Senator Edward Markey Terrified Me

In the late 80s, I attended a conference in Massachusetts in which Ed Markey, then in the House, gave an after dinner speech. His photo at that time is here. You can see even in that photo his arrogance and how sure he was of himself. His positions were so one-sidedly pro-government (liberal, progressive) that he terrified me. What I mean is that here was a 43-year old man who was totally convinced of his liberal views and would impose them on all of us along with other members of the Washington gang. People would elect them and they’d run with it. Markey would be there screwing up decade after decade, because he didn’t understand economics and didn’t care anyway. The prospects were scary. Now this guy is a Senator. He still has a gun on all of us.

I had no bias for Republicans, however. When Bill Buckley came to Harvard in 1961 or so, I didn’t like him either. He debated someone there and I attended. He was equally an arrogant man, very sure of his “conservative” views, someone that I had no use for. I could not figure out what these conservatives meant by conservatism, and I still haven’t. This reminds me. My father, born in 1907, grew up in Warsaw. Poland was not a separate country at that time. During the war, he experienced both Russian and German rule. I once asked him which was worse, and he said they were both bad. He had no use for either the German soldiers or the Russian cossacks with their horses and swords. This remark no doubt encouraged me to reject both parties, but of course a great deal else did the same.

I am just as terrified (in the sense explained above) today as then. It is impossible for me to have even the least shred of respect for any of these power-mad, ignorant, foolish idiots in Washington who pretend to know what’s good for everyone. What they come up with is so self-evidently insane that the only rational explanations for it are that (a) they are owned lock, stock and barrel by special interests, (b) they believe their own baloney but are too dumb to see that it’s counter-productive, and (c) they are so power-mad and evil that they do not care about whom they are injuring and killing.

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4:56 pm on February 2, 2014