I Got Your Moral Clarity Right Here . . .

August 30, 2009

Waterboarding of terrorists = bad.

Actual drowning of young women = good.

Doctor Zero:

I do not believe a political career is worth a young woman’s life. Period. I don’t think Mary Jo Kopechne was proud to die for Ted Kennedy. I don’t think her horrifying death was a necessary human sacrifice to enable his “fortunate fall.” Ted Kennedy was not the victim of Chappaquiddick. Anyone who believes those things is a degenerate who should be shunned by civilized people.

I disagree with the notion that any aspect of Kennedy’s life “redeemed” him for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Redemption requires contrition, an admission of guilt. Kennedy never admitted responsibility or guilt for what happened at Chappaquiddick. I wish he had, because the idea of so many people rushing to grant him undeserved absolution is nauseating.

I disagree that the world will “sorely miss” the “moral clarity” of someone who enjoyed jokes about the woman who died because of his cowardice and lust for power. The human race will be greatly improved when it is infested by fewer such creatures.

Mark Steyn:

You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo’s – but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history … Who knows – maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim – and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

Well. Make that a couple of nations. There is the matter of southeast Asia to consider. The Vietnamese. The Cambodians.

A Conservative Shemale:

The Times doesn’t bother to mention the fact that he was responsible for cutting off aid to the South Vietnamese when North Vietnam invaded, which directly lead to the fall of South Vietnam and the boat people crisis of the late 70’s and 80’s.

Why mention stuff like that? It doesn’t fit the narrative.

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