"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."

Mark Steyn writes about the 50th anniversary of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne,

In a country that now vaporizes careers for an infelicitous tweet, Ted Kennedy killed a woman and dared us to call him on it. Thanks to the likes of the Associated Press, America failed that test.

...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.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterward, 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 resegregation 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. And in fact setting a new moral standard in which a drunken adulterer's appetites can cause a woman's death and he pays no price is also an end to civility.

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 & Co do, 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.

Read more here.

Ted Kennedy in the #MeToo era

Maureen Callahan writes in the New York Post about

one of the most grievous miscarriages of justice, one of the grossest abuses of wealth and political power, and one of the most ill-deserved second acts in modern American history: July 18, 1969, the night a probably-drunk Ted Kennedy drove off a bridge at Chappaquiddick and left a young, adoring campaign aide named Mary Jo Kopechne to die in about three feet of water, her horrific death a slow agony — one that took hours — as she doubtless waited for her hero, the young and virile Ted, to run for help.

Instead, he stumbled back to his hotel room, called down to the front desk to complain about noisy guests, and went to sleep.



So when it comes to significant anniversaries, the way the media marks them matters — if they’re marked at all. It’s hard to believe, in the #MeToo era, we’re not reckoning with the night Ted Kennedy left a young woman to die and truly did not care, who panicked only when he realized this might cost him a future presidency, who walked right into a lifetime Senate seat and a lionization that extended to a eulogy, delivered by President Obama, that called Ted “a champion for those who had none.”

Tell that to those who loved and survived Mary Jo.

Read more here.

Well, not exactly!

He defined liberalism in America

In GQ an article written by Michael Kelly in February 1990 about Teddy Kennedy when Kennedy was still an active US Senator is brought up out of the archives and linked to by Oregon Muse. Kennedy's personal life prominently featured

a childish belief that the rules of human behavior do not apply to himself, a casual willingness to place himself in compromising positions with an attractive young woman and, most probably, a reckless use of alcohol.

...There have been many theories advanced to explain Kennedy's behavior, all of which make much of the extraordinarily competitive and amoral atmosphere (especially as far as the treatment of women was concerned) in which the Kennedy boys were raised. As Garry Wills makes clear in his elegant The Kennedy Imprisonment, Ted Kennedy was born and bred to act like the last of the Regency rakes: to be a boor when it pleases him, to take what he wants, to treat women as score-markers in the game of sport-fucking and to revel in high-stakes risks. Joseph Kennedy Sr. flaunted his affairs in front of his wife and children, made crude passes at his sons' dates and well past his middle years was still chasing doxies. John Kennedy's mad womanizing—frolicking with nudettes in the White House swimming pool, banging a call girl in Lincoln's bed, carrying on barely secret affairs with admitted mobster girlfriend Judith Campbell Exner, with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield—was beyond anything Teddy has ever done or, for that matter, anything anybody has ever done. Neither Joe nor Jack was punished by the church, state, or wife for such behavior—and the late-born Teddy, coming into the family when its adult behavior patterns were already mythologized, presumably figured that neither the rules of decency nor of retribution applied to a Kennedy. The boy grew to manhood without learning how to be an adult. His drinking suggests nothing so much as a frat boy on a toot. His actions with women seem to be more evidence, as writer Suzannah Lessard put it in 1979, of "a severe case of arrested development, a kind of narcissistic intemperance, a huge, babyish ego that must constantly be fed."

...A cosseted upbringing, a juvenile nature, a powerful sexual greed, the liberation of putting aside the White House, the arrogance of vanity inherent to a Kennedy, the tragedies of his life—they all play a big part too. But periodic excessive drinking does seem to be the catalyst that brings those forces together and releases them.

...Even a partial listing of the major bills in whose passage Kennedy has played a part is impressive. Whether you admire them or not, these are the measures that transformed—mostly liberalized—America in our time: the first Immigration Reform Act; the Voting Rights Act and its extensions; the Freedom of Information Act; the Gun Control Act; the Campaign Financing Reform law; the Comprehensive Selective Service Reform Act; the Eighteen-Year-Old Vote law; the Occupational Safety and Health Act; the War on Cancer bills; the recodification of federal criminal laws; the Bilingual Education Act; the Fair Housing Acts; the Age Discrimination Act; the Airline and Trucking Deregulation bills; the Job Training Partnership Act; the South African sanctions; and the Grove City Civil Rights Restoration Act.

...Kennedy has abandoned the costly Utopian reforms he pushed in the Seventies—such as government-financed universal health insurance and welfare payments that guaranteed an income above the poverty level for all—and now focuses on less-budget-busting programs. He is increasingly successful and increasingly prolific. The 100th Congress (1987-1988) was the best period he or almost any senator has ever had: Kennedy moved more than twenty major pieces of his own legislation through the Senate, including a comprehensive plan to assure medical care, support services and discrimination protection for people with AIDS.

...Kennedy's role in the Bork fight stems from and illustrates his overarching position in American politics. In a rare moment of irritation with the American Civil Liberties Union, the senator once said, "The ACLU thinks that it defines liberalism in the country. I define liberalism in this country." He was exaggerating only a little. In the religion of liberalism, Kennedy is the guardian of orthodoxy. He is the voice of the interest groups that define the Democratic Party; the black activists, the trade unions, the feminists, the environmentalists, the teachers' unions and the perennial progressives.

..."To be truly human," Ted Kennedy once said, "is to shape your own world." And he has, far more than most men dream of, done just that. He has made laws. He has been at the front of sweeping change, improving the lives of many people. He has helped perpetuate a dynasty. The truth is, however, the world shapes us far more than we shape it. The truth is, the forces of the world—the rules of primogeniture, the warp of genetics and the woof of environment, the killing power of bullets and the grip of alcohol—shaped Ted Kennedy and shape him still. It is the sad irony of his life that while he has wrought his will on the world at large he remains unable still to control his own life. He started out in this world dangling from strings held by his father and his brothers. They're gone now, but Teddy dangles still, dancing to the echoes of an old and tired tune.

Read more here.

The Senator of Sleaze

Let's remember Ted Kennedy. 48 years ago yesterday the drunk Senator from Massachusetts drove his car off a bridge with Mary Jo Kopechne in the passenger seat. At Daily Mail, Charlie Laurence writes about The Senator of Sleaze who was a drunk sexual bully... and left a young woman to die.

Misanthropic Humanitarian writes more at Ace of Spades and provides us with a photo of The Lion The Drunk Driver of the Senate.


Read more here.

Exclusive!

The best interviewer in the media has gotten an exclusive interview with Chris Christie about Bridgegate. Manhattan Infidel also gets the help of three surprise guests, but I'm afraid it is still up to us readers to try to decide who is telling the truth.