By Bob Weir
“Death makes angels of us all,” wrote the author and poet, Jim Morrison. So it appears to be with the demise of the “Liberal lion of the Senate,” Ted Kennedy. The man whose life reads like a manual for bad behavior is, in death, being lionized by those who continue to repudiate his myriad transgressions. What kind of a country are we if we willingly blind ourselves to evil because it masquerades as virtue?
For the past 40 years our country has, from time to time, been influenced by a man most notable for fleeing the scene of a negligent homicide and attempting to have someone else take the blame for him. Even with the entrenched power of the Kennedys in Massachusetts, they couldn’t keep all the facts surrounding the drowning death of Mary Jo Kopechne from being publicized. God only knows what that poor woman went through as she waited in a watery grave, perhaps believing that the man who saved himself would come back to save her. If she expected a profile in courage from Ted Kennedy, she died disappointed.