Another Famous Person Died Thread

“How about I just give you a pat on the head? Seems more important that you feel good about yourself than it does me.”

“Killed hundreds of thousands? I'd like to see proof of that. Saddam HUssein killed around 1,000,000....but who's counting”

“Proof shmoof. We stick to bumpersticker catch phrases 'round these parts.”

“How bout....Kill a lady and try to get away with it cuz I hate Bush

Naw that wouldn't fit on a bumber sticker...nebermind”

“How can a person even begin to defend something like that? Ya wanna quibble over whether it was 600,000 or 1.1 million??

I don't defend Kennedy for Chappaquiddick.

What's your excuse?

Let's TRY for just a single moment to keep things in perspective..... or you can let your brain fall out of your ear and run down your sleeve.


Again.

”

“You can't defend Kennedy but yet you can't resist listing every Republican misdeed you ever heard of...How's that work?...TRY to explain the connection. It's nothing more than Tit for tat 3rd grade playground bu11$h1t. That's my perspective”

“The Kennedys gave meaning to the term "plausible deniability" before it was even coined. That whole family was/is some piece of work.”

“All those people dead for nothing and not a peep out of these people.

It's like being in post-war Germany.”

“or Crawford, Texas.”

“The denial that all politicians are crooks is the american way - except in my party (A).”

“Bio: Mary Jo Kopechne


Birth: Jul. 26, 1940
Death: Jul. 19, 1969


Teacher and Administrator, she is most remembered for her controversial death in an automobile accident with Senator Edward Kennedy; the resulting political scandal caused Kennedy to reverse his decision to run for the US Presidency. Born in Forty Fort, Pennsylvania, she was the only child of insurance salesman Joseph and Gwen Kopechne. After graduating from Caldwell College, New Jersey, she taught at Montgomery Catholic High School in Montgomery, Alabama, and then moved to Washington DC to work as a secretary for Florida Senator George Smathers. Shortly afterwards, she went to work as a secretary for New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy following his election in 1964. After Senator Robert F. Kennedy's death in 1968, she moved to Matt Reese Associates, a Washington DC firm that helped politicians establish campaign headquarters, and it was there she met Senator Edward Kennedy, Robert Kennedy's younger brother.


On the evening of July 18, 1969, she attended a party on Chappaquiddick Island, near Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, in honor of the "Boiler Room Girls," a name given to the six young women who had helped the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign, and who had closed up his files after his assassination in June 1968. All six of the women were single, and the six men in attendance were all married but present without their wives, and the attendees gathered for a late night party at the Lawrence Cottage, rented by Joe Gargan for the occasion.


Late that evening (the exact time is in dispute), Kennedy offered to drive Kopechne back to her hotel at the Katama Shores Motor Inn in Edgartown, and later claimed that he mistakenly took a wrong, right turn onto Dyke Road, a dirt road leading to a beach about a mile down the road, instead of turning left onto the paved Chappaquiddick Road leading to the ferryboat which they would need to use to go to Kopechne's motel.


A half-mile down Dyke Road, Kennedy drove off the side of the Dyke Bridge, and the car overturned into Poucha Pond. Kennedy got out of the overturned car, but Kopechne failed to exit the car and died. Kopechne's body was recovered later that morning; the diver reporting that Kopechne had positioned herself near the back seat wheel well where an air pocket had formed, and had apparently suffocated rather than drowned. Her parents ruled out an autopsy, so the cause of death was never officially determined.


Senator Kennedy later pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, for which he received a two-month suspended sentence and one year probation. Kopechne's death and Kennedy's failure to properly deal with the accident, along with numerous discrepancies in his account of what happened, damaged his reputation and is regarded by many as the major reason that he decided to cancel his run for the presidency in 1972 and subsequent years.


Kopechne's funeral was held on July 22, 1969, at St. Vincent's Roman Catholic Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, and she was buried in the parish cemetery there.


(bio by: Kit and Morgan Benson)



Burial:
Saint Vincents Cemetery
Larksville
Luzerne County
Pennsylvania, USA”

“I feel something between pity and disgust for stovie.

Quite clearly Kennedy did something wrong. Keeping it as a crusade banner 40 years later must be mentally chalenging. Now that Ted is gone what do you want to happen? Dig him up and hang the corpse?”

“Mentally challenged? Yep, that pretty much sums up Stovey.

*snicker*”

“Poor little KILLER.”

“The people that hold Ted to be a great Dem HERO disgust me.”

“As Edward Kennedy was laid to rest yesterday, accompanied by a further fusillade of eulogies, we were forcibly made aware, once again, of the American fixation with the idea of personal redemption. The British are a less forgiving people. While even the right-wing US press skated around the late senator�s appalling personal behaviour over many years, in this country even politically sympathetic newspapers published excoriating accounts, concentrating on the incident 40 years ago when the 37-year-old Ted Kennedy abandoned Mary Jo Kopechne to die alone in a car he had driven off a small bridge linking Chappaquiddick to Martha�s Vineyard.

It was only in a British newspaper that the American author Joyce Carol Oates was able last week to publish the following (factually accurate) account: �Kennedy chose to flee the scene leaving the young woman to die an agonising death, not of drowning, but of suffocation over a period of hours. It was over 10 hours before Kennedy reported the accident, by which time he�d consulted a family lawyer. The senator�s explanation for this unconscionable, despicable, unmanly ... behaviour was never convincing.�

As Oates might have gone on to remind us, Kennedy�s subsequent broadcast in which he sought to keep alive his political career was a staggering display of self-pity from which even his illustrious team of speechwriters could not preserve him; and although he paid $90,000 out of his own ample pocket to the parents of Mary Jo, her mother later recalled: �I don�t think he ever said he was sorry.�

If the Kennedys are the nearest thing to a royal family in the United States, they have almost divine status in Martha�s Vineyard (where President Obama delivered his initial eulogy last week), and so the Massachusetts senator easily avoided the prison term that would have been inevitable had the driver been any other drunk called Ted.”

“A mentality that harps on one and excuses the other is one for the psych books.

As bad as Chappaquiddick was, it was an accident. Iraq was a choice. The people that engineered it knew what war was. They knew the chances they were taking.

Perhaps the difference is that these people fully supported the invasion of Iraq so a part of it is Theirs. They're defending themselves, not Bush.


last edited: 8/29/09 6:52:22 PM”

“People who hold any fu cking politician up as a hero disgust me.”

“Do some reading up on Joe Kennedy Sr. "The apple doesn;t rot far from the tree." (Roaul Dahl)”

“SternO, show us some abortion pics, while you're two brains cells are firing.”

“I See what you're saying TIlt, but once again you have A.D.D. and can't discuss anything without mentioning your hatred for all things Bush...try to stay on topic for one post....just a sentence or two, without mentioning Bush..

Now, I don't think that the Chappoquiddick thing was an accident. At least it's not been proven to be a fact. I suspected fowl play the first time I heard the fishy(pardon the pun) story...”

“Now, I don't think that the Chappoquiddick thing was an accident. At least it's not been proven to be a fact. I suspected fowl play the first time I heard the fishy(pardon the pun) story...”
Stratd00d
11:02:36 AM
8/30/09

I will accept the original crash may have been an accident from a drunk driver. But he did not accidently not call authorities or accidently concult his legal advisors before calling the police. He learned the "rules of life" from his daddy- A few people coun. But most don't.”

“And this is different from other politicians in what way?

Cheney sobered up before he let anyone know he shot a guy while hunting.

The Governor of South Carolina got busted before he admitted flying off to South America to get some.

Nixon never told the truth.

Karl Rove lied under oath to protect his chain of command from what was tantamount to treason.

It not good. It's not right. But is sure isn't limited to any one person, party, or idealogy.

The real sin, IMHO, is when the trespasser winds up being a true hypocrit by blasting others for their "faults" despite his/her own misgivings.”

“RR, I'm not sure what your gig is, but no one here is trying to canonize Kennedy. Do you think you're the only one who remembers Chapppaquidick (sp)? Kennedy was a flawed human being, just like the rest of us. Nonetheless, he and his family gave a lot for this country and he deserved a moment to be remembered for his contributions. I'm uncertain what your motive is. Perhaps you should start your own thread and satisfy your need therein.”

“I think Strat is a plant ---- That HAS to be an act.”

“Nonetheless, he and his family gave a lot for this country and he deserved a moment to be remembered for his contributions.

Frankly that's where you and I would disagree. Every contribution that I can find was ultimately self-serving. But I'll leave now.”

“That can be said of every piece of legislation ever enacted. It's the nature of "market" politics.”

“I think Strat is a plant ---- That HAS to be an act.�
Tllt

Ok, I admit it...I'm a ficus....”

“If so, you're smarter than I thought, j/k.”

“Has anybody watered Strat today? � < WINK >”

“No, but he tends toward being incontinent anyway. Picked it up from Stovie, I believe.”

“Tsk, tsk...

Even the so called moderate DEMs resort to personal attacks when they can't defend their hero's like Ted.”

“Hey troll, fill out your profile.”

“What is it? Oh yeah in asphyxiation the last few seconds the pain explodes in their mind as the brain is robbed of oxygen. They gag, I am certain she was choking on water, cold and alone in the car...YEAH real hero.”

“That's a much worse way to die than to have one's village fire-bombed in El Salvador.

Blast you, Teddy!”

“Fire Bombed Village in El Salvador...okay um Lusho which US politician did that?”

“Come on now, it was the '80s.

"They" were two days march from Texas and if "we" had not helped slaughter all those threatening banana-picking peasants it would have been Red Dawn.

He "saved" the world from communism........and threw some lucrative contracts to the bomb-makers.

War is a racket...............”

“Lusho..all I am asking is WHICH VILLAGE did a US politician Fire Bomb...now Dems firebombed Dresden, Tokyo etc in World War II. And I THINK LBJ (Democrat) firebombed Vietnamese Villages.

So all I am asking is to tell me which village US personnel Fire Bombed (I am guessing you are implying aircraft were used) in El Salvador....And who was the US Politician who directly was responsible?

ITs simple, you made an accusation now back it up there.”

“I love it when a History Lesson breaks out on a TT thread!!!

'32oz”

“The reports say Mary Jo was alive trapped in the car for up to five hours after Ted got out and he hid for 10 hours or so.
It figures that a 'moral' person like drunkO would defend his hero Ted.


last edited: 9/01/09 8:03:14 AM”

“Someone should call Glen Birch@Fox to find out the truth of all these mysteries.”

“They attempt to deflect from Rebublican war crimes with a traffic accident (again). They might be fooling themselves with that crap, but that's about it.”

“Squeal t*lty, squeal............”

“Sorry Cocaine Dan, it was all republicans flying those WWII bombers........or at least all the bombardiers.

It was the Truman administration that facilitated the French attempt at re-conquest in Indo China.
In spring 1954 Nixon issued a public statement saying that the U.S. might have to send combat troops to Indo China since the Vietnamese where "un-fit to govern themselves".
This statement caused a fire storm of protest in the Senate that year and led some to call it Nixon"s War.

There is plenty of blame to go around, Candy Dan.”

“drunkO started hitting the bottle early today.”

“From Killing Hope.....

The United States was supporting the government of El Salvador, said Ronald Reagan, because it was trying to "halt the infiltration into the Americas by terrorists and by outside interference, and those who aren't just aiming at El Salvador but, I think, are aiming at the whole of Central and possibly later South America and, I'm sure, eventually North America."

Psychiatrists have a term for such perceptions of reality. They call it paranoid schizophrenia.

If the insurgents in El Salvador, by far the smallest country in all of Central and South America, were engaged in what Ronald Reagan perceived as a plot to capture the Western Hemisphere, others saw it as the quintessential revolution.

Viewed in the latter context, it can not be asserted that the Salvadorean people rushed precipitously into revolution at the first painful sting of repression, or turned to the gun because of a proclivity towards violent solutions, or a refusal to "work within the system", or because of "outside agitators", or any of the other explanations of why people revolt so dear to the hearts of Washington opinion makers. For as long as anyone can remember, the reins of El Salvador's government had resided in the hands of one military dictatorship or another , while the economy had been controlled by the celebrated 14 coffee and industrial families, with only the occasional, short-lived bursting of discontent to disturb the neat arrangement.

The El Mozote Massacre was in December 1981 and carried out by the Salvadorean army's U.S.-trained Atlacatl Battalion in which an estimated 1,000 civilians were murdered.”