WANTED ! : A "Brutal" Servant

The best nostalgia and firming-up of good first-judgments often comes when we are on our way to buttressing a long-held prejudice.

So it was for us when a foray into the life of  Jack Kemp--former NFL quarterback, graduate degreed economist, congressman and Reagan cabintet member.

It was a double play of sorts:  Kemp-to-Tim Russert-to Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

It would be a handy tool for locating the BIG "KULTUR" schism (or chasm) to divine how many people under the age of 45 remember either Kemp or Moynihan or both of them in any focussed way.

They were the last of a truly "bipartisan-but-very-coherently pausible debaters with a granite bedrock of love for the country and its people.

It does not matter to whom he SAID it, but  DPM coined the sentence:

"Sir, you are entitld to your very own opinions...BUT you are NOT entielef to your own discrete facts..."

Treading even heavier on the sensitivities of the misleading propagandist-demasgogue-prevaicator,  Moynihan once said  to an arrogant bureaucrat:

"He lies not just because it is in his personal or political interest to lie....He lies because it is his NATURE to lie ! "

It matters not whether he was talking about Nixon or Kissinger...Clinton or Ron Emanuel.  The sting is unerruing.

I do not see Moynihan's  ilk anywhere in the public ken today. We have seen the last of the Kemps and the Moynihans.

But we are less of a nation without them.