The Palins and the Kennedys

Apparently it's big news that Sarah Palin's daughter's boyfriend's mom was arrested for abusing Oxycontin. Why this is making headlines is beyond me. 

The highly qualified Caroline Kennedy ("I care about a lot of things") is also in the news, as she is likely to be appointed to Hillary Clinton's Senate seat. I haven't heard anyone mention recently that she has an uncle who, on a summer evening in 1969, left a party (completely sober, I'm sure) with a young female staffer in his car, "parked" for a while in a secluded area, and then drove off a bridge into a channel at Chappaquiddick Island, MA. He swam to safety and then did what any of us would have done: he waited until the next day (after the body was discovered) to tell the police. There were several houses with people home close by and it was later determined that she probably survived for about 25 minutes after the car was submerged. He probably reasoned that avoiding the damage that drunk-driving and adultery would do to his political career was more important than the life of Mary Jo Kopechne (he overestimated the Democratic voters of Massachusetts). Authorities declined to press charges for manslaughter. I'm sure that had nothing to do with the fact that Caroline's uncle was a United States Senator. A few years prior, his brother vacated the Massachusetts Senate seat to become President and arranged for Caroline's uncle to be appointed to the seat, where Ted Kennedy remains to this day.