruction,” which the Clintons have done so much to advance. But there is that small matter of Senator Kennedy’s own history — and in particular, his attack on Judge Robert Bork in 1987. Senator Kennedy, you’ll recall, said this about Judge Bork after Bork was nominated by President Reagan to serve on the Supreme Court:

Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, children could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

This was a vicious smear and a landmark moment in modern American politics. If the Left is interested in tracing the etiology of the “politics of fear and personal destruction,” they might begin by focusing on the remarks by Senator Kennedy. It changed politics in this country in a terrible and durable way. And it was not an isolated moment. Senator Kennedy has spoken some of the most divisive and vitriolic words that have emerged from the upper chamber of Congress. It was Kennedy, for example, who charged that the war in Iraq was a “political plot hatched in Texas” and has accused President Bush of telling “lie after lie after lie after lie” – charges that were false, reckless, and inflammatory.

One could hardly pick a worse person than Edward Kennedy to instruct us on moving beyond the politics of fear and personal destruction.

Senator, heal thyself.