Great opinion piece. He was able to summarize what I have felt, having to live in this state and watch this breathless parade of toadies heap praise on him for being such a fine person and great legislator.
There IS that one, little, itsy-bitsy thing about going off a bridge and leaving a girl to gasp her last breaths in the pitch black from a diminishing pocket of air while you figure out how to save your reputation.
As Mark Steyn alludes to, anyone could make a mistake, have a lapse in judgement, even make a serious enough one to get someone killed.
Anyone.
To have bad judgement of any kind resulting in harm to others can happen at any time. You a little too fast down a residential street and a kid steps out from behind a parked car, or whatever. The circumstances of those events have to be borne and lived with no matter who you are.
But what illustrates the quality of people is how they live their lives from that moment when confronted with the truth and consequences of their poor judgement.
As he lay panting on the bank after saving his own physical skin from the icy waters of Poucha Pond in Chappaquiddick, he IMMEDIATELY began to figure out how to save his personal and political skin.
He lay there in the sand, thinking of who he could call to help him, frantically wondering how he would get out of this trap, searching for ways how he could avoid the shame and scandal of a famous married politician with alcohol on his breath and a dead unmarried woman in his car on a deserted road.
As he lay there on his back in the sand, there was a 29 year old woman, her clothes plastered to her body in the pitch black, underwater with her face in an air pocket, and she could not figure out how to get out.
She probably thought “He will save me. He will swim down and open the door and pull me out. Or he will get help. If I stay here and wait, he will come.”
And that is wha makes his “ugliest single moment from the late senator’s 77 years on Earth” at Chappaquiddick (as a liberal columnist recently said) such a heinous one is his behavior following the accident.
How instead of putting her LIFE first, he schemed, juggled, obfuscated, hedged, delayed and used every social and political scheme and resource at his disposal to save his reputation, even the wearing of the neck brace.
Liberals want to redefine everything so that reality is packaged in terms, phrases and definitions that make the reality so much more flexible and explainable.
It is why they call “abortion” choice.
It is why they call “discrimination” Affirmative Action.
It is why they call “Terrorists” insurgents or Freedom Fighters.
It is why they now call acts of terrorism “man-caused disasters”.
And it is why they have always called the death of 29 year old Mary Jo Kopechne a “tragedy for the Kennedys”.
And how Ted Kennedy dealt with that tells you all you need to know about him.
Well stated.
Ted did have people around him that cleaned up his mess very well, including dealing with public perception of events. Hopefully, as far as any Kennedy children that are left that will stop with Ted’s death, especially with the internet to sort through to secure the truth.