Sometime next week, the Massachusetts senate will pass a bill allowing the governor, Deval Patrick, to appoint a temporary replacement for Teddy Kennedy (pending a January 19th special election). More likely than not, the Democrats will have 60 votes again by the beginning of October. Now, what I think would be kind of sweet is if Gov. Patrick nominates Michael Dukakis as the interim senator.

Dukakis gets a lot of grief. But regardless of what you thought of him as tactical politician, he was a progressive reformer. And everything really turned sour in this country when he lost. People tend to trace the starting point of the downward trajectory to Reagan’s election, or to Nixon’s. But it’s not that we elected those flawed men that set us on the wrong path. It was that Reagan’s presidency (unlike Nixon’s) was not corrected. It was the election of the Bush Crime Family, despite all the evidence of criminality, that validated what Reagan had done and allowed him to be sainted by the mainstream press. And it was the tentacles of the Bush family that took hold and eventually strangled us, and nearly brought us to our knees.

It would be strangely fitting to see Dukakis come back from the politically dead to cast one of the deciding votes that gives us a decent universal health care plan. It would kind of bring the whole epic to a close with a fitting coda.

I’m for Dukakis. Let him be the nail in the Bush Crime Family’s coffin.