An Open Letter to Mort Kondracke,

afte his lame defense of Ted Kennedy's reference to President Bush's nominees to the Courts of Appeals as "neanderthals":

You, sir, are a neanderthal, a slope-headed knuckle-dragging troglodite, a pre-human species with barely enough brain capacity to chip stones for tools, a pre-lingual moron. But I mean that in a nice way.

Get real! To hear you defend the splenetic blurts of tired bore like Ted Kennedy makes me wonder if you have been in the Potomac miasma just a little too long for your own mental health. What we cornfed yahoos out here in the red states understand by "neanderthal" is "subhuman," and it's serious insult, not to mention wildly inaccurate. Kindly let Mr. Kennedy make his own excuses for his boorish gaffes. A well-known journalist, not employed by the WaPo or the NYTimes, is expected to not only carry the title pundit, but to actually be a pundit, i. e. a wise man.

If you haven't noticed, it's the Democrats who are reactionary these days, resorting to antidemocratic methods to hold onto gains they achieved through the most undemocratic of our three branches. They are the ones fighting the rearguard actions. They are the ones behind the times, as their response to the threats to our country from terrorism shows. If anybody deserves to be called a neanderthal, it would be over-the-hill political bosses like Kennedy who are still in office thanks to religious slurs and machines that have all but withered away except in a few enclaves like Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. If Bush's nominees are neanderthals, then Ted Kennedy is a bonobo. (In case you don't recognize it, that means he's a hirsute primate who has the manners and morals of a chimp.