I don’t get it. Because the guy died, we should be talking about something that happened decades ago? When Laura Bush dies, are we all going to be too afraid to mention how she killed someone in a car accident, or perhaps will it seem like not something in particular need of reflection? Doesn’t make any damn sense.
It just stinks of people who didn’t like Kennedy feeling excluded as everybody mourns a senator. “But, but… but that lady died…”
Liberals keep trying to make that equation. They don’t seem to get the fact that no one ever elected Laura Bush to national office.
Then you need to get your sense of smell fixed. It’s got nothing to do with “feeling excluded”.
What does that have to do with anything?
If someone elected dies, it’s the best time to start talking about someone whose death they were involved with decades.
If someone not elected dies, we mustn’t talk about someone whose death they were involved with decades ago.
Is that how it goes?
ETA: Really, I’d like to know what the preferred situation is. We should mourn him, but at the same time remember Mary Jo? We shouldn’t mourn him, because of Mary Jo?
Here’s National Lampoon’s classic VW ad from 1973: http://www.jasoncoleman.com/Media/Images/tedvwsmall.jpg
You mean apart from the title of the OP, that it was in bad taste, it made people wince.
No, nothing interferes with that.
Regards,
Shodan
Not this liberal. I cringe every time someone tries to use it.
Laura Bush was a common citizen in a car wreck, a 17-year-old bad driver who was let off under the principle of “poor kid, it’s bad enough she has to live with it”. Ted Kennedy was already a Senator and national celebrity who should have known better. People harp on Chappaquiddick because of perceiving a greater injustice, not just in the (pretty terrible as it is) event per se, but in how they feel the event + the way it was handled should have immediately and irreversibly ruined him and ended his career, but that they feel he abused his connections and power to escape that consequence.
Sucks to be the dead person’s family in both cases, but even I, ideologically a Kennedy supporter, can tell the difference in public relevance.
The other editorial cartoons in that collection make me gag. There’s nothing so pretentious and overbearing as pretending to speak for God, no matter who the cartoon is about.
The Peter Brooke cartoon in the Times had the same subject material, but was handled a bit more gracefully imo.
link and click to the cartoon for the 27th.
Yeah. I guess to me “so upset” implies more than mild expressions of disapproval. But even so, that’s a minority of comments. The majority, by a wide margin, are approving, neutral, or off-topic.
That’s not fair, making me crack a smile and lowering my dudgeon like that.
OK I am way too young to get that. I read the Wiki for this Kopechne girl, but what is “The Camelot Myth” about?
Camelot was a very successful 1960 Broadway musical about King Arthur, Guinevere, and the knights of the round table. Shortly after the assassination of JFK, Jackie Kennedy told a journalist that the late president’s favorite lines from the musical were:
“Don’t let it be forgot
That once there was a spot,
For one brief, shining moment
That was known as Camelot.”
The term “Camelot” has since been associated with the Kennedy administration, sincerely by those who idealize it and ironically by those who excoriate it.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a political issue, and I’m trying to avoid making it one. I’m only 23, so all I’m offering is my view as someone who wasn’t even alive when the Mary Jo thing happened. Also, I knew little and paid little attention to Ted Kennedy. I’m not from Massachusetts, he’s not my senator. Further, and I think this is an important aspect of generational zeitgeist, the name “Kennedy” doesn’t have the associations for people my age that it does older people. JFK, Bobby, and even JFK Jr were before my time. I remember the news coverage of Jr’s plane crash when I was a kid, and all I could think was, “Who?” I was more interested in Corn Pops and Transformers, probably.
To me, Ted was just a senator with some famous relatives. In fact, before a few weeks ago I hadn’t even realized he was JFK’s brother. The term “Kennedy family” has been used as such an arch, expanding term since my youth that I assumed it was a large family tree, and that Ted was maybe JFK’s cousin or something. This may make me sound ignorant, but I’m probably just as ignorant to the family dynamics of most senators who aren’t mine and haven’t run for president in my post-adolescent years.
With that in mind, and going only on facts from history books, it still strikes me as quite odd to try and drum up the Mary Jo incident now. I don’t think it should be white-washed, but it’s not the defining element of his life. It just seems like maybe everybody’s still worked up about Mary Jo, but decided to hold it in for 30 years, and now that he’s dead it’s got to come gushing out.
I imagine that since this took place in the 70s, a period where news media was at its height, and there wasn’t a lot of competing media to draw attention away, so it was probably a very large, quite talked-about thing, so a lot of people are still probably harboring feelings from the frenzy. Had that happened today, the tone would probably have been more something like “A senator was in a car accident where a passenger died today. In other news, Paris Hilton is launching her own line of handbags!” so that’s the context in which I imagine it.
So, if I can speak as a somewhat impartial observer with no strong feelings for or against Ted Kennedy, it is somewhat understandable to want to vent about Mary Jo (and I see a lot of that happening on this forum), but criticizing the press for “ignoring it” like the OP’s cartoon does just seems so, so bitter.
So when Nixon died, should the obituaries have focused on his recent books, rather than Watergate?
Was it that big of a deal back then? It didn’t seem to slow down his senatorial career.
It ensured that he would never be president. So yes, it was a big deal.
Did he want to be president? You’d think after his two brothers, he’d be able to spot a trifecta in the works.
Well, he DID run for President in 1980, though it may have been just the way of the Liberal wing to try and do something about Carter’s squandering of their post-Watergate advantage. They may have suspected he wouldn’t get to President anyway and just have been hoping he’d make a better showing v. Reagan and save the Senate majority, who knows? He ended up playing to Carter the role Reagan played to Ford in 76, the standardbearer for the True Believers who did not really love the official candidate. Even then, so relatively close in time to the event, it was mentioned but was not the central theme of the campaign WRT him.
Of course, a lot of the thought behind “Chappaquiddick kept him from the Presidency” seems to hinge on a notion that otherwise the candidacy and even the office itself would have been his for the asking in '72 or '76, and I don’t know if that would have been a such a safe bet. Things change.
No, I’m taking it non-ironically. I don’t agree with the message, but it’s over-the-top enough that I can’t be offended by it, and have to laugh.
You do know that he ran for the office against the incumbet Democratic president, Jimmy Carter, in 1980, right? :eek:
Please tell me you know that.
All during the 1970s, Ted Kennedy was for the Democrats the assumed heir to the throne. His brother had been elected President, another brother had been about to be nominated for president (and probably would have beaten Nixon in '68 had he indeed been nominated), so it was a logical assumption. But the Chappaquidick incident hung around his neck like a millstone, and not so much for the fact that Mary Jo Kopechne died, per se, as for the fact that he was seen as having a) panicked when it happened, which contributed to her death, and b) refused to own up to the responsibility for what he had done and allowed the whole thing to be covered over and avoided through the use of his family name and influence.
In one sense, I suppose that the result in 1980, and the fact that he was never legitimately able to run for president again thereafter, should be for him enough pennance for his actions on that night. Perhaps that’s sufficient reason to give him a pass over the course of the last 25 years or so, especially in light of his continued efforts in the Senate on behalf of the causes he felt were important. But I don’t agree, and solely for the reason that I don’t think he ever actually did HIS part in dealing with that issue. So long as he continued to act as if the body under the rug didn’t need to be addressed, he should have continued to pay that price.
