Edward "Teddy" Kennedy: How the Lecher became the Lion

Let us cut to the chase.  Edward “Teddy” Kennedy was one miserable, contemptible excuse for a human being.  But happily dead he has been for eight years, so why bother now sifting through the sordid details, the mountainous offal strewn in the wake of his long and epically degenerate life?   

It happens slowly, but at some point you consciously begin to feel it and convulse.  You are chocking on one more chunk of the thick stew of distortion of America’s heritage, the smearing of the greats and elevation of frauds and profligates. Time to pause and reflect on how we have come to this sorry state. In full throttle is the Bolshevization of American history, an ideologically motivated démarche to de-moralize and ultimately criminalize resistance and dissension to the forced march to equality.  The left through its capture of America’s culture-shaping institutions – the schools, the universities, the media and vast entertainment complex, and the courts – rewrites American history as a vast and singular expression of racial and ethnic exploitation and oppression. The ubiquity and pervasiveness of “racism” means that our language must be constantly monitored to repress this impulse (which according to Barack Obama is in our DNA), and that our public spaces – the statuary, monuments, the names of buildings, schools, streets, etc.  – must be purged of any historical references, symbols or imagery that might offend the delicate sensibilities of social justice warriors: nothing can remain in any form that does not depict the suffering of their selected victim classes and excoriate the oppressors, who are?  Well, go to a local school or university and discover “white privilege.” Confederate monuments are being torn down, schools are being renamed, speakers who fail the test of orthodoxy are banned and sometimes assaulted: soon the conformity and uniformity will be complete.

How then does the defunct Teddy, “the Lion of the Senate” Kennedy fit into this scene of wreckage and ruin?  He was a principal agent, a man who performed far above his meager talents.  But this answer leads to a more complicated and fundamental question.  How was he able to do it? How was this arch hypocrite, a man so intellectually mediocre, so personally dissolute and debauched able to rise to this pinnacle of political power, eulogized at his death as a champion of the disadvantaged and downtrodden, officially “lionized” as a great Senate statesman?   

One might reasonably argue that Chappaquiddick was for Edward Kennedy his defining moment both as a man and as a politician.  The decades that followed were merely exposition and commentary on this shameful episode of moral immolation. As a man?  A coward, a libertine, a liar, a fraud, complicit in a homicide from one of his countless alcohol fueled, philandering escapades.  He abandoned a young woman in his submerged Oldsmobile he had driven off of a bridge, then fled the scene and sobered up.  She could have been saved, but the Senator was busy huddling with his handlers with the more important task of concocting a story to thwart the law and to salvage his political career, letting his girlfriend of the moment slowly drowned.  As a politician? He used the wealth and influence of his family and the power of his office to suborn the local authorities, buy off the Kopechne family and ultimately to evade responsibility for actions that would have sent any other man to prison.

He was never completely able to escape the shadows and shame of Chappaquiddick, but the voters of Massachusetts had to have a Kennedy in Washington, perhaps to keep the women in the Bay state safe, and with the passage of time and the crafting of a fashionable leftish championing-the-underdog image, his abandonment of Mary Jo to die became a mere peccadillo, collateral damage of the sort happily overlooked so as to keep a playboy with a magic name in a high place. Here then is the beginning of the answer to the question posed above:  how did the lecher become the lion? 

With gusto Kennedy positioned himself firmly on the left embracing its antinomian trends and leading the charge of American identity politics.  Rewarded with the unconditional support of its pandered-to beneficiaries, he was thus in large part able to immunize himself from the sharper edges of the contempt he deserved.  Teddy never came to endure what should have been an outpouring of disgust and repudiation for a man with the moral fiber of a bunko artist and the life-style of Caligula.

The easy life of a protected rich wastrel and reprobate was, however, not enough for Teddy. He was, after all, a Kennedy, committed to what he liked to call “public service” a laughable, crude piece of unintended irony for someone wholly self-indulgent in his gross personal conduct and self-serving in his public role.  A life devoted to beakers of Johnny Walker and whoring was not enough to, as they say, “make a difference.”  Kennedy needed to inflict himself on the nation. And so he did … make quite a difference. Two of his signature pieces of mischief, that pushed the country toward its current state of anguish, deserve mention here.  First, his support and active selling of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which produced the opposite of what he promised.

From the Center for Immigration Studies

 Although the 1965 bill was intended only to end discrimination, some people feared a major increase in immigration and a change in the source countries of immigrants. Supporters of the measure assured doubters that this would not happen. Senate immigration subcommittee chairman Edward Kennedy (D-MA.) reassured his colleagues and the nation with the following:

“First, our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually. Under the proposed bill, the present level of immigration remains substantially the same ... Secondly, the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area, or the most populated and deprived nations of Africa and Asia ... In the final analysis, the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change as sharply as the critics seem to think.” [emphasis added]

In the “final analysis,” we are talking about the word of Teddy Kennedy.  Most apropos is a single phase -- Kennedy “reassured his colleagues and the nation,” the same sort of reassurance, perhaps, he gave Ms. Kopechne in watery bowels of his Oldsmobile – “don’t worry, honey, I’ll get you out of here.”  He lied with the verve of a true Bolshevik – “everything is the opposite of what I say it is.”  The country was “flooded with millions of immigrants” who dramatically changed “the ethnic mix of this country.” America, thanks in large part to his man, has been transformed, ethnically, culturally, economically by this law. California, once a competitive and healthy two-party state is now because of the immigration influx unleashed after 1965 entirely controlled by a single party.  Hillary Clinton’s nearly three million vote margin over Donald Trump in the 2016 election came out of California, a Democrat clientele of Kennedy’s creation.  Her plan, upon election, was to turn the rest of the country, politically, into California. Aside from the increasingly isolated, gated, tony enclaves of the predominately rich white Democrats such as Hollywood, Silicon Valley, parts of San Francisco, and Palm Springs, California will increasingly come to resemble a vast enlargement of Tijuana with the drug trafficking, the crime and the poverty.

Catering to a burgeoning, resentment-laden set of victim classes and importing lots of needy people into the country along with the extraction and redistribution of resources from its largely middle class citizens to support them would create a cultural and political backlash that would threaten the power structure and its overseers.  Thus, the second piece of the Teddy Kennedy legacy: “hate” legislation.  From a peroration in the Senate in 2007, “Standing Against Hate.” 

I'd like to speak … regarding the Hate Crimes Amendment -- at a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that leads to violence here at home. Now more than ever, we need to act against hate crimes and send a strong message here at home and around the world that we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate…..  Since the September 11th attacks, we've seen a shameful increase in the number of hate crimes committed against Muslims, Sikhs, and Americans of Middle Eastern descent…..  Hate crimes are a form of domestic terrorism…. Like other acts of terrorism, hate crimes have an impact far greater than the impact on the individual victims. They are crimes against entire communities, against the whole nation, and against the fundamental ideals on which America was founded. [emphasis added]

What a vapid collection of useless abstractions and non-sequiturs from a man who ceaselessly preached but never practiced.  “At a time when our ideals are under attack from by terrorists in other lands”?  Terrorists do not attack “ideals”: they attack and kill defenseless people which is what makes them so terrible.   Not clear as well is why terrorists would be attacking our ideals in other lands, but this is Ted Kennedy talking, oblivious to minimal standards of evidence and coherence. Why, a rational person might ask, do we need to send this “message” to the world that “we will not tolerate crimes fueled by hate”?  Since there was absolutely no evidence that we did tolerate such crimes, why was he talking like this?  To distract people from the obvious fact that so much of the terrorism going on around the world was being done by people of “Middle Eastern descent,” and to hope people might not wonder why politicians like Kennedy were so eager to put more of them in their neighborhoods.  No one in the political establishment from President Bush after 9-11 on down was speaking of Islam as anything other than the “religion of peace.”  One has also to ponder: how America had managed to stave off collapse until 2007 by ignoring these crimes, now morphed into “domestic terrorism” against, first, “entire communities,” then, “the whole nation” and then, yikes! America’s foundational “fundamental ideals.”  Once again, we are supposed be traumatized by terrorists attacking those wonderful “ideals” – what specific ideals he doesn’t bother to say, but the more nebulous and vague the abstractions, the easier it was to keep his multicultural scam going.  And the scam?  Import millions of third world people, many of whom are resistant to assimilation, some of whom are hostile to American norms.  Then, stigmatize the resentment of the American hosts who bear the cultural, financial burden as “bigotry and prejudice.”  Gotcha! Welcome to twenty-first century America where lechers are lions and where the politicians have christened half of the citizens as “irredeemable” racists, xenophobes and bigots because many of them believe that it is not a good idea to let anyone and everyone into the U.S. who simply wants to come. 

The mumbo-jumbo of “Standing Against Hate,” late in a career of pretending to be a statesman was unfortunately one of Teddy’s many signature incoherent episodes of Senate oratory. Since his death in 2009 it can be said in fairness to him that he did leave his mark; he did make a difference: to the American people he did figuratively what he did literally to Mary Jo Kopechne fifty years earlier.