Showing posts with label Kennedy family. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kennedy family. Show all posts

Sunday, May 25, 2008

It's A Very Big Family

"Kennedys Feel Bobby-Socked: Outraged RFK Kin Say Hillary's Now 'Toast'"



So reports the NY Post:
Members of the Kennedy family are incensed over Hillary Rodham Clinton's invoking the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy to explain why she's staying in the race - and they think it could be the death knell of an increasingly desperate and sloppy campaign.

"That comment may be the last nail in her campaign's coffin," a Kennedy relative told The Post. "How can Hillary even use the experience argument when she repeatedly pushes the wrong buttons in her comments?"

An insider added, "I think people really felt that a line was crossed and that her campaign - and even her legitimacy as a politician - ended today."

Said a second relative, "She no longer has only her husband to blame for the ill-chosen comments coming from her camp."

While Robert Kennedy Jr. immediately came out in support of Sen. Clinton on Friday, others in the family's inner circle are fuming.
One cited "a perceived insensitivity" in her comment, made Friday before a South Dakota newspaper's editorial board, especially with the 40th anniversary of RFK's death two weeks away and Sen. Ted Kennedy battling a brain tumor.

"We were all sort of dumbfounded that she would say such a thing," the insider said.

There was also anger outside the family. Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), a Hillary supporter, told Bloomberg News that she said "the dumbest thing you could have possibly said." And the Rev. Al Sharpton ripped the comment as dangerous.

The Kennedy family insider added: "I know that many Clinton supporters in New York and New Jersey are sickened by her comments and that they are more concerned with Senator Kennedy's health and well-being than they are her campaign anymore.

Clinton was explaining why she was still in the race against Sen. Barack Obama when she said: "My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June. Right?"

Then she added: "We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

That line, which she later said was meant to convey the fact that nomination battles can extend late into the primary season, also sparked outrage for touching upon Obama's personal safety.

It was also just plain inaccurate, say historians, noting that Clinton's drawn-out battle with Obama in a seemingly endless primary season is nothing like the 1968 and 1992 Democratic campaigns.

Bobby Kennedy was not in the midst of a long-fought primary battle when he was assassinated. He entered the race on March 16, 1968, less than three months before the June 5 shooting.

As for Bill Clinton, despite his wife's perceptions, he'd won the nomination long before mid-June 1992. The race was essentially over by March 20, when Paul Tsongas dropped out and Clinton became the front-runner with a 7-to-1 delegate lead over Jerry Brown.

Obama, meanwhile, plans to give the commencement speech at Wesleyan University's graduation today in Connecticut, replacing the ailing Ted Kennedy.

Obama will be greeted by an unprecedented amount of security. The ceremony will be closed to the public, and guests will have to go through metal detectors.

One presidential historian thinks Clinton's loose-lipped reference to assassination raises the danger of someone's targeting Obama.

"Everybody, in the back of their minds, has been thinking of this, that Senator Obama could be in danger," said Rick Shenkman, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia.

"Now it's out there. It only takes one psycho."

In a radio interview yesterday in Puerto Rico, Obama said that he had accepted the apology Clinton issued Friday and that her comment about RFK was just "careless."

Monday, June 11, 2007

Staunch Women . . . .

. . . . We just don't weaken.

The revolutionary costume pour du jour, Tony-award winner Christine Ebersole in "Grey Gardens":






"Let's win the revolution, with style!

The Revolutionary Costume For Today, from "Grey Gardens," premiered March 7, 2006
Music: Scott Frankel
Lyrics: Michael Korie
Book: Doug Wright
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

(Speaking)
Oh, hi. Thank heaven you're here. You look absolutely terrific, honestly. (Mother wanted me to come out in a kimono so we had quite a fight...)

(Singing)
The best kind of clothes for a protest pose
Is this ensemble of pantyhose
Pulled over the shorts, worn under the skirt
That doubles as a cape.

To reveal you in capri pants
You fashion out of ski pants,
In a jersey knit designed to fit
The contour of your shape.
Then cinch it with a cord from the drape.

And that's the revolutionary costume for today.
To show the polo riders, in khakis and topsiders,
Just what a revolutionary costume has to say.
It can't be ordered from L.L. Bean.
There's more to living than kelly green.
And that's the revolution, I mean.

Da da da da dum...

(Speaking)
Just listen to this: The Hamptons Bee, July, 1972: "The elderly bed-ridden aunt of former First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, Mrs. Edith Bouvier Beale..."

My very own mother, can you imagine?

"...and her adult daughter, Miss Edie Beale, a former debutante once known as Body Beautiful Beale..."

They called me Body Beautiful Beale, it's true - that was my whaddyacallit, my uh ... sobriquet.

"...are living on Long Island in a garbage-ridden, filthy 28-room house with 52 cats, fleas, cobwebs, and virtually no plumbing. After vociferous complaints from neighbors, the Board of Health took legal action against the reclusive pair."

Why, it's the most disgusting, atrocious thing ever to happen in America!

(Singing)
You fight City Hall with a Persian shawl
That used to hang on the bedroom wall,
Pinned under the chin, adorned with a pin
And pulled into a twist.

Reinvent the objet trouve,
Make a poncho from a duvet,
Then you can be with cousin Lee
On Mr. Blackwell's list.
The full-length velvet glove hides the fist.

And that's the revolutionary costume for today.
Subvert the CrisCraft boaters, those Nixon-Agnew voters.
Armies of conformity are headed right your way.
To make a statement you need not be
In Boston Harbor upending tea.
And that's a Revolution, to me.

Staunch!
There's nothin' worse, I tell ya,
Staunch!
S-T-A-U-N-C-H.
Staunch women, we just don't weaken.
A little known fact to the fascist pack
Who comes here for antiquin'.

Da da da da dum...

(Speaking)
Honestly, they can get you in East Hampton for wearing red shoes on a Thursday - and all that sort of thing. I don't know whether you know that - I mean, do you know that? They can get you for almost anything - it's a mean, nasty, Republican town.

(Singing)
The best kind of shoes to express bold views
Are strapless mules in assertive hues
Like fuscia or peach, except on the beach,
In which case you wear flats.

When I stood before the nation
At Jack's inauguration,
In a high-heeled hump, I got the jump
On Jackie's pillbox hat.
Just watch it where you step with the cat!

And that's the revolutionary costume pour du jour.
You mix'n'match and, Presto! A fashion manifesto.
That's why a revolutionary costume's de rigeur.

The rhododendrons are hiding spies,
The pussy willows have beady eyes.
Binoculars through the privet hedge,
They peek at you through the window ledge with guile!

We're in a Revolution!
So win the Revolution with style!

Da da da da dum.