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Tuesday, September 1, 2009
I swear, by my life and my love of it, that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
/Mary Jo Kopechne
(maybe, if she’d lived long enough to be able to write something like that on paper. Would she willingly give her life for Ted Kennedy’s later ’successes’? If she were visited by one of Marley’s ghosts, and asked to choose, before her untimely death, given the future’s history, would she have chosen to asphyxiate in a bubble of air in the bottom of a foul, dark lake? For Ted?
Ted Kennedy reveled in living his life in spite of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne; a death that would’ve ended the career of most any other politician, especially one with an ‘R’ after the name.
The Kennedy name; I hope it lives on only in infamy.
Oh, and that’s Ayn Rand’s quote, really. )
A comment I left on Doctor Zero's post "The Death of the Individual", a well-written summary of Ted Kennedy's rise to fame only after the 'sacrifice' of Mary Jo Kopechne.
(And Doctor Zero, how could you write an entire essay on 'individualism' without one mention of Ayn Rand?? )
Also seen, behind The Green Door, Karl of ex-PW fame (also posting at Patterico's, but I'm not reading there anymore, given his assholic history re: Jeff G.)...
The unspoken legacy of Ted KennedyKarl is known for his detailed posts, with thousands of links, making this post a great resource.
Oh, and it's The Green Room, not Behind the Green Door~!The post-Chappaquiddick Ted Kennedy alienated the socially conservative and hawkish members of the Democratic Party, driving many of them into what ultimately became the Reagan coalition. He preserved Massachusetts liberalism as a Democratic ideal that failed every time it ran for the presidency. And that is a legacy Democrats want to discuss even less than Chappaquiddick.
Media morons like MSNBC’s Chris Matthews may have rushed to cast Pres. Obama as the last Kennedy brother. Pres. Obama was smart enough to call Ted Kennedy’s death the closing of a chapter in our history. The last thing Barack Obama needs is to be cast as Curly Joe Besser in the Kennedy family drama, for there is no political advantage in it for him.
