Big Dogs Weblog

Don’t Sugarcoat It

Aug 31, 2009 Political

And I won’t- Kennedy has been planted, after having been dragged all over the Continent, it seems. The last time I saw something dead taken to so many places, I believe it was the two headed monkey in the P.T. Barnum exhibit.
Hear ye, hear ye- come and see- for your edification- one night only- the Lion of the Senate- a man able to skate on a murder charge by invoking his brothers tragedies- Come one, Come all!

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 omelette 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 okay 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?

article.nationalreview.com

Yep, how true- I am sure that Mary Jo was good with the whole “sacrifice your life for Teddy” thing. And now comes stage two, or act two, or perhaps the ceremonial dragging of the body through the streets was that. 

Perhaps the “Win Healthcare for Teddy” is act three in this farce- if so, we need to bury that abomination with Ted. Healthcare we might need to change somewhat- but we do not need a bill that weighs more than Teddy, and that is what we have now- a bloated carcass that stinks to high heaven. 

And the lies that are said by Hussein about this bill- “No, it will not fund abortions.” Yes, it will– simply because there is no language explicitly forbidding it.

“No, illegal aliens will not be covered.” Yes, they will– while one section says no, there is another section explicitly forbidding the exclusion of anyone, regardless of their origin.  So, the deception continues, as the sleight of hand in the bill keeps things in, by attaching riders. Teddie would be so proud of the lying done in his name.

Teddy did do some things we can learn from- he surely was an expert at vilifying people- I am sure we could sit at the feet of the master, if he wasn’t dead.

When a man is capable of what Ted Kennedy did that night in 1969 and in the weeks afterwards, 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 re-segregation 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.

article.nationalreview.com

Yes, Teddy brought us the definition of “Borking” someone- a noble deed, and so very civil. We need not bring up Clarence Thomas,or Samuel Alito’s hearings, where Teddy was every bit the bully he was with Bork, but it is an obligation on my part, at least, to not allow anyone to sugarcoat Teddy’s life. When you look at someone’s life “warts and all”, it should be a complete life, unadulterated and laid bare.

Teddy had a LOT of warts.

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