RIP Edward Kennedy

[Ed Anger]

It was reprehensible.

Debatable.

Mary Jo certainly shares in the responsibility, although you GOPtards would like to write that all off. She knew he was drunk. She chose to get into the car. She knew the possible consequences of that poor choice. You don't jump into a cage with a polar bear and expect to come out alive.

Shoo.

missing your mod powers? never give up power. NEVER.

[Barrister]

missing your mod powers? never give up power. NEVER.

I pulled a Sulla and have retired to the countryside. 

[Ed Anger]

missing your mod powers? never give up power. NEVER.

I pulled a Sulla and have retired to the countryside.

You are no Sulla. Maybe Cato the Younger.

[Admiral Yi]

Both of Joan's posts on page 7 were very good.  Stopped reading after that.

[Caliga]

Shoo.

Treat posts labelled as "Fate" like line noise.

[Barrister]

Shoo.

Treat posts labelled as "Fate" like line noise.

I thought that's what I was doing.

[Kleves]

I thought that's what I was doing.

You responded. That was bad. 

[Fate]

Shoo.

Treat posts labelled as "Fate" like line noise.

The only line noise in this thread is Berkut's despicable and tasteless trolling.

[Barrister]

The only line noise in this thread is Berkut's despicable and tasteless trolling.

Shoo.

[Fate]

The only line noise in this thread is Berkut's despicable and tasteless trolling.

Shoo.

If you are only going to pollute this thread with nonsense, then I ask that you please cease and desist.

RIP Ted, you were the last of the great Senators.

[jimmy olsen]

I don't know if it's murder. Maybe negligent homicide? Our resident lawtalkers should know. I think he showed indifference and failed to render aid. That would mean some jailtime for most people.

The irony is that if the same thing had occurred in today's moral climate it's doubtful he'd face the same sort of ridicule that he faced back then. He probably be viewed more as a survivor who went through a horrible ordeal. He'd go to rehab and be the Golden Boy once he got out.

I disagree, drunk driving is viewed and dealt with far more harshly today then it was then. He'd be jailed for sure today.

[Neil]

I don't know if it's murder. Maybe negligent homicide? Our resident lawtalkers should know. I think he showed indifference and failed to render aid. That would mean some jailtime for most people.

The irony is that if the same thing had occurred in today's moral climate it's doubtful he'd face the same sort of ridicule that he faced back then. He probably be viewed more as a survivor who went through a horrible ordeal. He'd go to rehab and be the Golden Boy once he got out.

I disagree, drunk driving is viewed and dealt with far more harshly today then it was then. He'd be jailed for sure today.

Tell that to Donte Stallworth.

[Sheilbh]

I guess that I've heard so much bashing on Kennedy over Chappaquiddick that I've come to put it aside, to some extent, when considering his over all career. I've tried to give Kennedy his due for the positive things he's done, while still finding his getting away with Chappaquiddick a serious flaw.

I don't think he deserves the blame for getting away with Chappaquiddick though, or for people being willing to ignore it.  I believe under Mass law at the time he should have been charged with manslaughter.  He wasn't.  But I don't think it's his fault that the state behaved like he was a Nehru-Gandhi.  It was the states and it's shameful.

Kennedy is bashed for the perception that, when the accident happened, he acted in such a manner as to give the impression he cared more for how it would affect his public career than about the dead chick.

This is something I never get.  The Kennedy's always had a reputation for wildcatting around and it was 1969.  Being found with a girl who may have been a mistress after crashing your car drunk driving surely would have meant he wouldn't be President; but then neither did crashing the car, repeatedly diving in to try and save her, not calling the emergency services - though there was a callphone on the bridge - but calling your nearby cousin, then going to a nearby motel where you wake up and are seen calmly reading the paper at 8 the next morning.

In what world is manslaughter and a seeming indifference to an individual's human life (especially his disgusting speech afterwards) less likely to end one's political career than drink driving and a mistress?

He was drunk enough to drive a car off a bridge but not drunk enough to be expected to not act rationally in a catastrophe.  That's a very specific level of drunkenness.

From the Kennedy obit, he acted rationally, but callously:

All Teddy Kennedy's ambitions, however, foundered on the events of the night of July 18 1969, when he left a party with Mary Jo Kopechne (who had worked on Bobby Kennedy's presidential campaign the year before), and drove a big, black Oldsmobile off a rickety wooden bridge at Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts, into an 8ft-deep tidal pool. He managed to escape — he could not remember how — but Mary Jo Kopechne was trapped in the car.

Kennedy, on his own account, "repeatedly dove down and tried to see if the passenger was still in the car", but was unsuccessful. Rather than raise the alarm, however, he returned to the cottage where the party had been, slumped into a parked car, summoned two friends (both of them lawyers), and went back with them to the bridge, where they tried in vain to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne.

Although there was a pay-phone near the bridge, no one contacted the police. Instead, Kennedy swam back to the inn where he was lodged. At 2.25, some three hours after the accident, he emerged, dry and neatly dressed from his room, and asked the proprietor what time it was. Next morning, before breakfast at 8am, he was seen calmly reading a newspaper in the lobby of the inn.

He then returned to his room where he again met the two lawyers, and made several telephone calls. By the time he went to the police the car had already been found, with Mary Jo Kopechne dead inside it.

Kennedy himself later admitted that his behaviour was "inexplicable", even while attempting to account for it by saying that he must have been in a state of shock, and a neuro-surgeon did indeed diagnose "concussion". It could not but seem, however, that he had tried to save his own reputation before exhausting all means of saving Mary Jo Kopechne's life.

[Sheilbh]

I think I broadly agree with Clive Crook.  Apparently Americans don't like the truth in obituaries.  Most British obits I've seen take several paragraphs to discuss Chappaquiddick.  Anyway, Clive Crook:

A foreigner reflects on Ted Kennedy

I hesitate to say anything about his passing--least of all, anything addressed to American readers. I didn't grow up with the history, as Americans of my age did. I'm an outsider, so reverence for the dynasty and the deeper sense of loss that goes with it are things I cannot feel. I'll just point to a few of the articles I've read today that seemed to shed some light.

The Boston Globe has the fullest coverage, as you might expect, and it is very well done.

I thought this essay by Sean Wilentz for The New Republic was outstanding.

    His political longevity testified to the love of his constituents, through thick and thin, but also to his persistence, his ability to learn and to grow, and then to surpass himself. The sadness, the squandering, the might-have-beens of his life would have crushed others, but Kennedy endured, his principles intact.

You ought to read the whole article, but that capsule sums the man up pretty well, I think. I'd have added charm and energy--he was phenomenal in both respects--to the summary list of assets, and I don't think "the sadness, the squandering, the might-have-beens" does justice to his lowest point, but still.

Speaking of that, how to deal with Chappaquiddick has been a problem for many commentators and obituarists. Many decided, I think, that decency requires a veil to be drawn and euphemisms deployed, such as Wilentz's in that snippet. I disagree. I think you have to look at it unflinchingly, because you cannot understand the miracle of Kennedy's redemption otherwise. What he did was terrible. He survived as a politician only because of his name--a disgusting thing. But it changed him, and see what he then did with his life. He was emphatically not, as Paul Krugman writes, always a great man. He was once much less than a great man. What is astonishing is that he nonetheless made himself a great man.

I admired EJ Dionne's column for several reasons, including for the way it captured unique, or at any rate very unusual, aspects of Kennedy's political personality. He was neither cynic nor soggy centrist. He was passionate, a liberal's liberal. Yet he was pragmatic, and was capable of liking and respecting people who disagreed with him. Firm principles married to a friendly tolerance of other views: on both sides of modern American politics, that is so rare.

    And there was this Kennedy paradox: Precisely because he knew so clearly what he wanted and where he wished the country to move, he could strike deals with Republicans far outside his philosophical comfort zone...

    [K]ennedy's liberalism was experimental, not rigid. Principles didn't change, but tactics and formulations were always subject to review. He gave annual speeches that amounted to a report on the state of American liberalism. He always sought to give heart to its partisans in dark times -- "Let's be who we are and not pretend to be something else," Kennedy said in early 1995, shortly after his party's devastating midterm defeat -- but he did not shrink from pointing to liberal shortcomings.

    In that speech, he insisted that "outcomes," not intentions, should determine whether government programs live or die. In 2005, he criticized liberals for failing to harness their creed to the country's core values.

I think that last point is crucial. On the left of the Democratic party, it is not hard to find disdain and even contempt for "the country's core values", insofar as those values depart from the ones espoused by a progressive liberal.

As for the willingness to cut deals in the name of progress, one wonders of course what role Kennedy might have played in fashioning a compromise on healthcare. He strongly favored the public option, but I find it hard to believe he would have preferred no reform at all to a Massachusetts-style system, or that he would have committed himself to vote against any measure that did not contain a public plan--the position that many Democrats now seem to be adopting. In more ways than one, he will be missed.[/QUOTE}

[Admiral Yi]

I don't think he deserves the blame for getting away with Chappaquiddick though, or for people being willing to ignore it.  I believe under Mass law at the time he should have been charged with manslaughter.  He wasn't.  But I don't think it's his fault that the state behaved like he was a Nehru-Gandhi.  It was the states and it's shameful.

That's assuming the family didn't call in any favors.