Posted on 08/30/2009 3:25:22 AM PDT by Scanian
In all the obits published and specials aired this week, Chappaquiddick gets a few paragraphs, a few minutes, a tidy recapping of the events of July 19, 1969: The married Ted Kennedy, driving late at night with young campaign aide Mary Jo Kopechne, pitches off a bridge and into the water below. He escapes; she drowns. He does not report the accident for 10 hours. He pleads guilty and gets a suspended sentence, two months in jail.
In most of these narratives, Chappaquiddick is told as Ted's tragedy, the thing that kept him from ever becoming president. And in these narratives, he is chastened, goes on to make amends through a life of public service, advocating for the disadvantaged and the downtrodden -- and, especially, women. No one's perfect, right?
But how is it that so many women unabashedly revere Kennedy today? The particulars of Chappaquiddick are especially gory; his behavior after the accident approaches the amoral. Once he broke free and swam to the surface, Kennedy said that he dove back down seven or eight times to rescue Kopechne. Failing, he swam back to shore and checked back into his hotel, and a short time later lodged a noise complaint with the desk clerk. The people in the room next to his were partying and it was interfering with his sleep. Then he asked the desk clerk for the time.
According to the Aug. 4, 1969 edition of Newsweek, that clerk, Russell E. Peachey, told Kennedy it was 2:25 a.m., then asked, "Is there anything else I can do for you?"
"No, thank you," Kennedy replied.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
This is the stuff that should have been read at the wake on Friday. Below is Kennedy’s real legacy.
Teddy Kennedy:
1. He was caught cheating at Harvard when he attended it. He was expelled twice, once for cheating on a test, and once for paying a classmate to cheat for him.
2. While expelled, Kennedy enlisted in the Army, but mistakenly signed up for four years instead of two. Oops! The man can’t count to four! His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, former U.S. Ambassador to England (a step up from bootlegging liquor into the US from Canada during prohibition), pulled the necessary strings to have his enlistment shortened to two years, and to ensure that he served in Europe, not Korea , where a war was raging. No preferential treatment for him! (like he charged that President Bush received).
3. Kennedy was assigned to Paris , never advanced beyond the rank of Private, and returned to Harvard upon being discharged. Imagine a person of his “education” NEVER advancing past the rank of Private!
4. While attending law school at the University of Virginia, he was cited for reckless driving four times, including once when he was clocked driving 90 miles per hour in a residential neighborhood with his headlights off after dark. Yet his Virginia driver’s license was never revoked. Coincidentally, he passed the bar exam in 1959. Amazing!
5. In 1964, he was seriously injured in a plane crash and hospitalized for several months. Test results done by the hospital at the time he was admitted had shown he was legally intoxicated. The results of those tests remained a “state secret” until in the 1980’s when the report was unsealed Didn’t hear about that from the unbiased media, did we?
6. On July 19, 1969, Kennedy attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island in Massachusetts . At about 11:00 PM, he borrowed his chauffeur’s keys to his Oldsmobile limousine and offered to give a ride home to Mary Jo Kopechne, a campaign worker. Leaving the island via an unlit bridge with no guardrail, Kennedy steered the car off the bridge, flipped, and into Poucha Pond.
7. He swam to shore and walked back to the party passing several houses and a fire station. Two friends then returned with him to the scene of the accident. According to their later testimony, they told him what he already knew - that he was required by law to immediately report the accident to the authorities. Instead Kennedy made his way to his hotel, called his lawyer, and went to sleep. Kennedy called the police the next morning and by then the wreck had already been discovered. Before dying Kopechne had
scratched at the upholstered floor above her head in the upside-down car. The Kennedy family began “calling in favors”, ensuring that any inquiry would be contained Her corpse was whisked out-of-state to her family before an autopsy could be conducted.
Further details are uncertain, but after the accident Kennedy says he repeatedly dove under the water trying to rescue Kopechne and he didn’t call police because he was in a state of shock. It is widely assumed Kennedy was drunk, and he held off calling police in
hopes that his family could fix the problem overnight. Since the accident Kennedy’s “political enemies” have referred to him as the distinguished Senator from Chappaquiddick.
He pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident, and was given a SUSPENDED SENTENCEOF TWO MONTHS. Kopechne’s family received a small payout from the Kennedy’s insurance policy and never sued. There was later an effort to have her body exhumed and autopsied, but her family successfully fought against this in court, and Kennedy’s family paid their attorney’s bills.... a “token of friendship”?
8. Kennedy has held his Senate seat for more than forty years, but considering his longevity, his accomplishments seem scant. He authored or argued for legislation that ensured a variety of civil rights, increased the minimum wage in 1981, made access to health care easier for the indigent, funded Meals on Wheels for fixed-income seniors, and is widely held as the “standard-bearer for liberalism”. In his very first Senate roll he was the floor manager for the bill that turned U.S. immigration policy upside down and opened the floodgate for immigrants from third world countries..
9. Since that time, he has been the prime instigator and author of every expansion of an increase in immigration up to and including the latest attempt to grant amnesty to illegal aliens. Not to mention the pious grilling he gave the last two Supreme Court nominees, as if he was the standard bearer for the nation. What a pompous ass!
10. He is known around Washington as a public drunk, loud, boisterous, and very disrespectful to ladies. JERK is a better description than “great American”. “A blonde in every pond” is his motto.
11. In anticipation of his demise, his latest antic is to give the governor of Massachusetts the power to appoint his replacement to the Senate. Ironically, it was he who lead the successful movement to deny the Governor that power five years ago when Senator John Kerry was a presidential candidate and Mitt Romney was Governor....Yep,
He’s all about fair play!
Let’s not allow the spin doctors to make this jerk a hero — how quickly the American public forgets what his real legacy is.
A LOT of the younger people don’t have a clue about all of this, and us older ones tend to forget things that happened so many years ago. I HAVEN’T!
The above was received in an email that had no credits as to it’s author. Whomever it was did a yeoman’s job.
Because he whole-heartedly endorsed the libs’ most important sacrament: ABORTION
And he’s getting a Catholic funeral because they don’t have enough guts to tell the Kennedys to go to hell (where Teddy is probably bunking down)
I rest my case.
A former girlfriend went to work in Fat Boy’s Boston office as a college intern about 30 years ago.
On her first day, one of the first things they told her was “Don’t ever get into the elevator alone with the Senator. Always have an escort.”
It was not a joke, it was an instruction. Then in his late-40’s, Swimmer was a known sexual predator, even with his own young employees.
And so she didn’t.
Kill them when they’re unborn, kill them when they’re born’ kill them when they’re old. Push “#!0” for the Democrat Party.
there was a thread on here, where a priest has given a sermon on WHY it was wrong to bury kennedy with a Catholic funeral...among other things he was never given an annullment from his first wife.
99.82% of the Church exists outside the cesspool known as the Archdiocese of Boston
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I’ll take your archdiocese, match it and call you with the Archdiocese of Chicago. All in.
e was a college football star, that means that besides wealth and power he was also a manly man.
*****
How gay.
You are contributing nothing but over the top emoting and generalizing; traits of both leftists and morons.
As cutesy as you may find it, when a Harvard guy plays tough football positions and the pros try to draft him then we can assume that he is pretty much a fit, tough guy.
That alone is a big draw to women, now start adding to the list of star athlete, rich-yes, educated-yes, Kennedy-yes, celebrity-yes, powerful-yes, at what point was he supposed to not be good with women?
But how many Catholics truly were embarrassed by Ted Kennedy. Seemingly none of the Irish Catholics in Massachusetts were. The Kennedy family proved to be a bad advertisement for Roman Catholicism given the fact that they lived unabashedly like heathens. It is interesting that the Pope remained steadfast in his opposition to laud Kennedy upon his death, a stance not seemingly picked up by Kennedy’s Catholic constituents.
As a Chicagoan you’re the one responsible for the Daley machine, Obowma, Jesse Jackson Jr., Blagojevich, Durbin and Oprah.
I see that you still have nothing to add, well, keep working at it.
Isn’t it chilling that abortion is so integral to the understanding of liberal policies? However, is it really about choice or about the desire for people to have promiscuous sex without consequence? Given the fact that abortion became an issue in the “swinging ‘sixties” and seventies, it seems coincidental to the sexual liberties embraced at that time primarily with college students. Now that abortion is a constitutional right, the next thing on the ‘sixties leftist agenda is gay marriage. One immoral, anti Christian thing after another.
Simple answer. Toeing the leftist line du jour trumps all else.
The Birth control pill was introduced to American women in 1965, ROEvWADE was 1974.
By the way Catholics were so far left during the sixties that their vote in the three elections was 82% democrat, 79% democrat and 56% democrat. That is even worse than Obama's 54% from them .
When you consider what some of the Left’s core constituencies are—homosexuals, atheists, loose-livers of every kind—it comes as no surprise that they make one attack on Judeo-Christian values after another.
The Left is amoral, if not immoral, and we shouldn’t expect them to stop until America has been officially turned into one, big Sodom and Gomorrah.
His actions right after that accident at Chappaquiddick say more than anything about the nature of the man and he was evil. The press shows their own nature in the fact they have deified this POS this whole week and know exactly what Chappaquiddick was about and what it reveals and why they try to cover it up for their boy. And really it is nothing but an extension of the Demonrat party and an example of the lengths they will go for power. There are no excuses for his actions whatsoever.
The Leftwing practical application of “free love” and “women’s equality” is expressed better in Lenin’s formulation a century ago. He called the result of those policies a “community of women” which meant universal male access to women for sex. That is still how Left men and even some of the women see it.
Men like that do not hate women. They simply do not ascribe anything like intelligence or sensibility to women. They love women the way they love their poodles and yorkies.
Of course, judgment of the soul is God’s call. Kennedy may very well have “seen the light” at the last moment.
It seems likely, however, that the Senator, who knew months ago that he was gravely ill, would not have waited until he was at death’s doorstep to repent. And if he did, in fact, feel remorse for his dissolute life during his rather long illness, he made no public statement of repentance and certainly did not express sorrow for supporting abortion in such a militant way throughout his career.
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