Hypocrisy as a fine art

Hypocrisy is not unusual, especially in Congress, but Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., has turned it into a high art form.

In Senate confirmation hearings on Sam Alito's fitness to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, Kennedy came on as a moral exemplar in his heavy-handed questioning of the nominee's ethics, honesty and integrity.

Whatever you think of his court rulings, Alito's personal lifestyle on and off the bench is above reproach; would that all our public officials lived such clean, decorous lives. The same cannot be said for the morally duplicitous Kennedy.

The senator, in his pretentious elitist fashion, hammered away at Alito for belonging, several decades ago, to a men's-only Princeton alumni group that opposed plans for the Ivy League university to go coeducational. Even though Alito played no role in the group - in fact, he barely remembered it - Kennedy tried to hold the matter up as an example of the judge's insensitivity, if not outright hostility, to equal rights for women.

You'd never guess from his holier-than-thou inquisition of Alito that the Bay State's aging hypocrite currently belonged to something called Owl, a Harvard alumni-student social club that excludes women. Well, maybe it's not hypocrisy. Perhaps he just forgot. At least he's still welcomed at Harvard - from which he was once booted for cheating on an exam.

Remarkably, Kennedy doesn't seem to have a clue about the low regard in which so many Americans, for understandable reasons, hold him. Massachusetts may have forgiven their senator for that unpleasantness at Chappaquiddick in 1969, but much of the rest of the country has not.

He has even written a book for children to be published in May, in which he includes stories about his dog, Splash. Can you believe that? As comedian Jay Leno noted, it's as if O.J. Simpson named his dog Slash.