Sen. Ted Kennedy and the Miracle of Moral Relativism

(By American Zen's Mike Flannigan, on loan from Ari)

"I'm more than willing to go off decorum to ensure THIS MAN is not beatified. Sorry, he destroyed lives. And he knew it." - Moonie Times scribbler Andrew "Not so" Breitbart on Twitter

The death last Tuesday night of Senator Ted Kennedy has unleashed a lot of pent-up hatred of not just the late senator and his historic legacy but against all victories hard-won by the liberal lawmaker over nearly a half a century in the Senate. In the last day and a half, we've heard it all: Leftists clinging to Kennedy's bloated corpse in order to keep the health care bill afloat; Teddy's daddy being a bootlegger; and, of course, Chappaquiddick.

How soon right wingers forget about the blood- and shit-stained legacies of the forebears of their own heroes. Thank the Good Lord for moral relativism! Huzza!

While it may be true that Edward Kennedy's father was a bootlegger, what they seem to forget was that, A) it still has nothing to do with Kennedy's legacy in the Senate, B) Ted Kennedy was less than two years old by the time Prohibition was repealed C) Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. was a lifelong Republican.

The biggest point that ought to be brought up is D.

Personally, I'd rather have a senator representing my state whose father was a bootlegger than a chief executive who used Daddy's money to steal an election and whose father's father was a Nazi financier who made enough money for Adolph Hitler to buy and make armaments that would go on to kill American soldiers. I'd also rather have in the Senate a man who spent a lifetime in public service to make amends for one tragic mistake than have as a president an incurious intellectual bulimic whose grandfather made money off concentration camp slave labor, tried to overthrow the government in a fascist coup and later lined his pockets with that slave labor money when his trust fund kicked in and would never find the cajones to decry his grandfather's seditious shortcomings.

Prescott Bush was the kind of villain you'd see in a Robert Ludlum or Ian Fleming novel. Like Kennedy's father, he would later bury his criminal past in public honors and public service, eventually becoming a United States Senator himself while the press dutifully never once mentioned his attempted fascist coup in 1933 that would've involved right wing industrialist buddies like Remington (who would've supplied the arms to millions of disaffected WW I veterans).

The press's silence was understandable. After all, part of the coup's strategy was to bribe the editors of 25 of the biggest newspapers in America and one can only assume that during Bush's candidacy the bribe money kept flowing.

Prescott Bush, despite being named by Gen. Smedley Butler, the man who would've led this ragtag army to help depose Franklin Delano Roosevelt, never once saw the inside of a federal courtroom nor ever had to testify before a Congress of which he would in less than 20 years time become a large part.

Accountability, or the lack of it, is a two-edged sword, and these right wing shit smears beneath Rush Limbaugh's and Andrew Breitbart's tortured BVD's ought to heed that lesson.

The rage, rage coming from the right that we're hearing against Kennedy really has nothing to do with Chappaquiddick. It has more to do with Kennedy successfully defeating losing, hateful, spiteful GOP agendas and policies and showing them up for the evil that they were. In voting on historic civil rights, immigration, educational, national security and health care issues, to name but a few, Senator Kennedy wasn't merely a man who had lived in history but one who made history as someone always near the very center of power in Washington, a man to whom Richard M. Nixon would personally extend a health care compromise.

But red-lensed moral relativism makes all the difference to those who weren't even alive or old enough to follow the news when Kennedy walked away from the scene of an accident that left a young woman dead. It may be true that perhaps Kennedy should've been impeached and thrown out of the Senate as a result of his crime. But if that had happened, who knows who would've succeeded him and Head Start perhaps wouldn't exist. Edward M. Kennedy, instead of being regarded an unpunished villain, ought to serve as a example of the value of giving a person a second chance.

The Bush clan had plenty of chances to make good, to make amends, to right the wrongs of their forebears. Ted Kennedy took his second chance and remained, with the ongoing blessings of the grateful voters of Massachusetts, in the Senate for another 40 years, justifying the second chance that fate gave him. The Bushes, far from making amends, entered public service to enrich themselves, to add a superficial patina of glitz and respectability to hide a subversive, corrupt, seditious past and present that merely served to shield them from accountability for their own crimes.

Mary Jo Kopechne's name is more famous than the names of any soldier that has died in Iraq or Afghanistan, even more of a household name than NFL safety Pat Tillman. Yet when George W. Bush's time comes, no one will bring up the names of some of the first casualties of his successful invasion and occupation but failed war in Iraq that was built on a dog-eared house of cards made up entirely of jokers. No one even on the left will bring up the names of Staff Sgt. Donald C. May, Jr., Lance Cpl. Patrick T. O'Day and Pfc. Francisco A. Martinez-Flores. Those three Marines died in exactly the same way Mary Jo Kopechne died when their tank drove off a bridge and plunged into the Euphrates less than a week after the invasion.

In the balance, I'd rather have a man like Ted Kennedy representing me and my interests than the scion of a long line of war criminals and profiteers who combined never had to face one tenth the accountability that Ted Kennedy endures even in death.