Two commentaries on the odious pig Kennedy that I’ve been very much looking forward to. First, Velociman:

I saw what Ted Kennedy did to Robert Bork. I saw what he did to Kopechne. There was not a noble bone in that savage’s body. Any political position he took was calculated to garner him power. No more, no less. Which I suppose one could say about most politicians, absent the body in the Olds and scalps in the closet. Kennedy did not inspire: he merely counted coup.

I just remember being quite stoned (while visiting Chappaquiddick — M), and staring into that little pissant pond of water, and thinking: how do you get out of a car, and shut the fucking door, and swim away, when there’s somebody else in the car? That’s all I kept thinking: he had to have shut the door on her, because she asphyxiated. At any rate, I never explored the details. I suppose he could have enticed her to roll a window up behind him. In an upside down car.

Ted is how I’ll always look at liberals: you can walk down the halls of the Senate with a goddamned severed head in hand, but if your politics are correct the entire fucking universe of the left will surround you, and protect you, and nurture you. Because only the game matters. No rules, no decency, no pride, no law. Just the fucking game. And winning.

Yep. And integrity, compassion, and human decency be damned. Nothing whatsoever matters but the Grand Project, which is bigger than all of us, and each of us.

Next up, Miz Weasel:

For once in my miserable life, I wasn’t going to go there. Though there are so very many things to dislike about Ted Kennedy, I knew other people would mention them all today, and I don’t need the karma. But nobody’s quite nailed the thing that bugs me.

It’s the way Mary Jo Kopechne died. I mean her literal, actual last moments on earth. She almost certainly lived for some time on air trapped in the car. Maybe hours. The diver who recovered her body found her kneeling with her hands against the seat and her head in an air pocket.

Hours. In the pitch dark and cold and wet, breathing up her last, stale, warming scraps of air. Waiting for help to come. Help would surely come, wouldn’t it?

Not five years later, Kennedy was screaming “is there one system of justice for the average citizen and another system for the high and mighty?” over Richard Nixon’s pardon for…whatever it was Nixon was supposed to have done. Without, apparently, feeling the slightest twinge of irony or embarrassment. Or anguish. Or self-awareness.

He named his dog Splash and wrote a book about him. He didn’t seem to have any idea there were subjects he should avoid. Or remorse he ought to feel. And nobody around him saw fit to tell him. Not that you can order someone to feel shame.

To them, Chappaquiddick was an unfortunate accident that happened to Ted Kennedy’s presidential hopes.

That’s monstrous, and all the good-deed-doing in the world can’t make it anything else.

Nor can all the looking-the-other-way in the world do anything but discredit and disgrace the people doing it.

And with that, all right-thinking people need now to complete the cycle is for Doc Zero to weigh in with one of his typically brilliant essays, and we’ll…hey, whaddya know!

After five days of flood-the-zone news coverage, eulogies, and encomiums, filled with hundreds of op-ed pieces and blog posts, the Democrats have made their vision of Senator Edward Kennedy’s life and career crystal clear. I’ve had some fun at their expense, but the late Senator has now been returned to the earth at Arlington, and fun time is over. I have some serious disagreements with the things I’ve heard from the Left over the last few days.

I do not believe a political career is worth a young woman’s life. Period. I don’t think Mary Jo Kopechne was proud to die for Ted Kennedy. I don’t think her horrifying death was a necessary human sacrifice to enable his “fortunate fall.” Ted Kennedy was not the victim of Chappaquiddick. Anyone who believes those things is a degenerate who should be shunned by civilized people.

I disagree with the notion that any aspect of Kennedy’s life “redeemed” him for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Redemption requires contrition, an admission of guilt. Kennedy never admitted responsibility or guilt for what happened at Chappaquiddick. I wish he had, because the idea of so many people rushing to grant him undeserved absolution is nauseating.

I disagree that the world will “sorely miss” the “moral clarity” of someone who enjoyed jokes about the woman who died because of his cowardice and lust for power. The human race will be greatly improved when it is infested by fewer such creatures.

The vile reprobate’s bloated carcass, instead of receiving the wholly unearned and unjust honor of resting in the nation’s most hallowed ground, should have been tossed into an alley behind the filthiest whorehouse in Boston, there to be gnawed by those few sewer rats capable of digesting so rancid a meal. But as the polyp Kennedy’s entire life proved beyond debate, there really is no justice in this world. And if there is, she’s an orphan, to misquote an old favorite of mine.

But we can all be thankful that the filthy bastard is dead now, and can do no more harm to young women — or the nation. With his final removal from it, the world truly is a better, brighter place, and if there is a Hell, Kennedy is surely ensconced there for his full just measure of richly-deserved torment. Now all we have to cope with here on Earth below is the legion of deluded, morally-stunted tools who want him canonized.

Update! In the interest of…well, decency, actually, Jules finds something nice to say about the raddled old murderer:

In what is perhaps his most meaningful legacy, something that can be appreciated on both sides of the aisle, he was directly and heavily involved in bringing the violence in Northern Ireland to a negotiated, equitable end. He overcome his own anti-British stance, holding IRA terrorists and their supporters to a high standard, and bringing the Irish Catholic and Protestant adversaries together with British politicians. It worked, and established a precedent and a template that can be useful in places like Iraq that have similar problems. via Boston Herald, it is perhaps the most significant example of Kennedy’s famous ability to reach across aisles and bring people together.

Those accomplishments would make a historic figure of any pol. Does it amount to the redemption all the commentators have been talking about, loath though they may be to delve much into what needed to be redeemed? Maybe. Though there’ll always be an asterix.*

*It’s a big one.

It most certainly is. And they say Hitler loved dogs, too. Not that they’re at all equivalent, of course; Hitler murdered millions, while Kennedy was content to limit himself to just one.

What a guy.