Ted Kennedy to pay?

[Title adapted from the "Amendment To Be" spoof of "They Call Me Bill" that the Simpsons did; the intended implication is "to pay in Hell", a suggestion linked by commenter white rabbit at DaisyDeadhead's blog post]

[ETA here's the Guardian obituary]

Ted Kennedy has died.

I can plead, I hope, some justification for being ignorant about some of the facts that follow, because of being born a) in the wrong country, and b) too early, to have ever seen the news at the time of the events in question. I hope I would have had the decency to remember them now if I had known of them before, and added a post like this unprompted.

Ted Kennedy, in the news coverage that I've seen has been a progressive campaigner in the US Senate, fighting for such worthy causes as a decent (and necessary) increase in the US minimum wage; for various human rights issues; and challenging the abuses by the rightwing in America.

That is the basis, it seems, for the various hagiographies of Senator Kennedy that have cropped up in the feminist blog land.

But for every sainthood to be considered (the origin of the word hagiography, darlings - the entry in the "Lives of the Saints" that each saint receives!), there must also be the Devil's Advocate, whose job it is to find all the reasons why a person should not be confirmed as a saint.

Step forward, DaisyDeadhead.

There are some seriously shitty things, and I think that Ted will not be getting his sainthood any time soon if people listen to what Daisy has to say (backed up by good sources). Indeed, Daisy and her commenters suggest that he might even be going down instead of up...

Daisy depicts how Senator Ted Kennedy managed to destroy (literally in the first case, figuratively in the second) a number of women's lives:

First up, she offers the not-so-mysterious case of Mary Jo Kopechne: a woman left to drown in an upturned car stranded in a tidal channel. As near as may be established, Senator Kennedy was drink-driving and was responsible for driving the car off a bridge and into the water. He got out. He never called for help but instead when the car was discovered the next morning, his victim was found drowned, pressed up where the last air pocket would have been. The only explanation for the failure to call for help appears to be that Kennedy didn't want to turn up drunk at someone's house.

If that is not enough to bar him from sainthood, then what about his first wife, Joan Bennett Kennedy? The wikipedia article about her tells the tale, it seems to me, of a woman betrayed and abandoned. Daisy's verdict is more damning still: "So, he fucked up Joan, wiped his ass with her like toilet paper, moves on to woman 22 years younger, and yes! He's much happier now!"

Oh yes, and since I mentioned the origins of hagiography above, let's be clear here: "verdict" comes from the Latin for "speaking truth". I use the word with a mind to that origin...

The best that can be said of Kennedy seems to be that he was a bad man who tried to do some good (Joyce Carol Oates adds a similar opinion @ the Guardian website). But there are still plenty who have every right to feel betrayed by the Senator: not just the poor woman he left to drown; not just the wife whom he abandoned to her alcoholism.