Chappaquiddick was funny?

I thought Melissa Lafsky's comment on Mary Jo Kopechne was pretty outrageous:

Who knows -- maybe she'd feel it was worth it.

An unfathomable degree of ideological blindness and derangement is necessary to imagine that a young woman might have seen her own death at Kennedy's hands as "worth it" if it furthered the career of the great man and the liberal cause. See Carolyn Tackett's takedown of Lafsky's piece.

But then Lafsky raises another question that leads to something even more stunning:

We don't know how much Kennedy was affected by her death . . .

Correct. We can't judge the soul of another. And charity compels us to assume the best. But it has come to light, if it's true, that Teddy was fond of cracking jokes about Chappaquiddick. Close Kennedy friend Ed Klein relates the following:

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?” 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 the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too

Charming. Hear the audio here.

So not only might Mary Jo have felt that her death was "worth it" because it fueled an awesome career in the Senate, but also, perhaps, because it supplied the world, and especially the Lion of the Senate, with a decades-long stream of knee slappers about how he drunkenly drove his car off a bridge and left her to asphyxiate in his car.

Lest we forget the terrible facts of that night: the diver who recovered Kopechne's body the next morning

later testified at the inquest that Kopechne's body was pressed up in the car in the spot where an air bubble would have formed. He interpreted this to mean that Kopechne had survived for a while after the initial accident in the air bubble, and concluded that

Had I received a call within five to ten minutes of the accident occurring, and was able, as I was the following morning, to be at the victim's side within twenty-five minutes of receiving the call, in such event there is a strong possibility that she would have been alive on removal from the submerged car.^[8]

Farrar believed that Kopechne "lived for at least two hours down there."^[16]

More from RS McCain:

It has often been written that Mary Jo Kopechne "drowned." She didn't. The cause of death was asphyxiation -- there was an air pocket inside the overturned car, and Mary Jo lived long enough to breathe the last remaining oxygen in that air pocket. And while Mary Jo was breathing her last . . . what did Ted Kennedy do?

Well, among other things, he began trying to concoct a cover-up story: "Why couldn't Mary Jo have been driving the car? . . . Why couldn't she have let him off and driven to the ferry herself and made a wrong turn?" His own cousin, Joe Gargan, talked Ted out of attempting to get away with that.

Kennedy beat the rap. Multiple witnesses have testified that Kennedy had been drinking all day. It was a clear-cut case of vehicular manslaughter, but he was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of leaving the scene of an accident.

So much for all that. Let's get back to honoring Kennedy with wretched excess and political opportunism.

*Update 8/29: More on "was it worth it?" from Allahpundit.

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