Corks don't fall far from the barrel

My grandmother used to say, "Be careful walking in the chicken yard, you don't want to bring anything into the house." I trust all grasp her point.

Joe Kennedy, father of Ted Kennedy, D-Mass., would have been wise to heed this pearl of wisdom. But did the apple fall far from the tree, or, in his case, did the cork fall far from the barrel?

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Kennedy continued displaying his visceral contempt for President Bush in a speech at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think-tank. "They repeatedly invent facts to support their preconceived agenda – facts which administration officials knew or should have known were not true." "Issue after issue. Mislead. Deceive. Make up the needed facts. Smear the character of any critic." "It is undermining our national security, undermining our very democracy."

I submit Kennedy cannot be referring to Bush, but can in fact only be referring to his father and brother.

His brother's ill-conceived plan to overthrow Cuban despot Fidel Castro, known as the Bay of Pigs invasion, resulted in 114 of the Cuban exiles being killed and 1,198 being captured. Kennedy's CIA sat passively listening to their rebel leader pleading "I have nothing left to fight with. Am taking to the woods. I can't wait for you." Of course, the rebel leader had no way of knowing Kennedy and his CIA had no intention of extending one finger of help.

Teddy's brother, the president, would later privately claim, "I just took their advice," referring to the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But as we now know the truth lies somewhere between his private laments and his public acknowledgement of it all being his fault.

Perhaps Teddy was having a flashback when he said, "Mislead. Deceive. Make up the needed facts." Perhaps he wasn't talking about the Bush administration or the brilliantly courageous American fighting forces that are currently in foreign combat theaters. Maybe, just maybe, he wasn't referring to President Bush, when he called Iraq, "Bush's Vietnam" and accused the president of "making up the facts." Might he have been once again having a flashback to his brother's ill-fated presidency?

It was his brother who presented America with Vietnam, under the guise of deploying 400 Special Forces troops to train and advise South Vietnamese troops. It was his brother, the President Kennedy, who under the umbrella of said lie, had approximately 60,000 Americans die. It was his brother's lie that created approximately 18,000 women widows. It was his brother's deployment of 400 American "advisers" that led to approximately 2,500 MIAs and 800 POWs, 114 of whom died in captivity.

President Bush may not be the best domestic-minded president, as I have previously pointed out, but he has not lied to nor misled America, irrespective of what some insist on believing. The only remote similarity to Teddy's brother's Vietnam we face today is that 82 percent of Vietnam veterans who saw heavy combat and strongly believe we lost the war for a want of political will.

Maybe Teddy is lamenting that America will have more intestinal fortitude than he and his appeasement friends.

Teddy must have been referring to his brother the president, when he fomented, "It is undermining our national security." It has been written that his brother had affairs with women suspected of being Nazi spies and gangsters' molls. As biographer Nigel Hamilton put it, "To have a president [Kennedy] who cannot control his sexual appetite, who is always taking reckless risks and cannot stop himself, not only threatens the status of the presidency, it also threatens national security."

So let's see. Ted's father, Joseph, couldn't control his sleeping around on his mother. His father was a known gangster and bootlegger. His father was an avowed racist, having had a black co-worker of his future son-in-law, Peter Lawford, fired because he and Peter had dared share a bag lunch as they worked.

His grandfather, John Fitzgerald, couldn't stay away from cigarettes or cigarette girls, including the blonde cigarette girl named "Toodles" Ryan who ultimately cost him a mayoral election.

His brother, the President Kennedy, has already been referenced. Which leaves the Chappaquiddick kid, poster sot, philanderer and boy-did-I-make-a-complete-mess-of-my-life senator from Massachusetts. I think it's safe to say that cork didn't fall far from the barrel.