Kennedy Was a Good Scoundrel
Mass immigration advocates never cease to inform us of how good and moral they are. Few did more to inflict excessive immigration on our country than the late Senator Ted Kennedy—and few people felt better about themselves for doing so than Kennedy. Before he died, he sent the Pope an appeal for a blessing. In self-congratulation he declared that “I have done my best to champion the rights of the poor and open doors of economic opportunity. I’ve worked to welcome the immigrant [and] fight discrimination. . . .”
Be that as it may, in terms of personal ethics, Kennedy was a hyper-scoundrel. He was a cheat, an adulterer, a drunkard, and a grossly irresponsible man whose lack of character became legend after the Chappaquiddick scandal. Evidently he was a traitor as well. The opening of Soviet archives following the collapse of the Soviet Union revealed that he contacted Moscow during the Cold War and offered to assist the Soviets in undermining President Reagan’s missile deployment plans.
His character was certainly on display when he made promises about immigration legislation. Before the infamous 1965 immigration act, he vowed that it would not bring about an immigration policy admitting close to a million people a year and also declared that it would not change the nation’s ethnic makeup. As it turned out, these outcomes were exactly what came about. Either Kennedy was lying, or he was too incompetent as a legislator to know what the truth was. Perhaps distracting him were thoughts of wine and women.
Prior to passage of the first amnesty for illegal aliens in 1986, Kennedy promised that amnesty would happen only once. Thereafter he led subsequent charges for amnesty bills.
In times past, we tended to evaluate the content of peoples’ character in terms of how they conducted their private lives. Then the assumption was that if people were honorable at the personal level, they would be honorable in public life. Today, the common notion, at least in liberal circles, is that advocacy of “enlightened” policies will cover a multitude of personal sins. Aside from Kennedy, another example is former President Bill Clinton who drew high praise from feminists for his support of abortion and other leftist-agenda items, even though he regularly used and abused women for his pleasure.
Maybe the reason for this inversion of morality is guilt. Failure to perform basic moral duties such as loyalty to family, country and God cause a guilty conscience, despite the best efforts of sophisticates to deny the importance of such duties. Perhaps this was the case with Ted Kennedy, who broke so many of the commandments pertaining to God and man. One of Kennedy’s associates said that the former senator loved to bask in the warm approval of the media and immigrants’ organizations. Their accolades no doubt comforted him with the thought that he was really a good person, despite what the small voice of his conscience may have had to say.
When you know that you’re moral because you espouse the proper policies (as defined by the lords of the media and other elites), it doesn’t really matter what the consequences of those policies are. Thus Kennedy, a self-styled champion of the poor, opened gains to job loss and wage depression for America’s working poor—while at the same time making it harder for immigrants, given their excessive numbers, to assimilate and prosper.
Did the wealthy and insular Kennedy know or care about their plight? Probably not. And even if he did, there was no problem. His chorus of well-wishers was always on hand to reassure him of his goodness.