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RUSH: I tell you, folks, this is just unbelievable. There’s actually a piece at the Huffing and Puffington Post on what would Mary Jo Kopechne have thought of Ted’s career. It’s written by a woman, and the last line: ‘Who knows — maybe [Mary Jo Kopechne]’d feel it was worth it.’ Are we to believe now that liberal young women like to die for the cause of advancing Kennedys’ careers?

JOHNNY DONOVAN: And now, from sunny South Florida, it’s Open Line Friday!

RUSH: I kid you not, folks. I kid you not. And now we’ve got this Ed Klein guy on TV saying Ted Kennedy loved Chappaquiddick jokes! He would ask people if they’d heard any. My gosh, if Ted Kennedy liked Chappaquiddick jokes I guess we can tell some. Whoa! What a day this is going to be. It’s Open Line Friday and I am Rush Limbaugh. I’m here for three hours and when we go to the phones the content of the program is all yours pretty much fair game whatever you want to talk about. The telephone number is 800-282-2882; the e-mail address ElRushbo@eibnet.com. Melissa Lafsky, ex-lawyer blogger and writer writing at the Huffing and Puffington Post: ‘What Would Mary Jo Kopechne Have Thought of Ted’s Career?’ and here are the last couple of ‘graphs.

‘Still, ignorance doesn’t preclude a right to wonder. So it doesn’t automatically make someone (aka, me) a Limbaugh-loving, aerial-wolf-hunting NRA troll for asking what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted’s death, and what she’d have thought of the life and career that are being (rightfully) heralded.’ Now, the premise of this is that Mary Jo Kopechne’s death actually is what launched Ted’s Senate career because that’s where he had to go to rehabilitate and so forth and so she says: ‘Who knows — maybe [Mary Jo Kopechne]’d feel it was worth it,’that drowning or whatever, dying in Ted Kennedy’s car was worth it? What liberal women like to die for the cause of advancing the careers of Kennedys? This is unbelievable.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: By the way, did you see the TV ratings for the cable networks that have gone wall-to-wall Kennedy? They’re in the tank. They’re in the tank. The only people that really care about this, to the extent they do, are the media. It’s a closed little circle. It’s a closed little clique. The rest of the country is not interested in it.

And I tell you, I watched some of this, and I don’t remember this lovey-dovey devotion to Ronald Reagan when he died. I remember the media being stunned and shocked that so many people showed up at the parades in California. Well, the people lining the route as the hearse was going to his library, the stuff in Washington, the official state funeral in Washington. The media was stunned. But nobody’s watching it. I mean, these people are dying doing this. They’re just talking to themselves. That’s really what they’re doing. They’re talking to themselves and nobody is watching. The numbers just tanked. So since they’re doing that, people say, ‘You ought to play some of your Kennedy parodies as our own tribute,’ and I don’t know, folks.

I don’t know. You can go to RushLimbaugh.com if you’re a member, and you can hear them all there. I mean, we have all of the parodies. Well, we haven’t uploaded some of the most recent ones. But there are some great ones: The Philanderer, Let’s Bork Again. You… (interruption) Yeah, the talking and couldn’t understand him. That was great during the Clinton reelection of 1996. Oh, I know, there’s a bunch of good ones. I don’t know, I just… (interruption) I can’t believe it. You three in there who are constantly warning me not to do stuff, ‘Oh, no, don’t say that! Oh, gosh, no. Rush, don’t!’ These three are egging me on to go do some of these Kennedy parodies? What do you think? Ah, the voice of reason, the broadcast engineer steps in without my even asking him and says, ‘No.’

You guys… I’ll tell you why you’re doing this because I’m going on vacation and think I’m going to escape any heat and you just want to have some laughs here. This is a very solemn day. It’s a very, very solemn day, I can tell by watching the State-Controlled Media. Well, I know. He asked for Chappaquiddick jokes. Ted Kennedy laughed. He asked if anybody had any new Chappaquiddick jokes. Here, let me grab that sound bite. Hang on here. It’s Ed Klein, number nine. This was on the radio in Washington, DC. Ed Klein, editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine. I don’t know if he’s former editor or the current editor but he’s being interviewed here by Katty Kay of the BBC, and Katty Kay says, ‘Senator Kennedy would often make jokes at his own expense, right, Ed?’

KLEIN: (chuckling) I don’t know if you know this or not, but one of the — his favorite topics of humor was indeed Chappaquiddick itself and he would ask people, ‘Have you heard any new jokes about Chappaquiddick?’ That is just the most amazing thing. It… Not that he didn’t feel remorse about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, but that he still always saw, um, the other side of everything and the ridiculous side of things, too.

RUSH: That is unbelievable. That is sick. Folks, that’s just not normal. I’m sorry. You are in a car, it goes off the bridge, a woman dies, and you don’t report it, and you try to get out of it, and you do get out of it, and you want to hear jokes about it for the rest of your life? And this becomes something that you’re known for in your inner circle and it’s explained away by saying, ‘Ah, Ted still liked to see the other side of everything, and the ridiculous side.’ What was ridiculous about that was his behavior! For crying out loud, a woman dies in his car and he wants to hear jokes about it? I can’t relate. I can’t relate. (interruption)

Yeah, of course we hear about the good sense of humor. Yip yip yip yip yahoo. I’ll tell you what, I remember the story. This is a true story. The New York Daily News had the pictures. Senator Kennedy was vacationing off the coast of the South of France. He was in a boat, a speedboat with a quite-attractive young woman, and they were both decked out in their swimsuits. And we know this because there were helicopters, you know, paparazzi taking pictures. One of the pictures from the New York Daily News shows the woman diving off the side of the boat for a swim. The next picture shows Senator Kennedy doing the cannonball going in after her (which is probably the first time he went in the water after a woman).

The next couple pictures show him back in the boat engaged in hanky-panky — and the pictures got shown around before they were published in the New York Daily News and they showed them to Senator Howell Heflin of Alabama. And Heflin looked at it said (doing legendary Heflin impression), ‘Well, I do declare! Ha! It sho’nuff look to me like Senator Kennedy done changed his position on offshore drillin’.’ Ah, there’s all kinds of these stories going around, but I don’t know that this, ladies and gentlemen, is the day for that kind of thing. You gotta play number ten, Mike, Judy Woodruff, this is on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer last night. Special senior correspondent Judy Woodruff had an exchange with the presidential historian Michael Beschloss about the passing of Senator Kennedy. (laughing) It’s funny because she’s all enraptured here in Kennedy nostalgia, but then listen to what she wonders about.

WOODRUFF: If the Kennedys were so influential, how do you explain the many years of Ronald Reagan, of the two Bush presidencies, the fact the country is so divided. Does that mean the Kennedys weren’t so influential after all?

BESCHLOSS: Not a bit, because the country always goes through conservative and liberal periods. In the 1960s that was a time that was ripe for Kennedy liberalism.

RUSH: This is still great ’cause Judy Woodruff says, ‘What are we doing here? All this influence of the Kennedy family and look what we’ve got to put up with, eight years of Reagan. We’ve had to put up with 12 years of a Bush in the White House.’ (laughing) These people are just wringing their hands. They’re so filled with angst.

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