Ted is Dead (UPDATED)

The story.

They say not to speak ill of the dead, so I’ll just have to enjoy this next beer in silence.

UPDATE for BingBing and others who may not know the background, I give you this marvelous retrospective by Carl Cannon.

“It was just a car accident, really, albeit one involving alcohol, excessive speed, and the late-night machinations of a married man partying with an unmarried woman…

There’s no way to know for sure, but the accident at Dike Bridge on Chappaquiddick Island on July 18, 1969 probably cost Edward M. Kennedy the presidency. It certainly cost Mary Jo Kopechne her life…

Here is what is known:

On July 18, 1969, Kennedy and five other men – all but one of whom was married – met six single young women who had worked on Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign. The women were known as the “Boiler Room Girls” for their tireless work in a windowless office in that ill-fated campaign. All of them, especially Teddy, had grieved hard when Bobby had been killed 15 months earlier…

Sometime late at night after an evening of drinking, Kennedy and Kopechne went for a drive in his 1967 Oldsmobile…

In any event, Kennedy wasn’t headed toward the ferry landing when his car careened off Dike Bridge and into the inlet known as Poucha Pond; they were heading toward the beach (to fuck – Beef)…

Kennedy got out of the car alive, Mary Jo Kopechne did not. He said he dived down several times to try and rescue her, before walking back to the cottage where his friends were staying. To do so, he passed at least four houses with working telephones, including one 150 yards from the accident with a porch light on – as well as a firehouse with a pay phone. When he got to the cottage, none of the women were told what happened. According to the 763-page coroner’s inquest, this was just the first of a series of appalling decisions Kennedy made that night, decisions that stretch credulity…

Upon reaching Edgartown, Kennedy went to his room at a local inn – it was now 2:25 a.m., — where he spent the night, and the following morning engaged in small talk about sailing with a local yachter and agreed to have breakfast with the man when Gargan and Markham showed up about 7:30. They asked him who he’d called about the accident only to receive the astounding reply: no one. Kennedy explained it this way at the inquest: “I just couldn’t gain the strength within me, the moral strength, to call Mrs. Kopechne at 2 in the morning and tell her that her daughter was dead.” But he hadn’t called the cops, either, and wouldn’t until 9 a.m.

Not reporting a fatal traffic accident is a felony in most places. On Martha’s Vineyard, if the driver is a Kennedy, it’s not even a matter of official curiosity: The local police chief never even asked Kennedy why he waited nine hours to report what had happened. The state of Massachusetts, citing Kennedy’s excessive speed on the bridge, suspended his license for six months. That was it.”

That was it. A six month driver’s license suspension for allowing a young woman to die needlessly, failing to report the accident in a timely manner, and everything else that was illegal and immoral in that litany of wrongs that night.

Ted Kennedy was a scum sucking maggot-out-of-hell shyster politician, and now he’s dead. I, for one, am glad he’s dead, and hope he suffers all of the torments of hell.

He never came clean.

UPDATE II [bing]

Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s top ten achievements.