Hello My name is Mary Jo Kopechne. I would have been 65 years of age this year. Read about me and my killer below.
When Sen. Ted Kennedy was merely just another Democrat bloating on Capitol Hill on behalf of liberal causes, it was perhaps excusable to ignore his deplorable past.
But now that he's become Sen. John Kerry's leading campaign attack dog, positioning himself as Washington's leading arbiter of truth and integrity, the days for such indulgence are now over.
It's time for the GOP to stand up and remind America why Sen. Kerry's chief spokesman had to abandon his own presidential bid in 1980 - time to say the words Mary Jo Kopechne out loud.
As is often the case, Republicans have deluded themselves into thinking that most Americans already know the story of how this "Conscience of the Democratic Party" left Miss Kopechne behind to die in the waters underneath the Edgartown Bridge in July 1969, after a night of drinking and partying with the young blonde campaign worker.
But most Americans under 40 have never heard that story, or details of how Kennedy swam to safety, then tried to get his cousin Joe Garghan to say he was behind the wheel.
Those young voters don't know how Miss Kopechne, trapped inside Kennedy's Oldsmobile, gasped for air until she finally died, while the Democrats' leading Iraq war critic rushed back to his compound to formulate the best alibi he could think of.
Neither does Generation X know how Kennedy was thrown out of Harvard on his ear
15 years earlier -- for paying a fellow student to take his Spanish final. Or why the US Army denied him a commission because he cheated on tests. As they listen to the Democrats' "Liberal Lion" accuse President Bush of "telling lie after lie after lie" to get America to go to war in Iraq, young voters don't know about that notorious 1991 Easter weekend in Palm Beach, when Uncle Teddy rounded up his nephews for a night on the town, an evening that ended with one of them credibly accused of rape. It's time for Republicans to state unabashedly that they will no longer "go along with the gag" when it comes to Uncle Ted's rants about deception and moral turpitude inside the Bush White House.
And if the Republicans don't, let's do it ourselves by passing this forgotten disgrace around the Internet to wake up memories of what a fraud and fake Teddy really is.
The Democratic Party, not to mention Sen. John Kerry, should be ashamed to have the national disgrace from Massachusetts as their spokesman. And the GOP needs to say so out loud.
I remember all of this and I'm sure most of you do, too.
