Mark Steyn’s columns always have plenty of quotable passages, but he surpassed himself with a review of the movie Chappaquiddick:
There is, as it happens, another brother – or “brother”: Kennedy cousin Joe Gargan, who lost his parents at a young age and was raised by Teddy’s parents as (almost) one of their own. As played by Ed Helms, Joe is the conscience of the picture: he doesn’t exactly do the right thing, but he’s broadly in favor of others doing the right thing, which, in the moral universe of the Kennedys, gives him a sporting chance of winding up a couple of circles of hell further out from where the rest of them are headed.
From a column he wrote after Ted Kennedy’s death:
As Joan Vennochi wrote in The Boston Globe:
Like all figures in history – and like those in the Bible, for that matter – Kennedy came with flaws. Moses had a temper. Peter betrayed Jesus. Kennedy had Chappaquiddick, a moment of tremendous moral collapse.
Actually, Peter denied Jesus, rather than “betrayed” him, but close enough for Catholic-lite Massachusetts. And if Moses having a temper never led him to leave some gal at the bottom of the Red Sea, well, let’s face it, he doesn’t have Ted’s tremendous legislative legacy, does he? Perhaps it’s kinder simply to airbrush out of the record the name of the unfortunate complicating factor on the receiving end of that moment of “tremendous moral collapse.” When Kennedy cheerleaders do get around to mentioning her, it’s usually to add insult to fatal injury. As Teddy’s biographer Adam Clymer wrote, Edward Kennedy’s “achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”
You can’t make an omelet without breaking chicks, right? I don’t know how many lives the senator changed – he certainly changed Mary Jo’s – but you’re struck less by the precise arithmetic than by the basic equation: How many changed lives justify leaving a human being struggling for breath for up to five hours pressed up against the window in a small, shrinking air pocket in Teddy’s Oldsmobile? If the senator had managed to change the lives of even more Americans, would it have been OK to leave a couple more broads down there?
I hope that I never make Mark Steyn angry with me.
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