If It’s Sunday Morning: Tim Russert, Ted Kennedy, Saddam Hussein, & The Bush White House
by It’s the end of another year. We’ve lost a number of notable and well-known folks, for good or not-so-good, in all walks of life in 2009. Sometimes, it’s those pieces I wrote back-when, at a time when history had not yet played out for some, that tend to foretell a bit of the future.
We have all gone mad. Mad, MAd, MAD I tell you! The cycle finalized itself on a Sunday morning, somewhere after 10 AM EST, a number of years ago. Here’s how I know how, when and where it happened….
I have a habit of watching the morning political debate shows. Don’t ask why. I guess I have a thing for comedy. But never did I expect to be so … insulted … no, not insulted but maybe amazed … actually, it wasn’t amazement … hmmm, I think I was roll-on-the-floor hysterical. So I was hysterical—yep, that’s it—on that morning years ago when on Tim Russert’s show, “Meet The Press,” I was subjected to Ted Kennedy pseudo-preaching about ethics. C’mon, isn’t that a bit like Saddam Hussein handing out lollipops and Bibles, and asking us all to forgive and forget … and let’s just sit down and chat and have tea together?!
Russert seriously asked Kennedy what he thought about the Bush White House just the week before suddenly requiring their staff to attend a fresh go-round of ethics training due to a flurry of not-so-politically-correct faux pas. Kennedy earnestly replied that, truly, ethics couldn’t be learned from a class. After all, being ethical was a part of one’s inner being. Ethics related how people acted in daily life. The entire concept had nothing to do with simply checking a box, as the government is so regularly wont to do. It was about—here we need a drum roll—about a person’s inherent character.
Should I have choked right then on my disbelief, or should I have held it in? I decided to hold it in just a few beats so I could savor the look in Kennedy’s eyes, his seemingly genuine warming-up to his subject matter. I abstractedly noted how O-L-D he looked, and wondered how often he might think over his part in our collective past … a slice of his life which gave him a solid place in questionable history and cloaked him in an infamy he could’ve never expected at the time; certainly it was an infamy he would never have wanted in his more coherent moments.
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