MARK STEYN ON CHAPPAQUIDDICK’S FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY: Speaking Ill of the Ted.

Last year there was, very belatedly, a fine feature film about Chappaquiddick, which I reviewed here, and which contains a dialogue exchange taken almost verbatim from a ten-year-old column of mine:

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?

That bit turns up in the movie:

Joan Vennochi’s words are put in Ted’s mouth: He says defensively that all men are flawed — ‘Moses had a temper, Peter betrayed Jesus.’ And my cheap riposte — ‘Moses didn’t leave a girl at the bottom of the Red Sea’ — is given to the outraged Joe Gargan, already on his way out, supplanted by better, colder, harder fixers. When the guy gets out and leaves the girl at the bottom of the sea, it offends the natural order: Joe is telling him he’s not a man.

He wasn’t — and nor were those who went along with it. I have rarely been more disgusted by the public discourse of a free society than by the obsequies that attended Kennedy’s passing a decade ago.

Read the whole thing.