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| No special privileges for Kennedys |
| 2010-04-15 |
| It must be nice to be a Kennedy. To paraphrase American Express, privilege has its privileges. According to theBoston Globe, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's family is to be given "a rare opportunity to raise objections" to anything in the late senator's 3,000-page FBI file before it is released to the public. This extraordinary concession is being granted because, "the family of a deceased person may have a privacy interest," according to Dennis Argall, an FBI spokesman. Argall further assures us that the family can't object to removing portions of the document simply because it is "embarrassing." What he doesn't say is this: It will be impossible for the public to know exactly what information was withheld at the family's request and why. There would be a multitude of possible explanations, however, because the Kennedy family has produced a president, multiple senators, congressmen, and ambassadors during the past five decades. JFK Jr. even founded a magazine that traded in political and celebrity gossip. Privacy seems like a poor excuse for a family that has so consistently sought and cultivated the limelight -- and whose members continue to seek it, as seen by Caroline Kennedy's cartoonish run at a U.S. Senate seat from New York last year. Any Kennedy hoping to get elected in the future should understand that there is a very fine line between respecting a family's privacy and sparing it further embarrassment, particularly since Ted Kennedy's life left more than a few prominent blots on the family escutcheon. The most prominent were Chappaquiddick, the William Kennedy Smith rape trial, and the scurrilous 1983 entreaty to the Soviets to help undermine President Reagan in exchange for assistance in electing Democrats. In any case, Kennedy's life, warts and all, is now part of American history and thus deserves to be analyzed as dispassionately as possible, which requires having access to all of the facts, including those that might embarrass the Kennedy clan. It's not for either the Kennedy family or the FBI to decide what details of his public life are inconvenient. The very fact that the Kennedys appear so eager to censor what the public is ultimately able to learn about the family suggests the importance of protecting access to all of the documents in that file for the public today and for historians tomorrow. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #5 Anonymoose, I went to Duke with Willy Smith and was a good friend of his. He is a doctor, one of the only people in the whole clan that does not live off the government dole or his family name. He never, ever, gave a vibe that he would force himself on a woman and believe me, I saw him around women in an advanced stage of inebriation several times. I think he got played and was rightfully acquitted. But it was Teddy that woke him up and got him to go to Au Bar that night. |
| Posted by: remoteman 2010-04-15 22:21 |
| #4 7) Poster boy for term limits. |
| Posted by: Jefferson 2010-04-15 11:34 |
| #3 I can boil the highlights of his career down to a few bullet points. 1) Demanding the US leave Vietnam and invade northern Ireland to fight the British. 2) Chappaquiddick. 3) Secretly conspiring with the Soviet Union to undermine both Jimmy Carter's and Ronald Reagan's nuclear deterrent in Europe. 4) His culinary contribution, with the help of Christopher Dodd, the "waitress sandwich", which elsewhere is called "gang rape". 5) Being the clan drug dealer to Kennedy children, so that wouldn't risk embarrassment to the clan by buying their drugs from outsiders. 6) Defending rapist William Kennedy Smith, and golf club murderer Michael C. Skakel, who just lost another appeal, and has two more pending. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2010-04-15 10:08 |
| #2 According to theBoston Globe, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy's family is to be given "a rare opportunity to raise objections" to anything in the late senator's 3,000-page FBI file before it is released to the public. Well, that should cut it down to a handy one and a half page phamphlet... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2010-04-15 10:06 |
| #1 Yet another example of the elitist mentality our career politicians and their families share. They have been above the law practically their entire adult lives; now they are above scrutiny indefinitely. More proof, in my eyes, that our government (congress in particular) has considered itself to be above, beyond, and over the people for generations. The words of, by and for only apply to their legacies; which are edited at the leisure of their families and colleagues to allow only for irreprehensible actions to be noted in the pages of history. Isn't it tragic that history, the one tool humanity has to build true wisdom, is so hastily edited by those who wish to fundamentally change the dynamics of our nation? More tragic still is that the free people of our nation are so willing to submit to historical editing; something I would expect of a people living under the thumb of a third world dictator. At least they donÂ’t have a choice. |
| Posted by: Keeney 2010-04-15 08:43 |