America's royal dynasty ends after 40 years of borrowed time

I've about had my fill of the worshipful fluff that serves as the coverage of the death of Ted Kennedy. Those of you familiar with me know I have very little tolerance for the idea of the Kennedy family as a political dynasty, a position I know puts me in direct conflict with those who insist upon preserving phony memories of Camelot.

Of the endless tributary memorials playing non-stop on a mainstream media channel near you, perhaps the most obnoxious is the assertion that were it not for Teddy's Chappaquiddick "indiscretion" in July of 1969, he would have been President.

Mary Jo Kopechne, according to the mainstream media, was a mere "indiscretion" that stood in the way of the re-instatement of their Camelot.

Carl Cannon:

On July 18, 1969, Kennedy and five other men – all but one of whom was married – met six single young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy's 1968 campaign. The women were known as the "Boiler Room Girls" for their tireless work in a windowless office in that ill-fated campaign. All of them, especially Teddy, had grieved hard when Bobby had been killed 15 months earlier. Although he was only 37 years of age, Teddy had lost all three of his brothers; two to assassin's bullets, one in the skies over England in World War II. Mary Jo Kopechne had felt gut-shot by Bobby's murder, too. For all of those people who met in the cottage in the island off Martha's Vineyard, getting together must have been cathartic.

Sometime late at night after an evening of drinking, Kennedy and Kopechne went for a drive in his 1967 Oldsmobile. Kennedy placed the time he left at 11:15 p.m. A local cop who believed he saw the car put the time at 12:40 a.m. – significant at the time because Kennedy testified that he was taking Kopechne to a ferry that ran to Edgartown, a ferry that stopped running at midnight. In any event, Kennedy wasn't headed toward the ferry landing when his car careened off Dike Bridge and into the inlet known as Poucha Pond; they were heading toward the beach.

Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone. When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner's inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity.

First of all, he and two of the men, a cousin named Joseph Gargan and a friend named Paul Markham say they returned to the bridge to try and rescue Mary Jo. (If the Edgartown constable who believes he saw Kennedy was accurate, this was impossible.) Next, the men claimed that they drove Kennedy to the Chappaquiddick ferry landing, where he told them not to tell the other women for fear that they would try to rescue Mary Jo – at great peril to themselves – and assured them that he would report the incident to authorities. Then, the men said, Kennedy dove into the water and swam across the sound to Edgartown himself.

Upon reaching Edgartown, Kennedy went to his room at a local inn – it was now 2:25 a.m., -- where he spent the night, and the following morning engaged in small talk about sailing with a local yachter and agreed to have breakfast with the man when Gargan and Markham showed up about 7:30. They asked him who he'd called about the accident only to receive the astounding reply: no one. Kennedy explained it this way at the inquest: "I just couldn't gain the strength within me, the moral strength, to call Mrs. Kopechne at 2 in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead." But he hadn't called the cops, either, and wouldn't until 9 a.m.

Of course, Teddy himself employed that famous Kennedy charm in reducing Mary Jo Kopechne's death into a cute little cocktail hour anecdote himself, and his sycophants in the press were only too happy to chuckle along (audio courtesy
Hot Air)


Despicable. Even if you are a liberal and admire all that Ted Kennedy did to destroy this country/advance his liberal agenda, the level of elitist privilege on display here is nothing short of monstrous.

Ted Kennedy brought the word "borking" into our vocabulary and was the first to successfully employ the "politics of personal destruction" to eviscerate his political opponent, Robert Bork. He also attempted to undermine Ronald Reagan (and some might say, sell out his country to the Russians) during a pivotal moment in the cold war for personal political gain (via Ace):

"On 9-10 May of this year," the May 14 memorandum explained, "Sen. Edward Kennedy's close friend and trusted confidant [John] Tunney was in Moscow." (Tunney was Kennedy's law school roommate and a former Democratic senator from California.) "The senator charged Tunney to convey the following message, through confidential contacts, to the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Y. Andropov."

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."

He may have been charming and friendly, he may have been a great reacher across the aisle, and long time Washington insiders on BOTH sides of the aisle may have nothing but kind words for him at his passing. But to me, he will always be the ruthless partisan who embraced the far left in ways that his much more famous brothers never did, despite the left's claim on them. To me, he will always be the hypocritical liberal moralizer, who no matter how often he championed his beloved "downtrodden" could never wipe the stain of Mary Jo's blood from his hands.

The question that keeps occuring to me in the face of the accolades over the most "important", "effective", "skilled", etc., Senator in history, is exactly what kind of skill set makes one an effective Senator? Because without the powerful Kennedy family clout, money, power and mystique behind him, I'm thinking Teddy was really something of a rather ordinary and flawed individual. Cheater, underacheiver, party boy, drunkard, womanizer. That he was effective in weilding the power that came with the Kennedy name, no one is denying; however, without this power that he was born into, I sincerely doubt he would have been able to accomplish much at all, if indeed he ever rose to the Senate in the first place.

It is time for the Kennedy mystique to come to an end. America is a Democratic Republic, not a monarchy, and the Kennedys were not simply the closest thing America had to royalty. The Kennedys, for all intents and purposes, WERE royalty. After Bobby and Jack, Teddy and the next generation simply glided into political power on the wings of their famous name and established political power network. Qualifications for office were never questioned; it was a birthright rarely, if ever denied. Barack Obama's election to the Presidency is largely credited to the Kennedy family endorsement of him late in the the primary season.

It is time for the Kennedy family's presumption to power to come to an end once and for all, 40 years after it should have drowned in the Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick Island.