David

Karki

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September 2, 2009

Ted Kennedy’s Dead; Can We Stop Lying About Him?

I know that it's generally considered improper to speak ill of the dead. And, as a Christian, that whatever one has done in this life has now been met upon death with His infallible eternal justice, thus rendering whatever I might attempt to add as wholly unnecessary (to say nothing of out of place).

Nevertheless, I cannot help but react to the passing of Senator Edward Kennedy – and more specifically, the state-run media's virtual deification of one who reveled in sleaze for most of his wretched existence on this planet with dismay. And while it may not be my place to cast further judgment upon him beyond what the Lord did when his mortal soul departed this world, I can certainly protest the fraudulent and phony re-writing of a very sordid history so as to continue perpetrating the outright lie that the Kennedy men were something better than what they were.

The idea that the Kennedys were some kind of royal American monarchy, and that they came at all close to the veritable Abercrombie & Fitch catalog image that the media tried to foist off on us, should be enough to make anybody with the slightest hold on or concern for the truth sick to their stomach. All three – John, Robert and Ted – were serial philanderers, users and abusers of prescription drugs and drink, and thanks to their family's wealth and famous surname never once held accountable for their misdeeds, which in turn enabled them to commit them all the more.

And Ted was probably the worst. Expelled from Harvard for cheating, he joined the Army to rehabilitate his image only to be assigned a cushy desk job in Paris in order to avoid combat in Korea, then came back and finished law school and barely passed the bar exam but never practiced (the firms who hired Harvard grads then knew he was unexceptional as a lawyer), instead getting handed his older brother's Senate seat upon John's ascension to the presidency (which, combined with Bobby's being appointed Attorney General, led to the passage of federal anti-nepotism laws).
 

He worked for nothing, he earned nothing and only advanced – or got off the hook, as the case may have been – due to his name. And throughout this, his brother's presidency, and both of his brothers' tragic assassinations, he chased women and drank, getting arrested for drunk driving more than once.

It was this pattern of behavior that led to his manslaughter of Mary Jo Kopechne in July 1969, as a drunk Ted drove his Oldsmobile with the pretty young staffer as passenger into the Chappaquiddick, then left her there to drown to death as he skulked off to a hotel, not reporting it to police until he and his cronies figured out how to spin the married senator getting caught with another woman in a way that would save his political career. It's believed that Mary Jo survived for perhaps several hours in an underwater air pocket in the car, and could have survived if Ted had either had a shred of decency and made every effort to save her himself, or had simply called the police as soon as possible. 

Instead, he deliberately caused the death of a naïve young woman whose only mistake was stupidly falling for the Kennedy mystique. And rather than being jailed for aggravated manslaughter, as anyone else who had perpetrated this crime with multiple previous drunk driving arrests on their record would have been, Ted was let off with a slap on the wrist. Oh, his presidential aspirations were gone as a result (oh, poor baby), and many Kennedy family sycophants think we're supposed to feel bad for him because of that. Bad for him!

I feel bad for Mary Jo, whom he killed, and the parents who were robbed of a daughter and never received justice in return. Nor did they ever get an ounce of repentance from the perpetrator.

After that, Ted's life was a mix of drunken fornication and the passing of one awful piece of liberal legislation after the next: The immigration reform of the 1960s that's overwhelmed America, helped to fiscally bankrupt it and dilute her national identity; the Medicare acts that essentially created the concept of the HMO (which the Senator disingenuously demagogued later in his career) and has led us to a $70 trillion entitlement shortfall; the despicable character assassination of an honorable man in Judge Robert Bork, solely to keep him off the U.S. Supreme Court by any means necessary (which added the term “borking” to the political lexicon).

Simply put, there was scarcely an issue where Ted didn't stand against the Constitution, against America and with those who would do both harm or alter them to where they would be unrecognizable. I consider this to be his greatest misdeed, since it's the only one in the list that affected the rest of us, and not just those unfortunate enough to be in his immediate vicinity. And this legacy will continue to detrimentally affect us all long after he's gone.

The media can keep lying to themselves all they want, but we should not be made to participate in it. The truth is that Ted Kennedy wasn't who they're portraying him as, and to pretend otherwise is to commit fraud. And to bury him in Arlington National Cemetery of all places, is an insult in the extreme to that sacred and hallowed American ground and to all whose most noble sacrifice in service of their country has earned them the highest-honored place of eternal rest.

The senator may have legitimately repented on his deathbed for all I know, and the Lord may have shown mercy upon him. Even if so, that doesn't justify the papering over of the ugly truth. As the saying goes, he who does not remember history is doomed to repeat it. Given Ted's history, that's one we should never want repeated. Ever.

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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