Ted Kennedy's Dead; Was Red; 'Nuff Said
28 August, 2009
Ted
Kennedy's body has barely had time to assume room temperature, but
already the lionization of this entrenched incumbent Senator from
Massachusetts has kicked into overdrive across our popular media.
The Chappaquiddick "incident" was referred to by one news reader
as one of Kennedy's "personal tragedies." These revisionist
histories were written perhaps even before Kennedy breathed his last,
thanks to his long battle with brain cancer. In life, Kennedy was
an ardent leftist who famously referred to Barack Obama as "Osama bin
Laden... Osama Obama..." before finally managing to spit out the man's
name. In death, he became "the Lion of the Senate," a man adored
by both sides, a man known for his willingness to cooperate in
bipartisan feats of conflict resolution and diplomacy. How much
difference a brain tumor makes.
The reality is, of course, that Ted Kennedy was an absurd, bloated caricature of a man, and as reprehensible a senator as ever cast a vote for gun control or partial-birth abortion. He was not a paragon of bipartisan cooperation; he was an ideologue who voted with the Democrats fully one hundred percent of the time during his last Congress.
Kennedy's voting record, historically, was perfectly monstrous. He supported a Soviet-sponsored initiative to freeze our nuclear weapons program, which would have guaranteed the Soviet Union's military superiority, and he took to the senate floor to condemn President Reagan's call to develop a missile defense program. That missile defense program, or perhaps more accurately, the threat of that program, helped force the Soviets to spend themselves into bankruptcy and arguably hastened the collapse of the USSR.
The supposedly "bipartisan" and eminently cooperative "Lion of the Senate" was also instrumental in the defamation of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. The intellectually dishonest and ideologically driven effort on the part of the Democrats to discredit Bork (because he was politically conservative) was so vehement that the term "Borking" was coined. To "Bork" a nominee is to condemn and discredit that nominee based, not on his or her ability to do the job, but on one's dislike of his or her political opinions. (With typical Democrat hypocrisy, this objection to a nominee's political outlook and even personal biases was swept aside in the rush to confirm the racist judge Sonia Sotomayor, whose legal decisions have been overturned by the Supreme Court more than half of the time.)
Despite his support of environmentalist causes and extremist environmental legislation, Kennedy opposed an environmentally friendly power-generation project called "Cape Wind" because its wind turbines, to be built on Nantucket Sound, would have been an eyesore to the nobles looking on from the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis. Kennedy's "do as I say, not as I do" philosophy extended from this to avoiding property taxes and other pesky issues with which us little people and mere mortals have to cope. Notably, he and his family profited from the oil industry, even as Kennedy spoke out against "Big Oil" and condemned its fat cat masters for their "excessive profits." More recently, he supported the "cap and trade" concept, legislation that was nothing more than a means of taxing industry while supposedly shuffling around blame for carbon emissions.
No friend to national security, Kennedy was a vocal opponent of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2003 he claimed there was no "imminent threat" from terrorism, and that Bush's war was a "fraud." How a man capable of slurring and stammering such rhetoric could be characterized as a bipartisan master of legislation, adored and respected by all, defies imagination.
Then, of course, there is the reason "the Lion of the Senate" never went on to resurrect "Camelot" at the White House.
"Chappaquiddick" and "Mary Jo Kepechne" have become meaningless words that people throw, or dismiss, in a kind of knee-jerk "I hate Ted Kennedy" or "I like Ted Kennedy" reaction to whatever the man did or tried to do in life. It's worth taking the time to remember and to understand, however, just what Kennedy did four decades ago. The Chappaquiddick affair torpedoed his chances of ever running for President, after all. It seems to me that it might have been kind of significant.
According to this column by Sean O'Donnell, on July 18, 1969, Ted Kennedy -- probably drunk -- left a party on Chappaquiddick Island in the company of one Mary Jo Kepechne, a young woman whom he was presumably "seeing." He promptly drove off a bridge.
Kennedy managed to get clear of the vehicle, swim to shore, and walk back to the party. She didn't.
Kennedy never called for help. When Kepechne's body was found, he finally went to a police station, but it's clear he didn't give a damn and made no attempt to save her or to get help for her. He even managed to fit in a nap, sometime prior to talking to the cops. The "incident" speaks volumes to his character, or lack thereof. He's also quite clearly guilty of manslaughter but, because of the era in which the "accident" happened and because of the great power he and his family wielded, he never faced any legal consequences. Where the Kennedys are concerned, all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Kennedy's corpse is still being levered out of the chair behind his desk, but already the Democrats in Massachusetts are showing their true colors. Where previously they changed the law to prevent a Republican governor from appointing a Republican Senator to fill a vacancy, they now, in a show of blatant hypocrisy, want to change the law back so that Kennedy's sweat-stained seat can be filled by yet another Democrat. They can't abide the thought that the voters of Massachusetts might get a say in their representation in the Senate, and they don't trust those voters to choose "correctly" and continue their decades-long rule. This is "Taxachusetts," after all. Who do those not-Democrats think they are, anyway?
The Kennedy Legacy, such as it is, is not one of American nobility. The Kennedy family represents the worst of American politics and American wealth. They are a close-knit tribe of elitists to whom the law is presumed not to apply the way it does to us ordinary people. They are a very wealthy family whose scions decry wealth. They are industrialists, businessmen, and power-mongers whose progeny attack industry, indict business, and seek dominion. They are an arrogant aristocracy who belittle the American citizenry in their deeds if not explicitly in their words, saying one thing while doing the opposite and expecting never to be criticized. They are remembered in popular culture not for their many misdeeds, their political missteps, their extramarital affairs, or their personal oddities. The reality of the Kennedy family has been dispatched down the Memory Hole; only the myth of Camelot has been allowed to remain.
I take no pleasure in anyone's death. I am not particularly sad, however, to see Ted Kennedy no longer spitting and stuttering his way through political invective from the floor of the Senate, spewing vitriol that, were it to issue frothily from the lips of anyone else, would be reason to suspect the loud and angry orator of being drunk, of having suffered a stroke, or of being utterly and irrevocably mentally imbalanced. Ted Kennedy was no lion. He was not even a mouse. He was a rat, grown fat on the earnings of others, complacent in the sense of entitlement that characterized his family and its politics.
He will not be missed. Not by me, anyway. >>