I Would Have Trouble Being Collegial

I’m getting tired of hearing all these Senators from both parties talking about what a great guy, what a charmer Ted Kennedy was. I don’t think I’d be able to be that friendly with someone who, regardless of his politics, essentially murdered a young woman with whom he had probably been philandering, got away with it, and joked about it. You know, there was another Ted who everyone thought was charming, too. His last name was Bundy.

[Late Sunday afternoon update]

Mark Steyn has some related thoughts:

You can’t make an omelette without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed — he certainly changed Mary Jo’s — but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been okay to leave a couple more broads down there? Hey, why not? At the Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky mused on what Mary Jo “would have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history . . . Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.” What true-believing liberal lass wouldn’t be honored to be dispatched by that death panel?

We are all flawed, and most of us are weak, and in hellish moments, at a split-second’s notice, confronting the choice that will define us ever after, many of us will fail the test. Perhaps Mary Jo could have been saved; perhaps she would have died anyway. What is true is that Edward Kennedy made her death a certainty. When a man (if you’ll forgive the expression) confronts the truth of what he has done, what does honor require? Six years before Chappaquiddick, in the wake of Britain’s comparatively very minor “Profumo scandal,” the eponymous John Profumo, Her Majesty’s Secretary of State for War, resigned from the House of Commons and the Queen’s Privy Council, and disappeared amid the tenements of the East End to do good works washing dishes and helping with children’s playgroups, in anonymity, for the last 40 years of his life. With the exception of one newspaper article to mark the centenary of his charitable mission, he never uttered another word in public again.

Ted Kennedy went a different route. He got kitted out with a neck brace and went on TV and announced the invention of the “Kennedy curse,” a concept that yoked him to his murdered brothers as a fellow victim — and not, as Mary Jo perhaps realized in those final hours, the perpetrator. He dared us to call his bluff, and, when we didn’t, he made all of us complicit in what he’d done. We are all prey to human frailty, but few of us get to inflict ours on an entire nation.

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[Bumped]

65 thoughts on “I Would Have Trouble Being Collegial”

  1. This is what makes you Jim, you personally, evil…

    Wow, touched a nerve?

    The evil thing I wrote was: Both parties have corrupt members

    This response is on no level a defense of the charge. It is a pathetic attempt to defend the indefensible. It is the direct reason that corruption of any kind can exist. Pure evil.

    It is not a defense, it is a statement of fact.

    You have the intelligence to be part of the solution but choose not;

    What solution is that?

    Ask yourself: would you rather have a Congress full of corrupt legislators who fight for everything you believe, or one full of incorruptible lawmakers who are also avowed socialists? Is corruption really your top priority?

  2. For sure, but only one party campaigns with the message of ‘cleaning up the culture of corruption” a la Hillary Clinton as if it were a one sided phenomenon only the ‘evil’ republicans engage in.

    You have a short memory. Gingrich came to power in part by campaigning against the “culture of corruption” exemplified by Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski.

  3. Jim seems to think that vices like drunkenness and adultery are as bad as crimes like causing someone’s death. But I realize he’s just trying to muddy the waters in typical troll fashion by pretending I was talking about corruption in general including extremely minor vices like stealing pens and rubber bands from the office. So let me rephrase my first comment, for the tiny of brain:

    When someone who has committed negligent homicide isn’t properly punished, but is instead protected and “forgiven” and sent on his way into an important and prominent career, the entire society that this person lives in becomes that much more corrupt. And corruption stemming from this wrongfuly-applied mercy towards people who committed negligent homicide causes brain damage among the populace: for example, people talk as if it’s some great tragedy that because of Chappaquiddick Kennedy was “denied the Presidency” (as if he was entitled to it in the first place!), where he would at most have gotten eight years, and instead had to “settle” for a lifetime career in the Senate, where he got to do lasting and probably permanent harm to the nation. I’ve said this elsewhere, but a less tolerant (IOW, weak and decadent) era a man who left a young woman to die thus committing negligent homicide if no other more serious charge can be laid against him would have been banned from public life and shunned by polite society at the very least.

  4. And actually, if you’ll look back at accounts of any time a Republican pol does something that’s either against the law or flouts the rules of proper behavior, like the governor of South Carolina who disappeared for a week so he could play hanky-panky with his mistress in Argentina or someplace, you’ll see that Republicans on the whole disapprove of stuff like that and the pol’s career is usually if not ruined (we can’t seem to get rid of creepy adulterer Newt) then at least knocked down a step or two (that South Carolina governor I mentioned was being thought of as presidential campaign material — I haven’t heard that anymore). But if you’re popular enough with the media and the Rich People Who Matter, and you’re a Democrat, you can throw live virgins off a cliff and your backers will think of some sort of excuse. (“They went willingly to their deaths in order not to burden Gaia with their carbon footprints!”)

  5. And actually, if you’ll look back at accounts of any time a Republican pol does something that’s either against the law or flouts the rules of proper behavior, like the governor of South Carolina who disappeared for a week so he could play hanky-panky with his mistress in Argentina or someplace, you’ll see that Republicans on the whole disapprove of stuff like that and the pol’s career is usually if not ruined (we can’t seem to get rid of creepy adulterer Newt) then at least knocked down a step or two (that South Carolina governor I mentioned was being thought of as presidential campaign material — I haven’t heard that anymore).

    Vitter, Ensign and Sanford are all still in office, and Guliani, McCain and Fred Thompson were all viable presidential candidates. Reagan and George W. Bush had the loyal support of their party. Foley and Craig are only gone because the GOP draws the line at same-sex fornication.

    But if you’re popular enough with the media and the Rich People Who Matter, and you’re a Democrat, you can throw live virgins off a cliff and your backers will think of some sort of excuse.

    That must explain John Edwards’ prominence in the Democratic Party these days.

    I will, however, agree with you about the “popular with the media” part — you sure see plenty of Guliani, McCain, and Gingrich on TV.

  6. Yes Jim, you did touch a nerve. I hate corrupt and the fact that we don’t vote them out which means a lot of the voters are corrupt as well (not all, some are just stupid and ignorant.) This is not the evil thing…

    The evil thing I wrote was: Both parties have corrupt members

    No. It’s truth. The evil thing is your attempt to defend the indefensible.

    The method is so common among the left that it is almost laughable.

    It is not a defense, it is a statement of fact.

    Correct. This is what makes your defense evil. You have the intelligence to know what you are doing which is willful, intentional deceit. You know it is not a defense, yet use it as a defense. So now, will you claim that you are not defending Rangel or Kennedy?

    If you were stupid or just ignorant you might have an excuse, but you are not. There is such a thing as good and evil. Defending evil makes it possible to grow. That’s what you’re doing and that’s evil.

  7. So now, will you claim that you are not defending Rangel or Kennedy?

    I am not defending Rangel or Kennedy, I am attempting to put them in context. It takes no moral courage to be outraged at the sins of your political enemies, and if their sins are the only ones you notice, your morality is indistinguishable from partisanship.

  8. It takes no moral courage to be outraged at the sins of your political enemies

    Lord, now he’s claiming that we’re outraged at Kennedy’s elevation to secular sainthood because we want to show off how moral we are. Bless his smug little heart.

    and if their sins are the only ones you notice, your morality is indistinguishable from partisanship.

    But forgiving their sins — their unrepented, swept-under-the-rug sins — because “they do so much good!” isn’t partisanship at all. Gotcha.

    PS: A lot of Republicans were pissed at Giuliani’s shabby personal life. As for the others, I was unaware of them having actively engaged in adultery as opposed to simply having gotten divorced and remarried, which is something that even most rock-ribbed conservatives today let slide, but you’re the one with the preoccupation with the bedroom habits of conservative pols so I guess you’d know. And as for John Edwards, he and his baby-mama seem to be back in the news, which is far from the shunning he deserves. (At least, AFAIK, Rudy didn’t get his mistress pregnant. Maybe you could open up your stored files of the National Enquirer and let me know if I’m wrong.)

  9. As for the others, I was unaware of them having actively engaged in adultery

    And yet they all have said as much on the record (except George W. Bush — his sin was drunk driving). You have a typically human ability to tune out what you don’t want to hear.

    At least, AFAIK, Rudy didn’t get his mistress pregnant.

    How, exactly, is that a greater sin than the adultery itself?

  10. How, exactly, is that a greater sin than the adultery itself?

    In the same way that injuring or killing someone while driving drunk is a greater sin than simply driving drunk. One is reckless with potential consequences, while the other actualizes them

  11. In the same way that injuring or killing someone while driving drunk is a greater sin than simply driving drunk. One is reckless with potential consequences, while the other actualizes them

    But the moral choice in both cases is exactly the same. To call one a greater sin is to make people morally responsible for their bad luck.

  12. To call one a greater sin is to make people morally responsible for their bad luck.

    Well, that seems to be what the justice system does. Are you proposing that there should be no distinction in punishment between simple DUI and DUI/manslaughter?

    Or to get back to the case of adultery, are you saying that it would be a lesser sin than adultery/offspring if all necessary birth-control measures were taken? It’s all betrayal, but in the latter case, there is the additional price to the wife of losing the husband’s resources to a child she didn’t bear.

  13. I am not defending Rangel or Kennedy

    I’ll take your word for it. However, you are quacking like a duck…

    …amid a large crowd of ducks that commonly do the same thing.

    Which is to say, when faced with an argument you don’t like you change the subject rather than man up and either agree or refute it.

  14. But the moral choice in both cases is exactly the same. To call one a greater sin is to make people morally responsible for their bad luck.

    I agree with Jim somewhat here. Many sins simply are not illegal. Especially when you consider that often even fantasizing about something heinous is often considered a serious sin in its own right, but few legal systems (except for the ruthlessly totalitarian) would treat that fantasy as a crime.

    The justice system does consider intent, but intent only occurs in the course of some activity. What law does is that it makes someone responsible (not morally responsible!) for the consequences of certain actions (or more accurately, it provides negative consequences for certain actions or harm resulting from those actions).

    And I must agree with Ken’s assessment of Jim to an extent. Rationalizing Kennedy’s abandonment of a traveling companion to death by drowning as a case of “personal moral failings” which blurs in with other leaders’ personal moral failings is excusing an act of evil and hence, is an act of evil in itself. It doesn’t matter if well after the fact there is “doubt” whether she could have been saved or not. It doesn’t matter that other leaders have benn drunkards or worse. Kennedy made an evil choice. Jim chooses to rationalize it rather than accept it as it was.

    As a final observation, manslaughter is probably the appropriate sentence for what Kennedy did, but I think there are cases where intent to kill is irrelevant. If the action performed is extremely heinous and irresponsible or if the defendant killed while committing certain other crimes (like breaking and entering), then I think a charge of murder can be applied in some states.

  15. Well, that seems to be what the justice system does. Are you proposing that there should be no distinction in punishment between simple DUI and DUI/manslaughter?

    No. There is a difference between moral responsibility and criminal responsibility. Imagine two drunk drivers who separately each hit a pedestrian, and the two pedestrians are taken to the hospital in critical condition, where days later one dies and one survives. The law punishes one driver more than the other — he has done a greater harm. But I don’t see any reason to say that one driver is more moral than the other.

    Or to get back to the case of adultery, are you saying that it would be a lesser sin than adultery/offspring if all necessary birth-control measures were taken? It’s all betrayal, but in the latter case, there is the additional price to the wife of losing the husband’s resources to a child she didn’t bear.

    The sin is in the choice, not in consequences that the sinner has no influence over.

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