At 12:45 AM, on this date 47 years ago, July 18, 1969, Senator Edward M. Kennedy—who had been drinking and partying, drove of the now-famous Dike Bridge which connects Martha's Vineyard with the also now-famous Chappaquiddick Island.
In his car was a young Mary Jo Kopechne, his 29-year-old political aide.
Teddy managed to get himself out of the car while it was sinking into the pond, but apparently made no effort to help his companion. He then walked back to his hotel, took time to complain to the manager about a noisy party, took a shower, and slept through the night as if nothing had happened.
The next morning he woke up late, called a friend or two, ordered a couple of newspapers, and decided to meet with and talk things over with some of his lawyer friends. He finally reported the "accident" at about 9:45 AM.
Kopechne was Dead, but Need not Have Been
By that time, Kennedy's half-submerged car had been reported by passers-by, and Mary Jo Kopechne's body had been discovered and recovered by a local fire department diver.
Significantly, Kopechne had not drowned. Subsequent forensic investigations proved that she survived in an air pocket inside the car for perhaps 6 or 7 hours.
Trying to live until such time as she could be rescued — after all, what kind of friend, or even human being, would not be doing all he could to save friend?
Mary Jo died of suffocation only because the air pocket ran out of oxygen. This was after she had maintained her body in an excruciatingly painful and exhausting position for seven hours to that her nose and part of her forehead could continue to fit into the tiny airpocket.
Had Kennedy reported the incident to the police immediately, or even hours later—rather than spending all his time thinking about himself—she would have been rescued, and she would be 76 years old today.
Massachusetts Democratic Party Machine Justice
Kennedy was never charged with Driving While Intoxicated. He was given a 60-day suspended sentence for "leaving the scene of an accident."
He never acknowledged his blame for taking someone's life. He never apologized for his actions or inactions. He was a man wholly without conscience.
Most Democrat Party Voters (but not all)
There is little doubt that without this even on his "resume," Kennedy would have been the Democrat nominee for president at some point. In fact, he came close to upsetting incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Millions of Democrats, knowing all of the above, still voted for him.
That should answer all the questions from Republicans, independents and Conscience Democrats who ask rhetorically: "How can you still be so wild for Hillary, knowing what you already know?"
The answer is that party and ideology is everything. It supersedes morality, ethics, the law, or the country.
As we have pointed out before: If Nixon had been a Democrat, and today's Democrats in Congress were in the majority in 1974, there would have been no impeachment proceedings.
[As an aside for today: That is why it doesn't matter what anyone did on Benghazi, on the email server, on the Clinton Foundation, or the solicitation of funds for the foundation from foreign governments while Clinton was secretary of state. Nothing matters.
The Democratic Party, and an enormous percentage* of its adherents are deep into the post-ethical age. Politics, specifically partisan politics, is all that matters to them. (*Not all. We hear from a number of liberal Democrats of conscience who tell us they will never vote for Hillary, no matter what.)]
Kennedy supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton.
Many questions about what happened at Chappaquiddick remain unanswered, for Kennedy—who was expelled from Harvard for cheating in his exams—has given contradictory explanations to some questions and refused to answer others.
As a number of articles (even in New York newspapers) have pointed out: Without the tragedy of his brothers' assassinations, and the magic of his family name, Ted Kennedy would be nothing.
As one senate rival told him: "If your name was simply Edward Moore instead of Edward Moore Kennedy, your candidacy would be a joke."
Kennedy Initiated the Era of Politics of Personal Destruction
As New York magazine summed up in the late 80s, it was Kennedy who ushered in the "politics of personal destruction."
He did this with his outrageous lies during the hearings of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork. Here is what he magazine said:
"Ted Kennedy's America apparently was a place where a senator could spend a half hour grilling a Supreme Court nominee with questions provided by his staff, not listen to the answers, then sum up with a 30-second epigram intended for the evening news that had nothing to do with either the questions asked or the answers given."
Even the New York Times admitted he was Despicable
The New York Times noted that nothing in his 46-year tenure comes close to summing up his "less-than-admirable qualities," than this:
"Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens ..."
And even the Times admitted, that what it called a "fact-check" revealed:
"Kennedy’s was an altogether startling statement. He had shamelessly twisted Bork’s world view — “rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids” was an Orwellian reference to Bork’s criticism of the exclusionary rule, through which judges exclude illegally obtained evidence, and Bork had never suggested he opposed the teaching of evolution…"
As an "excuse," the Times said:
"Not good, but surely not the first time a senator stood before his colleagues and decided that the ends justified the means."
But they went on:
"The speech was a landmark for judicial nominations. Kennedy was saying that no longer should the Senate content itself with examining a nominee’s personal integrity and legal qualifications…. From now on the Senate and the nation should examine a nominee’s vision for society … the upper house should take politics and ideology fully into account.
"Kennedy did distort Bork’s record, but his statement was not the act of a desperate man. This was a confident and seasoned politician, who knew how to combine passion and pragmatism in the Senate. Unlike the vast majority of those who were to oppose Bork, Kennedy believed from the beginning that the nomination would be defeated and that the loss would prove decisive in judicial politics."
As the Times goes on to say, leftists (today's self-styled "progressives") believe it was:
"a precedent well worth setting...it was crude and exaggerated, but it galvanized the opposition as nothing else, and no one else, could...”
Ted Kennedy's Legacy: The Ugliness of Modern Political Discourse
As others, more intellectually honest than the Times, have noted:
"Thus began the modern era of below-the-belt, win-at-any-cost politics, played for the highest of stakes….
Kennedy is praised for his “passion” by the same people who recoil in horror from the passion of town-hall protesters and pro-life advocates.
Awarding political power, and respect, on the basis of “passion” is another road to totalitarianism."
What is Kennedy's legacy?
The tone he set is now the tone of political "debate," not just in the senate, but in everyday political discourse around the country. He was the crass, ugly Facebook post, or the anonymous Tweet, or email blast before it became the norm.
In fact it became the norm because of him.
"The tone set by Senator Kennedy in connection with the Bork nomination lives on in the Senate. It also lives on in the mainstream media."
We live in Edward Kennedy’s America not only in the consequential legislation that he sponsored and saw through the Senate, but also in the afterlife of the vulgar political sham on which Senator Kennedy relied to defeat the nomination of Judge Bork."
For Pejman Yousefzadeh of the New Ledger, Kennedy’s speech “was not only nonsense, it was "nonsense on stilts."
Kennedy’s statements were patently untrue, and what’s more, the Senator had to know that they were untrue...his sense of propriety, decorum, and fair play were sorely lacking.
Those who wonder how American political debate became so coarse, so unrefined, and so demagogic, ought to look at Kennedy’s speech on Bork as a catalyst for the national descent into a prolonged political shouting match.
Kennedy's Character: The Most Telling Legacy of All
And in the eyes of the editors at National Review, the most infamous aspect of Kennedy's Bork speech is less the personal attack than how it encapsulated a shift the senator had made on another issue entirely:
"Senator Kennedy was famed for the power of his oratory. Another way of saying that is to note that he was a gifted artist whose medium was slander, and he found his canvases in Supreme Court nominees Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas.
"Powerful a speaker as he was, it is not clear that Senator Kennedy’s rhetoric was powerful enough to sway the hardest hearts, including his own."
Consider what Kennedy had said years earlier, when it was to his advantage to say it (he thought—in supposedly "Roman Catholic" Massachusetts politcs:
“Wanted or unwanted, I believe that human life, even at its earliest stages, has certain right which must be recognized the right to be born, the right to love, the right to grow old.”
But as the National Review noted, it was:
"A beautiful sentiment, beautifully expressed and callously ignored when the political winds changed and he felt himself compelled to denounce the “back-alley abortions” that would be necessitated in “Robert Bork’s America.”
Like many of the most powerful Democrats — Jesse Jackson and Al Gore come to mind — Senator Kennedy left behind his pro-life convictions when they became a political burden. This is an especially painful failing in Kennedy, whose family has traded on its Catholicism so profitably."
While we must supposedly "never speak ill of the dead," (although there are many in history we all speak ill of) we would be lying if we said that Edward M. Kennedy was anything less than despicable. It's not just that he did wrong things, or was sinful—we all are guilty and have come short of the Kingdom of God.
But Kennedy was downright evangelistic in his zeal to lie to the American people and to change the basic decency and respectful tone in which most Americans try to operate in their lives. He didn't care. He was an awful human being. And he was no patriot.
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Intelligent Political Discourse—for the Thoughtful New Mexican