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. >>