BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Thursday, December 18, 2003
How stupid can you get? This
past January, Charles Pierce wrote a profile of Ted Kennedy for the
Boston Globe Magazine that included a passage so mean it took
my breath away. It still does. Here it is:
That's how you survive
what he's survived. That's how you move forward, one step after
another, even though your name is Edward Moore Kennedy. You work,
always, as though your name were Edward Moore. If she had lived,
Mary Jo Kopechne would be 62 years old. Through his tireless work
as a legislator, Edward Kennedy would have brought comfort to her
in her old age.
Yet, as I wrote
at the time, some people -
especially conservatives - just didn't get it. James Taranto, who
writes the "Best of the Web" column for the Wall Street
Journal's OpinionJournal.com, correctly called it "pure poison."
But others, including the stunningly overrated Mark Steyn, actually
thought Pierce was absolving Kennedy for his criminally
negligent conduct in the death of Mary Jo Kopechne.
And so it goes. A little while ago
I learned that the Media
Research Center, an
organization that documents so-called liberal bias, had awarded
Pierce its "Quote
of the Year." First place!
No explanation is offered, but, for connoisseurs of the MRC, none is
needed. Obviously Pierce is being singled out for an extreme act of
liberal woolly-headedness - for daring to suggest something so stupid
and offensive as the notion that Kennedy's liberal deeds somehow
offset what he failed to do that day at Chappaquiddick.
Gah! As if!
The MRC no doubt got that idea from
idiot boy Bernard Goldberg's new book, Arrogance: Rescuing America
from the Media Elite. I haven't seen it (lest you think that
means I'm not entitled to insult him, be assured I've read his
first
comic book); but Pierce
recently wrote during a guest turn on Altercation
(no direct link available) that Goldberg, too, thought Pierce was
trying to say something nice about Ted Kennedy.
Good grief. Conservatives love to
complain about the state of public education. Yet, clearly, it is
they who can't read.
New in this week's
Phoenix. George W. Bush has a new running mate:
Saddam
Hussein. And that's going
to cause a whole heap of trouble for the Democrats.
(Note to Bernie Goldberg and the
Media Research Center: I'm not actually trying to make people think
that Saddam is going to replace Dick Cheney on the Republican ticket,
or that Bush secretly likes Saddam, or anything like that.
Okay?)
Also, who was Robert
Bartley?
posted at 3:45 PM |
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link
MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
