Category Archives: Media Criticism

Two Grim Fairy Tales

come to an end:

Forty years have passed since Chappaquiddick. Immediately after the accident, Mr. Kennedy scrambled to organize the best and brightest to save his career, rather than to save the life of 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne.

Before the facts were gathered, as her family was being prepped for a cash payoff, the Massachusetts voter – in “shock” and “denial,” the beginning phases of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s grief cycle – was asked by the senator in a carefully constructed televised speech to look away from his misdeed in the name of his family’s recent tragedies.

In a time of grief, the young senator framed his future as a referendum on Camelot. And the media didn’t call him on it. The fix was in.

The result was Mr. Kennedy needn’t do more than show up for work to atone for his calculated selfishness. Without apology or contrition, Mr. Kennedy crafted a public career in which he spent taxpayers’ money – certainly not his own – to make up for his unspeakable behavior.

As long as he toed the liberal line, this trust-fund Robin Hood was protected by the liberal masses and the mainstream media. Hollywood did its job by not putting his story on the big screen.

Doing to the reputations of Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork what he did to Miss Kopechne only reinforced his value to the Democrat Media Complex as the memory of his brothers’ more authentic Camelot began to fade.

It is interesting that Hollywood never made a movie about Chappaquiddick. You can bet it would have happened if it had been a Republican. Actually, it could make an interesting project for some brave filmmaker out there.

Putting The Fox In Fox News

Man, the Fox Report is pretty hot tonight. Julie Banderas is on a honeymoon, and Patti Ann Browne is sitting in as anchor. And all the stories are being covered by women tonight, including Molly Line and Laura Ingle (who graduated to there from KFI in LA a few years ago — she definitely doesn’t have a face for radio).

Also, I noticed that Shannon Bream sat in for Brett Baer Friday night. She’s another one of those beautiful smart lawyers, like Megyn Kelly, that they’ve picked up. Are they grooming her for bigger things?

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.

Read all.

[Bumped]

Some Questions For Nancy Pelosi

and the CIA:

1. Given that you were aware of the conduct for which CIA interrogators are now being investigated and possibly prosecuted, and you at least tacitly approved of such conduct, will you ask President Obama to pardon the interrogators?

2. Since you were aware of what the CIA interrogators were doing yet remained silent, are you at all complicit in their conduct?

Speaker Pelosi, assuming that you reject the IG’s report (and Leon Panetta’s assertion that the CIA told congress the truth in 2002) please respond to the following:

1. When you discovered that you were lied to in September 2002, did you confront Director Tenet? If not, why not?

2. Were the CIA personnel who lied to you in September 2002 fired and prosecuted? If not, why not?

3. When you discovered that you were lied to in September 2002 did you insist upon Congressional hearings? If not, why not?

There are more. But don’t expect the press to ask them. They’re only a watchdog when it’s a Republican in office. With Dems, they’re lapdogs.