It’s funny watching a Kennedy struggle with the Rittenhouse case By Andrea Widburg
I’ve never been a fan of the Kennedy mystique. When I think of John F. Kennedy, aside from the fact that I enjoy reminding Democrats that he would be a Republican now, I think of compulsive womanizing, massive drug cocktails, and the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco. My thoughts about Teddy Kennedy are even worse. With him, it’s a fake neck brace and Mary Jo Kopechne slowly suffocating in a car lodged in shallow water. I also think of his waitress sandwiches.
With those images in mind, I had to laugh (along with a lot of other people) when Maria Shriver, Teddy’s niece, announced on Twitter that she had no idea how to explain to her son how someone could commit a crime and not get “charged” for anything.
There’s a lot to unpack in the following tweet:
First, the tweet manages to imply that Shriver is trying to explain this mystery of life to a little boy, someone who is slowly learning his way around the world and struggling to form his own opinions. Maybe he’s ten or thirteen.
Nope. Her older son is 28 and her younger one is 24. Talk about infantilizing one of those boys…er, young men.
Second, Shriver has spent decades as a journalist and was First Lady of California during ex-husband Arnold Schwarzenegger’s term as a RINO governor in California’s statehouse. With that in mind, her statement that she’s shocked that Kyle Rittenhouse (who is much younger than both her sons) “didn’t get charged for anything” makes her sound like a moron.
What really happened back in September 2020 is that the Kenosha District Attorney charged Kyle with lightning speed. That’s why he was in court for three weeks, watching the allegations against him crumble.
Image: Maria Shriver photo by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0). Poster by Andrea Widburg.
Third, assuming solely for the sake of argument that Kyle committed the crimes alleged, how much lack of awareness does it take for Teddy Kennedy’s niece to grapple with the fact that someone might be guilty and not get charged or convicted. After all, Teddy Kennedy, whose reckless driving saw his car veer off a bridge and land upside down in shallow water, and whose incredible disregard for human life saw him leave Kopechne to drown while he tried to salvage his political career, was never charged. Instead, he was lauded as “The Lion of the Senate.”
And that wasn’t the only legal failure in the Kennedy family. Do you remember William Kennedy Smith, Maria’s first cousin, who was credibly charged with rape back in 1991? (An evening that, coincidentally involved Sen. Teddy “Waitress Sandwich” Kennedy himself.) After a much-publicized trial, Smith was acquitted.
All of which leads me to believe that, if Rittenhouse really had been guilty—which he most emphatically was not—Maria Shriver, of all people, should have known precisely how to explain his acquittal (or failure to be “charged”) to her adult sons.
Naturally, I was not the only one who found Shriver’s tweet ludicrous to the point of embarrassment:
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