Isn't it great how Ted Kennedy overcame the obstacle of Mary Jo's death?

The vilest comments to materialize in the wake of Senator Kennedy’s demise are those that seem to suggest that we are all lucky that Mary Jo Kopechne’s death didn’t ultimately end Ted Kennedy’s political career. How tragically close we came, they seem to be saying, to being deprived of the benefits of this legislator’s tremendous contributions to the Republic.

Here you have an important object lesson in the dangers that accompany the cult of personality. This one man, fortified by the bogus mystique that was built up around his family with the help of the media, attracted an important core following, not only among the pathetic morons and greedy porkaholics in Massachusetts who returned him to the Senate for decades, but among liberal academics and pundits who transformed him into a “hero”, cloaking this rich man’s desire to confiscate the wealth of his fellow citizens for the purpose of creating an all-powerful state (from which his own wealth would always be secure), in the mantle of an overarching concern for the poor. Even worse was the complicity of the leftist hallelujah chorus in playing down this sexual predator’s brazen contempt for individual women, because he could always be counted on to deliver the goods when it came to “women’s issues” (read, “abortion rights”).

It would have been far more honest for liberals – and more palatable to the rest of us - simply to have said about Ted Kennedy, as FDR supposedly remarked about “Tacho” Somoza, “he may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” The post mortem attempts to pass him off as a great-souled statesman fairly bubbling over with compassion for the dispossessed have rather the effect on non-fans of a big swallow of ipecac syrup.