JTT wrote:Finn dAbuzz wrote:parados wrote:Kennedy was charged with the law in place at the time.
The claims that he got away with murder are just sour grapes. There was no murder to charge him with under the circumstances.
He was charged with leaving the scene of an accident which was the least of offenses the authorities might have levelled against him.
A perfect example of a rich fat cat using his power and connections to avoid responsibility, but you can rationalize it was something else.
As the Republican ship sinks further below the water line, you get more and more outlandish, Finn. Where is that old measure of Binn d'AFuzz equanimity?
My views about Ted Kennedy do not rise and fall with the fortunes of the Republican party, and if you consider them outlandish I can't say I'm surprised.
The flood of adulation for Kennedy that I've witnessed this weekend has made me ill, and this thread is an attempt, in some small way, to counter-balance his lionization. This is the point of addressing his flaws at this time.
That he was driving, on July 18, 1969, intoxicated with a young woman with whom he was having or planned to have an affair, isn't a shining moment in his life or career, but it's also not the damning measure of his character.
What does render him contemptible is his conduct subsequent to his driving his vehicle off the Dike Bridge.
We all make mistakes; we all do stupid things. What differentiates us in terms of our character though is whether or not we accept responsibility for our mistakes and are willing to be held accountable for their consequences. In this case, the consequences of Kennedy's mistake was the death of a young woman, and he did all he could with the considerable power available to him to avoid accountability.
We are not all presented with such dramatic opportunities to display our character. Kennedy was, and he failed miserably. Of course not everyone will meet these tests with success, and perhaps it is unfair to expect a 37 year old United States Senator with aspirations to lead the nation as its president to do so. After all the poor boy always paled in comparison to his three older brothers.
Only Teddy knows for certain whether he actually attempted, as he claimed, to save Ms Kopechne from the submerged car, but his less than heroic subsequent behavior establishes grounds for reasonable doubt. It is clear that rather than agonizing over the death of his companion, Kennedy agonized over the trouble the incident would cause for him. It is also clear that he waited at least 10 hours before notifying the authorities of the incident in order to allow time for his blood alcohol to drop below levels of intoxication, and for him to get his story straight --- a story which he considered modifying to either put Ms Kopechne in the driver's seat or himself someplace else entirely.
It is also clear that Senator Kennedy used his position and the position of his family to pull whatever strings might be pulled to assure him the least degree of accountability for personal negligence that led to someone's death.
Having saved his cowardly ass and his political career one might assume that Teddy would find it a bit difficult to judge the character of others from on high, if not because of good grace, than because he feared being castigated as a hypocrite. Not our Ted.
One might also think that having dodged a bullet, he might have learned a lesson about the complications than can arise from philandering and excessive drinking. Nope, not our Ted.
Why should he have learned any lesson other than being a rich and powerful man with a legendary last name sets one apart from everyone else, and that indeed, " ...there (is) one (justice) system for the average citizen and another for the high and mighty."
Despite the fact that most of the nation believed that Chappaquidick sounded the death knell for Kennedy's presidential aspirations, we didn't understand that for Teddy,
fixing the Chappaquidick mess meant fixing it in all ways. It was nothing. Certainly nothing worse than being expelled from Harvard for cheating, and after all, the Kennedy family had a right to the presidency. Perhaps they didn't own it the way they owned Ted's senate seat, but everyone wanted a Kennedy back in the White House. So not only did Ted run for the presidency in 1980, he tried to wrest it away from another Democrat, Jimmy Carter.
By all accounts he is a hard working legislator, quite committed to the policies in which he believes and often willing to move past partisan rhetoric in order to achieve practical compromises.
This reflects well upon him but it is hardly the stuff of heroes or deserving of fulsome honors.
It is also generally agreed that he has taken very seriously the role of patriarch of the Kennedy clan, and has tried hard, and with success, to fill the paternal void left to his nieces and nephews by his brothers' murders.
Of course the example he has set for these children is subject to debate, not least of all as respects how he treated his wife Joan.
Most agree that he is a fun loving guy with a good sense of humor who regularly greets, without pretense, all of the "little people" that work in the Capital.
Are the rest of his peers such sh*ts that this qualifies him as an icon?
His recent illness apparently triggered the eulogizing instinct in politicians and pundits in Washington, but the reaction was premature. By current accounts, Senator Kennedy is recovering just fine, and there is no reason to believe he will not be back in his senatorial saddle before too long. I'm glad for those who care about him, and certainly do not hope he has a set back or doesn't recover fully.
The notion that I am kicking him while he is down is absurd. This implies that I am taking advantage of his condition to make comments about him that I would not otherwise make if he was up and about and capable of defending himself. I have a consistent record in this forum of holding Teddy in the lowest regard, which has been and will continue to be entirely without effect on the life and career of Senator Kennedy. I have not exulted in his misfortune nor wished further harm upon him. I am not formulating insults based on his infirmity as some did when Reagan was suffering from advanced Alzheimers, and I am in no way an adversary of his capable of leveling any blow against him, let alone a low one.
I find it disturbing not that so many people do not share my antipathy for him, but that even those who acknowledge that he is seriously flawed still consider him worthy of lionization.
I also find it ironic that a group of people who can generally be relied upon to assume that wealth and power are, by definition, character flaws, and profess, like the Senator himself, to holding equal treatment under the law to be one of the most important principles of our society, are able to so easily dismiss Kennedy's clear abuse of wealth and power in a (successful) effort to obtain preferential, and unequal treatment under the law.
