MEDIAITE: JOKING ABOUT RUSH DYING? FUNNY! JOKING ABOUT TEDDY'S BUTT? YOU'RE OUT!

Well, isn't this interesting.  For the first time since I discovered Mediaite.com, the media industry blog founded by former MSNBC reporter Dan Abrams, a comment of mine has been deleted.

Mediaite's Senior Editor Glynnis MacNicol, the rabid leftist former Air America co-host who poses as a news writer, authored a thread linking to an op-ed on the The Onion bylined by "Rush Limbaugh."  It is beyond a doubt satirical, but she pointedly accentuated her clear warning that Rush didn't write it by adding this: "though [it's] likely there are parts to it some folks very much wish were real ..." 

She doesn't specify which parts she means, but there are a lot to choose from that would be right up her alley, which is located in the heart of the Hate-Rushbury neighborhood.  For example, the part in which The Onion's "Rush" writes:

What I should really do is just commit suicide. I have this little Sunday ritual I started around the time I publicly compared the torture at Abu Ghraib to a fraternity prank, where I climb into my Jacuzzi and put a gun in my mouth. But I can never work up the guts to pull the trigger. A few times I came close to overdosing on prescription pain pills, but my g--damn doctors were always there to save me.

(snip)

You know what? I wish someone would just kill me. I'm serious ...

As can be observed in my first comment on the thread, I was unable to access the Onion piece because it is blocked by my employer, and was blissfully unaware of the extent of its malice -- although I suspected it was what it turned out to be.  You see, like too many progressives, Glynnis loves herself some profane rants about conservatives. A recent example: Her breathless approval of potty-mouthed so-called journalist Matt Taibbi's poison-penned response to moderate conservative David Brooks' views on the history of Haiti's government.

Frequent leftist Mediaite commenter "The Real Royal King" has a similar mindset.  He wrote that he "enjoyed the part [of the Onion piece] where the Reflective Rush describes his fans along his funeral procession" after succeeding his goal of achieving death, which he followed up with some pedestrian jibes about Rush's weight (which is in a down cycle currently).  At that point, I thought it was a perfect opportunity to illustrate the hypocrisy of people who pretend Rush is as cruel to other people as they are to him.  So when RRK wrote ...

Remember the pre-gastric collar Rush at his blubbery zenith, adorned in an Orson Wells (sic) all black ensemble, sweating, wildly and spastically jumping up and down and thrashing his arms all about? That was a self-parody even the Onion couldn’t hope to mimic. I understand Haiti is in desperate need of tents. Rush should be a mensch. Hundreds of people could be housed under that fabric.

...I knew I could make him pop off by just slightly tweaking that remark, and replied:

They’re doing fine with Ted Kennedy’s old swim trunks.

This predictably got the following irony-free reaction out of RRK:

How nice to joke about a much-adored deceased individual.

Of course, that is what RRK was doing just about an hour before -- joking about a much-adored individual (i.e., Rush, a living broadcasting legend), "enjoy[ing]" imagining he was a victim of suicide.  When I turned his insult on one of his own heroes, he cried foul, never realizing I was doing no more than holding a mirror to his ugly attitude. 

When I revealed my gambit, showing RRK he was "a hypocrite with a capital HIPPO," I wondered how he'd react.  He didn't reply, but I got a reply in a sense when my comment was deleted, presumably by Ms. MacNicol. 

I find this to be ironic in the extreme, and here's why: According to someone who loved Ted Kennedy, he also liked to joke about himself. And Ted was also known to have a laugh at the expense of "a much-adored deceased individual."

You may have heard of that person. Her name was Mary Jo Kopechne.

Kopechne was the forever 28-year-old young woman that Senator Edward M. Kennedy literally drove to her drowning death off of a bridge coming from Martha's Vineyard's Chappaquiddick Island in 1969.

Where did I get the idea that Ted was in the habit about laughing about Chappaquiddick, you might ask?  Rush?  O'Reilly?  Beck?  Alex Jones?

Uh, no. National Public Radio.

The morning after he passed away, NPR's Katty Kay interviewed former Newsweek magazine editor Ed Klein on The Diane Rehm Show.  Klein said the following as he concluded his reflections on Teddy's life:

KATTY KAY, NPR HOST: Ed Klein, that's what I'm hearing today, that people are sad at his passing, and yet celebrating this huge life and its huge long list of accomplishments.


ED KLEIN, FORMER NEWSWEEK EDITOR: I think he'd be the last person who would want us, those he's left behind ... to, um, be, uh ... morose and, and full of bathos. I think he, he --

KAY: He would come in with a big guffawing laugh and make us laugh too.


KLEIN: He would, yes. You're so right, he would. And he'd probably have a joke to tell as well.


KAY: At his own expense.


KLEIN: Well y'know, he, I don't know if you know this or not but, one of his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself. And he would ask people, "Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?" I mean, that is just the most amazing thing. It's not that he didn't feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw, um, the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.


KAY: Ed Klein, former foreign editor of Newsweek, and author of a new book on Ted Kennedy ... We are remembering the life of Senator Ted Kennedy, who died last night after a battle with brain cancer at the age of 77.  Do stay listening.

I'm sure there are some other people out there who listened or read what Klein said, and it makes perfect sense to them; Kennedy could somehow solicit jokes about the incident that killed a passenger in his car without being a ghoul.  If you are one of those people, I invite you to comment on this thread and tell me why you think so.  Enlighten me.

There are a lot of reasons one could poke fun at Ted Kennedy: His weight, his libido, his drinking problem, his being the runt of the Kennedy litter. I've joked about those things in the past, but some years ago, I decided that it wasn't cool to joke about Chappaquiddick.  Not only because it trivialized the life of Mary Jo Kopechne, but because the joke wasn't so much on Ted as much as it was on the rest of us.  The fact that he never served time in prison and was not expelled from the Senate by his colleagues is a classic miscarriage of justice.  He escaped punishment because the regal aura of the Kennedy clan overwhelmed any sense of equity that would have seen him treated as would any other man who drove off of a bridge, left his passenger to die, made himself scarce until the next morning, and spun a preposterous story.

Many progressives feel that Kennedy's life of public service atoned for his complicity in Kopechne's demise, with one even suggesting that Mary Jo was the "catalyst for the most successful Senate career in history ... Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it."  New York Times writer and Kennedy biographer Adam Clymer actually wrote (in 1999): “[His] achievements as a senator have towered over his time, changing the lives of far more Americans than remember the name Mary Jo Kopechne.”  How sick is that?  Mary Jo was a human being who deserved a full life.  Through his negligence (to put it mildly), Ted Kennedy ended her life. But when she becomes the topic, some people use themselves as human shields to protect Kennedy from accepting responsibility as if he were their own child.

I suppose the motive for my comment's deletion was disrespect for the recently departed.  IMHO, my mild disrespect shown to Ted Kennedy (which was only to make a point about the hypocrisy of being delighted by death fantasies about Rush Limbaugh) pales in comparison to the disrespect shown to Mary Jo Kopechne's shortened existence by Kennedy cultists eager to dismiss her as a nothing but a right-wing talking point.  I thought at first I might suggest in the memory of Teddy, people who think of Mary Jo as an obstacle to his majestic memory ought to get a check-up to make sure they don't have brain cancer, but on second thought, it seems more like a symptom of heart disease.

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