Some say Ted Kennedy was a philanderer and lacked any sense of morality or honor.  They point to the day Kennedy had left the scene of a fatal car crash on the small island of Chappaquiddick on Martha’s Vineyard, taking the life of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne. The second-term senator waited nearly 10 hours to report the accident and offered no explanation other than he “panicked.”

Those who do not have powerful connections would have been charged with manslaughter and faced justice for leaving a woman in 7 feet of cold water alone and dead overnight. He just slept it off. Those in the media who praise his stint as a hero in the senate without mentioning this example of privilege and cowardice as usual give half the story.

From ABC- The details of the July 19 accident were salacious: a Regatta Weekend reunion party at a friend’s cottage with all married men (except one) and six women — the “boiler room girls” — who had worked together on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign.

After a day of sailing and heavy drinking, Kennedy drove his black Oldsmobile sedan off a small wooden bridge into Poucho Pond, trapping Kopechne in seven feet of water. On July 26, 1969, Kennedy delivered the television speech that saved his senatorial seat. Speaking to the nation for just 13 minutes, he described a cookout “for a devoted group of Kennedy campaign secretaries” and denied the rumors of drunk driving or “immoral conduct.”  He acknowledged his failure to report the accident promptly as “indefensible” and described the “irrational” thoughts that consumed him that night, such as

wondering “whether some awful curse did actually hang over all the Kennedys.” Even those who had faith in the senator worried about his ability to handle a crisis. Friends testified in an inquest that after the accident a confused and crying Kennedy, trying to blame the accident on others begged, “What am I going to do, what can I do?”

Within five days of the accident, Kennedy’s lawyers arranged for him to plead guilty to leaving the scene of the accident involving personal injury with a two-month suspended sentence and one-year probation.

Michelle Malkin- There is a time and place for political analysis and criticism. Not now.

Yes, there will be a nauseating excess of MSM hagiographies and lionizations — and crass calls to pass the health care takeover to memorialize his death.

That’s no excuse to demonstrate the same lack of restraint in the other direction. Not now.

The Anchoress– I remember being 11 years old and watching Kennedy make a statement on television after the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. What seems vivid in my memory is something I am no longer sure of: was he wearing a neckbrace during that speech? Perhaps that was another time, or my memory is fouled up from all these years of news-watching.

I do recall his voice quivering as he suggested that his family seemed to be under some terrible curse. With the 1968 murder of RFK still fresh in our Catholic memories, and JFK’s death still a long-opened wound, my parents were moved by Kennedy’s tremors.

I was moved. My mother who, I must admit, had a bit of a morbid streak about her, counted off the Kennedy tragedies, “Joe, killed in the war; Kathleen killed in an airplane; Rosemary institutionalized after a botched lobotomy….JFK assassinated…Bobby assassinated…what family can endure this? His mother is a woman of sorrows.”

Well, true that. The loss of one child is something a parent never gets over. Rose Kennedy lost 4 in their prime. And being married to Joe Kennedy could not have been a bed of roses, either.

Someone emailed me a moment ago wondering how long it would take for Kennedy’s death to be politicized – specifically by the left, specifically in order to push through the rapidly souring Obamacare, and “wouldn’t that be a dreadful and classless thing?”

The answers, at least on Twitter, are “immediately,” and “yes, dreadful and classless, but nothing less than Kennedy himself would have expected and participated in”; it is what politics has devolved to, after all. Even as he lay dying, the “Liberal Lion” was trying to finagle a means of protecting his Senate seat for his party. Or, someone was. And already on Twitter, the Obamacare proponents are insisting that Kennedy’s death will “give Obama the push he needs, to pass his plan.” After 50yrs of trying to confiscate other peoples money in the form of taxes or opening the door for the immigration mess from his 1965 bill, R.I.P Sen. Kennedy maybe now after 40yrs Mary Jo can rest now too…..mpress

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