Camelot bailout

Out of all the government waste we see every day from the over-greased oinkers in Washington who are leveraging future generations to the hilt and beyond, perhaps the most maddeningly laughable fact is this: More than $1 out of every $5 of the $126 million Massachusetts is receiving in earmarks from a $410 billion federal spending package is going to help preserve the legacy of the Kennedy family.

Taxpayers are already up in arms (as evidenced by the government trying harder than ever to take our arms), and when we couple that with our money going toward further “honoring” a wealthy, politically influential family that is certainly partly to blame for the rise in unconstitutional and unprecedented transfers of wealth this nation has seen in past decades, the needle on the anger meter ticks up a notch.

One group of taxpayers must be especially furious at the bailout of the Kennedy legacy – that group of taxpayers is called “the Kopechne Family.”

For the Kennedys, Ted in particular, the “public service” accolades are accumulating. In just the past few months, Kennedy was awarded an honorary degree from Harvard, which he may have earned by symbolically cheating on an honorary test. The Massachusetts Maritime Academy announced it will rename its training ship “The Kennedy” (complete with high-tech sonar system that can detect submerged Oldsmobiles up to 5,000 fathoms down). And officials in Boston have proposed building a national institute focused on the U.S. Senate and Kennedy’s legacy – fittingly enough with taxpayers footing the construction bill. Kennedy has also received recognition from Mexico, most likely as their way of saying, “Thanks to you and your colleagues for being so weak on border security.”

Most recently, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told a joint session of Congress that Ted Kennedy has been awarded an honorary knighthood. The ceremony will mark the first time there have been that many Kennedys in the room during a kneeling since Marlene Dietrich died.

That so many millions of taxpayer dollars from the 9,000 earmark omnibus spending bill are going toward honoring a family for their decades of selflessly spending somebody else’s money seems so wrong that it could only come from Washington, D.C., and of course it did. Thanks to this kind of lunacy, taxpayers now feel like people being led to the electric chair whose money has been confiscated and used to build a monument to Thomas Edison – and, on top of it all, we’re expected to applaud before the final switch is thrown.

If our money must be used for a Camelot bailout, I hope there’s at least an irony museum built that bears the Kennedy name. This museum would put on display the Joe and Rose mindset that our tax money is honoring – a life philosophy that sent a daughter away to be lobotomized and kept in an institution, because a “special needs” and imperfect child would get in the way of the family’s political agenda of raising sons who could attain high political office. Why? So the sons would be in a better position to fight for the human rights of the less fortunate. As William Shatner’s character said in “Airplane II,” “Irony can be so ironic sometimes.”

But since the Kennedy money is already on the way to Massachusetts and there’s not much we can do about it now, I’ve come up with a few other suggestions for projects to include in the Kennedy Family Legacy Bailout Initiative. If my money must honor Kennedys, this is how I want that money used:

• Construction of the “Dike Bridge to the 22nd Century”

• A glass-bottom boat tour of Poucha Pond

• The “Jack & Bobby’s Marilyn Monroe Rodeo Re-Enactment Show” in the JFK Museum’s adultery wing

• Declaring Au Bar a national landmark

• Ceremonial bronzing of silver spoons for all family members holding rank of second cousin or higher

• Changing the name of the Boston Marathon to the “Rum Run” in honor of Papa Joe

• Commissioning singer Tony Orlando to record all of the Kennedy family’s favorite songs on a commemorative CD entitled, “Knock Three Times on the Ceiling if Jackie’s Coming”