Crying for Kenndy?...Don't

Public servant my eye. He and all of the others in the house and senate are on the take. Some for everything and a few just getting their toes into the trough!>>>

Ed West.

It says much about humanity’s basic urge to be ruled by dynasties that Teddy Kennedy came anywhere near being elected president in 1980. Whatever his other qualities, his behaviour at Chappaquiddick eleven years earlier, where he might have been able to save Mary Jo Kopechne’s life but instead chose to save his own career by waiting until his blood/alcohol level reached a legal level, would have ruled out anyone else from becoming local rat catcher, let alone leader of the greatest nation on earth.

But after the murder of his brothers John and Bobby, Teddy became America’s atheling – until the public realised there was little good left to come out of that clan (with the exception of Arnold Schwarzenegger, married to Teddy’s niece Maria Shriver).

Kennedy was no doubt a dedicated servant of Congress and a passionate believer in combating poverty, but his lasting legacy on this side of the Atlantic was to poison Anglo-American relations for a generation. It’s not often said aloud but many British people when they first saw United 175 hit the World Trade Centre felt, alongside shock, pity and a sense of solidarity with the American people, also a feeling of “now you know what terrorism is like, will you stop funding the murder of our people?”

For years Kennedy was the bang-drummer-in-chief for brainless Irish-American IRA sympathisers, dimwits who shouted “troops out of Dublin!” and sang maudlin songs from the comfort of Boston and New York, giving money for strangers 3,000 miles away to murder their neighbours.

For despite the pseudo-Marxist justifications the IRA used, which was obviously lapped up by useful idiots on both sides of the Irish Sea and across the Atlantic, their goal was always ethnic cleansing against their neighbours, the people who Americans still call “the Scots-Irish”.

Kennedy himself said that Ulster Protestants “should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain”, without in any way suggesting he would give Boston back to the Indians (or the English-Americans, for that matter) and return to Co. Wexford. He compared Britain’s presence in Ulster with America’s in Vietnam, and later forced Jimmy Carter to ban arm sales to the RUC, blackening the name of that tirelessly heroic band of men, each one of them worth a thousand spoiled Ivy League playboys.

Kennedy spoke out against violence in Northern Ireland while cosying up to IRA terrorists, the cause of the violence, ensuring Gerry Adams could visit the States in 1996 and celebrate that great festival of plastic patriotism and falseness, the American St Patrick’s Day Festival. He only later distanced himself from Sinn Fein/IRA after their goons murdered Robert McCartney and the American public woke up to the reality of “the boys”.

It’s bad manners to speak ill of the dead, before his family have got the chance to bury their loved one, but it cannot go forgotten. I’m sure Kennedy was essentially a good man and a servant of his own country, but he was certainly no friend of ours. >>>

Adrian Michaels.

I know it’s August but the television has been wall-to-wall Teddy Kennedy today. And I live in the UK. I can’t imagine how tiring the coverage must be in the States.

The death of a longstanding public servant is certainly a moment worth noting. The senator was also, I grant, part of a very famous family. Some in Britain might miss that the Kennedys are as close to royalty as America gets.

But Teddy Kennedy is not deserving of these tearful invocations to saintliness. He was a “great parliamentarian” because he was an elected politician for a very long time and helped to cut a lot of deals. His longevity meant that he could point to a number of legislative causes that he had helped to champion.

I might prefer a swifter epitaph, that the senator was “a long-serving recipient of nepotism”.

The New York Times writes: “Born to one of the wealthiest American families, Mr Kennedy spoke for the downtrodden in his public life while living the heedless private life of a playboy and a rake for many of his years. Dismissed early in his career as a lightweight and an unworthy successor to his revered brothers, he grew in stature over time by sheer longevity and by hewing to liberal principles while often crossing the partisan aisle to enact legislation.”

We are therefore toasting his legendary ability to lunch, while glossing over the IRA, untimely drownings and so on. Let us try to mark someone’s passing with respect, yes, but proper distance and judgment. Even if it is August. >>>