The Tattered Remnants of Camelot

As I type this, Patrick Kennedy has fled the jurisdiction of Washington D.C. for the climes of Minnesota. I suppose he will stay there until this latest car accident kerfuffle (his second in two weeks) blows over. What do you want to bet that if any of us nearly hit a police car on Capitol Hill, smashed into a barrier meant to thwart car bombers and then staggered about with alcohol on our breath, that we would be languishing in a jail cell, not in the Mayo clinic? One of my coworkers was pulled over last week in the same area for "accelerating too fast." And what does it mean for the family name that when you get into a situation like this, everyone immediately assumes you were soused? Let's take a look at this bit from AP.

Edward Kennedy's name will forever be tied to the Chappaquiddick scandal of 1969, when his car ran off a bridge, killing his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne. Kennedy did not immediately report the tragedy, and later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident. Patrick's mother, Joan Kennedy, has long struggled with alcoholism and has been arrested several times for drunken driving. In 2004, her children took temporary guardianship of her affairs. Last year, she was found sprawled on a Boston sidewalk in the rain, and was hospitalized with a concussion and a broken shoulder. One of Robert's sons, David, died in 1984 of a drug overdose. Robert Jr. was arrested in 1970 for marijuana possession and again in 1983 after nearly overdosing on heroin. Another of RFK's sons, Michael, was accused of having an affair with his family's teenage baby sitter. Michael died in 1997 when he ran into a tree while playing touch football on skis. John Kennedy Jr. was killed in 1999 when his small plane crashed off Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. William Kennedy Smith, another Kennedy cousin, was tried and acquitted of raping a woman in 1991 at the family's Palm Beach estate. On the weekend of the alleged rape, Edward Kennedy had roused his nephew to visit some nightclubs.

The senator, who testified at the rape trial, apologized for "faults in the conduct of my personal life." In his book "Sons of Camelot," Laurence Leamer wrote that of all the Kennedy grandsons, "none seemed less able to compete than Ted and Joan's youngest son Patrick." As a youth, Leamer wrote, Patrick had an asthmatic condition that "if not psychosomatic, was clearly exacerbated by the tensions within his family. He had a father who he feared might be assassinated, a mother who moved in and out of an alcoholic haze, in and out of rehab, and in and out of emotional constancy."

And this is the bunch who liberals consider to be the royal family of America. Camelot. Camelot written by Edgar Allan Poe. As I've said before, I guess if you're a Democrat, you have to take your heroes where you can find them. When you set the bar of morality so low for yourself, it's only logical that you set the bar low for your heroes too. So, you worship America's most dysfunctional family, which includes President Kennedy, who got headaches if he didn't have sex every day with a woman not his wife. And you keep reelecting a Kennedy brother who walked away, while a woman slowly suffocated to death in a car at the bottom of a cold, black pond. And now liberals are pleading for compassion and sensitivity and humanity for a "sick man," who is only trying to get better -- after they eviscerated Rush Limbaugh for the same addiction.

While he's gone, Patrick should do something about that hair. He looks like a Pakistani Howdy Doody.