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Mitch McConnell Heaps Praise On Late Sen. Ted Kennedy
Yahoo News ^ | October 02, 2015

Posted on 10/02/2015 10:03:36 AM PDT by Steelfish

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To: Steelfish

He’s daring the conservative base to come after him.


41 posted on 10/02/2015 10:40:26 AM PDT by SMM48
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To: Steelfish
“WE’VE HAD NO MORE EXTRAORDINARY SENATOR IN OUR HISTORY THAN EDWARD M. KENNEDY,” MCCONNELL SAID TO APPLAUSE.

That piece of scum should be tossed out of office for that statement alone. Kenny was human garbage. Every instinct he had was sick and perverted. He is responsible for the 1965 immigration fiasco, and any number of other pieces of horrible legislation.

42 posted on 10/02/2015 10:40:35 AM PDT by DiogenesLamp ("of parents owing allegiance to no other sovereignty.")
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To: Lurkinanloomin
"We’ve never had a Senator get away with murder......"

Hillary?

43 posted on 10/02/2015 10:41:09 AM PDT by mass55th (Courage is being scared to death - but saddling up anyway...John Wayne)
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To: Steelfish

WEll Mitch hopefully some day you will be able to spend a lot of time burning in Hell with Tedddy.


44 posted on 10/02/2015 10:41:19 AM PDT by Georgia Girl 2 (The only purpose of a pistol is to fight your way back to the rifle you should never have dropped)
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To: Steelfish

We thought we had won the House and the Senate. We didn’t know the House and Senate leaders had already turned into democrats. Fire them all.


45 posted on 10/02/2015 10:44:56 AM PDT by McGruff (Trump-Cruz 2016. Make America Great Again.)
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To: HarleyLady27

I think we would have been settling up shop on Mars and beyond


46 posted on 10/02/2015 10:47:04 AM PDT by al baby (Hi Mom)
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To: Steelfish

Folks, remember the names of the freepers that demanded you support this POS ‘no matter what” and helped get him reelected because they will be the same people screaming for lesser evil in the coming election.


47 posted on 10/02/2015 10:52:26 AM PDT by Norm Lenhart
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To: Will88

You have to read down into the article
https://www.yahoo.com/politics/an-establishment-under-siege-looks-back-wistfully-151404857.html?nf=1


48 posted on 10/02/2015 10:58:52 AM PDT by Steelfish
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To: Steelfish

“WE’VE HAD NO MORE EXTRAORDINARY SENATOR IN OUR HISTORY THAN EDWARD M. KENNEDY,”, That’s right there has never been a Senator in history more inebriated, drug addled, sexually deviated, moral lacking, murderous, inept, and corrupt as Teddy!


49 posted on 10/02/2015 11:00:56 AM PDT by Mastador1 (I'll take a bad dog over a good politician any day!)
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To: Steelfish

Tell me again what party McConnell belongs to?


50 posted on 10/02/2015 11:08:39 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: Steelfish

It is unbelievable the sway that poxy, lecherous, old drunk had over Senators like Hatch, McConnell, Lott, McCain.


51 posted on 10/02/2015 11:09:01 AM PDT by Paine in the Neck (Socialism consumes EVERYTHING)
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To: madison10

Ted Cruz button-holed it correctly - McConnell is a liar.


52 posted on 10/02/2015 11:11:04 AM PDT by Slyfox (Will no one rid us of this meddlesome president?)
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To: Mastador1

The coroner said, “Ted Kennedy killed her as surely as if he had put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger.”

She was found in rigor mortis position with her head and neck arched upward into an air pocket in the upside down car with her arms frozen in rigor mortis position against the seat.

She died of oxygen deprivation, NOT OF DROWNING. She had used up all the oxygen in the small air pocket she found.

The coroner estimated she lived a MINIMUM of TWO HOURS in that position.

Kennedy did not report the accident until the next morning.

If he had reported it immediately she could have been saved.

On this day – July 18, 1969 – Senator Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kopechne.

Jul 18, 2013
photos.newhavenregister.com

On this day – July 18, 1969 – After a party on Chappaquiddick Island, Senator Ted Kennedy from Massachusetts drives an Oldsmobile off a bridge and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, dies.

Events at Chappaquiddick Island gained international attention on July 18, 1969, when the dead body of Mary Jo Kopechne was discovered inside an overturned car in a channel on the island. The car belonged to Senator Edward M. “Ted” Kennedy, who did not report the midnight incident to police authorities until the following morning.

Kopechne’s body was recovered from the submerged car, and Kennedy entered a plea of guilty to a charge of “leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury”. He received a sentence of two months in jail, which was suspended. (AP)(Wikipedia)

.......................................................................................................................

politicsdaily.com

Ted Kennedy’s actions that followed the accident – not summoning emergency personnel who might have saved her life, the cover-up of the facts, not even reporting the accident until the following morning – likely would have landed a man without political connections in prison. It was heartbreaking for her family and friends to experience the loss of a lovely, devout, and socially committed 28-year-old woman. For millions of Americans who never knew her, the tragic incident has fed a festering cultural grudge.

The idea that Edward M. Kennedy could be a viable national politician – let alone a much-admired and lionized political figure – has convinced millions of everyday citizens and succeeding generations of conservative activists that among the elites of academia, politics, and the media two standards of behavior exist: One for liberal Democrats and another for conservative Republicans.

Liberals in the media pretend not to see this. Or rather, they blame those who feel aggrieved. This very morning, my old friend James Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly employed the usual euphemisms about Kennedy’s behavior in his post – and then launched a preemptive strike against anyone who might view Teddy’s life with gimlet eyes. “A flawed man, who started unimpressively in life — the college problems, the silver-spoon boy senator, everything involved with Chappaquiddick — but redeemed himself, in the eyes of all but the committed haters, with his bravery and perseverance and commitment to the long haul,” Fallows wrote.

But hold on a minute: The “college problems” were serial cheating. The “silver-spoon” stuff, I suppose refers to, among other things, the speeding and reckless driving that ominously foreshadowed Chappaquiddick. And that phrase “redeeming himself in the eyes of all but the committed haters,” well, the problem with that is that to many people, redemption implies that a sinner has come clean.

Certain theological questions present themselves here. One of them is whether one can completely atone for a sin that is not truthfully confessed.

On July 18, 1969, Kennedy and five other men – all but one of whom was married – met six single young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. The women were known as the “Boiler Room Girls” for their tireless work in a windowless office in that ill-fated campaign.

Sometime late at night after an evening of drinking, Kennedy and Kopechne went for a drive in his 1967 Oldsmobile. Kennedy placed the time he left at 11:15 p.m. A local cop who believed he saw the car put the time at 12:40 a.m. – significant at the time because Kennedy testified that he was taking Kopechne to a ferry that ran to Edgartown, a ferry that stopped running at midnight. In any event, Kennedy wasn’t headed toward the ferry landing when his car careened off Dike Bridge and into the inlet known as Poucha Pond; they were heading toward the beach.

Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone.When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner’s inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity.

First of all, he and two of the men, a cousin named Joseph Gargan and a friend named Paul Markham say they returned to the bridge to try and rescue Mary Jo. (If the Edgartown constable who believes he saw Kennedy was accurate, this was impossible.) Next, the men claimed that they drove Kennedy to the Chappaquiddick ferry landing, where he told them not to tell the other women for fear that they would try to rescue Mary Jo – at great peril to themselves – and assured them that he would report the incident to authorities. Then, the men said, Kennedy dove into the water and swam across the sound to Edgartown himself.

Upon reaching Edgartown, Kennedy went to his room at a local inn – it was now 2:25 a.m., — where he spent the night, and the following morning engaged in small talk about sailing with a local yachter and agreed to have breakfast with the man when Gargan and Markham showed up about 7:30. They asked him who he’d called about the accident only to receive the astounding reply: no one. Kennedy explained it this way at the inquest: “I just couldn’t gain the strength within me, the moral strength, to call Mrs. Kopechne at 2 in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead.” But he hadn’t called the cops, either, and wouldn’t until 9 a.m.

Not reporting a fatal traffic accident is a felony in most places. On Martha’s Vineyard, if the driver is a Kennedy, it’s not even a matter of official curiosity: The local police chief never even asked Kennedy why he waited nine hours to report what had happened. The state of Massachusetts, citing Kennedy’s excessive speed on the bridge, suspended his license for six months. That was it.

In protesting Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, Ted Kennedy thundered, “Is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?” These words, uttered five years after Chappaquiddick, are ubiquitous on conservative websites where they are offered up as evidence, not only of Kennedy’s hypocrisy, but the mainstream media’s as well.

Similarly, to movement conservatives, Kennedy’s attack on Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork is offered up as a case study in the press’s historic double standard. Immediately after Bork’s July 1, 1987, nomination, Kennedy took to the Senate floor.

“Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions,”he said. “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 could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is — and is often the only — protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy....”

It is an article of faith among conservatives that if a Republican senator had launched an attack this personal and vitriolic – not to mention wildly exaggerated – against a nominee named by a Democratic president that liberals would have gone ape and that the ladies and gentlemen of the Fourth Estate would have made the intemperate conduct of the Republican senator the main issue.

Twenty-nine years ago, after the inquest cast doubt on his version of events at Chappaquiddick, Kennedy briefly took issue with the report, then went about his duties: In a speech to a Boston business group, he lambasted Nixon’s decision to extend the Vietnam War into Cambodia, he consented to his first broadcast interview since Bobby Kennedy’s death, and he kept an appointment to narrate Aaron Copland’s Lincoln Portrait. As Time magazine noted at the time, this engagement included a bit of irony: The opening lines of Lincoln read by Kennedy that night included this passage. “Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We ... will be remembered in spite of ourselves.”

......................................................................................................................................................................

For Democrats, the end always justifies the means, and rhetoric will always trump reason. Two orators of the Democratic party of the last 40 years, Bill Clinton and Ted Kennedy, were two of the most immoral men who ever graced public life. Clinton will speak tonight, and as always, his horrific history of rape and abuse of women will be ignored so he can pose as a person who really cares. Just ask Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathleen Willie, among others too numerous to name, how much he cares.

But the worst example of all is the Democrat’s lionizing of Ted Kennedy. In a seven minute video at the DNC, there were plenty of quotes from Kennedy and his admirers that should be seen through the agonized eyes of a young girl, slowly asphyxiating in a car submerged in water, a young woman vainly trying to open the door so she could breathe just one more time, a young woman betrayed by the scion of the country’s most powerful family who left her to die.

Mary Jo Kopechne.

Kennedy said:

For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.

Whose dream? Mary Jo’s?

I believe in the bright light of hope and possibility

I always have even in the darkest hours.

That bright light of hope was the pressure his family brought to bear so he wasn’t arrested for vehicular manslaughter.

Everything he did was about the future, it was about going forward.

You bet Kennedy never looked back.

Barack Obama: Those of us who knew Teddy and worked with him here —

people of both parties knew that what drove him was something more.

Sure they knew what drove him. The accessory to rape with his nephew, the sex on tables; why do you think Clinton idolized the Kennedys?

............................................................................................................................................................................

1. Ted Kennedy’s idea of funny was asking people to tell him the latest Chappaquiddick joke.

Here is what one of his biographers had to say after Kennedy’s death on Aug. 25:

I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?”

This isn’t just any bozo talking through his hat: It’s Ed Klein, who wrote four books on the Kennedy clan over the past two decades, including The Kennedy Curse.

Klein, by the way, is the former foreign editor of Newsweek magazine and former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine.

(It does make one wonder about Newsweek and the New York Times, however, when one of their recent senior decision makers thinks he’s burnishing Teddy’s image by telling a story in which a killer — convicted, sentence suspended — seems to be dancing on his victim’s grave.

I know there are some people out there who doubt this story. Here is the link to the YouTube copy of the broadcast interview between Klein and guest host Katty Kay on National Public Radio’s Diane Rehm Show on Aug. 26.

2. Radio interview — again from YouTube — with John Farrar, the diver who got to the scene of the Chappaquiddick accident in 25 minutes — once fishermen found the car nine or 10 hours (depends on whether you believe Teddy’s timeline) after the car plunge. Farrar believes Mary Jo Kopechne found an air pocket in Teddy Kennedy’s submerged Oldsmobile and lived for an hour or more (he’s said up to four hours).
Here’s the link to the 1994 radio interview with Farrar.

3. And while we’re still at it, here’s a TV piece on Kennedy that includes an interview with Leslie Leland, the foreman of the grand jury that Farrar mentions in the previous clip.

By the way, Farrar’s a firefighter and Leland’s a pharmacist . I’ll tell you in a future post about the kind of pressure these guys were under from what was known then as “the Kennedy Mafia.”

Here’s the link to the news report with the 1989 Leland interview.

Wait, Saint Ted, let’s hear one more time how you liked a good joke about Mary Jo Kopechne’s death at Chappaquiddick. Here again is the link to what Ed Klein had to say about you. (Remember, this is a Kennedy sycophant telling the story.)

4. Ted Kennedy — nicknamed “Cadillac Eddie” in university — was kicked out of Harvard for paying another student to take a Spanish test for him in 1951. Teddy then joined the U.S. Army as a private but his father, Joseph — multi-millionaire, former ambassador, powerhouse of the Democratic Party — made sure Teddy got nowhere near the Korean War, which was going on at the time. Teddy spent that war as part of a U.S. Army honour guard in Paris. After the war, he was re-admitted to Harvard. Thanks, Dad.

Wealth and power do have their advantages.

blogs.canoe.ca
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Elizabeth Warren: “Ted Kennedy Changed My Life . . . I Think Of Him Every Single Day”…:

“Ted Kennedy changed my life,” Warren said. “He changed how I understood what it is that a public servant does. And I think of him in this race every single day. And I come to this convention and I think of him every single hour.”

SO DID MR. AND MRS. KOPECHNE.


53 posted on 10/02/2015 11:13:47 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: MarvinStinson

The Republican branch of the Democrat Party. But do not tell that to the Kentucky Republicans or they will get crazy.


54 posted on 10/02/2015 11:14:45 AM PDT by sport
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To: Mastador1

The MSM is insisting that it was BAD for Rubio to drink water.

but just fine for Teddy Weissmuller (the Lion of the Senate) to leave Mary Jo Kopechne in the water to DIE.

Chappaquiddick’s unanswered questions

by Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe July 21, 1994
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/3007/chappaquiddicks-unanswered-questions

“I’ve answered all the questions.”
— Edward Kennedy, July 8, 1994 on the tragedy at Chappaquiddick

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO TOMORROW, on July 22, 1969, Mary Jo Kopechne was buried at St. Vincent’s Cemetery in Plymouth, Penn. She had died three days earlier, pinned underwater when Sen. Kennedy’s car swerved off Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island. Within hours of Kopechne’s death, a Kennedy aide named Dun Gifford flew a chartered plane into Edgartown (the Martha’s Vineyard town of which Chappaquiddick is a part), with orders to get the body off the island. Before Massachusetts officials had even decided whether to perform an autopsy to settle the cause of death, Kopechne’s remains were in Pennsylvania — beyond the state’s jurisdiction.

— Did Kennedy order Gifford to remove the body?

That’s one question the senator has never answered.

In fact, quite a few questions have never been answered.

At least, not by Kennedy.

At least, not truthfully.

Kennedy and Kopechne were part of a group of 12 that had come to Chappaquiddick for the Edgartown Regatta and a private barbecue afterward. Half the guests were married men, half were single women in their 20s. Kennedy and Kopechne left the party at some point that evening and ended up driving off the bridge.

Though Kennedy managed to extricate himself from the car and get back to his motel that night, Kopechne remained in the car until her body was recovered by a Fire Department diver at 8:45 the next morning. To the diver, Capt. John Farrar, it was clear that she had neither drowned nor died quickly. Kopechne survived for some time by breathing a pocket of trapped air, finally suffocating to death when the oxygen ran out. When Kennedy reported the accident to the Edgartown police, it was 9:45 a.m. — some nine or 10 hours after he left Kopechne in his car.

Questions:

— Why did Kennedy and Kopechne leave the barbecue?

Kennedy said they wanted to return to their respective motels and left to catch the ferry (which only operated until midnight) back to Edgartown center. But Kennedy’s chauffeur, who was on hand, didn’t drive them; Kopechne didn’t take her purse or her room key; and they didn’t go to the ferry. Kennedy headed in the opposite direction — to Dike Bridge and the secluded beach beyond.

— What time did they leave?

Kennedy claimed he left at 11:15 p.m., and the accident happened a few minutes later. Yet Deputy Sheriff Huck Look reported seeing Kennedy’s black Oldsmobile at 12:45 a.m., heading down Dike Road toward the bridge. After the accident, the senator said he hadn’t been able to rescue Kopechne because of the “strong and murky current” in which he kept getting “swept away.” In truth there was no current at 11:15. The water was absolutely slack, at low tide. At 12:45, however, the current was fast-moving and strong.

— Did Kennedy take a wrong turn without realizing it?

So he testified, and his whole story rests upon that claim. But the road to the ferry, which Kennedy had already traveled several times that day, was the only paved road on the island. Anyone driving from the house where the barbecue was held would have felt the road bank unmistakably to the left — toward the ferry — and would have seen the shiny left-turn sign. By contrast, it required a deliberate effort to turn right, toward the bridge. Dike Road was unpaved and very bumpy. Its entrance was obscured behind bushes and necessitated a 90-degree turn — hard to do inadvertently.

— Why didn’t Kennedy call for help to rescue Kopechne?

Because, he said, he was in shock. He called his behavior “irrational, indefensible, inexcusable and inexplicable.”

Yet he was not too traumatized to return to the barbecue and fetch two close lawyer friends, Joey Gargan and Paul Markham. He was not too traumatized to make more than 16 long-distance phone calls that night to aides and advisers (none of whom tried to get help to Kopechne, either). Despite his “shock,” he managed to: return to his motel, complain to the manager about a noisy party, go to sleep, chat with a friend the next morning about the boat race, order two newspapers, meet again with Gargan and Markham and return to Chappaquiddick to call another lawyer from a pay phone — all before going to the police.
Senator Kennedy’s car is dragged by a wrecker from the channel off Chappaquiddick Island.
Other questions:

— How much alcohol had Kennedy drunk that night?

— If he and Kopechne did leave the barbecue at 11:15, what occupied their time until 12:45, when Deputy Look saw them drive toward Dike Bridge?

— After getting out of the submerged car, why didn’t Kennedy walk to the lighted house a few yards away and call for help? Or call from the house with the barbecue? Or from his motel?

— Did he urge Gargan to fabricate a story about Kopechne being alone in the car when it went off the bridge?

— Did he go to the police only when he realized he would not be able to carry off such an alibi?

— If, as Kennedy said later, what was uppermost in his mind was “the tragedy and loss of a very devoted friend,” why did he summon 19 high-level political advisers to Hyannis the next day?

— Was the prosecutor rewarded for not bringing manslaughter or driving-to-endanger charges against Kennedy?

— Why was the grand jury threatened with jail and intimidated by a judge when it tried to look into the tragedy?

— When an inquest was eventually held, why did Kennedy fight — against all precedent — to keep its proceedings secret?

— Why was Farrar, the diver, barred from telling the inquest and grand jury what he knew?

Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, Mary Jo Kopechne was buried. Three days later, Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and was sentenced to two months, suspended.

Following the secret inquest in January, District Judge James Boyle found “probable cause” that Kennedy had driven “negligently” and had engaged in “criminal conduct” that “contributed to the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.” The senator was never prosecuted and never tried. Though he did not save his young friend that midsummer night in 1969, he did preserve his political career. Kennedy has been reelected to the Senate four times since.

One final question — the one Kennedy himself asked in 1974, when Richard Nixon was pardoned:

“Do we operate under a system of equal justice under law, or is there one system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty?


55 posted on 10/02/2015 11:15:12 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: Paine in the Neck

Ted Kennedy gave directions with liquor stores and bars as the major landmarks, i.e.,

“You’ll pass Argonaut’s Liquors on the left and Scooter’s on the right, then turn right on the street between the Satire Lounge and the Lion’s Lair, then continue until you see the tree that looks like a huge martini.”


56 posted on 10/02/2015 11:19:02 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: jtal

Ted Kennedy drank a bottle of wine every day. Unless he was sick. Then he drank two.


57 posted on 10/02/2015 11:19:37 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: al baby

Ted Kennedy was addressed by three separate liquor store owners as “the guy who paid for my houseboat.”


58 posted on 10/02/2015 11:20:20 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: PoloSec

Ted Kennedy entered his liver in a Tough Man competition.


59 posted on 10/02/2015 11:20:58 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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To: The_Media_never_lie

Ted Kennedy had a reserved parking space at four different liquor stores.


60 posted on 10/02/2015 11:21:41 AM PDT by MarvinStinson
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