45 replies to this topic

[DaveBond21]

Veteran US Senator Edward Kennedy, the brother of ex-President John F Kennedy, has died aged 77 after a long battle with cancer, US media say.

The Democratic Massachusetts senator was diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour in May last year.

He became a member of the Senate in 1962 to replace his brother when he resigned to become president, and was re-elected seven times.

He has been an active supporter of current President Barack Obama

http://news.bbc.co.u...cas/8221686.stm





RIP

[Matt_13]

RIP

[coco1997]

Can't say I'll lose any sleep over this one, but a loss is a loss and my condolences go out to those who loved him.

[dinovelvet]

Can't say I'll lose any sleep over this one, but a loss is a loss

...except when it happens in Chappaquiddick.

[killkenny kid]

RIP, the end of a era.

[Aris007]

RIP, the end of a era.

Yes. My idea exactly!

RIP.

[Trident]

RIP

I remember times when he was said to run for Presidency himself (70's). Never happened, of course. True, the end of an era.

[danielcraigisjamesbond007]

I remember seeing him in the Senate during a trip to DC in middle school.


RIP Ted Kennedy...
So sad.

[HildebrandRarity]

Can't say I'll lose any sleep over this one...

...except when it happens in Chappaquiddick.

Brilliant! Even stylish!



Now...his elder sister Eunice, who recently died aged 88 and who was instumental in kick-starting the Special Olympics in the 1960s...well, now that was a great individual and the best of that litter.

God Bless her (Eunice's) soul and may He have mercy on his (Ted's).

[Mr. Blofeld]

Ted Kennedy... is now a dead Kennedy.

Rest in peace, Teddy.

[DR76]

You were a very interesting character, Senator Kennedy. RIP.

[Trident]

Now...his elder sister Eunice, who recently died aged 88 and who was instumental in kick-starting the Special Olympics in the 1960s...

I've seen her 2003 at the Special Olympics in Dublin. A truly most remarkable woman.

[Loomis]

Did he support the IRA?

[Trident]

Did he support the IRA?

Not that I would be aware of.

[Conlazmoodalbrocra]

A wonderful politician, a great man, the last of a dying breed. All in all, a sad day for world politics.

Did he support the IRA?

He didn't support the IRA, but he was staunchly against the British activity in Northern Ireland. In other words he wanted a peaceful end to achieving full Irish independence.

[Otis Fairplay]

I remember times when he was said to run for Presidency himself (70's). Never happened, of course.

It didn't during the 70's, no.

[byline]

I have feelings of ambivalence for the man, yes, but it cannot be argued that, as a senator, he did everything he could to improve the lives of the marginalized and less fortunate among us. That's especially remarkable, given the life of privilege he came from. RIP, Ted Kennedy.

[HildebrandRarity]

...

[Trident]

I remember times when he was said to run for Presidency himself (70's). Never happened, of course.

It didn't during the 70's, no.

No, I meant actually becoming the Democrat's candidate. Refused two times IIRC, '72 and '76; I had already forgotten about the '80 primaries.

[Jim]

Brain cancer sounds unfeasibly grim, so RIP.

Well, when you leave a girl in your upside down car in a pond to die and then lie about it you quickly derail your chances of becoming POTUS.

Any chance you could be marginally less abrasive in pretend persona for once? Time and a place, etc.

[HildebrandRarity]

Sorry and understood.

[DamnCoffee]

RIP.

[dinovelvet]

Did he support the IRA?

Not that I would be aware of.

The Telegraph, amongst others, seem to think so :

http://blogs.telegra...end-of-britain/

[Ambler]

Did he support the IRA?

Not that I would be aware of.

The Telegraph, amongst others, seem to think so :

http://blogs.telegra...end-of-britain/

Like many Catholics the Kennedys were Anglophobes. (Not that anyone would know that from the BBC's sycophantic obituaries yesterday.) It's also true that Ted Kennedy was a brainless supporter of the IRA, hardly uncommon among Irish Americans. However, Teddy's many failings paled next to the antisemitism and pro-Hitler stance of his father, Joseph.

Some family.

[Salomé]

Did he support the IRA?

Not that I would be aware of.

The Telegraph, amongst others, seem to think so :

http://blogs.telegra...end-of-britain/

Like many Catholics the Kennedys were Anglophobes.

I assume you meant American Catholics, since I'm not aware of a correlation between Catholicism and anti-British or English sentiment over here.

[Trident]

Like many Catholics the Kennedys were Anglophobes. (Not that anyone would know that from the BBC's sycophantic obituaries yesterday.) It's also true that Ted Kennedy was a brainless supporter of the IRA, hardly uncommon among Irish Americans.

You mean he openly supported the IRA in particular, not just the general cause of a united Eire? Never been aware of that particular streak. Surprises me not a little, as I would have suspected much graver repercussions regarding such a major crack in relations between the US and Britain. His hayday was the 70's and IRA terror was a daily concern back then, with countless victims in Northern Ireland and Britain. Most remarkable.

[Ambler]

Most remarkable.

Indeed. Remarkable and contemptible. Here's the Wolfson-award winning historian Andrew Roberts on the subject:

In 1971, Teddy Kennedy likened the British presence in Ulster to the American invasion of Vietnam - a despicable analogy at a time when U.S. troops were using the poisonous chemical Agent Orange and napalm against the Vietcong.

He went on to state that the Protestants of Ulster 'should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain'. The fact that they had been in Ulster for 360 years - three times as long as the Kennedys had been in America - clearly passed him by. It was not until St Patrick's Day 1977 that Ted acknowledged that the Protestants might be allowed to remain in their homeland.

In 1978, he successfully pressured President Jimmy Carter's administration not to allow the U.S. to sell arms to the Royal Ulster Constabulary - sanctions which effectively equated Britain's Ulster police force with repressive dictatorial regimes in Africa and Asia.

It was no coincidence that he raised the flag of Irish nationalism whenever his Senate seat came up for re-election. His call for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1980 was condemned as ignorant grandstanding by the great Irish statesman Conor Cruise O'Brien, but it went down well in the Irish pubs in Boston where money was raised for the shamelessly pro-IRA fundraising organisation Noraid.

True to form, Kennedy blamed British 'insensitivity' for the 1981 hunger strikes led by the terrorist Bobby Sands in Belfast's Maze prison, rather than the IRA for the continuing murderous strife in Northern Ireland.

We can only be thankful in Britain that Ted Kennedy narrowly missed being elected as Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1980, for he might have won the White House.

His chances were wrecked by those still unanswered questions about the death by drowning 11 years earlier of 29-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a pretty political assistant, in a car driven by Kennedy.

It is important to go back to that horrific incident - and to Kennedy's despicable behaviour on the night - to explain why his character alone ought to disqualify him from any British honour, irrespective of his shameful support for the terrorist IRA.

At 12.45am on July 18, 1969, and with Mary Jo in his car, Kennedy - who had been drinking and partying - drove off the Dike Bridge connecting Martha's Vineyard (where the Kennedys had their holiday retreat on America's East coast) with Chappaquiddick Island.

He managed to extricate himself, walk back to his motel, complain to the manager about a noisy party, take a shower, sleep the night, chat to a friend the next morning, order two newspapers, meet his lawyers and finally report the accident to the police at 9.45am.

By then, however, his car had been spotted and Mary Jo's corpse had been found by a fire department diver, Captain John Farrar, at 8.45am.

She had not drowned, but had survived in an air pocket inside the car, only to asphyxiate when the oxygen finally ran out several hours later. The brutal fact is that had Kennedy alerted the police earlier, Mary Jo might be alive today.

She was given no autopsy and Kennedy was not charged with drink-driving, but merely given a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident. To this day, Kennedy has not apologised to Mary Jo's family, and, of course, the tragedy did not for a moment affect his future rampant drinking and womanising.

Kennedy lobbied President Clinton hard in 1996 to award Gerry Adams an American visa (Adams promptly used his subsequent U.S. visit to raise money for Sinn Fein) and later to get him invited to the White House. But it is quite wrong to suggest, as the American historian Arthur Schlesinger does, that these initiatives 'led to the IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday accords'.

These, in fact, only came about as a result of the IRA's political and military leadership recognising that they had been defeated on the ground by 1996-98. All that these American invitations afforded Adams, apart from flattering his ego, was to lend Sinn Fein an utterly spurious respectability on the world stage.

Only after 9/11 - when Americans discovered on their own soil how loathsome terrorism truly is, and how far from a noble romantic struggle - did Kennedy cynically distance himself from Adams and fellow Sinn Fein stalwart Martin McGuinness, refusing to meet them in 2005 after the IRA brutally murdered Robert McCartney in a Belfast bar in January that year.

Read more: http://www.dailymail...l#ixzz0POGQuMKj

EDIT: quote marks added

Edited by Ambler, 27 August 2009 - 01:53 PM.

[dinovelvet]

Interesting footnote, apparently he spent his last few days watching marathons of Bond and 24!

http://www.nytimes.c...ics/27year.html

[Jim]

Most remarkable.

Indeed. Remarkable and contemptible. Here's the Wolfson-award winning historian Andrew Roberts on the subject:

In 1971, Teddy Kennedy likened the British presence in Ulster to the American invasion of Vietnam - a despicable analogy at a time when U.S. troops were using the poisonous chemical Agent Orange and napalm against the Vietcong.

He went on to state that the Protestants of Ulster 'should be given a decent opportunity to go back to Britain'. The fact that they had been in Ulster for 360 years - three times as long as the Kennedys had been in America - clearly passed him by. It was not until St Patrick's Day 1977 that Ted acknowledged that the Protestants might be allowed to remain in their homeland.

In 1978, he successfully pressured President Jimmy Carter's administration not to allow the U.S. to sell arms to the Royal Ulster Constabulary - sanctions which effectively equated Britain's Ulster police force with repressive dictatorial regimes in Africa and Asia.

It was no coincidence that he raised the flag of Irish nationalism whenever his Senate seat came up for re-election. His call for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland in 1980 was condemned as ignorant grandstanding by the great Irish statesman Conor Cruise O'Brien, but it went down well in the Irish pubs in Boston where money was raised for the shamelessly pro-IRA fundraising organisation Noraid.

True to form, Kennedy blamed British 'insensitivity' for the 1981 hunger strikes led by the terrorist Bobby Sands in Belfast's Maze prison, rather than the IRA for the continuing murderous strife in Northern Ireland.

We can only be thankful in Britain that Ted Kennedy narrowly missed being elected as Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1980, for he might have won the White House.

His chances were wrecked by those still unanswered questions about the death by drowning 11 years earlier of 29-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, a pretty political assistant, in a car driven by Kennedy.

It is important to go back to that horrific incident - and to Kennedy's despicable behaviour on the night - to explain why his character alone ought to disqualify him from any British honour, irrespective of his shameful support for the terrorist IRA.

At 12.45am on July 18, 1969, and with Mary Jo in his car, Kennedy - who had been drinking and partying - drove off the Dike Bridge connecting Martha's Vineyard (where the Kennedys had their holiday retreat on America's East coast) with Chappaquiddick Island.

He managed to extricate himself, walk back to his motel, complain to the manager about a noisy party, take a shower, sleep the night, chat to a friend the next morning, order two newspapers, meet his lawyers and finally report the accident to the police at 9.45am.

By then, however, his car had been spotted and Mary Jo's corpse had been found by a fire department diver, Captain John Farrar, at 8.45am.

She had not drowned, but had survived in an air pocket inside the car, only to asphyxiate when the oxygen finally ran out several hours later. The brutal fact is that had Kennedy alerted the police earlier, Mary Jo might be alive today.

She was given no autopsy and Kennedy was not charged with drink-driving, but merely given a two-month suspended sentence for leaving the scene of an accident. To this day, Kennedy has not apologised to Mary Jo's family, and, of course, the tragedy did not for a moment affect his future rampant drinking and womanising.

Kennedy lobbied President Clinton hard in 1996 to award Gerry Adams an American visa (Adams promptly used his subsequent U.S. visit to raise money for Sinn Fein) and later to get him invited to the White House. But it is quite wrong to suggest, as the American historian Arthur Schlesinger does, that these initiatives 'led to the IRA ceasefire and the Good Friday accords'.

These, in fact, only came about as a result of the IRA's political and military leadership recognising that they had been defeated on the ground by 1996-98. All that these American invitations afforded Adams, apart from flattering his ego, was to lend Sinn Fein an utterly spurious respectability on the world stage.

Only after 9/11 - when Americans discovered on their own soil how loathsome terrorism truly is, and how far from a noble romantic struggle - did Kennedy cynically distance himself from Adams and fellow Sinn Fein stalwart Martin McGuinness, refusing to meet them in 2005 after the IRA brutally murdered Robert McCartney in a Belfast bar in January that year.

Read more: http://www.dailymail...l#ixzz0POGQuMKj

EDIT: quote marks added

Here's the Wolfson award winning historian Andrew Roberts on Wikipedia

Roberts' work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 was praised by George Bush but was panned by some critics for a number of historical, geographical, and spelling errors. The Economist described the book as "less a history than a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices", and pointed out that Roberts had the Red Army marching "eastward" over Europe (rather than westward, and that this geographical inversion was done two other times in the book), and he misspelled names such as "Srebenica” and “Götterdämmerung.” He also confused historical people with the same name (such as Luigi Barzini).

In an April 2007 article in The New Republic Johann Hari accused Roberts of supporting massacres against civilians, including the 1919 Amritsar massacre, which Roberts called "necessary", and British concentration camps built during the Boer War (1899-1902), using quotes from Roberts' books on Salisbury and A History of the English Speaking People. Hari also pointed out that Roberts had addressed Springbok Club, a white supremacist organisation that flies the Apartheid old South African flag and calls for "the reestablishment of civilised European rule throughout the African continent". The US historian Mike Davis says of Roberts' claims that the British camps were built to protect the Boers, and they only died of diseases brought about by their own incompetence: "This is tantamount to Holocaust-denial" Frederic Smoller in defence of Roberts argued that the views of Davis represent a 'staggering revisionism' because, he claimed, the Salisbury government did not plan a genocide.

Roberts claimed he did not realised the Springbok Club was racist when he took on the speaking engagement. Hari responded with lengthy quotes from Roberts' work which he claimed contradicted this. [See 'Correspondence', The New Republic, Feb 12th 2006] Roberts later responded by saying Hari, who is gay, must have "a crush" on him.

Roberts has also been heavily criticised for his view on Ireland. Professor Stephen Howe notes that Roberts "passionately dislikes Ireland and the Irish, with their supposed betrayal of Britain in both world wars.". While in his 2006 review for Spectator Magazine Anthony Daniels says "In his hostility to all things Irish, Roberts fails to mention that Ireland, after many years of failure, is now a great economic success."

Daily Mail - same source

In early 1934, Rothermere and the Mail were editorially sympathetic to Oswald Mosley and the radical National Socıalıst British Union of Fascists. Rothermere wrote an article entitled "Hurrah for the Blackshirts", in January 1934, praising Mosley for his "sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine". However, pressure from advertisers in the Daily Mail grew significant when Rothermere proposed to set up a cigarette company and so Rothermere backed off and ceased to support them.

During the great abdication crisis of 1936, the Daily Mail supported the King, but was only joined by the Daily Express, Evening Standard and Evening News.

Rothermere was a friend and supporter of both Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler, which influenced the Mail's political stance towards them up to 1939. Rothermere visited and corresponded with Hitler. On 1 October 1938, Rothermere sent Hitler a telegram in support of Germany's invasion of the Sudetenland, and expressing the hope that 'Adolf the Great' would become a popular figure in Britain. However, this was tempered by an awareness of the military threat from the resurgent Germany, of which he warned J.C. Davidson. Rothermere had an executive plane built by the Bristol Aeroplane Company which, with a speed of 307 mph, was faster than any fighter. In 1935, this plane was presented to the RAF on behalf of the Daily Mail where it became the Bristol Blenheim bomber.

In 1937, the Mail's chief war correspondent, George Ward Price, to whom Mussolini once wrote in support of him and the newspaper, published a book, I Know These Dictators, in defence of Hitler and Mussolini. Evelyn Waugh was sent as a reporter for the Mail to cover the anticipated Italian invasion of Ethiopia.

Rothermere and the Mail supported Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement, particularly during the events leading up to the Munich Agreement. After the Nazi invasion of Prague in 1939, the Mail changed its stance.

Oh dear.

[Ambler]

Well, I won't take this too far off topic, but going on about The Daily Mail's editorial stance back in the 1930s is fairly pointless today. You should check out the glowing tributes the [Manchester] Guardian paid to Uncle Joe back then.

I've written for both newspapers by the way.

"In his hostility to all things Irish, Roberts fails to mention that Ireland, after many years of failure, is now a great economic success."

Oh dear indeed...

As for Johann Hari you might want to go to the primary source, his article in The Independent, and check out the readers' comments at the foot of the page. To compare British holding camps with extermination facilities is ing stupid to put it mildly.

Edited by Ambler, 27 August 2009 - 10:20 PM.