Discomfort with the Kennedy adulation

I said earlier I wasn’t going to bad mouth Kennedy, but the white washed adoration oozing from the media impels me to say something.  Politically and, if you’re into American dynasties, dynastically, the adulation upon his death is understandable and, depending on your political orientation, fitting.  He was indeed a political colossus, and if you liked his politics, then who the heck cares about his myriad personal failings, right?  He was also the last of a generation that lives large in American hearts.  I personally came of age too late ever to understand the Kennedy mystique.  I missed Camelot, and just heard about affairs, mafia ties, political corruption, all of which seemed to me to be rather charmless.  But again, if you’re a Kennedy fan (and all American media falls into that category), Teddy was one for the books.

But here’s the thing:  Kennedy wasn’t just a drunken liberal politician or scion of a family the American press took to its heart.  Instead, he was two things that I find unforgiveable:  a traitor and a murderer.

The traitor part comes because he actively and secretly worked with America’s enemies to undermine the United States during the Cold War.  He was a murderer because of Mary Jo Kopechne.  If, when he drunkenly drove into the water, Mary Jo had died immediately, he would have been “nothing more” than an involuntary manslaughterer.  However, when he ran away from the scene, leaving a living Mary Jo to die alone and afraid, trapped in a sinking car, he elevated his moral and legal status to that of murderer.  Even before I became a conservative, I never forgave or forgot that fact.

I anticipated the posthumous drooling, and I really did intend to keep the high moral ground of holding my tongue, but the myriad MSM reports of him as merely “flawed” inflame me.  He wasn’t just flawed.  He was, at best, immoral and, at worst, evil.