If Ted Kennedy's crusading was supposed to be a show of compassion, to the observant individual it failed miserably. His compassion was always at the expense of other people's money and never his own.

Ted Kennedy has gone to his maker.  The news media are full of stories about him and his legacy, at least the legacy they want us to believe, and just about everyone including John McCain are ready to propose him for sainthood.  It's enough to make you sick. 

Born in 1932, Edward Kennedy was the youngest son of an Irish millionaire who had made much of his money during prohibition as a bootlegger.  Somehow he eluded Elliot Ness and his FBI colleagues, possibly because of political connections.  He invested his gains in legal areas of business and finance, which he parlayed into even an even bigger fortune, and set his eyes on political careers for his sons, likely to enable them to maintain the family fortune. 

Of his brothers, Joseph Junior, was killed in World War II, John was elected President, then assassinated in office.  Robert was also killed during a presidential run, leaving Ted to carry on the family political fortunes.  While all had their problems, he was almost certainly the worst of the lot.   

He was found guilty of cheating on an exam at Harvard but later returned and graduated, when a lesser personage would probably have been dismissed permanently.  After obtaining a law degree from Virginia and working for two years as an assistant district attorney he entered the US Senate in a special election.  A family friend had held the position until he reached the mandatory age of thirty.  He never left the Senate until his death. 

What everyone should remember first about Ted Kennedy is the 1969 Chappaquiddick incident, which resulted in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, who was traveling in the car, with him.  Kennedy somehow drove the car into a pond but managed to escape leaving Kopechne to drown.  He reported the incident to law enforcement some 10 hours later, purportedly after getting the family connections involved, to the extent that he was never arrested, booked, charged, or even tested for alcohol.  At least, he should have stood trial for negligent homicide.  Instead he delivered a prepared speech and was let off the hook by friendly law enforcement officials who didn't want to charge a man with his connections. 

After surviving an incident that should have made him a political pariah his greatest achievement was to create for himself a sinecure out of the elective office of senator from Massachusetts.  There, representing the state that was in many respects, the cradle of American Freedom, he fought against everything that the founding fathers stood for, and to reverse so much that they had achieved.

As a member of a powerful, politically involved family he became essentially a member of a new royalty interested in perpetuating its own prestige, power and fortunes at the expense of the United States, if necessary.  This fact became known when the Soviet defector Vasiliy Mitrokhin smuggled his archive of secret KGB documents to the West and publicized some of them in 2002.  They included substantiation that Kennedy had coordinated his 1980 attack on Jimmy Carter with Moscow, opposing President Carter's opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

Then, in 1986 Vadim Zagladin, second in command of the International Department of the Soviet Communist party, met Kennedy during the 1986 visit.  Zagladin reported that Kennedy wanted to use the arms control negotiations with the USSR to politically undermine President Reagan.  Substantiation of his actions can be found at Canada Free Press, and in the text of this letter to Yuri Andropov.   Kennedy was, effectively communicating sensitive political information to a hostile foreign power for personal and party political gain.  It should have landed him in court on charges of treason.  Instead, nothing was done. 

Another incident we must not forget were the attacks he led against Supreme Court nominees Clarence Thomas and Robert Bork.  During Bork's 1987 Supreme Court confirmation hearings Kennedy stated that

"Robert Bork's America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens' doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of the Government, and the doors of the Federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens …"

Nothing could have been further from the truth, but Kennedy was hell bent on trashing someone whom he perceived as a political enemy.  It is more than likely that his animosity toward Judge Bork was motivated by the latter's probability of working against the expansion of government that Kennedy favored.  He wanted no one to get in his way, and Bork would have been a formidable obstacle on the Supreme Court bench. 

Finally, lest we forget, Ted Kennedy was an ardent proponent of the violent Irish Republican Army, which essentially made him guilty of meddling in the internal affairs against the interest of U.S. ally, Great Britain. 

In a post mortem examination of Ted Kennedy's life ABC News attempted to cast Kennedy in an extraordinary light; to persuade us that the events of Chappaquiddick made him a better person and led to his crusading in the Senate for the benefit of those less fortunate.  This is a fabrication.  If anything, he continued to carry on as before, but was, perhaps more discrete.  He drank, philandered, and made a mockery of the dignity of his office.  And if his crusading was supposed to be a show of compassion, to the observant individual it failed miserably.  Ted Kennedy's compassion was always at the expense of other people's money, and never his own.  He was no statesman; he was a betrayer of trust, and of his nation for personal political gain.  He had no compunction about betraying his first wife and family, then his second, leads us to wonder whom else he would betray for his own interests.  The list appears above; his nation, the legacy of Massachusetts as the cradle of the American Revolution, and even his president. 

Whenever the opportunity presented itself he used his position and his wealth to gain an advantage over others.  He respected power because he had to, because it was a tool he used for his own advancement.  This, coupled with the belief that he was better than others, and that the rules ordinary folk had to follow didn't apply to him made him an excellent example of hubris in action.  Unfortunately, he didn't die of it, as would be the case in a Greek tragedy. 

The most tragic aspect of his death from brain cancer is not the fact of the illness that killed him.  It is the fact that he spent the last months of his life travelling to the best medical practitioners, at great expense, to see if his life could be prolonged.  This is a right that the health care legislation he was championing would deny the American public.  Did he care about them?  Obviously, he did not.  His public persona was largely a product of public relations, which he probably understood as well as anything else. 

It should also be remembered that his championing of welfare programs and education spending have done little or nothing to promote the elimination of ignorance or poverty.  SAT scores continue to decline, and poverty continues to exist, not because of extraneous factors that can be addressed by government spending; they exist because people have not taken the steps to remedy them within their own lives.  Of course, Ted Kennedy didn't want them to do so.  It would interfere with his plans for the massive expansion of government and the curtailment of true individual rights.  Weak, dependent people, turning to him and his colleagues for handouts suited him more.  He would have served America better by using his money and position for philanthropic purposes, and stayed out of politics. 

It has been reported that he will be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, which is a travesty, to say the least.  It is an insult to anyone who wore the uniform of the United States Military and died in action.  Ted Kennedy did serve briefly in the army, but did nothing of note.  His greatest achievements were all at the expense of the people and the government of the country he was supposed to uphold.  It is a sad testimonial to the state of our nation's affairs that he is being lauded today.  We should be saying "goodbye and good riddance."