The Kennedys recently endorsed Barack Obama, and Teddy Kennedy
drew a parallel with President Kennedy — a vision of a new Camelot
rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the Bush administration.
Either he was addressing the largest group of amnesiacs ever
gathered in one place in history or the media and much of America
have been eating funny mushrooms and are in the throes of a mass
delusion.
Back to reality: The late President Kennedy bears responsibility
for the initiation of one of the bleakest episodes in modern
American history — the Vietnam War. Only because Khrushchev had
more common sense than he did, we avoided an enormous catastrophe.
After the fall of the Soviet Union, when the Russians’ secret files
were opened, we learned, among other bits of knowledge, such as
that the Rosenbergs were indeed Russian atomic spies, that there
were functioning, deployed, short and mid-range atomic missiles in
Cuba. If we ever, as threatened, tried to land troops directly
after the Bay of Pigs debacle on Cuban shores, our troops would
have been slaughtered — one missile, thousands of Americans
annihilated. This is all not to mention that the fiasco of the Bay
of Pigs was authorized by President Kennedy himself, and then he
hung the Cuban patriots out to dry by withholding promised air
support.
Many of Kennedy’s private and cabinet sessions were secretly
recorded, and many years later, one of these recordings from the
time of the Bay of Pigs episode reveals Kennedy musing that for a
President to go down in history he has to have a war. “Where would
Lincoln be without the Civil War?” A cynic might therefore suggest
that Kennedy’s trip to the brink of a nuclear holocaust was not a
result of his inexperience but, rather, it had a more selfish
origin. On the domestic front, he accomplished little, and his
promises had to be delivered by President Johnson. He did, however,
inaugurate the White House revolving door policy as far as women
were concerned, and even in this area it needed a subsequent
President — Clinton — to bring it to a point of perfection.
The other members of the Kennedy bunch are also hardly poster
boys for responsible government — or even human beings. The
liberals hug Robert Kennedy’s memory, but choose not to remember
that he personally authorized the wiretaps on Dr. Martin Luther
King. He also carried on the President’s policies, and as in many
families, there were traditions; such as passing down clothing from
an older to younger child — only they did this with women. The
most well-known of these involved the late Marilyn Monroe. After
the President was through with her, he passed her down to Bobby.
Eventually, as we all know, the poor woman killed herself.
There are, of course, the gaggle of Kennedy relatives who have
been arrested and charged with everything from drunk driving, to
rape, and even murder.
This, of course, brings us to the present Bloviator-in-Chief
Teddy Kennedy. It would be easy to write him off as another
senatorial windbag. But he bears a distinction born by no other
Senator. He has killed someone — and not while serving as a member
of the armed forces. After a drunken party, he drove off a bridge
and left his passenger Mary Jo Kopechne alone to drown to death,
trapped in his car.
All of this makes us wonder at the judgment of Mr. Obama, or the
American public. Camelot, once the fairy tale aspect is put aside,
is as attractive as a cesspool — and may even smell a lot
worse.
