Hello again. Did I miss anything?
Anyway first day back online after a leisurely summer being poked prodded, dialysed and made hideously and explosively sick with antibiotics and weird blood chemistry and already I have my CoTD, on the death of Ted Kennedy. Exactamundo, WILFSSON:
WILFSSON
27 Aug 09, 2:12am (about 6 hours ago)
‘He became one of the great senators of our time’ says Obama and the Washington claque echoes him.
But, great as in comparison to who – or rather what?
Joe Biden? John Kerry? Jesse Helms? Hilary Clinton? John Edwards?
Considering a forty-year Senate career in which virtually every member has been a bought and paid for corporate hack, the question of greatness is surely rather moot.
He may have endorsed Obama, he may have helped the NI peace process but for all his eloquence on democracy and justice he would never have been in office had Kennedy senior not been a fascist, a bootlegger and an arms dealer Ambassador to Britain and Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission who essentially bought his sons into office with both money and influence. “We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes” he said. Ted Kennedy was a rich man from a rich family who expected to have political power.
So he lost two brothers to political assassination – “Hello. I’m Edwardus Kennedius Maximus, brother of a murdered politician, brother of another murdered politician” – but just because you’ve been bereaved it doesn’t make you any more moral. If that were the case humanity would’ve reached a much greater state of moral perfection by now.
He was untrustworthy in marital life and drove his first wife to drink with his many blatant affairs. He drank massively, which was a running joke in the media. Under the influence of drink and at a surprisingly late stage in his ‘distinguished’ life and career he played a very shady role in the commission and cover-up of a drunken rape by his nephew.
This is greatness?
There are those who will argue that tangled private life and personal peccadilloes like a few affairs and a constant smell of whisky have no bearing on the political greatness or otherwise of any given powerful man (because a woman would never recieve such generosity from the media, but that’s a whole other subject). It’s what He Does, not what he does that’s important – political achievements are somehow supposed to outweight complete arsery.
And he was an arse. What it always, always came back to for me with Kennedy is that the distinguished senator and sprig of American nobility left a girl to drown in a car wreck. He ran to save his own skin, and then he lied about it. He simply did not care whether she was alive or dead, provided he and his family not have any trouble. To me it said all that needed be said about his basic humanity, irrelevant of his politics.
Mind you I can’t let Kennedy politics go completely unremarked. They were of the white-bread, business as usual, carry on guys, let’s do a deal here school of politics, leavened with a hefty dose of guilt-fuelled ‘Hey, let’s be a little nicer to the servants, then we won’t have to deal with too much unpleasantness’ and a soupcon of “Oh yeah, lets give a concessions to the chicks, too while we’re at it. That’ll get me laid at least once.”.
Don’t get me started on the Kennedys and the Catholic church. I’ll be here all bloody day.