Mary Jo Kopechne could notbe reached for comment

What? You expected me to pass up this one last opportunity to use that line?

Sen. Ted Kennedy died shortly before midnight Tuesday at his home in Hyannis Port, Mass., at age 77.
The man known as the “liberal lion of the Senate” had fought a more than year-long battle with brain cancer, and according to his son had lived longer with the disease than his doctors expected him to. . . .
A hardworking, well-liked politician who became the standard-bearer of his brothers’ liberal causes, his career was clouded by allegations of personal immorality and accusations that his family’s clout helped him avoid the consequences of an accident that left a young woman dead.

Michelle Malkin says:

There is a time and place for political analysis and criticism. Not now.
Yes, there will be a nauseating excess of MSM hagiographies and lionizations -- and crass calls to pass the health care takeover to memorialize his death.
That’s no excuse to demonstrate the same lack of restraint in the other direction. Not now.

OK, I'll risk the Boss's umbrage and explain why I've so often used that "could not be reached for comment" line I stole from Ann Coulter.

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.

The media will forgive liberals anything. Just look at the passive-voice construct in his obit: "an accident that left a young woman dead."

Forgiven by the media, liberals are shameless about such things. And so, in subsequent years, Americans were often subjected to the shameful spectacle of Ted Kennedy, the Chappaquiddick swim champ, lecturing us in moralistic tones about this, that and the other.

Whenever Kennedy would inflict his pompous self-righteous liberal moralizing on us, I'd always hear Ann Coulter's immortal words: "Mary Jo Kopechne could not be reached for comment."

And so I've used that line for the last time. And the knowledge of that finality is the only sadness I feel about Ted Kennedy's death.

UPDATE: Carol at No Sheeples Here has a fitting tribute to the kind of Irish drunk who gives Irish drunks a bad name.

UPDATE II: Jules Crittenden reports from Boston, where they love them some Irish drunks:

Regarding Kennedy himself, they don’t exactly need to fire up the hagiography. Ted Kennedy’s image enhancement has been a life-long project that only requires the bow of a national funereal extravaganza. Served in the Army, 51-53, didn’t go to Korea, overcame a Harvard cheating scandal, slid into his big brother’s seat, held for him till he was old enough, dodged responsibility in the death of Mary jo Kopechne, though whether he dodged consequences is debatable.

I'm just grateful the old fraud finally had the decency to die, so that the torch could be passed to a new generation of decadent overprivileged swine.

UPDATE III: I have no idea why some of the commenters here are complaining that I have failed to be appropriately reverent toward the Kennedy mythology. It's not as if there were any shortage of media reverence out there:

In the quiet of a Capitol elevator, one of Edward M. Kennedy's fellow lawmakers asked whether he had plans for a family Thanksgiving away from the nation's capital. No, the Massachusetts senator said with a shake of his head, and mentioned something about visiting his brothers' gravesites at Arlington National Cemetery.
In his half-century in the public glare, Kennedy was, above all, heir to a legacy -- as well as a hero to liberals, a foil to conservatives, a legislator with few peers.

"Heir to a legacy"! Or, as Time magazine calls him, "The Brother Who Mattered Most." Well, he certainly was the one who mattered most to Mary Jo . . .

UPDATE IV: I'm called a "gutless little coward" by an anonymous blogger, but apparently I'm enough of a role model to be linked and quoted by a new blogger with a dilemma: "My first night blogging and Ted Kennedy dies. I don’t have much good to say about Kennedy," says A Conservative Shemale. NTTAWWT.

Prominently featured on her blogroll: Ace of Spades. NTTAWWT.

UPDATE V: Bob Belvedere is appropriately mournful, and my heart was stirred by this touching tribute from Reaganite Republican:

[T]his man was a complete and utter fraud as leader of any kind . . . oft-tipsy Teddy was a comprehensively irresponsible and selfish fake.

Uncork the champaign, says G.J., who recalls Ted's career as a clandestine pro-Soviet subversive:

This letter which details Senator Edward Kennedy’s offer to help the Soviet Union defeat Reagan’s efforts to build up the nuclear deterrent in Europe was unearthed by a Times of London reporter in the 1990s after the KGB files were opened.
It got little or no attention, however, until the publication of Paul Kengor's book The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.

Drunken Commie-loving traitor, R.I.P. And I hereby declare this Mary Jo Kopechne Memorial Day.