[quote=DevNell;1461511]
I will state right away, up frront that I do not consider the term conservative to be interchangeable. with the phrase right wing blowhard. But that does not mean a right wing blowhard cannot be a conservatve.
You open your mouth and let others decide that one for you.
Have I given the office of Senator enough silence to represent respect?
1. Brasserie I: In December 1985, just before he announced he would run for president in 1988, Kennedy allegedly manhandled a pretty young woman employed as a Brasserie waitress. The woman, Carla Gaviglio, declined to be quoted in this article, but says the following account, a similar version of which first appeared in Penthouse last year, is full and accurate:
It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.
As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room. Kennedy, Dodd and their dates leave shortly thereafter, following a friendly argument between the senators over the check.
Eyewitness Betty Loh told me that Kennedy had “three or four” cocktails in his first half hour at the restaurant and wine with dinner. When she walked into the room after Gaviglio had gone in, she says, “what I saw was Senator Kennedy on top of Carla, who was on top of Senator Dodd’s lap, and the tablecloth was sort of slid off the table ‘cause the table was knocked over—not completely, but just on Senator Dodd’s lap a little bit, and of course the glasses and the candlesticks were totally spilled and everything. And right when I walked in, Senator Kelly jumped off…and he leaped up, composed himself and got up. And Carla jumped up and ran out of the room.”
According to Loh, Kennedy “was sort of leaning” on Gaviglio, “not really straddling but sort of off-balance so it was like he might have accidentally fallen…He was partially on and off…pushing himself off her to get up.” Dodd, she adds, “said ‘It’s not my fault.’ ” Kennedy said something similar and added, jokingly, “Makes you wonder about the leaders of this country.”
2.Brasserie II: On September 25, 1987, Kennedy and a young blonde woman—identified by several sources as a congressional lobbyist—allegedly got carried away at a wine-fueled lunch in a private room upstairs and succumbed to the temptations of the carpet, where they were surprised in a state of semi-undress and wholehearted passion by waitress Frauke Morgan. The room, located next to the restrooms, is secured only by a flimsy accordion door, which could not be fully closed. Morgan declined to be interviewed for this story or to comment on or refute the accounts of other sources.
However, waitress Virginia Hurt, who says Morgan described the scene to her shortly after witnessing it, recalls, “He was on the floor with his pants down on top of the woman, and he saw her and she just kind of backed away and closed the door. The girl didn’t see Frauke. So Frauke went downstairs and told the manager and [another waitress] overheard.”
A waitress to whom Morgan spoke just after the incident says, “She told me…she went up to offer them coffee and when she opened the door…there they were on the floor.” Morgan said explicitly, the other waitress goes on, that Kennedy had his pants down and his date “had her dress up,” and the two “ ‘were screwing on the floor.’ ”
Says another waitress to whom Morgan immediately related the episode, “She said she had walked in to ask them if they needed anything else before she gave them the check, and she just sort of found Senator Kennedy on top of this [woman] on the floor and they were sort of half under the table and half out.”
A copy of La Brasserie’s reservation list for that day shows that a luncheon table for two in the back room was reserved for Kennedy. A copy of the check, signed “Edward M. Kennedy,” shows he was billed for two bottles of Chardonnay.
3....on July 18, came the defining moment of Kennedy’s life, when he drove his Oldsmobile off a bridge on the island of Chappaquiddick, sending young Kennedy staffer Mary Jo Kopechne to her death and drowning his chances of ever getting to the White House. This much-explored accident is worth mentioning because the factors surrounding it are the same ones so apparent before and so apparent still in Kennedy’s personal life: a childish belief that the rules of human behavior do not apply to himself, a casual willingness to place himself in a compromising positions with an attractive young woman and, most probably, a reckless use of alcohol."
A SOBER LOOK AT TED KENNEDY: GQ Features on men.style.com
4. . Chappaquiddick:A sombre Kennedy speaking on national television way back in July 1969.
“I regard as indefensible the fact that I did not report the accident to the police immediately.”
Indefensible was one word for it. What Kennedy had done was to abandon to a lingering and horrific death a young woman whose life could almost certainly have been saved.
Mary Jo Kopechne was in his car when it plunged into the river near Chappaquiddick Island. While Kennedy managed to swim free, she was trapped inside. Shamefully, inexplicably, Kennedy did not raise the alarm. He waited until the next day before contacting the cops.
Mary Jo is believed to have survived for some time in an air bubble. She could have been saved ?
[There were also doubts about the way Kopechne died. Dr. Donald Mills of Edgartown, wrote on the death certificate: "death by drowning". However, Gene Frieh, the undertaker, told reporters that death "was due to suffocation rather than drowning". John Farrar, the diver who removed Kopechne from the car, claimed she was "too buoyant to be full of water". It is assumed that she died from drowning, although her parents filed a petition preventing an autopsy-http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKkopechne.htm]
5. Among callers to one US phone-in show was the pilot who flew him back to be questioned by the police after Chappaquiddick.
The pilot recalled that what struck him most about Kennedy was his absolute arrogance.
That pampered arrogance and Kennedy’s contempt for women remained in evidence down through the years. Chappaquiddick defined Edward Kennedy. Nothing that followed, nothing that he did ever made it right.
Lindy McDowell: How Ted Kennedy lived in the shadow of Mary Jo’s death - Lindy McDowell, Columnists - Belfasttelegraph.co.uk
6. As long as we’re on the subject of humor this morning, what kind of jokes did the late Ted Kennedy like to tell his closest friends? One of Kennedy’s close friends, former editor of Newsweek and New York Times Magazine Ed Klein, tells the Diane Rehm Show that Chappaquiddick jokes were high up on the list (audio here, at 30:10):
I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, “have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?” That is just the most amazing thing. It’s not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.
If that’s true it makes Kennedy kind of a monster. The odd thing is that if you listen to the whole show, the tone of everyone involved is nauseatingly haigographic and reverential. Klein apparently let his guard down a bit; after he lets it slip Kennedy liked to joke about the woman he killed you can actually hear in his voice that he’s trying to backpedal.
Hot Air » Blog Archive » “One of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself”; Update: Audio added
7. "...that some Democrats see the Republican president as being a threat and the true obstacle to peace, instead of seeing our enemies as the true danger,” said Paul Kengor, a political science professor at Grove City College and the author of new book, The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.
In his book, which came out this week, Kengor focuses on a KGB letter written at the height of the Cold War that shows that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) offered to assist Soviet leaders in formulating a public relations strategy to counter President Reagan’s foreign policy and to complicate his re-election efforts.
The letter, dated May 14, 1983, was sent from the head of the KGB to Yuri Andropov, who was then General Secretary of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party.
In his letter, KGB head Viktor Chebrikov offered Andropov his interpretation of Kennedy’s offer. Former U.S. Sen. John Tunney (D-Calif.) had traveled to Moscow on behalf of Kennedy to seek out a partnership with Andropov and other Soviet officials, Kengor claims in his book.
Romerstein, a former House intelligence committee staffer and a researcher of Soviet archives, uncovered numerous documents suggesting that Ted Kennedy was a “collaborationist” with the Soviets during our Cold War. Romerstein also co-authored, along with Eric Breindel, the highly praised “Verona Secrets, Exposing Soviet Espionage and America’s Traitors.”
According to Romerstein, a review of Soviet Communist Party archives offers an unflattering view of Kennedy. Some of the documents that have come to light since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 include claims that:
Sometime in 1978, Kennedy requested the KGB’s assistance to set up a relationship between the Soviets and a firm owned by former Sen. John Tunney, D-Calif. Again, on March 5, 1980, Tunney, acting as Kennedy’s liaison, met with KGB agents in Moscow. During that meeting, Tunney articulated Kennedy’s position that “nonsense about ‘the Soviet military threat’ and Soviet ambitions for military expansion in the Persian Gulf … was being fueled by [President Jimmy] Carter, [National Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski, the Pentagon and the military industrial complex.” Kennedy, according to the documents, offered to speak out against President Carter on Afghanistan.
The Baltimore Reporter Letter Details Kennedy Offer To USSR | Sweetness & Light
And, to my grieving friend, DevNell, I hope that time will allow you to recalculate your posted considerations for the Senator.
The ancient monarchical argument is that the great prince could have his way with the serving wench, because he takes care of the peasants.
2500 Bills, authored or co-authored, and 552 became public law.
Mary Jo died so that the food additive and allergy labeling act could live? Is that the trade-off?
To make this argument is to think of yourself as a peasant.
That the good 'noble' in the castle knows what is best for you is not the American way.
May you find peace.
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