Senator Ted Kennedy looks ridiculous today, in the wake of his foolish reliance on a bogus story of "repression" under the Bush administration's anti—terror efforts. As we noted last Thursday, the Senator took to the pages of the Boston Globe and wrote this whopper:

Just this past week there were public reports that a college student in Massachusetts had two government agents show up at his house because he had gone to the library and asked for the official Chinese version of Mao Tse—tung's Communist Manifesto.

Leave aside for the moment that Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto (Kennedy is so careless with details that he went to print with this howler; the student actually alleged it was the Thoughts of Chairman Mao that got him into alleged trouble), the story of the government agents showing up has been found to be an utter hoax, credulously accepted and amplified by Kednnedy.

But Kennedy isn't apologizing. Far from it, his spokesman is adopting a variant of the Dan Rather fake—but—accurate line:

Laura Capps, a Kennedy spokeswoman, said last night that the senator cited ''public reports" in his opinion piece. Even if the assertion was a hoax, she said, it did not detract from Kennedy's broader point that the Bush administration has gone too far in engaging in surveillance.

So the Senator's negative opinion, based on fiction, somehow is still real. Because feelings matter more than facts, I suppose.

If Kennedy were a man, he would publicly apologize to President Bush for repeating a vicious lie about him and giving it credence. But of course, if Kennedy were a man, Mary Joe Kopechne would be alive.

Thomas Lifson  12 24 05