Predictably, the push has begun to get a Kennedy into the Senate seat held for lo those many years by Ted Kennedy. The Kennedys favorite newspaper – the Boston Globe – all but annointed Joe in a news story by Frank Phillips that also handily reminded everybody that the seat is, after all, the permanent property of the Kennedy family.
Said Philips:
“With Massachusetts having paid its final respects to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the politics of succession begins in earnest this week – candidates will emerge, a race will take shape, and the Kennedy clan will have to reveal whether it wants to keep the seat in the family.
“All eyes now are on Joseph P. Kennedy II, the former US representative, with family members and political allies expecting him to make a decision very shortly on whether to enter the Democratic primary.
“No other Kennedy of his generation with the political stature to step into the role has signaled interest in it, according to Democratic insiders and people close to the family.”
Apparently, that sort of political analysis passes for serious thought on the Globe’s pages.
There are at least three reasons why Joe Kennedy should not be a U.S. senator from any state. First, he’s not only a defender of a declared enemy of the U.S., but is also guilty of shamelessly using that enemy’s resources in an unsuccessful attempt to polish his own image here in America. I refer, of course, to Kennedy’s deal with Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez under which the latter gives the former heating oil which is then sold to “the poor” in America.
The deal makes Kennedy an enabler of a disgusting PR victory for Chavez and assists the tinhorn tyrant in his ongoing stripping of the Venezuelan people of the few remaining shreds of democratic freedom they have left. It is likely to be generations before the people of Venezuela will recover any realistic hope of regaining their freedom.
Besides, if Kennedy was serious about helping poor Americans stay warm in winter, he would work to get the government out of the energy industry’s way so that it can develop the billions upon billions of barrels of recoverable oil resources in our own country, as well as the trillions of cubic feet of natural gas we also have waiting to be developed. Are our political and intellectual elites ever going to learn that the quickest way to cause shortages is to give government more control over the production and distribution of a needed resource?
Second, a review of his six terms in the U.S. House reveals absolutely nothing of memorable legislative accomplishments, athough he served on a significant panel, the House Banking Committee. He did manage, however, to divorce his first wife in 1991 in order to marry a former staff member in 1993. This kind of thing must be in the water at Hyannis Port.
Note that he asked the Vatican for an annulment of the first marriage because he wasn’t mentally capable of entering the relationship. And he boycotted a 1991 speech to Congress by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II to protest “the British occupation of Northern Ireland,” thus suggesting that the “lack of due discretion or judgement” noted in his appeal for an annulment was not limited to his marital perspectives.
Finally, If the people of Massachusetts want to throw away their representation in Congress by electing somebody from the same family over and over again, that’s their business. But I dare say most of the rest of us are puzzled – when we are forced to think about it at all – that they insist on perpetuating a faux royal American family. Don’t they understand we banned aristocracy more than 200 years ago? Don’t they get it that Camelot was mostly a PR sham?
Apparently they don’t, if the Globe’s view is indicative of the general opinion among Bay State citizenry that it’s up to the Kennedy clan whether they want to keep the seat or not. What do they think they are dealing with here, a seat in the U.S. Senate seat or in the British House of Lords?
There is perhaps one consolation for those of us in journalism. The Boston Herald’s Jules Crittenden puts it well in noting Glenn Greenwald’s suggestion that we just give up and declare the Kennedy family royalty:
“Kennedys, Bushes, Clintons. God save ‘em all. We sell a lot of newspapers off their dynastic posteriors. Then you got your Gore, the current Duke of Earl, Marquis of Gaia. Sir Arnold. There’s lesser outliers like the Cuomos, Daleys and Jacksons. Maybe even a new Obama line just starting.”
I dunno, Jules, I get tired writing the same story about somebody – voters or a spouse – being played for fools over and over again.
UPDATED: The New Republic’s Kirchick nails the Chavez-Kennedy outrage
Not quite convinced by my thoughts above that Joe Kennedy ought not be in the Senate (or the House or anywhere else in the federal government)? Then maybe you will listen to one of the bright young minds at The New Republic, James Kirchick who demolishes Kennedy’s defense of his deal with Chavez.
Among much else, Kirchick notes that “by shuttling oil to the underprivileged, Chavez was deliberately mimicking his hero Fidel Castro, who has sent Cuban doctors throughout the world as a supposed sign of international good will. But Chavez made no bones about the real motivations underlying his ‘oil diplomacy’: ‘It is a card that we are going to play with toughness against the toughest country in the world, the United States,’ he told an Argentinean newspaper.”
Be sure and read the entire Kirchick column here.
