Posted on 08/29/2009 7:01:34 AM PDT by kellynla
We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation — or, at any rate, its “mainstream” media culture — declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s passing, America’s TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there’s a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.
In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940–1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine: “Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.”
That’s the way to do it! An “accident,” “ugly” in some unspecified way, just happened to happen — and only to him, nobody else. Ted’s the star, and there’s no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was . . . a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in the Boston Globe: “Like all figures in history — and like those in the Bible, for that matter — Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.”
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?
We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.
Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.
His defenders would argue that he redeemed himself with his “progressive” agenda, up to and including health-care “reform.” It was an odd kind of “redemption”: In a cooing paean to the senator on a cringe-makingly obsequious edition of NPR’s Diane Rehm Show, Edward Klein of Newsweek fondly recalled that one of Ted’s “favorite topics of humor was, indeed, Chappaquiddick itself. He would ask people, ‘Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?’”
Terrific! Who was that lady I saw you with last night?
Beats me!
Why did the Last Lion cross the road?
To sleep it off!
What do you call 200 Kennedy sycophants at the bottom of a Chappaquiddick pond? A great start, but bad news for NPR guest-bookers! “He was a guy’s guy,” chortled Edward Klein. Which is one way of putting it.
When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, what else is he capable of? An NPR listener said the senator’s passing marked “the end of civility in the U.S. Congress.” Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost “civility” of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution . . . ”
Whoa! “Liberals” (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial, but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored re-segregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked “the end of civility” in American politics, that’s a shoo-in.
If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy’s comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky and Co., that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot — that “fleeting wisp of glory,” that “one brief shining moment” — must run forever, even if “How to Handle a Woman” gets dropped from the score. The senator’s actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.
“I’ve always wondered how much the Kennedy’s paid the Kopechne’s to go away quietly.”
From what I’ve read in the past, they were paid $90,000 by the Kennedys and $50,000 by the insurance company. One can only imagine what sort of pressure was put upon them by the Kennedy thug machine.
The bubbas got away with a lot too. Murder, probably, rape undoubtedly.
Lying cheating cowardly leadership, definitely.
Every week, when I read a new Steyn column, I think ‘he can’t top the last one.’ He always does.
This one soars in its brutal honesty. Well done Mark.
And btw, if anybody listened to NPR on Wednesday/Thursday (my boss is a donor!?!?!) It was the most sappy, worshipful tripe (even outdoing the breathless coverage of the inauguration) right down to the heavy, labored sighs and quivering voices.
But understand, too, that the implication (found in the general "trailer trash" idea) is that poor people living difficult lives are also the moral dregs. Coming, as I do, from poor people who led difficult lives, I admit I feel the sting of the stereotype.
By any reasonable definition of the word, it was murder.
It was bad enough to give her a ride while he was so drunk that he was incapable of driving. In fact, he had a chauffeur at the party because his family and handlers knew that he couldn’t be trusted to drive himself, but he evidently didn’t want the chauffeur along on his date—even though I’m sure he could have been trusted to keep his mouth shut, and probably often had.
But when Kennedy escaped the car, got to the surface, walked by several houses, went to bed and didn’t report the accident, that was deliberate murder.
You could even call it premeditated murder, since if he didn’t plan the accident beforehand, he did deliberately act in such as way as to cause Mary Jo’s death. She was still alive when he abandoned her, and she died because he deliberately decided not to do anything to save her.
Sure, he was drunk, but he had just had a sobering experience and more than a dash of cold water. He knew what he was doing, but he preferred to protect his political reputation more than he cared to take steps to save her life.
That is deliberate murder.
Romans 12:19 (NAS) Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, “VENGEANCE IS MINE, I WILL REPAY,” says the Lord.
Romans 12:19 (KJV) Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.
Maybe Teddy can tell Jesus some of those “Chappaquiddick Jokes”
The fact that we must endure glowing eulogies for marginal and crooked politicians like this, esp. with the help of the supposedly “watchdog” press, shows us just how far our standards have declined over the decades.
Many in Congress and the government should be in jail for obvious crimes or acts of corruption in office or during campaigns. Any of us certainly would be. We would have a hard time finding work (including government jobs in sensitive areas) - and be placed on various watch lists for some of these criminal activities.
Instead, we get nonsense - weepy displays, baseless public defenses, and even civil-service and Committee-Chair PROMOTIONS - for these low-life, marginal contributors, and outright crooks.
Geither, Frosty-freeze Jefferson, Rosty the Postman, Sandy Burglar, Barry the cokehead, the Clintons’ and their doc hide-&-seek games, Ways & Means tax-crook Wrangel, etc., etc.
It’s enough to make the average citizen want to give up the moral life — and go into politics.
Indeed, Ted Kennedy's greatest achievement on this earth may have been to prove, forever & for all time, that white trash can come with an elitist's pedigree too.
Search Google with the title and you can read the entire thing on line.
Do it before it is airbrushed out.
That was not Mark saying it. He was referencing.
Understood.
So true.
He got away with it on earth. He isn’t getting away with it now.
Whre is Rush going next week???? I didn’t know he would not be there.
I read that “Teddy” told a priest on his dying bed that he was ready to go to Heaven. I couldn't get this out of my mind. Is that what a contrite man says?
There is the story of another dying Irishman who, asked by a priest whether he repented his sins, said no. He had enjoyed them and the memory of them as well. He repeatedly refused to say that he was sorry. Finally the priest was reduced to pleading, "Won't you at least say that you are sorry that you are not sorry?"
This physical and moral wreck of a man was arrogant to the end. He was truly the worst of the Kennedys and far beyond Chappaquiddick (about which we are told he liked to joke,) he did immeasurable damage to this country.
Brilliant, Mark!!!
Spot-on. As Steyn always is.
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