Another one bites the dust

Former U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, darling of the Reagan Republicans, died early this morning at her home in Bethesda, Md., at the age of 80.

One of the champions of the conservatism that has morphed into the near-totalitarian state we now "enjoy," Kirkpatrick drank the 9/11 Kool-Aid and became a fervent neo-conservative.

And she didn't really care much for international law, either:

I know one thing. I know the prisoners in Guantanamo are being treated under the laws of combatants. And that is quite different from the Geneva Conventions. They were arrested in the course of seeking to kill Americans in an ongoing war.

I say to-MAY-to, you say to-MAH-to.

My enduring memory of Jeane Kirkpatrick comes from the Commencement ceremony at my college in 1986. It was the year before I graduated, and I was singing in the choir (as I did every year). Amb. Kirkpatrick was the speaker.

There was a tradition among graduates back then to smuggle champagne corks into the basketball arena, then pop them throughout the ceremony to see if they could reach the scoreboard suspended high above them. On this day in '86, someone mis-aimed either intentionally or inadvertently and shot a cork about 100 feet toward the dais. It landed in the flower arrangement at the base of the podium where Amb. Kirkpatrick was speaking. She couldn't have missed it if she tried.

To her credit, she paused briefly, looked down into the flowers, looked back up with a somewhat bemused expression on her face, and continued her address.

Anyway, we're still trying to dig out of the mess that she and her ilk helped create over the last twenty years. So, goodbye, Jeane. Hope you like it hot.