From last night’s Fox News All-Stars.

On Ted Kennedy:

Well, I suspect they will name the [health-care] bill after him as a way to gather sentimental support. I’m not sure it will have much of an effect.
But in looking at him and his legacy, I would take the middle road, the high road between Kirsten and Bill. Look, this is the most important senator since Lyndon Johnson, and I would say the most important senator in American history who never became majority leader.
And he was the titular and the de facto head of American liberalism as an ideology. And trying to look at it as a future historian might, I think they might say that his political life marks and heavily influenced the trajectory of American liberalism.
In a sense, they might conclude that he was one of its champions, but he took it too far. He overshot.
I will give you two examples. Civil rights: He and his brother Bobby were early, dedicated, and sincere champions — courageous — of civil rights. But Teddy took it into affirmative action and reverse discrimination, which were more highly problematic.
Secondly was in the social safety net. He was a strong supporter of Social Security, extending it to the disabled, and [of] Medicare, children’s health. But he took it way into the Great Society which created a whole culture of dependency which ironically had to be undone by a moderate Democrat, President Clinton.
In that speech that we saw, the most famous he ever gave of “The dream will never die” – that was not a speech given against Reagan or a right winger. It was given against the moderate Jimmy Carter.
[Ted Kennedy] represented the extreme liberalism in a sense…that’s why the Democrats were denied the White House for almost all of the last 50 years with the exception of Clinton and Carter, the likes of whom Kennedy opposed.

On how Holder’s investigations will affect the CIA:

Well, they have been really badly damaged.
Look, the CIA is central intelligence. Its role is to give intelligence. We are in the middle of two wars. It was aggressive in the eight years of the Bush administration and it prevented a second attack.
Now everybody who is interrogating is scared to death and nobody is going to do anything that is not exactly by the book and extremely passive and ineffective.
Secondly, the administration has removed the interrogation of high- level Al Qaeda out of the CIA. It is now going to be housed in the FBI and directed by the White House.
That means that if you catch an important terrorist, the CIA is not going to investigate him. And if you catch, you know, a farmer in Afghanistan who is driving a consignment of sheep across a war zone, and you catch him, well, that’s going to be CIA work.
It’s been cut out of the main human intelligence gathering…If I were head of the CIA as Panetta is, who has been trumped and rebuffed and humiliated, had his agency emasculated, he ought to resign on principle.