Posted by
VBushmills on Thursday, August 27, 2009 7:06:45 AM
It isn't nice to speak ill of the dead, so Bernard Chumm begged off providing a eulogy here. I like the way William Kristol on Fox News danced around Kennedy's personal failings (they were many, many and not just one car wreck and act of cowardice). He said he couldn't understand why Kennedy had remained an unrepentant "liberal" (there's that word again) for so many years, watching it fail over and over again.
In that comment I found a teachable moment, for we covered Kennedy's type in our recent piece of the
Mother of all Liberalism. Ted Kennedy remained a liberal for precisely the same reason Kim Philby remained a Communist, his vanity would not allow him to repent on a single act or thought he had done in his life. Teddy clung to the cross of liberalism to protect the inerrancy of his own choices...just like Philby did Stalinism. The ultimate vanity. Courage, fortitude, truth, fealty to the cause, all had nothing to do with it.
Teddy was the mother of all spoiled kids. He cheated at Harvard, but the worst he had to pay was three years at Charlottesville. Indifferent to the pain and misery of others, just as Karl Marx was, the only contrition he felt about Mary Jo Kopechne was the lasting stain that event caused him. The ultimate of frat pranks, I suppose, almost 25 years after being elected to the Senate, was when Kennedy and "best friend" Chris Dodd (we can't wait to see him frog-marched on the way to arraignment) made a "senator sandwich" out of a waitress at La Brasserie in 1985. As always, he skated.
Edward Kennedy, 1932-2009, RIP in whatever level of eternity Dante deems is best suited to your enormous appetites.
VB