Henry Rollins is a terrible human being...

[Imran Siddiqui]

[Q Classic]

Anyone in favor of rotating modship?

**** no, let's not be the EU.

[Theben]

I agree with Guynemer, but not Drake. Anything but that.

Besides, you guys got fond farewells for Nixon.

[Drake Tungsten]

Thank god we have The Huffington Post and former Air America hosts to counter the right-wing noise machine with reason and facts.

But in all the florid or scalpel-sharp prose, there's one constant: Peeking out from the center of the story is the matter of his playing a major part in the death of a 28-year-old woman.

Mary Jo wasn't a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan. She was a dedicated civil rights activist and political talent with a bright future -- granted, whenever someone dies young, people sermonize about how he had a "bright future" ahead of him -- but she actually did. She wasn't afraid to defy convention (28 and unmarried, oh the horror!) or create her own career path based on her talents. She lived in Georgetown (where I grew up) and loved the Red Sox (we'll forgive her for that). Then she got in a car driven by a 36-year-old senator with an alcohol problem and a cauldron full of demons, and wound up a controversial footnote in a dynasty.

We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she'd have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don't know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.

Still, ignorance doesn't preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn't automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death, and what she'd have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-lafsky/the-footnote-speaks-what_b_270298.html

So with the death of Ted Kennedy last night, liberalism in this country has lost its champion; the person who, in the modern era, personified liberalism to a greater degree than anyone in Congress; I think that his death heralds the beginning of a very, very very dark period in this country.

I remember feeling that way in 1963 and in 1968-when his two brothers were murdered by the right wing in this country.

http://radioequalizer.blogspot.com/2009/08/libtalker-kennedy-brothers-killed-by.html

[Drake Tungsten]

There certainly are a lot of conservative lies to counter these days...

From all available evidence, God created our elected officials to drink and screw around. Arrogance, too, is common. So is sexual recklessness (witness Gary Hart, Robert Bauman and Barney Frank); power dements as well as corrupts. But Kennedy’s behavior stands out. The two most infamous Terrible Teddy stories make the point. Both take place at Washington’s La Brasserie, where Kennedy is a favorite customer.

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.”

Giving Kennedy the benefit of the doubt, it’s quite possible he did not intend an assault but meant to be funny, in a repulsive, boozehead way. Drunks are notoriously poor judges of distance, including the distance between fun and assault.

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.

http://men.style.com/gq/features/full?id=content_5585&pageNum=5

[Kuciwalker]

I agree with Guynemer, but not Drake. Anything but that.

Besides, you guys got fond farewells for Nixon.

Nixon was a great president

[Jon Miller]

I thought that Feingold or someone like him represented the best of liberalism in this country.

The claim that Ted Kennedy did makes me dislike liberalism.

JM

[Thoth]

Where's Mary Jo Kopechne's Eulogy?
by Henry Rollins

http://www.vanityfair.com/online/politics/2009/08/wheres-mary-jo-kopechnes-eulogy.html

Typical Repug, completely lacking in empathy...

ROTFL @ Drake calling Henry Rollins a Repug.

http://www.myspace.com/blackflag80shardcore

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Flag_(band)

[Harry Tuttle]

Henry is a pretty big liberal, no matter how hard he screams. I love the Huffington Post. The model of good journalism and reasonable opinions. Asshats...

[Darius871]

ROTFL @ Drake calling Henry Rollins a Repug.

ROTFL @ you thinking Drake is culturally clueless enough to not have been sarcastic to that extent.

[Az]

Henry Rollins rules, and any one article couldn't change it.

[Lorizael]

Mary Jo wasn't a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan. She was a dedicated civil rights activist and political talent with a bright future -- granted, whenever someone dies young, people sermonize about how he had a "bright future" ahead of him -- but she actually did.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Perhaps its my faulty memory but I seem to remember a rather inappropriate partisan discussion about President Ford in his death thread from Oerdin.

[Japher]

I have no respect for Ted Kennedy and probably never will. The liberal press isn't so much "whitewashing" him as they are diverting attention away from health care socialization. Ted may have actually survived a few more weeks/months but was convinced to "take one for the team" as he always has.

Not calling the cops is a serious issue, though he wasn't the only one who didn't call them. Also, there is a No Duty to Rescue clause that I bet holds in Texas.

[Imran Siddiqui]

@ Thoth for being sooo whooshed