“Waving the bloody shirt” is a timeworn political ploy first used by the venerable Republican Party in the aftermath of the Civil War. After the war, in order to get controversial legislation passed through the Congress the Republican Party would not so subtly remind the public in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, just who had fought first to preserve, and later to reunite the Union…and whom had worked to tear it asunder. By using such rhetoric, and by sometimes literally waving a shirt allegedly stained with the blood of Union soldiers spilled in the War Between the States, the Republicans were able to silence Democratic opposition to all manner of policies. “Waving the bloody shirt” was used in part to give us the so-called Reconstruction Amendments that outlawed slavery, made the former slaves citizens of the United States, and granted them the right to vote. The tactic was also used to help in the passage of the first civil rights legislation in the history of the Republic in the years of 1866, 1872, and 1875.

In the decade of the 1960s the Democratic Party brought the tactic back with a vengeance after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Nearly every major piece of legislation that Lyndon Johnson wanted passed was foisted onto a mourning public as one of Kennedy’s major legislative priorities, which allowed Johnson to get just about anything through the Congress and onto his desk. It seemed that everything from the Job Corps, to Operation Head Start, to Medicare were packaged by the wheeling-dealing Johnson as one of Jack Kennedy’s most cherished ideas, and in the shocking aftermath of Kennedy’s murder no one wanted to be seen as thwarting the last wishes of King John of Camelot, so several trillion dollars later we are still stuck with LBJ’s Great Society schemes.

Since then, politicians have used some variation of the bloody shirt in nearly every decade, especially when there is a war being fought. John Kerry and his band of lying miscreants used it in the fraudulent Winter Soldier hearings; George H. W. Bush did it when he campaigned in 1988 with the badge of a slain New York City police officer as a symbol of why we needed to fight the War on Drugs; and various politicians use the tactic when they stage photo ops with wounded servicemen to show their support for the troops. The bloody shirt will occasionally recede into the political closet, but it never truly gets retired.

With the death of Edward “Teddy” Kennedy, the Democrats have decided to dust off the bloody shirt again and wave it wildly in a last desperate attempt to resurrect a healthcare bill that seems to be dead on arrival. Senator Robert Byrd (Klan-WV) has proposed that the bill (or bills) winding through the Senate be named in honor of Senator Kennedy, whom everyone recognizes as a staunch supporter of a nationalized healthcare bill in a last ditch attempt at getting the sympathy vote for a bill that the majority of the people of America simply do not want. The line of thinking seems to be that Kennedy’s death should be used as a catalyzing agent to bring any recalcitrant Democrats around on the issue, and to stir up some much needed public support for the failing plan. What this line of thinking ignores is the most obvious point in the whole debate: The people do not support this idea! No matter whom the bill is named for, or said to be in memoriam of, the American people have spoken in poll after poll and the conclusion is always the same: We don’t want government run healthcare or government issued health insurance.

What is really appalling about this idea is the base motives involved in even making the proposal. The vast majority of the members of the United States Senate publicly claim to have been friends and admirers of Senator Kennedy, but before his body could get cold or his family could properly mourn his passing, his “friends” in the Democratic Party began plotting to use his passing as a political tool to pass their beloved healthcare legislation. They had barely begun rewriting the history of his life to make him into some type of tragic/heroic figure before they struck upon the idea to use his death as the bloody shirt they hoped would get them  power over one-sixth of the American economy. Alas, I should not have been surprised with this after the way the memorial for Senator Paul Wellstone was hijacked and turned into an impromptu anti-Bush political rally; yet it is just as unseemly now as it was then, and I had hoped they would avoid exploiting the death of their treasured “friend” for naked political gain.

However, no matter how enthusiastically they wave this bloody shirt, it will probably not have its intended effect. Even if the American people were united in their love and admiration of Teddy Kennedy, it probably would still not be enough to shake them from their fears of the federal government doing to American healthcare and health insurance what they have done with the postal service and Social Security. The American people will not fall for such a shameless ploy, and the Democrats should be embarrassed by their attempts at exploiting the death of one of their own in the pursuit of political power. Alas, we know that they won’t because liberal Democrats may feel your pain, but they feel no shame.