Below The Beltway

Over at The Huffington Post, Melissa Lafsky manages come up with both the most absurd and most offensive pieces of Ted Kennedy hagiography at the same time:

Mary Jo wasn’t a right-wing talking point or a negative campaign slogan. She was a dedicated civil rights activist and political talent with a bright future — granted, whenever someone dies young, people sermonize about how he had a “bright future” ahead of him — but she actually did. She wasn’t afraid to defy convention (28 and unmarried, oh the horror!) or create her own career path based on her talents. She lived in Georgetown (where I grew up) and loved the Red Sox (we’ll forgive her for that). Then she got in a car driven by a 36-year-old senator with an alcohol problem and a cauldron full of demons, and wound up a controversial footnote in a dynasty.

We don’t know how much Kennedy was affected by her death, or what she’d have thought about arguably being a catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history. What we don’t know, as always, could fill a Metrodome.

Still, ignorance doesn’t preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn’t automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.

Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.

Really ? Would she have felt that after hearing Kennedy’s initial statement to the police and his publicly televised statement ? Would she have felt that way after seeing him get a two month suspended jail sentence for what clearly was, at the very least, involuntary manslaughter ?

Would she really have thought that her life was less important than a man’s political career ?

Rick Moran puts it quite well:

I don’t know about you, but I sure would rather be alive and kicking than being the “catalyst” for the notion that Kennedy could never be president because of my death and this was somehow a good thing because of all the good my killer did during the rest of his life, being forced to abandon his presidential aspirations and serve in the senate.

Mary Jo Kopechne – Martyr to Kennedy’s failed ambition.

Of all the millions of words, tens of thousands of articles, blog posts, and other scribblings by liberals over the death of Ted Kennedy, this may be the most amazingly shallow, myopic, and ultimately self centered sentence that has been written. To write, to hint that Kopechne would have somehow preferred to be dead rather than alive in any circumstance, for any cause, or for any person in her life at that time is ghoulish, and bespeaks an extraordinary callousness toward life that calls to mind the absolute worst that ideologues of either the left or right are capable.

And, as Rick goes on to say, it is a truly despicable thing to write.

Melissa Lafsky, you should be ashamed of yourself.