Monday 30 March 2015

Obama: "What if we carried ourselves more like Ted Kennedy?" My jaw just interacted with the carpet.

The glib riposte to Obama's bizarre remark would be that many more young women would die needlessly and that the IRA would be rolling in dosh. The article quoting Barack Obama is being carried online by the Daily Mail wesbite, but is by-lined "Associated Press". Read it here. As far as I can tell, it doesn't mention the incident which defined Edward Kennedy's life, the minor matter of the fat sleazebucket driving a car off a bridge while drunk and leaving his passenger - 28-year old campaign assistant May Jo Kopechne - to die while he saved his own selfish neck.

For those of you too young to remember, here's how the same Daily Mail described the incident in a 2009 article headlined "Ted Kennedy: The Senator of Sleaze who was a drunk sexual bully... and left a young woman to die":
A drunk Ted had been driving back from a party to the family 'compound' on Martha's Vineyard when he veered off a bridge and into a deep tidal dyke. 
Mary Jo was in the back seat and, while he claimed he was just giving her a lift back to her hotel, it was widely thought that he had picked her up for sex. Kennedy swam ashore to save himself, but left Mary Jo to drown  -  in fact, it was even worse than that.  
It was nine hours before he reported the accident. In the meantime, he walked back to his motel, complained to the manager about a noisy party, took a shower, went to sleep, ordered newspapers when he woke up and spoke to a friend and two lawyers before finally calling the police. 
Divers later estimated that if he had called them immediately, they would have had time to pull out Mary Jo. She had not drowned, but had survived in an air pocket inside the car  -  she was asphyxiated only when the oxygen ran out several hours later.
The article, which you can read here, went on to point out that in any state other than the Kennedy fiefdom of Massachussets the wretched man would have been charged with homicide. Instead, he was allowed to plead guilty to nothing more serious than "leaving the scene of an accident", resulting in him losing his driving licence for a year and being given a two-year suspended sentence. Harsh or what?

President Obama was speaking at the opening ceremony for the $79m Edward M. Kennedy  Insitute in Boston. He described the institute as "a monument not to himself but to what we the people have the power to do together." Or alone, as you scamper away from the scene of an accident you've caused, leaving a young girl to die of asphyxiation.

The Edward M. Kennedy Institute is a monument to cowardice and selfishness.

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