Glad I’m not Ted Kennedy [update 2]

Let’s see if we can find something nice to say about Edward Kennedy now he’s dead.

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No, can’t think of anything. 

Maybe Mary Jo Kopechne might have . . . if he hadn’t killed her.

Anyway, I believe he died of cancer.  I understand the chief problem reported by the physicians treating him in was in finding a piece of Edward Kennedy that wasn’t malignant. . .

UPDATE 1: I can’t resist posting the eight words that ended for good this Kennedy’s presidential aspirations. 

The year was 1988, several sober years after he’d drowned Mary Jo Kopechne and the public apparently over it, and the fat one had just ended a rollicking speech to the Democratic Convention in which the refrain was “Where was George?” -- in reference to George Bush Sr’s time as deputy to Ronald Regan while various alleged scandals were happening.  You know the sort of thing: When Reagan was piling up the deficits, where was George? When the Reagan administration was selling arms to Iran, where was George? It played well with the press, who had already been primed to talk about him as presidential candidate material

Seated at the bar however was PJ O’Rourke and a gaggle of political journalists who came up with a lightning riposte:

“Where was George?  Dry, sober and in bed with his wife.” That’s where George was.  And that’s the line that played the next day, and the next.  And Ted never did get to run for president.

He was never convicted for the crime he did commit, but he was at least haunted by it for the rest of his shameless life.

UPDATE 2: Some other good comment around the traps:

• Lindsay Perigo: Ding! Dong! The Kennedy Is Dead!
      “Not since the capture of Saddam Hussein has America had as much reason to celebrate as it has over the death of the evil Senator Edward Kennedy. . .
      “Senator Kennedy was a two-timer, a hypocrite, a murderer and a communist. His death should occasion nothing but exultation. It should spell the end of Sovietized health care of the type he and Obama have been trying to sneak and rush through the legislative process.“
• Liberty Scott: Kim Il Sung like sycophancy
      ”He cheated at Harvard and was expelled along with the man who did the exam for him, and the family bought him a place back at Harvard (telling you the price of honour at Harvard), he talked about womens' rights when he showed the usual Kennedyesque interest in women for only one purpose, he undertook fundraising for the IRA in the 1970s (although later would damn them when he saw no further political advantage in funding Noraid)…
      “He is everything that is wrong in US politics, a pork barrel roller, a cheater, liar and if not murderer, then a lowlife who let a woman die to save his reputation from being stained by his drunk driving and philandering.
      “It speaks volumes that the media will be wall to wall with the sort of praise and sycophancy that Kim Il Sung got in North Korea when he died in 1994…”
• Liberty Scott (again): Killer and former sponsor of terrorism dies
      “For all of the bile thrown at the last Bush Administration, you can see no further example of hypocrisy from Democrats, and the US left, than the fawning adulation for this misogynistic lying fraud and sponsor of killers.
      “I said before: ‘Ted Kennedy exemplifies the worst of politics in the United States - a fraud, a thieving conniving pork barrel peddling image merchant who has supported murder and violence. A nasty piece of work if ever there was one.’
      May his kind never be seen again.”
• Ed West: IRA sympathiser Ted Kennedy was no friend of Britain
      “It says much about humanity’s basic urge to be ruled by dynasties that Teddy Kennedy came anywhere near being elected president in 1980. Whatever his other qualities, his behaviour at Chappaquiddick eleven years earlier, where he might have been able to save Mary Jo Kopechne’s life but  instead chose to save his own career by waiting until his blood/alcohol level reached a legal level, would have ruled out anyone else from becoming local rat catcher, let alone leader of the greatest nation on earth.
      “Kennedy was no doubt a dedicated servant of Congress and a passionate believer in combating poverty, but his lasting legacy on this side of the Atlantic was to poison Anglo-American relations for a generation ...For years Kennedy was the bang-drummer-in-chief for brainless Irish-American IRA sympathisers, dimwits who shouted ‘troops out of Dublin!’ and sang maudlin songs from the comfort of Boston and New York, giving money for strangers 3,000 miles away to murder their neighbours.
      “For despite the pseudo-Marxist justifications the IRA used, which was obviously lapped up by useful idiots on both sides of the Irish Sea and across the Atlantic, their goal was always ethnic cleansing against their neighbours, the people who Americans still call ‘the Scots-Irish.’
      Kennedy himself said that Ulster Protestants ‘should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain,’ without in any way suggesting he would give Boston back to the Indians (or the English-Americans, for that matter) and return to Co. Wexford. He compared Britain’s presence in Ulster with America’s in Vietnam [ignoring, obviously, that it was his brother who was chiefly responsible for that adventure].