Thursday - August 27, 2009

The Senator of Sleaze who was a drunk sexual bully…

After listening to the mawkish whitewash last night on the BBC (radio), I was quite surprised today to find this in the Daily Mail.  And it wasn’t the only commentary written in the Mail on this subject.

I do not gloat in his death even though I did not like the man. There was nothing to like or admire in my opinion.
Anyway, this commentary says enough and says it far better then I ever could.  As does the commentary by Ruth Dudley Edwards, link below.

Ted Kennedy: The Senator of Sleaze who was a drunk sexual bully… and left a young woman to die

By Charlie Laurence
Last updated at 3:31 PM on 27th August 2009

Senator Edward ‘Ted’ Kennedy stood for sleaze. Bloated and drunken, he used his standing in the Kennedy clan to chase vulnerable women - which brought his dream of reaching the White House to a shameful end.

He was the youngest of the four Kennedy brothers, and by far the longest lived.

Incredibly, he was in line to inherit his brother John F. Kennedy’s legendary presidency, but his chances were dashed following the drowning of the pretty, young campaign assistant Mary Jo Kopechne.

Forever known as the Chappaquiddick Incident after the Massachusetts island where it took place, the scandal in 1969 broke the Kennedy grip on the White House.

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.
Drowned: Mary Jo Kopechne was killed after Ted Kennedy drove his car off a bridge with her inside

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.

As always, Ted used the family name to save his neck. In any other state but Massachusetts, the Kennedys’ home turf, and with any other name, he would have been charged with homicide.

Instead, he escaped with a slap on the wrist: a two-year suspended sentence and the loss of his driving licence for a year. He had been allowed to plead guilty to no more than the charge of leaving the scene of an accident.

Kennedy lawyers arranged for him to pay £55,000 to the Kopechne family from his own pocket with a further £30,000 from his insurance. Mary Jo’s mother later said: ‘I don’t think he ever said he was sorry.’

At the height of the scandal, Kennedy went on TV to explain himself in an extraordinary 13-minute address in which he denied driving drunk and rejected rumours of
‘immoral conduct’ with Kopechne.

He said he was haunted by ‘irrational’ thoughts immediately after the accident, and wondered ‘whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys’.

He said his failure to report the accident right away was ‘indefensible’.

Yet the tragedy and his actions appalled millions of Americans.

The steamroller Kennedy political machine, combined with his popular opposition to the then raging Vietnam War, made him favourite for the 1972 presidential election, but the drunken drive that killed Mary Jo snuffed out his bid.

Edward Kennedy’s character flaws would have sidelined any man from a lesser family before his career had begun. Schooled in the height of privilege, like his brothers, at exclusive boarding ‘prep’ schools, Kennedy went on to Harvard.

But he was expelled from that Ivy League bastion for persuading another undergraduate to take his Spanish exams for him. It was an episode that should have served as a warning to the voters.

Kennedy joined the Army to redeem himself and was later readmitted to Harvard. He followed the classic path of the American elite to law school, graduated and was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar.
Irish support: Kennedy with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams - for years the Democrat was seen as a cheerleader for American Irish supporters of the IRA

Irish support: Kennedy with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams - for years the Democrat was seen as a cheerleader for American Irish supporters of the IRA

But he did not take a single case. He believed that, like his brothers, he was destined for greatness. As he could not stand for the Senate until he was 30, the Kennedy machine arranged for a ‘stooge’ candidate to hold the family seat for two years, when JFK left it for the White House.

He reeked of drink by nine in the morning and could be relied on to be bawling drunk at four in the afternoon. In Washington’s top La Brasserie restaurant, he once threw a waitress over a table in a private room and tried to have sex with her.

His face, once handsome, became as round as a football, bloated and criss-crossed with the broken veins of an out-of-control drinker.

IT’S A LONG COMMENTARY AND THE REST IS HERE WITH PIX

SEE RUTH DUDLEY EDWARDS COMMENTARY HERE

Posted by peiper     on 08/27/2009 at 10:16 AM   
Filed Under: • Crime • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Corruption and Greed • History •  
• Comments (3) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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