This has upset me to a surprising degree.

Teddy Kennedy has been the senator representing the People's Republic of Massachusetts for my entire life. And yes, there's a reason he kept getting re-elected to the U.S. Senate by huge margins. It's because he did his job and he did it the way we wanted him to.

It's surprisingly hard to accept that he'll be gone sooner rather than later. As anonymous_sibyl pointed out: it's almost as if by acknowledging Sen. Kennedy's mortality, we're all acknowledging our own.

Christ, anyone else almost afraid of hearing some witless right-wing howler monkey commenting on this right now? Because I guarantee those comments are going to be pretty fucking ugly in a way we can't even hope to imagine.