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Sunday column ping

Side effects may include Kennedyism
By Howie Carr | Sunday, July 29, 2012 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists
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Photo by Donald Traill

Hey Kennedys, it’s time you got back to your roots. Start drinking heavily.

Forget these prescription meds, especially Ambien.

Now it turns out Kerry Kennedy did not suffer any “complex partial seizure” when she hit the truck in upstate New York. She was on Ambien, as she first admitted, before lawyering up.

Remember how she was found slumped over the wheel of her Lexus after rear-ending a truck, “unable to walk, talk or see straight.”

The official charge was DWK — Driving While Kennedy.

Now we read a quote from Caroline Kennedy that the family has reached its “lowest point ever.” And I blame this latest nadir in Kennedy Babylon on Ambien.

Remember when Patches “Fredo” Kennedy was still a congressman. Like his cousin Kerry, he Ambiened up, staggered out to last call at some Capitol Hill watering hole, and then started driving to what he apparently thought was a 3 a.m. vote in the House.

Before Kerry trotted out the now-discredited seizure alibi, she confessed that maybe she had mixed up her meds. See, she meant to take a thyroid pill, which is large and blue and you take it in the morning, but confused it with an Ambien, which is tiny and orange and you take it at night.

But she did have a particularly Kennedy-esque excuse for her “seizure.” Once she bungee-jumped out of a dorm window at Brown University ... and landed on her head on the pavement.

My theory is, these Kennedys don’t look very carefully at the labels on their prescription pill bottles. They grab the first one they see in the medicine cabinet and then read the warnings on the side of the bottle.

If it says “Alcohol intensifies effects” or “Use care operating heavy machinery,” then they know they’ve got a winner.

And now the Kennedys are at each other’s throats over control of the Hyannisport compound, which they converted into a nonprofit to save $50,000 or so a year in property taxes. Which supposedly is why Taylor Swift wasn’t allowed to spend the weekend recently in the main house.

God only knows what might have happened to the poor kid if she had stayed overnight in that house of horrors. Think Marilyn Monroe, Mary Jo Kopechne, Pam Kelley, the blue-dot woman in Palm Beach, Michael Kennedy’s babysitter ...

And now Patches and his older brother, Ted Jr., are angry at Miss Vicki. She’s fighting back by recounting stories about how she rescued the Swimmer from a life of third-rate romances, low-rent rendezvouses and bad ice cubes.

“The late senator credited Vicki with helping him overcome the fear of getting close to someone again.”

Surely this will come as news to the hospitality-industry worker that Teddy and Chris Dodd made into a waitress sandwich at La Brasserie, pre-Vicki.

Lose the Ambien, Kennedys. Get back to your family’s traditional drug of choice. Chivas Regal.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1061149318