WE GET THE LEADERS WE DESERVE
The loss of a child is unimaginable, and the pain incomprehensible. It certainly is nothing to joke about, which is what Kennedy used to ask -- heard any new Chappaquiddick jokes lately?
Dec.24, 2003: Joseph Kopechne, Mary Jo's father, dies alone on Christmas Eve 24 years after losing his only daughter
Dec.20, 2007: Gwen Kopechne, mother of Mary Jo, dies alone in a nursing home 38 years after living with her only child's death
This piece is from PajamasMedia:
We Get the Leaders We Deserve
The people deserve blame for giving Kennedy's homicide a pass.
By Andrew Klaven, August 26, 2009
At the age of 38, Senator Ted Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge into a pond. He escaped the car, leaving 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne trapped inside under seven feet of water. I would guess he was drunk; I would guess she was his adulterous date for the day. He denied both accusations.
What was undeniable was that he waited ten hours to report the incident – all the long night. Even the next morning, he was seen chatting casually with an acquaintance at his hotel. There is evidence to suggest that Miss Kopechne was alive in the car for quite some time after the accident, breathing the last of the air caught inside.
Bad men can support good ideas. We can’t condemn liberalism itself on the strength of Kennedy’s character. It’s only a coincidence that the man who left Miss Kopechne to tap, tap, tap against the Oldsmobile window while he apparently tried to establish an alibi and otherwise cover his ass also spent a lifetime promoting policies that have endangered our freedoms, harmed our economy and damaged the lives of the poor people they were presumably intended to help.
What is no coincidence, however – what is criminal really – is that such a man spent nearly fifty years in the Senate of the United States. Fifty years in office – or 47 plus, I think it was – but in any case, longer than the longest-serving tyrant-for-life in the worst third world dirt puddle you can think of. Whose fault is that? Ours, of course. We the people allowed the courts to give his homicide a pass – he got a two month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident. We voted him back into office again and again, knowing what he was. Blame Massachusetts alone if you want to, but we, all of us, have failed to demand the term limits and the end to gerrymandering that would keep our representatives from devolving into entrenched toadies of special interests and unscrupulous slaves of their own ideologies. We have failed to demand the reforms that would keep our republic vital and true to its ideals. We get the leaders we deserve and God help us.
Ted Kennedy is dead at 77. Mary Jo Kopechne, rest in peace.
