Cheating on your wife can be forgiven. DUI can be written off as lapse of judgment or mistake. Killing someone accidentally and taking responsibility and showing remorse afterwards can be semi-forgiven.
Driving drunk with an aide, crashing into the river, abandoning the sunken car with the passenger, not reporting the accident to emergency services, and then using your family's influence to get out of the crime is scummy. Ted Kennedy is a scumbag, and it's good he is dead.
See how this differs from Laura Bush's (age 17) car accident?
See how your recollection of events is shaping your judgment of the accident, the man, and the entirety of his career? See how your sympathies lie more with one than the other, and how this shapes your ethical analysis? See how I can ask rhetorical questions, too?
Would you be as willing to forgive a teenager who kills your daughter because she was texting? Because she was talking on her cell phone? Because she (like *waaaay* too many drivers) was doing something other than paying attention to the several thousand pounds of metal traveling at a high velocity under her control? The very things she promised not to do when getting licensed?
*Everyone* makes bad decisions in life, and sometimes these bad decisions have horrible, horrible consequences. I doubt sincerely that anyone wanted her dead, and I strongly suspect that were he able to travel back in time and undo that mistake, he would. But the blanket condemnation you are putting on him is simplistic and dishonest, and calling him a "scumbag" assumes that he was exactly the same person on the day of his death as he was when the accident happened, and that's just willfully ignorant. We all change throughout our lives, regret our mistakes, learn from them, and do other things. To choose to define the entirety of his political career with a handful of things with which you personally agree or disagree is dishonest. Don't think that I'm a fan of Kennedy's - I'm well aware that he had his share of personal and professional problems, and I don't agree with everything that he's done.
However, I do make a distinction between disagreeing with a politician and his choices and conflating their personal and professional lives. Should I judge Ted Haggard just by the hypocrisy of his sexual escapades, or the entirety of his career? Should I judge Martin Luther King by his plagiarism, or by the full body of his accomplishments?
YeOldeMan said:
How about trying to block windmill construction because they "defiled" his yachting area.
A bad and selfish thing for him to have done. Unlike SCHIP, Medicare, and OSHA.
EDIT:
And on that note, I'm off for the day. Have fun discussing this.