Ethics

Caroline Kennedy for the Senate?

By Ed Brayton

I have to confess something: I don't get the Kennedys. By which I mean I just don't get the appeal of the Kennedy family and the way they are treated as virtual royalty in this country. Caroline Kennedy for the Senate? If her last name was anything other than Kennedy, would suggesting her appointment not provoke mostly bewildered looks and perhaps even laughter? I'm not saying she'll necessarily do a bad job, I'm just saying that the only reason she even sniffs an appointment to that seat is because of her name.

But as I said, I've never understood the appeal of the entire family. The family patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, was a vile man, bitterly anti-semitic and a staunch supporter, both rhetorically and financially, of Joseph McCarthy (and his son Robert was actually on the staff of McCarthy's committee, at his father's request). Other than being rich, ruthless and devoid of anything approaching a sense of ethics, there is little about Joe Kennedy to recognize at all.

Full post as published by Dispatches from the Culture Wars on December 21, 2008 (boomark / email).