Edward M. Kennedy became a laughingstock the old-fashioned way: He earned it.
Pompous blowholes like
Bill O’Reilly want to lecture us about “vicious postings on the Internet about Senator Kennedy [that] are disgraceful,” as if there could be anything more disgraceful than Senator Kennedy himself. Tell you what, Bill: Why don’t you fly off to Martha’s Vineyard for the weekend and get all
“melancholy” with sob-sisters like Matt Cooper and leave journalism to people who remember that journalism should concern itself with things like
facts and
truth.
The facts and the truth are that no “vicious postings on the Internet” could ever begin to describe what a loathsome excuse for a human being Ted Kennedy actually was. If Orrin Hatch feels obligated to say nice things about Ted, OK — Orrin’s a politician and, as Mencken said, the only way a journalist should ever look at a politician is down. And they don’t make them any lower than Ted.
I thought I’d stolen that line from
Ann Coulter, but a friend told me it actually originated as a Chevy Chase punchline on “Saturday Night Live” back in the ’70s. Either way, it was what I always said whenever I saw Ted Kennedy on TV, lecturing America about “social justice” and our “moral obligations”
blah blah blah.
THE STUBBORN FACTS OF TEDDY’S DISGRACE
Like we need lectures from Ted Freaking Kennedy about “justice”? If there were any justice in this world, Teddy would have been drummed out of the Senate as a disgrace as soon as the facts were known about what happened at Chappaquiddick on July 19, 1969. If there were any justice in the world, Ted Kennedy would have gone to prison for vehicular manslaughter. Instead, because he was born with the right last name, he was allowed to cop a plea to a misdemeanor charge of ”leaving the scene of an accident.”
Oh, yeah,
he left the scene, all right: While Mary Jo Kopechne was still alive, trapped inside the Oldsmobile that miserable drunken coward drove off the Dike Bridge. Facts, as John Adams said, are stubborn things. And any defense of Ted Kennedy’s actions that night
can be demolished with two stubborn facts:
- Mary Jo didn’t “drown,” but died of asphyxiation. The passage of Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption dealing with Chappaquiddick (pp. 38-43) was researched and written by my co-author Lynn Vincent, who was emotionally traumatized to discover this reality. Mary Jo did not drown, a horrific enough experience, but one which would have killed her in barely a minute. Rather, she remained alive, underwater in Teddy’s Oldsmobile, breathing the oxygen trapped inside an air pocket at the rear floorboard of the upside-down car. So, while Ted walked back to the regatta party at the Martha’s Vineyard cottage and tried to concoct an exculpatory cover-story (as his own cousin, Joe Gargan, later explained), Mary Jo was still alive, frantically hoping for a rescue that never came, until finally she breathed her last.
- Mary Jo Kopechne was a dedicated young liberal woman of tremendous potential. This was pointed out by Jimmie Bise’s co-blogger Paula at the Sundries Shack. Mary Jo had gone to Alabama during the civil rights era, having the courage to live out her own convictions. You don’t have to be a liberal to say of her that, at least, she was neither a hypocrite nor a coward. Nor could anyone rightly describe Mary Jo Kopechne as a lightweight bimbo, just another bit of womanizer Ted’s incidental arm candy. Had Mary Jo lived . . . Well, the women’s movement was just then coming into its own, and one could easily imagine an experienced Democratic political operative (for that’s what she was) enjoying a long and successful career in her own right.
This is one of the most astonishing things about the reaction to Ted Kennedy’s death:
The silence of the feminists, while cable TV news overflows with weepy tributes to the “Lion of the Senate.” Who can blame women like
Tammy Bruce and
Phyllis Chesler for renouncing the
soi-disant “Women’s Movement,” which requires that its members ignore O.J.’s murder of his wife and the brutal misogyny of
Sharia law?
Now the “Women’s Movement” expects its membership to remain respectfully silent during, or even compels them to join in, the apotheosis of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. (Who shares, along with that fine feminist hero Chris Dodd, credit for
inventing the “waitress sandwich.”) And not one of these “Women’s Movement” leaders will say a word in rembrance of Mary Jo Kopechne?
It just goes to show once again why you can’t spell “liberal” without L-I-E.
Even as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews
twisted himself into ridiculous knots to declare Obama “the new brother…of the Kennedy tradition,” liberals fumed over the “right-wing smear campaign” which reminded America that Teddy’s most memorable contribution to that tradition was to get drunk and drive an Oldsmobile off a bridge.
Whatever liberals want to blame on “ghoulishly insensitive right-wingers,” we have yet to match that.
Like the crooked swindlers they are, liberals keep trying to change the subject. Whenever anybody brings up Mary Jo Kopechne, liberals want to talk about Teddy’s wonderful legacy in terms of “issues.” OK, fine, let’s talk foreign policy:
- Ted Kennedy led the movement in 1973 to deny U.S. assistance to the pro-American government in Saigon, abandoning a U.S. ally to whom leaders of his own party — remember JFK and LBJ? — had solemnly pledged our support. The result? Not only the communist conquest of South Vietnam, and the exodus of thousands of desperate refugees, but also the collateral damage in neighboring Cambodia, bringing to power the Marxist maniac Pol Pot. The infamous “killing fields” — the mountains of skulls of innocent civilians slaughtered by the brutal Khmer Rouge death squads — there is the legacy of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.
- As noted Wednesday, every patriotic American should remember Ted Kennedy as a subversive traitor who tried to aid the Soviet Union by thwarting Ronald Reagan’s policies. In fact, as Connie Hair of Human Events explains, Teddy’s treasonous dealings with the Kremlin began under Reagan’s Democratic predecessor: “Kennedy’s private outreach to the KGB Soviet intelligence agency in attempts to undermine first President Jimmy Carter then President Ronald Reagan say as much as Chappaquiddick did about the man who appeared to have no moral restraints whatsoever on his personal pursuit of raw political power.”
Oh, yes, please, liberals, let’s
do talk about Senator Kennedy’s fine “legacy.” And while you’re at it, why don’t you go ahead and lecture us some more about “civility,” too? Because you arrogant creeps think the rest of us are too stupid to remember the tremendous
civility the Lion of the Senate showed toward Judge Robert Bork:
“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of the government …”
Of that notorious example of Kennedyesque rhetoric we might say, as Mary McCarthy famously said of pro-Communist playwright Lillian Hellman, every word was a lie, including “and” and “the.”
The death of Mary Jo Kopechne was an accident, but his actions at the time of and in the weeks following the accident were beyond the pale. Poor, scared rich kid gets strings pulled to make the whole thing go away.
Yes, Teddy was a “rich kid,” but other evil rich kids —
Lyle and Erik Menendez come to mind — were not repeatedly re-elected to the Senate. What made Ted different? Well, he was a Kennedy from Massachusetts, and a liberal Democrat. No Democrat with any ambition would dare speak the ugly truth about a Kennedy, nor would any of the Democratic Party’s dishonest stooges in the media.
And somehow, somewhere along the way, Teddy’s enablers in the Democratic Party and the party’s media franchise decided that to report the truth about Teddy would be a disservice to the memory of his slain brothers. This is a specimen of illogic so transparently absurd that it should cause any bright fifth-grader to say, “Huh?”
It was
Ted Kennedy’s own disgusting decadence which was the true disservice to the more honorable reputations of JFK and RFK. This is why I felt the need to
protest about the term “accident” being used to describe the events of July 19, 1969:
“Accident,” yes. Yet when a man guzzles booze all day and then drives off a bridge, it is certainly not an unavoidable accident. The idea of Chappaquiddick as a “tragedy” whose main victim was Ted and the “Kennedy legacy” . . . is the manure load Ted’s MSM hagiographers are now peddling.
At some point, a decent respect for truth requires that we stop pretending chicken manure is chicken salad. If honest and intelligent people cannot summon the courage to call a lie a lie, who is really to blame when lesser minds are deceived by the dishonest?
What power on earth can prevent a courageous people from repudiating a scoundrel? How can those who know the truth be respectfully silent while
craven idiots like Chris Matthews and equally craven politicians like
Nancy Pelosi sing the praises of this vile creature, as if there were anything about Edward M. Kennedy that respectable parents should want their own children to emulate?
HOW TO REMEMBER TED KENNEDY (IF YOU MUST)
It seems some people have failed to grasp the moral significance of public rhetoric. When a famous person is publicly praised, this amounts to a moral lesson, a sermon urging others toward emulation of the person praised: “Ted Kennedy was a fine example — be like him!”
“I think he’d be the last person who would want us — those he left behind — to be morose and full of bathos. . . . He’d probably have a joke to tell.”
Ah, so it is the late Senator’s sense of humor that his friend Ed Klein urges us to emulate now. And what do you suggest we might amuse ourselves with, Mr. Klein?
Just call that a green light for tasteless Kennedy jokes, if you like.
God bless him, but ol’ Teddy was the life of the party, even if he was also the death of partygoers. Hey, did you folks hear this one yet?
Q. What’s the difference between Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan?
A. As a young man Ronnie
saved girls from drowningOh, I got a million of ‘em, folks. I just swam in from Chappaquiddick, and boy, are my arms tired.
I tell, ya, Ted Kennedy gets no respect, no respect at all. Why, when Ted Kennedy came out in favor of abortion, his own mother said, “Oh, now he tells me!” . . .
Seriously, folks, appropriate tributes to Ted Kennedy’s legacy are a bipartisan obligation. As a matter of fact, the Republican National Committee is now raising money to fund the Edward M. Kennedy Memorial on the national mall in Washington. A leading sculptor has already been commissioned to create a monumental statue of an inverted Oldsmobile . . .
Let’s hear it for Shecky, ladies and gentlemen! He’s a man after Ted Kennedy’s own heart. The main difference between Shecky and Teddy is this: Shecky doesn’t like to share waitresses with Chris Dodd, so he always orders the
open-faced sandwich!
Ba-da-bing!
Why am I stealing Shecky’s jokes? To be honest, folks, Shecky’s never met a tasteless Ted Kennedy joke he wouldn’t steal in a New York heartbeat. Fat jokes! Drunk jokes! Any joke that makes Ted Kennedy look like the lying, lecherous liberal he was, you can bet Shecky’s going to steal it. So if you’ve got a real knee-slapper — the kind of joke even that corpulent, cowardly boozehound Ted would appreciate — please feel free to leave it in the comments.
Go ahead and laugh – Ted’s earned it!
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