Kennedy on Climate and energy

Truth https://t.co/ohbVh1p1BA

— 🇺🇸Col. Rob Maness ret. (@RobManess) November 8, 2021

Marking the end of civility in Congress

Mark Steyn:

An NPR listener said the senator's passing marked "the end of civility in the U.S. Congress." Yes, indeed. Who among us does not mourn the lost "civility" of the 1987 Supreme Court hearings? Considering the nomination of Judge Bork, Ted Kennedy rose on the Senate floor and announced that "Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit down at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution."

Whoa! "Liberals" (in the debased contemporary American sense of the term) would have reason to find Borkian jurisprudence uncongenial but to suggest the judge and former solicitor-general favored resegregation of lunch counters is a slander not merely vile but so preposterous that, like his explanation for Chappaquiddick, only a Kennedy could get away with it. If you had to identify a single speech that marked "the end of civility" in American politics, that's a shoo-in. And in fact setting a new moral standard in which a drunken adulterer's appetites can cause a woman's death and he pays no price is also an end to civility.

If a towering giant cares so much about humanity in general, why get hung up on his carelessness with humans in particular? For Kennedy's comrades, the cost was worth it. For the rest of us, it was a high price to pay. And, for Ted himself, who knows? He buried three brothers, and as many nephews, and, as the years took their toll, it looked sometimes as if the only Kennedy son to grow old had had to grow old for all of them. Did he truly believe, as surely as Melissa Lafsky & Co do, that his indispensability to the republic trumped all else? That Camelot – that "fleeting wisp of glory," that "one brief shining moment" – must run forever, even if "How To Handle A Woman" gets dropped from the score. The senator's actions in the hours and days after emerging from that pond tell us something ugly about Kennedy the man. That he got away with it tells us something ugly about American public life.

Mark Steyn on Teddy Kennedy: "I don't know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo's"

Speaking Ill of the Ted ...

This is the 50th anniversary of the day that Ted Kennedy killed Mary Jo Kopechne.

We are enjoined not to speak ill of the dead. But, when an entire nation – or, at any rate, its "mainstream" media culture – declines to speak the truth about the dead, we are certainly entitled to speak ill of such false eulogists. In its coverage of Senator Edward M Kennedy's passing, America's TV networks are creepily reminiscent of those plays Sam Shepard used to write about some dysfunctional inbred hardscrabble Appalachian household where there's a baby buried in the backyard but everyone agreed years ago never to mention it.

In this case, the unmentionable corpse is Mary Jo Kopechne, 1940-1969. If you have to bring up the, ah, circumstances of that year of decease, keep it general, keep it vague. As Kennedy flack Ted Sorensen put it in Time magazine:

Both a plane crash in Massachusetts in 1964 and the ugly automobile accident on Chappaquiddick Island in 1969 almost cost him his life.

That's the way to do it! An "accident," "ugly" in some unspecified way, just happened to happen – and only to him, nobody else. Ted's the star, and there's no room to namecheck the bit players. What befell him was a thing, a place. As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:

Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.

Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than "betrayed" him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let's face it, he doesn't have Ted's tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it's kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of "tremendous moral collapse." When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it's usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy's biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy's "achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne."

You can't make an omelet 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 OK 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 such a death panel?

Read the whole thing.

Senator Kennedy Colluded With Moscow, and CNN Doesn't Care

This is what REAL Russian collusion looks like.

In 1983, Kennedy reached out to Soviet leader Yuri Andropov and made an offer. Kennedy’s offer was worse than anything Trump was ever falsely accused of by Democrats.

Kennedy communicated that he could ensure that the three American television networks would give Andropov a prime-time slot to speak directly to the American people to counter Reagan’s foreign policies and Reagan’s framing of the USSR as a sinister regime.

Naturally, an American population more inclined toward the Soviet cause would undermine the incumbent American president ahead of his 1984 reelection. If the Soviets weren’t so bad, then why risk war over a few missiles that nobody seemed to want anyhow?

Kennedy would continue to oppose Reagan’s tough line at home against the Soviets and arrange for American TV time for Andropov. In exchange, the Soviets would undermine Reagan in prime time and echo Kennedy’s foreign policy talking points.

It's worth noting that Kennedy knew that the American media would cooperate in the collusion.  Just as they are cooperating with Putin in trying to overthrow Trump today.

Chappaquiddick - the truth

That accident at Chappaquiddick Bridge

Just an internet rumor?

I question that Teddy Kennedy ‘allowed’ Mary Jo to die. The turnoff is quite abrupt and the suspicion in my mind is that it may have been deliberate. As in: “Teddy, what would you do if I told you I was pregnant?” Teddy: “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

Mary Jo was pregnant when she died.

Remember when the Left ridiculed Reagan for wanting to have a missile to shoot down an ICBM?

They called it "Star Wars" and ridiculed Reagan for starting this program.  Wasn't one of the biggest doubters the guy who killed Mary Jo Kopechne?    Why yes! That was Ted Kennedy.  Who also wanted the assistance of the USSR to obstruct Reagan. 

Kennedy vs. Obama - Compare and Contrast

The Rich

The "rich" are never people like the Clintons, who acquired their wealth by the sweat of their brows, toiling in the harsh icy policy-mines of Davos. They're not the guys who make a bundle off some clever bit of tech, sell the company, then pledge to spend a fraction of their fortune on outfitting polar bears with inflatable vests to help them survive their imminent inundation in the boiling waters of the Arctic. They're not people like John Kerry, who married his way into a pile of money derived from a ubiquitous condiment; they're not people like Apple CEO Tim Cook, because c'mon, he's gay. They're not the Kennedys, because the Kennedys could strike oil on their Hyannis Port compound, pay African orphans a dollar a day to work the pumps by hand, build a pipeline that ran through a protected Monarch-butterfly preserve, and the media would still hang halos over their heads because JFK was martyred in Dallas by a free-floating toxic cloud of right-wing hatred that inhabited the brain of a well-meaning Marxist.

These are rich people, but they're good rich people, because you can imagine any one of them writing a check to Planned Parenthood with the words "keep up the excellent mammograms" in the memo line.

-- James Lileks

Booby Kennedy likes heroin

Bobby Kennedy is unhinged.  He wants the death of people and institutions that disagree with him.
 

From Power Line

.

Apparently yesterday’s rant about the Koch brothers wasn’t enough for Little Bobby. Here he is calling for the jailing of the Koch brothers, and possibly politicians who “deny” climate change, when all they’re really denying is the will to power of brownshirts like Little Bobby. (John referred to this rant yesterday, but here’s the tape.) He cites “reckless endangerment” as the legal cause of action for jailing the Kochs, who belong “with all the other war criminals.” Hmm: shouldn’t Little Bobby be in prison for the “reckless endangerment” of his unrelenting claims that vaccines cause autism, which every scientific review has debunked? How many children of getting the old childhood diseases again because their stupid, gullible parents listened to this demagogue? (Video is just 45 seconds long—hardly time to pour a shot glass for Power Line’s Little Bobby Drinking Game.)

But here's a possible explanation for his outbursts ... (in an article about RFK Backtracks Amid Skakel Furor 11/15/2002)

Kennedy served as a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney's office from 1982 until 1983, when he was arrested for heroin possession. He checked into treatment, pleaded guilty, and was given probation. He currently heads an environmental group working to protect the Hudson River.

It's amazing what the rich and famous can get away with.  Unfortunately, Bobby Kennedy may well be saying what much of the Liberals really believe.  What they really want to the rest of America. The new Brownshirts, who were also radical anti-capitalists.   

Jackie Kennedy 'had an affair with ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev and so did Bobby Kennedy'

• The Pink Triangle penned by Hollywood biographer Darwin Porter and independent publisher Danforth Prince comes out next month
• It reports alleged conversations with Gore Vidal and Truman Capote about the extra-marital affairs of Jackie Kennedy
• Porter claims Capote told him about Jackie's affair with Rudolf Nureyev while Vidal revealed her affair with another dancer
• A separate 'rumor' exists claiming Bobby Kennedy was caught in a passionate embrace with Nureyev
• Paris gossip magazine Paris Match allegedly claimed Nureyev once drunkenly boasted of an affair with Jackie Kennedy
• In an interview he also boasted that everyone thought he was the sexiest man alive including the Kennedys
• Capote also believed Bobby Kennedy was a closeted homosexual, according to the book

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

The Kennedy Tax Avoidance Schemes

This is the man who even in death remains a leading light of the Democrats.

When it comes to tax avoidance, the Kennedys wrote the book.

Throughout his political career, Kennedy advocated the wholesale redistribution of wealth via steeply progressive tax rates designed to fund an ever-expanding array of entitlement programs and social-welfare benefits as well as the public education system. Opposed to any provisions in the tax laws that might help mid- to high-earners minimize their tax liability, Kennedy once said, on the Senate floor, that he would be glad if “the word ‘shelter’ disappears from the tax vocabulary.”[1] On another occasion he said, “Instead of shutting down classrooms [due to a supposed lack of funding], let us shut off tax shelters.”[2] Whenever fellow legislators proposed tax cuts, Kennedy typically framed them as “giveways” and “bonanzas” intended to help only the wealthy.[3] And in the name of social justice, he supported the inheritance tax on assets that are transferred from one generation to the next; a repeal of that tax, he said, would unjustly “benefit millionaires.”[4]

But while the multi-millionaire Kennedy stood firmly in favor of raising taxes on high earners across the United States, he showed a pronounced reluctance to pay taxes on his own wealth. For many years, Merchandise Mart, the Chicago-based real estate conglomerate that Joseph Kennedy established in 1935, was the most valuable asset belonging to Ted Kennedy and his family. In 1974 Joseph Kennedy divided Merchandise Mart’s ownership among numerous family members, including Ted, in the form of a trust that was domiciled in the Pacific island of Fiji. Because the trust was based in Fiji, it was not subject to the taxes normally imposed on trusts domiciled in the United States.

As of 2005, the tax rate on U.S.-based trusts was 49 percent on everything above the first $2 million. But as of 2005, the Kennedys, who had transferred at least $300 million in trust funds from one generation to another, had paid a mere $132,000 in estate taxes -- a rate of four one-hundredths of one percent.[5] Had they set up those trusts in the United states, they would have owed more than 7,000 times that amount in taxes.

Ted Kennedy also received additional money -- free of inheritance taxes -- from a series of trusts that were established for him in 1926, 1936, 1978, 1987, and 1997.

Kennedy became skilled at avoiding not only inheritance taxes but also property taxes. For example, in 1980 theChicago Tribune conducted an investigation which found that although Merchandise Mart had a market value of $35 million, it had been assessed at only $22.8 million by tax assessor (and Ted Kennedy political ally) Thomas Tully. The low assessment permitted Kennedy and his extended family to decrease their property taxes by some $4 million over the course of two years. Another Kennedy-owned building, Apparel Mart, received similar, preferential consideration from the tax assessor, saving Kennedy and his clan another several million dollars in property taxes.[6]

In yet another maneuver to avoid paying taxes, Senator Kennedy invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax-free Massachusetts bonds.[7]

Via Discoverthenetworks.org

Democrats Celebrate Ted Kennedy, Mary Jo Kopechne Unavailable For Comment

Liberal Logic 101:
It’s OK to falsely accuse Mitt Romney of being responsible for the death of a woman he never met, while celebrating the memory of Ted Kennedy who let a woman drown to death.

H/T: Instapundit

A brief summary of Ted's accomplishments:

Democratic U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, 1962-2009

A key player in the creation of Medicare in 1965

A major driving force behind the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of 1965

Escaped manslaughter charges for 1969 Chappaquiddick incident

In the 1980s, supported the Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, a Soviet-sponsored initiative that would have frozen the USSR's military superiority in place

Secretly contacted the head of the Soviet KGB in 1983, in an effort to undermine the Reagan presidency

Described the 2003 U.S. war in Iraq as “a fraud”

Favored higher taxes for people in upper income brackets, but took many measures to minimize his own tax liability

Died on August 26, 2009

JFK's Teen Mistress Tells All

One of many.

She always called him “Mr. President” — not Jack. He refused to kiss her on the lips when they made love. But Mimi Alford, a White House intern from New Jersey, was smitten nonetheless.

She was in the midst of an 18-month affair with the most powerful man in the world, sharing not only John F. Kennedy’s bed but also some of his darkest and most intimate moments.

In her explosive new tell-all, “Once Upon a Secret: My Affair with President John F. Kennedy and Its Aftermath,” Alford, now a 69-year-old grandmother and retired New York City church administrator, sets the record straight in searingly candid detail.

Zachary Roth: "Double Standards R' Us" (Of course, if it were not for double standards, the MFM would have no standards)

From the Political Stooges in the WSJ:

Senators and Double Standards

Former senator Ted Stevens of Alaska died in a plane crash yesterday, and one Zachary Roth, writing for the Columbia Journalism Review ("Strong Press, Strong Democracy"), hastens to speak ill of him--and to demand that the press do the same:

You can expect to see a gaggle of Washington figures competing over the coming days to outdo one another in praising the eighty-six-year old ex-legislator--and whitewashing his record in the process. And since you can also expect the Beltway press to play right along, it's worth getting out ahead of this impending train wreck.

"Train wreck" is an odd metaphor to use after a literal plane crash, but whatever. Stevens narrowly lost his seat in 2008 after being convicted on corruption charges. But the conviction was overturned after the election after the revelation of what Roth acknowledges was "serious misconduct by federal prosecutors."

Nonetheless, Roth describes the "raging Beltway pity party" that followed as "to use a technical term--crap." Even though Stevens was wrongly convicted, and might have been acquitted in a fair trial, it was still "conclusively established that Stevens acted unethically by using his position for major personal gain," Roth argues:

No one wants to speak ill of the dead, and there's nothing whatsoever wrong with news outlets treating Stevens respectfully. But that's different from aiding in the willful distortion of a major coda to the late senator's career in public life. And yet, when lawmakers on both sides of the aisle line up to beatify their old friend in the coming days, here's betting that much of the press will play along.

Then again, as we noted in the preceding item, Ted Kennedy, who died a year ago this month, was widely lionized despite his foul behavior. An example is this story from TalkingPointsMemo.com, published the day after his death:

Ted Kennedy's greatest legacy was as a legislator in the U.S. Senate. Over 300 bills bearing his name became law, most dealing with the day-to-day social and economic needs of children, families, or the elderly. What made him such an effective legislator?

The author, who does not even mention that Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment, is one Zachary Roth.

Sen. Kennedy Offered to Collaborate with Soviets Against Reagan, KGB Documents Show

Blaming America first is not a new phenomenon. It was this view that caused Senator Ted Kennedy to try to work out an arrangement with Soviet leaders during the Reagan administration to bring Reagan down. Kennedy, along with many other leading lights on the Left believed that Reagan was a dangerous man who would lead the world to war. They believed in the permanent correlation of forces or the eventual convergence of the Soviet and Americans systems of government.

Unlike Reagan, Kennedy did not believe “we win, they lose.” Had Kennedy been successful, the Cold War would still be a feature of life and America would become more like Russia.

Perhaps Kennedy won after all.

From Net Right Daily:

Senator Edward M. Kennedy offered to work in close concert with high level Soviet officials to sabotage President Ronald Reagan’s re-election efforts and to arrange for congenial American press coverage of General Secretary Yuri Andropov, according to a 1983 KGB document.

Given the press' Leftist leanings, these revelations will not be widely explored by the MFM.

So why not delve more into a KGB document that has been preserved by Professor Kengor and others in anticipation of Russian government figures resealing those same files?

In his blog appearing on the American Thinker, Kengor details his many media frustrations.

“In 2006, when my book was released, there was a virtual media blackout on coverage of the document, with the exception of conservative media: talk-radio, Rush Limbaugh, some websites, and mention on FoxNews by Brit Hume,” he wrote. “Amazingly, I didn’t even get calls from mainstream reporters seeking to shoot down the story. I had prepared in great detail to be grilled on national television, picturing the likes of Katie Couric needling me. I didn’t need to worry.”

A "Liberal Lion" like Kennedy will not have to worry about the truth coming out in the MFM; they are the keepers of the flame.   Not even killing a young girl in a drunken driving accident could cool their ardor for the Prince of Camelot.   Kennedy was a disgusting piece of inbred trash, protected from accountability by money and syncopants in his inner circle and the media that wished they were.  Only God saved this country from the clutches of this piece of crap.

Kennedy

From Dennis Gartman:

We fear that his death will now be used by those supporting socialized medicine as a rallying point. Sen. Kennedy… who will be called ad nausea the “Lion of the Senate” again and again and again over the course of the next several days as we prepare for his funeral… wanted socialized medicine as his crowning achievement to his otherwise nonillustrious career, and now there will be sympathy votes in its favour to “honour” him.

We are left to wonder how the family of Mary Jo Koepechne will remember Sen. Kennedy, as we wonder how the faculty and administration of Harvard will remember him, for he killed her and he was expelled from there. Sen. Kennedy continually voted for each and every tax increase he could during his career, arguing that the wealthy should be willing and able to pay greater and greater sums of money to their governments, while the Kennedy family money was protected in various trusts around the country from the vagaries of taxation.

All these things being said, Sen. Kennedy’s death brings socialized medicine one step closer, for the Congress will now feel obligated to pass it in his memory. That is the harsh political reality of his death this morning. We’ve nothing more to say on this topic; we’ve said quite enough and he did quite enough.

I will never forget Chappaquiddick

Scott Johnson at Powerline ...

Ted Kennedy has styled himself an opponent of wealth and privilege, but his career is a tribute to their power when wielded by a man of the left. The lesson of Chappaquiddick thus remains timely forty years on.

I thought I would take a moment to bother you all, ladies included, to remind everyone that this is the 40th anniversary of the infamous Chappaquiddick incident in which an inebriated Senator Ted Kennedy marked a reunion of his brother Bobby's "Boiler Room" girls by driving one to her death off the Dyke Road bridge.

This manslaughter might have been forgiven if Kennedy hadn't decided to evade responsibility for the accident and cover it up by failing to report it, trying to co-opt one of his aides to cop to being the driver, and then leaving them to try and fix it for him for over seven hours.

Worse, Mary Jo Kopechne, whose drowned body was found in a position trying to eke out the last molecules of air within the submerged car, was left to drown by the self-involved Senator, who chose not to seek immediate help.

After proceedings by a Kennedy-friendly judicial system in Massachusetts, Kennedy was found guilty of leaving the scene of an accident and had his driver's license suspended. But perhaps the crowning event was Kennedy's appalling nationally-televised apologia, which I remember viewing on TV, and which still reigns as probably the worst and most self-indulgent political pitch ever.

The Kennedy family has received its reward for all it has done. I'm not sure that the American people were wicked enough to have deserved them.