Ding Dong the witch is dead!

[_richardMdBorn]

Mark Steyn has some apt comments about the swimmer:

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 omelet 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 OK 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 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.

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. 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.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/kennedy-ted-chappaquiddick-2545006-mary-senator

[_Dr. Shades]

Will you please name a couple of them?

Besides Mary Jo Kopechne? Sure.

Uhh, Mary Jo Kopechne isn't a piece of legislation or a policy. Try again.

Because of his politicization of the Iraq war which gave aid and comfort to the terrorists that they could think to drive us out, . . .

Please name the piece of legislation or the policy that Ted Kennedy enacted that politicized the Iraq war. I'd like to read it for myself.

. . . you may select any of the names of all US casualties there.

Please name the piece of legislation or the policy that Ted Kennedy wrote that caused a U.S. casualty.

Or anyone enslaved on the various welfare programs especially before the 1990's.

Please name the welfare program that Ted Kennedy wrote that enslaved anyone.

[_richardMdBorn]

Ted Kennedy attempted to betray his country in the 1980s.

Kennedy's message was simple. He proposed an unabashed quid pro quo. Kennedy would lend Andropov a hand in dealing with President Reagan. In return, the Soviet leader would lend the Democratic Party a hand in challenging Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. "The only real potential threats to Reagan are problems of war and peace and Soviet-American relations," the memorandum stated. "These issues, according to the senator, will without a doubt become the most important of the election campaign."

Kennedy made Andropov a couple of specific offers.

First he offered to visit Moscow. "The main purpose of the meeting, according to the senator, would be to arm Soviet officials with explanations regarding problems of nuclear disarmament so they may be better prepared and more convincing during appearances in the USA." Kennedy would help the Soviets deal with Reagan by telling them how to brush up their propaganda.

Then he offered to make it possible for Andropov to sit down for a few interviews on American television. "A direct appeal ... to the American people will, without a doubt, attract a great deal of attention and interest in the country. ... If the proposal is recognized as worthy, then Kennedy and his friends will bring about suitable steps to have representatives of the largest television companies in the USA contact Y.V. Andropov for an invitation to Moscow for the interviews. ... The senator underlined the importance that this initiative should be seen as coming from the American side."

Kennedy would make certain the networks gave Andropov air time--and that they rigged the arrangement to look like honest journalism.

Kennedy's motives? "Like other rational people," the memorandum explained, "[Kennedy] is very troubled by the current state of Soviet-American relations." But that high-minded concern represented only one of Kennedy's motives.

"Tunney remarked that the senator wants to run for president in 1988," the memorandum continued. "Kennedy does not discount that during the 1984 campaign, the Democratic Party may officially turn to him to lead the fight against the Republicans and elect their candidate president."

Kennedy proved eager to deal with Andropov--the leader of the Soviet Union, a former director of the KGB and a principal mover in both the crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the suppression of the 1968 Prague Spring--at least in part to advance his own political prospects.

In 1992, Tim Sebastian published a story about the memorandum in the London Times. Here in the U.S., Sebastian's story received no attention. In his 2006 book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism, historian Paul Kengor reprinted the memorandum in full. "The media," Kengor says, "ignored the revelation."

"The document," Kengor continues, "has stood the test of time. I scrutinized it more carefully than anything I've ever dealt with as a scholar. I showed the document to numerous authorities who deal with Soviet archival material. No one has debunked the memorandum or shown it to be a forgery. Kennedy's office did not deny it."

Why bring all this up now? No evidence exists that Andropov ever acted on the memorandum--within eight months, the Soviet leader would be dead--and now that Kennedy himself has died even many of the former senator's opponents find themselves grieving. Yet precisely because Kennedy represented such a commanding figure--perhaps the most compelling liberal of our day--we need to consider his record in full.

Doing so, it turns out, requires pondering a document in the archives of the politburo.

When President Reagan chose to confront the Soviet Union, calling it the evil empire that it was, Sen. Edward Kennedy chose to offer aid and comfort to General Secretary Andropov. On the Cold War, the greatest issue of his lifetime, Kennedy got it wrong.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/08/27/ted-kennedy-soviet-union-ronald-reagan-opinions-columnists-peter-robinson.html

[_Jason Bourne]

Bc, I wish that you would let the Gospel rule your thoughts more than politics.

The Gospel rules my politics in every way

It is certainly not the gospel of Jesus Christ the rules your politics. Mercy. Practice it. Learn not to judge lest you be judged the same way you judge. Practice it. You need it. Mormons are typcally politically conservative but you take it to new heights. .

Not being able to put human kindness and decency ahead of partisan hatred is so very unchrist-like that it stands as a wakeup call to anyone who cares about you that something is wrong.

Not being personally aquainted with the man and being on the receiving end of his left wing (read: contra Gospel)

Contra the gospel according to BC.

policies gives me the absolute moral right to celebrate his removal from the playing field. Everyone in the world has political cause to celebrate for this reason though of course many are duped into thinking his policies are correct.

I was not a Ted Kennedy fan. But publically the man practiced what he preached. He was a liberal and proud of it. Can't fault him for living what he believed even if I often disagreed. I also fell a bit of nostalgia as a seemingly historical era that covered most of my life has come to an end.

[_richardMdBorn]

I was not a Ted Kennedy fan. But publically the man practiced what he preached. He was a liberal and proud of it.

Did he practice what he preached with respect to women? How much money did he give to charity? Did he defend the powerless when his used his political power to get away with his shameful and illegal acts at Chappaquiddick?

[_Eric]

I'd just like to take a moment to comment on the fact that BCspace is now a full blown liberal. I think it is hilarious.

Look at this thread: Ding Dong the witch is dead? Holy smokes. It hasn't even been a full year yet and he has completely transformed into a full-blown, president-hating, protest-loving, values-shoving, lib.

This is happening elsewhere all over the country:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/90823/the-dai ... w-liberals

[_richardMdBorn]

I'd just like to take a moment to comment on the fact that BCspace is now a full blown liberal. I think it is hilarious.

Look at this thread: Ding Dong the witch is dead? Holy smokes. It hasn't even been a full year yet and he has completely transformed into a full-blown, president-hating, protest-loving, values-shoving, lib.

This is happening elsewhere all over the country:

http://www.hulu.com/watch/90823/the-dai ... w-liberals

Hi Eric,

I think it's funny how quickly protest became non-patriotic after the election last November.. Consistency is hardly a virtue of liberals. The community organizer does not like it when the community organizes against him. He wants to spreads the wealth of others around while keeping the gains of his alliance with Tony Rezko. There will be no lobbyists in his administration. Yea, right.

Richard

[_Eric]

Hi Eric,

I think it's funny how quickly protest became non-patriotic after the election last November.. Consistency is hardly a virtue of liberals. The community organizer does not like it when the community organizes against him. He wants to spreads the wealth of others around while keeping the gains of his alliance with Tony Rezko. There will be no lobbyists in his administration. Yea, right.

Richard

Richard,

My friend, I think you have it backwards. Protesting quickly became patriotic after the election last November. Prior to November of 2008 protesters were certainly unpatriotic.

The doublespeak from the new liberals (formerly known as Conservatives) is absurd:

O'Reilly pre-Obama: "Surveys show, many protesters are simply loons."

O'Reilly post-Obama: "When we cover the town hall meetings, we don't describe the protesters as loons."

Hannity pre-Obama: "I frankly find the partisan attacks against this president and the resentment towards this president at a time of war unprecedented."

O'Reilly pre-Obama: "The far left lives to hate the president."

Fox News pre-Obama: "You can't talk to a liberal without them trying to politicize this, undermine the effort, undermine the president, use the opportunity to attack the president."

Hannity post-Obama: "I think Obama is a disaster for this country."

Crazy ol' Beck post-Obama: "This guy is, I believe, a racist."

Hannity post-Obama: "Obama is destroying this country."

O'Reilly pre-Obama: "The radical left is growing bolder. It's trying to impose its insane agenda on everyone."

Hannity pre-Obama: "This is a case when liberals want to force their values down everyone's throat."

O'Reilly pre-Obama: "The USA has become strong because of its core values, of freedom, individual responsibility, and institutions like traditional marriage."

Fox News pre-Obama: "I think they need to get rid of hip-hop music."

Hannity pre-Obama: "Our framers, they all acknowledge America was a Christian nation."

Fox News pre-Obama: "Why are liberals so afraid of free speech?" "It's just a transparent effort by whiny liberals to silence the opposition."

Hannity post-Obama: "Ms. California... became the victim of left wing smears... just for voicing her opposition to gay marriage."

Fox News pre-Obama: "Should Redford and the rest of Hollywood liberals just shut-up?"

Hannity pre-Obama: "These pampered liberal limousine liberal Hollywood actors, they make these reckless statements all the time and they get away with it."

Hannity pre-Obama: "These liberals make themselves out to be victims."

Crazy ol' Beck post-Obama: "There is going to be a witch hunt, I believe, in this country and quite possibly around the world. The first group: Jews. Happens every time. Second group: I think, Conservatives."

Fox News post-Obama: "Nobody gets beat up worse in the mainstream media than a woman conservative. Or an African-American conservative."

Crazy ol' Beck post-Obama: "Times goes after me, and Fox news. They'll blame me, or anyone else they want to silence."

There's more: http://www.hulu.com/watch/90823/the-dai ... w-liberals

[_richardMdBorn]

Hi Eric,

I was referring to how the mainstream media and the liberals quickly decided that protesting was unpatriotic. Note that Bush did not attack protesters for protesting. He said repeatedly that they had the right to protest. He disagreed with them and the Democrats cried that their patriotism was bein questioned. Do Democrats believe in free speech? Remember how the Obama campaign twice tried to shut Extension 720 on WGN-AM in Chicago during the last year. I could cite other examples of this. I guess there's no chilling effect when Democrats are in power.

Watch out for such far right people as Nat Hentoff:

I was not intimidated during J. Edgar Hoover's FBI hunt for reporters like me who criticized him. I railed against the Bush-Cheney war on the Bill of Rights without blinking. But now I am finally scared of a White House administration. President Obama's desired health care reform intends that a federal board (similar to the British model) — as in the Center for Health Outcomes Research and Evaluation in a current Democratic bill — decides whether your quality of life, regardless of your political party, merits government-controlled funds to keep you alive. Watch for that life-decider in the final bill. It's already in the stimulus bill signed into law.

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/hentoff081909.php3