Wonderland: Bye Bye Teddy 1932-2009

[Warph]

If it were a matter of mere political disagreement, we would join the calls to strike a conciliatory tone and mourn the death of Sen. Edward Kennedy. But we do a disservice to him and the country to call him anything but what he was. Ted Kennedy was not a good man and we mourn the damage (or worse) he did both to individuals and to America.  ---The Rabbit

What they are saying about teddy in Wonderland:

"Ted Kennedy left the scene of a fatal accident for which he was at least partly responsible. Then he used his extraordinary power to get off, spending the rest of his career in pseudo-remorse, playing the most liberal of Senators. It was always an act to me, even when I agreed with him politically. This was not a life well lived." --author and screenwriter Roger L. Simon


"There is a lot one could say of Senator Kennedy -- positive from supporters, negative from critics. They say one should not speak ill of the dead. True. But I am of the view that one should not lie about the dead either." --political analyst Bill Bennett


"My own hope is that Ted Kennedy's deep commitment to a comprehensive health plan in our country will be honored now by his contemporaries, by his peers, in the near future." --former President Jimmy Carter (Selling health care)


"Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time." --President Barack Obama, lamenting the death of Ted Kennedy


"No one has done more than Senator Kennedy to educate our children, care for our seniors and ensure equality for all Americans. Ted Kennedy's dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year because of his leadership and his inspiration." --House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) (Does she mean that Kennedy did more than the people who actually educate our children and care for our seniors?)


"Ted Kennedy's dream was the one for which the Founding Fathers fought and for which his brothers sought to realize. The liberal lion's mighty roar may now fall silent, but his dream shall never die." --Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) (Actually, the Founding Fathers fought against oppressive big government)


"Ted Kennedy was the best senator, the best advocate you could hope for." --Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) (He was the best advocate -- unless your last name was Kopechne)


Actual headline of the Chicago Sun-Times: "Commentary by Mary Jo Kopechne: "Kennedy Drive No Afternoon Delight" --Chicago Sun-Times

[flintauqua]

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1918968,00.html

Ted Kennedy: Bringing the Myth Down to Earth

By DAVID VON DREHLE David Von Drehle – Thu Aug 27, 11:05 am ET

The patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy, spent a big part of his life in the movie business, so it's fitting, perhaps, to quote from a film as we reflect on the family he built. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance opened in 1962, when John F. and Robert F. Kennedy ruled Washington and young Edward M. Kennedy was winning his first of nine U.S. Senate elections. It is the story of a decent, but entirely human, fellow whose fame doesn't quite match the ambiguous facts of history. And there comes a point when the myth assumes a reality all its own. "This is the West, sir," says a newspaper editor. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."


The Kennedy family saga is an epic tangle of true legends and legendary truths. The father, with his bottomless checkbook and flair for p.r., cast his clan in flawless Carrara marble, more beautiful than human flesh - but in the long run, less compelling. To his younger children - especially the youngest, Ted - fell the difficult job of reconnecting a family of statues, dead icons, to the living and the vital and the real. (See pictures of a Kennedy Family album.)


That's where they belong: not up on pedestals but down among us, where the action is. The Kennedys of reality were as much a part of the tempestuous truth and hard action of the 20th century as any single family. It was an immigrant century, and Joseph P. Kennedy sprang from that soil. His father P.J. Kennedy was a prosperous saloon owner and ward boss in the hurly-burly of the Boston Irish. It was the urban century, long dominated by men like John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, the machine mayor of Boston whose daughter Rose married Joe and became the Kennedy matriarch. It was the century of the Roaring Twenties, and no stock trader or reputed rum runner roared louder than Joe Kennedy did. The century of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who played a long cat-and-mouse game with Joe's bottomless ambitions. The century of Hollywood, where Joe and his older sons cavorted among the starlets.


Onward through the riffling pages of the century's calendar: Hitler, World War II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, civil rights, the space age, Vietnam. Scarcely a tide flowed through history without the Kennedys somewhere on its back, gliding downwind or beating against it. And yet reality wasn't enough - first for them, then for the rest of us. If their story is raw material for an American Shakespeare, then you might say unappeasable hunger was the fatal flaw. (See pictures of the lion of the senate, Ted Kennedy.)


One of the family's many biographers, Laurence Leamer, marks the hinge in the Kennedy history - where the arc swings from romance to tragedy - as the day when Joe secretly had his oldest daughter, Rosemary, lobotomized in 1941. Her retardation was a blemish that he thought he might carve away. But for the public, the shadow first fell in 1944, when the oldest, and perhaps the most promising, of the Kennedys, Joe Jr., volunteered for a dangerous combat mission in an experimental flying bomb. The plane exploded before he could bail out. (See TIME's complete Ted Kennedy coverage.)


Quite a set of clothes had been laid out for that young man. In his mind and in the eyes of many others, he was flying toward the Navy Cross and, beyond that, a career in politics that would take the first Irish Catholic to the White House. With Joe Jr. gone, John Kennedy put on the outfit. He was a sickly, slight, half-crippled young man, but he managed to swell himself to size through cunning and courage and cortisone. Old-style politics, in the form of Chicago's Daley machine, boosted him across the Oval Office threshold. But as soon as he landed, the Kennedy myth-makers went to work vacuuming up the grit. The scaffolding of ward bosses was removed to reveal the polished image of a prince.


What John F. Kennedy was: cool under pressure, a shrewd decision maker, an inspiring speaker, a man who could learn from his mistakes. What he wasn't: a devoted husband, a vigorous athlete, a martyred saint, a budding King Arthur. With his sudden, shocking death, however, these truths were transmuted, through understandable grief, into the gauzy unreality of Camelot.


Read "A Family Gathers to Say Farewell to The Last Lion."


See TIME's best JFK covers.


Thus the weight of two unrealized lives dropped onto Robert's shoulders. He added a deeper dimension: a mission of compassion to go along with the steel and the wit and the will to win. And then, with a gunshot in a Los Angeles hotel, everything fell to Ted - the youngest, the mama's boy, the slipstreamer.


This was a young man who scored the only Crimson touchdown in the 1955 Harvard-Yale game, who won the moot-court competition at the prestigious University of Virginia School of Law, who became the youngest majority whip in Senate history. And yet, because success was never enough among those brothers, Ted Kennedy cast the shadow of an underachiever. There was always someone faster, smarter, more powerful, more glamorous, ruthless or suave. Perhaps, as the youngest, he didn't realize that the same had been true of his brothers before the mantle had fallen on them. According to Leamer, Rose Kennedy couldn't imagine that her smaller, weaker second son could be the equal of her first: "I didn't think you could have two in one family," he quotes her as saying. Publisher Henry Luce reported a conversation with Joseph P. Kennedy: "He told me once that he didn't think Jack would get very far, and he indicated he wasn't very bright." As for Robert: "In the high stakes of inheritance, Bobby seemed to have drawn the worst card," Leamer writes. "Unlike his brothers, he wasn't a handsome child ... scrawny and small, always struggling to keep up." (See pictures from Ted Kennedy's life and career.)


In his memorable eulogy for Robert, Ted Kennedy seemed to cherish the possibility that what was real about his family might possibly be enough. "My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life," the young Senator said in a voice cracked by grief. But by that point, he was arguing against a hurricane. Death, normally the great leveler, had become the ennobler of the Kennedys. One by one, they had passed into immortality, leaving Ted alone among the men of the family to live a full span. His brothers became the sweetened distillate of their best days and handsomest poses, while he made his way through more-mottled seasons, merely human, with all that humanity entails - the mistakes, misjudgments, weaknesses, appetites and fears. Could it be that the real Kennedy curse was not early death but long life, suffering by comparison to a mythical might-have-been?


It certainly looked that way in the harsh light of Chappaquiddick, a scant year after Robert's assassination, when the weight of expectations seemed to have broken him. Or during the worst of his bouts with the bottle. Or when changing mores turned the family tradition of skirt-chasing from a mark of virility to the sign of a cad. While the Senator grew fat and seemed to fall apart, his brothers remained ageless and timeless, slim, breeze-kissed. If he was reality, then we wanted no part of it. (See Ted Kennedy's top 10 legislative battles.)


But in the end, it will be said by all but his fiercest critics that Ted Kennedy walked tall and far, given his superhuman burden. There was something genuinely noble about his refusal to give in, the way he picked himself up from the canvas, even when he had knocked himself down - maybe especially when he had knocked himself down. It was his fate to prove that the Kennedys weren't storybook princes conjured to life, and his triumph lies in the fact that he didn't let the myth stop him. His sister Eunice, who died two weeks before Ted (only Jean survives from the nine Kennedy children), did something similar with her great creation, the Special Olympics. Her father had tried to erase the blemish of a handicapped daughter; this younger Kennedy chose instead to reveal the glory behind the blemish.


Ted might have gone early. In 1964 he was dragged, critically injured, from the wreckage of a plane crash. Had he died that day, he too would have remained forever young and dashing. No Chappaquiddick, no divorce, no boozy indiscretions. But also no antiapartheid campaign, no Americans with Disabilities Act, no Family and Medical Leave Act. Ted Kennedy survived to the ripe age of 77 and in the process brought the family saga full circle, back to the vital, urgent, messy clutch of the real. Back to America, a land of common people, not of princelings, where even our marble monuments celebrate lives molded from clay.


See TIME's complete Ted Kennedy coverage.

[Teresa]

Before anyone wants to throw me on the hard ass wagon... I will say this.. before I say what I really feel.. (((This will be my nice sentence..or as nice as I can be where he is concerned)))
I realize that he is a human being  who had a powerful father and strong family lineage who I'm sure is respected by some.
I'm not one of them.
I can't think of any other person who has done so much to destroy our country's republic. His welfare policies have done more to ruin the American work ethic and sense of personal responsibility than any single movement in history. Maybe there is someone who can top him, maybe it is Obama. He came from a crime family and operated much like a political gangster for decades.
Good riddance to bad rubbish to the old drunkard......

And as far as what the Koepechnee family must be feeling now. .....  I imagine relief would be one of their emotions.
Any of us would have spent the last forty years in jail for what he did in Chappaquiddick! Despicable old bastard...

[Diane Amberg]

Her parents died and are buried with her.

[greatguns]

I'm sure glad minimum wage was raised.

[Warph]

Alexander's Essay – August 27, 2009

Lion of the Left

"The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families. ... Public virtue cannot exist in a nation without private, and public virtue is the only foundation of republics." --John Adams

Have you ever attended a funeral service out of respect for a friend or colleague, and left perplexed as to whom the eulogy was referring? Just once, I would like to go to a service for some disreputable rogue and have a clergyman deliver a eulogy that was faithful to the facts rather than full of fiction. (Hopefully, that won't be my own!)

I am certainly not suggesting that we should stand in judgment of any man, for that is the exclusive domain of our Creator. However, we should never abandon our responsibility to discern right from wrong.

On that note, Edward "Teddy" Kennedy (22 February 1932 -- 25 August 2009) died this week at age 77.

Kennedy spent the last 47 of his years as a senator, having been perpetually re-elected by the people of Massachusetts. This made him the third-longest serving senator -- behind Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Strom Thurmond (R-SC) -- in that chamber's august history.

Of course, a fawning Leftmedia will inundate us with non-stop coverage of Kennedy's life, featuring interviews with his political sycophants up to, and probably well after, his interment at National Cemetery. The airways and printed pages are already sodden with accolades, mostly framing the senator's life as one of great personal tragedy but great public success.

Let's take a look at both.

Kennedy was born into great wealth, privilege and political influence, the fourth son and ninth child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. He never worked a day in a private-sector job, and like his brothers before him, he owed his political career to his father's considerable political machinations.
But, the mainstream media's reference to TK's life as one punctuated by personal tragedy is an understatement.

Before the age of 16, he had suffered through the death of his brother Joseph Kennedy Jr. (his father's heir apparent), who died when his B-24 bomber exploded over Surrey, England, during World War II, and the death of his sister Kathleen Agnes Kennedy, who died in an airplane crash in France.

In 1941 his father ordered a lobotomy for Ted's sister, Rosemary Kennedy, then age 23, because of "mood swings that the family found difficult to handle at home." The procedure failed and left Rose mentally incapacitated until her death in January 2005 at age 87.

Ted, like his brother John, developed a reputation as a serial womanizer in college. Unlike his Ivy League brothers, however, Ted was kicked out of Harvard for cheating, though allowed to return a few years later to complete his undergraduate degree.

Thanks to some election-night manipulation of returns by Old Joe, JFK was elected president in the closest race of the 20th century (49.7 percent to Richard Nixon's 49.5 percent). That paved the way for TK's victory in a 1962 U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts.

The thrill of victory was brief, however. On 22 November 1963, during a political visit to Dallas, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

In June 1964, Ted Kennedy was flying with friends on a private plane that crashed on a landing approach, killing the pilot and a Kennedy staffer. Kennedy survived but suffered severe injuries.

On 4 June 1968, Robert Kennedy, then a candidate for the Democrat Party's nomination for president, was assassinated after a Los Angeles political event. The political baton then went to Teddy, the last of the four Kennedy brothers, but his alcohol abuse and philandering would keep the presidency out of reach.

In 1969, on one of his infamous junkets to "the island" (Martha's Vineyard and Chappaquiddick), Kennedy's moral lapse would cost a young staffer her life, and would cost him any chance of becoming president.

On the night of 18 July, Kennedy left a party with an attractive young intern en route to a private secluded beach on the far side of Dike Bridge. Kennedy lost control on the single-lane bridge and his vehicle overturned in the shallow tidal water. (Note: I drove across this bridge in a large 4x4 truck a few years after this incident, and it was not difficult to keep it out of the water -- but then, I was not intoxicated.)

Kennedy freed himself from the vehicle leaving his passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne to suffocate in an air pocket inside the overturned car. After resting at the water's edge, he walked back to the party house, and one of his political hacks took him back to his hotel.

Nine hours later, after sobering up and conferring with political advisors and lawyers, Kennedy called authorities to report the incident. Kopechne's body had already been discovered.

With the help of Father Joe's connections, Kennedy was charged only with leaving the scene of an accident. In his testimony, he claimed, "I almost tossed and turned... I had not given up hope all night long that, by some miracle, Mary Jo would have escaped from the car." He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to serve two months in jail -- sentence suspended.

With Joan, his pregnant wife of 10 years, and their three children by his side, he claimed that charges of "immoral conduct and drunk driving" were false and he was promptly re-elected to his second full Senate term with a landslide 62 percent of the vote. However, his responsibility for the death of Kopechne would all but disqualify him from ever holding national office. Indeed, the moral composure of the nation differs significantly from that of his Massachusetts supporters and defenders.

Kennedy's political advocacy swung evermore to the left in the years that followed, and his personal conduct led the way.

In January 1981, Joan announced she had had enough, and they divorced.
Two Senate terms later, Kennedy was partying at the family's Palm Beach compound with his nephew, William Kennedy Smith, who was charged with the rape of Patricia Bowman during that evening. The Kennedy machine was able to undermine Bowman's charges by assassinating her character ahead of the trial.

Not surprisingly, Kennedy was an ardent backer of his friend Bill Clinton after the latter lied about sexual encounters with a subordinate White House intern in 1998.

In turn, Clinton awarded Kennedy the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which, along with the Congressional Gold Medal, is the highest civilian award in the U.S. It is designated for individuals who have made "an especially meritorious contribution to the security or national interests of the United States, world peace, cultural or other significant public or private endeavors."

Setting aside all of his personal tragedies, what about the tributes and rave reviews of Kennedy's public life, his success as a legislator?

According to Barack Obama, "Our country has lost a great leader, who picked up the torch of his fallen brothers and became the greatest United States Senator of our time."

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insists, "No one has done more than Senator Kennedy to educate our children, care for our seniors and ensure equality for all Americans. Ted Kennedy's dream of quality health care for all Americans will be made real this year because of his leadership and his inspiration."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid adds, "Ted Kennedy's dream was the one for which the Founding Fathers fought and for which his brothers sought to realize. The Liberal Lion's mighty roar may now fall silent, but his dream shall never die."

Oh, really?

Kennedy has a very long legacy of legislative accomplishments, but not one of them is expressly authorized by our Constitution, that venerable old document he has repeatedly pledged by oath "to support and defend."

Kennedy's long Senate tenure was, in fact, defined by hypocrisy.

For example, consider that this fine Catholic boy's advocacy for abortion and homosexuality was second to none.

In regard to Operation Iraqi Freedom, consider his claim during the Clinton years: "We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing weapons of mass destruction." A few years later, with his cadre of traitorous leftists at his side, Kennedy claimed, "The Bush administration misrepresented and distorted the intelligence to justify a war that America should never have fought."

Who can forget Kennedy's outrageous 2006 inquisition into the integrity of then Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito? In 1987 when Ronald Reagan nominated Alito to be a U.S. District Attorney, Kennedy's vote was among the Senate's unanimous consent. And when Sam Alito was nominated for the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in 1990, he again received Kennedy's vote and unanimous consent from the Senate. But after impugning Alito's character in his Supreme Court hearings, Kennedy blustered, "If confirmed, Alito could very well fundamentally alter the balance of the court and push it dangerously to the right."

Of course, Kennedy was an expert at "borking" judicial nominees. Indeed, he is responsible for the coining of the term. In 1987, President Ronald Reagan nominated an exceptional jurist, Robert Bork, to the Supreme Court. During Bork's confirmation hearings, Kennedy proclaimed, "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens." Despicable.

No agenda was more sacred to Kennedy than opposing Constitutional Constructionists in order to convert the Judiciary into what Thomas Jefferson called the "Despotic Branch" stacked with jurists who subscribe to the notion of a so-called "Living Constitution".

But among über-leftists like Kennedy, there is perhaps no greater hypocrisy than the fact that they are among the wealthiest of Americans but pretend to be advocates for the poor. Of course, they never give up their opulent trappings and lifestyles while pontificating what is best for the masses. (I have written on the pathology associated with this hypocrisy under the label "Inheritance Welfare Liberalism, or "rich guilt" if you will.)

And there is a long list of Kennedy legislation that has proven disastrous.
Second only to the looming disaster of his pet nationalized health care promotion, Kennedy led the charge for the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, ending quotas based on national origin. He argued, "Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. The ethnic mix of our country will not be upset. ...The bill will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area..."

How did that one turn out?

Kennedy also had some dangerous dalliances with the Soviets in 1983, endeavoring to undermine Ronald Reagan's hard line with the USSR. Fortunately, his efforts did not prevail.

But Kennedy did have one thing in common with his older brothers: He had powerful oratorical skills.

At the 2004 Democrat Convention to elect his lap dog, John Kerry, Kennedy, who wrote the book on political disunity, declared to delegates, "There are those who seek to divide us. ... America needs a genuine uniter -- not a divider. [Republicans] divide and try to conquer."

Fortunately, the American people weren't buying his rhetoric -- at least not until the 2008 convention, when Kennedy joined Barack Obama's "hope 'n' change" chorus: "I have come here tonight to stand with you to change America.... For me this is a season of hope -- new hope for a justice and fair prosperity for the many, and not just for the few -- new hope. And this is the cause of my life -- new hope that we will break the old gridlock and guarantee that every American -- north, south, east, west, young, old -- will have decent, quality health care as a fundamental right and not a privilege."

Predictably, and before the man has even been laid to rest, there is already a rallying cry from Ted Kennedy's grave: The Left and their mainstream media talkingheads are exhorting us to fulfill the late senator's misguided mission to nationalize health care. (I checked, and the Constitution doesn't authorize this either.)

As I contemplate the life of Ted Kennedy, I am left with two primary conclusions.

First, Ted Kennedy was no JFK.

In his 1961 Inaugural Address, John Kennedy said famously, "My fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country." Ted Kennedy inverted that phrase to read, "Ask not what you can do for your country, ask what your country can do for you," and in the process, turned the once-noble Democrat Party on end.

Second, a man who can't govern his own life should never be entrusted with the government of others.

One of our most astute Founders, Noah Webster, wrote, "The virtues of men are of more consequence to society than their abilities. ... In selecting men for office, let principle be your guide. Regard not the particular sect or denomination of the candidate -- look to his character."

In Webster's 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, the first use of "government" is defined in terms of self-government, not the body of those who govern.

Despite the Left's insistence that private virtue and morality should not be a consideration when assessing those in "public service" (unless, of course, they are Republicans), the fact is that the two are irrevocably linked.
Finally, in 1968, when Ted Kennedy delivered the eulogy for his brother, Robert, he said, "My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life..."

I would hope that whoever is slated to deliver Ted Kennedy's eulogy follows that advice because we do a disservice to him and our country to suggest Kennedy was anything more than he was.

I do not know who will bestow his final tribute, but I do know it will not be Mary Jo Kopechne.  ---Mark Alexander

Mark Alexander serves on the boards of several corporations, national organizations and Christian ministries. He is a Boy Scout Troop leader. He is a Life Member of the Air Force Association and Naval Institute, and a professional member of other military, intelligence and law enforcement professional associations.

[pamsback]

    I think........He was human...he f'ed up....he got caught...he had enough money to get away with it.......he finally grew up and semi got his S(*& together.....he's dead and that's all there is to it. His family loved him and that's all that really matters anyway.

[greatguns]

I'm amazed that his dad had enough clout to keep getting him relected all these years

[Diane Amberg]

I'm going to share something with you from a good friend here in Delaware, a die hard committed Republican, who knew Mary Jo Kopechne personally. He is an amazing person and is the same one who was at the My Lai ( me lie) massacre. He worked counter insurgent intelligence in Viet Nam.
    "No matter how insidious we are or appear to be, some of us change our ways while others never do. And in fairness to the late Senator Kennedy, I think he falls well into the former category. He changed himself into a meaningful ,effective member of the United States Senate. He was always an unapologetic liberal and never pretended otherwise. Millions, and I mean MILLIONS, will morn his death; some will not. And a few, like the spine shivers that they are, will laud it. On balance though, post Chappaquiddick, I think his life's ledger weighs substantially to the good.
  Mary Jo died 40 years ago this past July 18, and you know, over the past 40 years I can't think of a single day during which I have not thought about her at some point during the day."    Taken from a much longer e-mail

[pamsback]

 

"No matter how insidious we are or appear to be, some of us change our ways while others never do. And in fairness to the late Senator Kennedy, I think he falls well into the former category. He changed himself into a meaningful ,effective member of the United States Senate. He was always an unapologetic liberal and never pretended otherwise. Millions, and I mean MILLIONS, will morn his death; some will not. And a few, like the spine shivers that they are, will laud it. On balance though, post Chappaquiddick, I think his life's ledger weighs substantially to the good.

That seems to be a fair assessment.