Here's what I regard as a pretty repulsive column on the Huffington Post abut Ted and Mary Jo and I feel the same way about the responses to it.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melissa-lafsky/the-footnote-speaks-what_b_270298.html
I think Ted got of very, very lightly in the long run for Chappaquiddick. At the time the media just didn't investigate as strongly as they do now, especially when the person in question was someone like a Kennedy. A couple years ago Larry Craig almost got bounced out of the Senate for hitting on someone in a public restroom. Ted would have been history if Chappaquiddick happened today.
And as far as "service" goes, it's funny that service always involves something that everybody wants to do. I would think that true service would be anonymously picking up trash along the road or volunteering to clean public restrooms. Instead, service seems to involve things where you get all kinds of perks and people worship you.
It's too bad JFK and RFK were killed but they weren't putting their lives on the line (as far as they knew), rather they pursued and then exercised power. Whether they did good with it is a topic for debate. I personally think they did good. But they weren't being noble in doing what they were doing (unlike Joe Jr who died on a dangerous mission in WW II).
So Ted wasn't continuing some kind of noble tradition. Rather he was handed a lot of political power simply because of who was in his family and then was handed even more political power because his two brothers were murdered and Ted got a bunch of sympathy. And he had so much political power he probably could have been elected President, even though he hadn't done anything to remotely deserve the power. And then he threw a chunk of the power away when his carelessness killed a woman and then his political calculating resulted in her body staying in the water for 10 hours.
Someone was saying how it was a lot of pressure for him to considered the leader off all those kids of his murdered brother. For one thing, why was it up to him as opposed to all his sisters to do this? Secondly, if it was such a burden then why didn't he just quit the Senate and spend time being a surrogate father? Remember, this entire family was independently wealthy. He could have done anything he wanted. The thing he chose to do was keep a job that gave political power to himself but that took a lot of time that he could otherwise be spending with his family.
I don't want to bust on Ted too much. I think he did some good things in Congress and I doubt he was any worse than lots of other people in power. But I think his whole story illustrates how corrupt American politics can be. A guy gets a very powerful position because of connections and then holds it for half a century. And then he dies and everybody praises him. We don't even recognize ridiculous when it's right in front of us.
But there is something even more ridiculous and I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw some footage of the funeral coverage. Amongst the people Ted's son Patrick greeted was Senator Robert Byrd. He's in his nineties and in a wheelchair. If he didn't have a job right now then he wouldn't be able to get one. And yet he has a very powerful political job and can keep it for as long as he wants. It's just crazy.