Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Away from the eulogies, other, sharper voices are remembering the late Edward Kennedy and they're unstinting in their honesty. Let's give the first word, then, to Virginia Postrel: "Unlike his brothers, he lived to become bloated and middle-aged and politically out-of-step with the times. He lived to lose — to Jimmy Carter, the antithesis of glamour — and to see Reaganism triumph. And, of course, he lived to experience a scandal, Chappaquiddick, that even the Kennedy family could not retouch away."

Next is Rod Dreher: "Whenever we think of Camelot, and the Kennedy mystique, we edit out the vulgarity and the debauchery of the Kennedy men, who were, I feel safe in saying, not uncommon for their time and place and class."

Now, a constituent, Philip Greenspun: "I just noticed that Barack Obama gave a televised speech from Martha's Vineyard in praise of Ted Kennedy. Though he was speaking just a few miles from where Mary Jo Kopechne died, President Obama did not mention her."

For those who would say that this is bitter, boilerplate conservative comment, here's a moving remembrance from David Frum: "He knew and he expressed the sorrow of human life..."

If, after all that, you want to read something really grotesque, go to the Huffington Post, where Melissa Lafsky ponders "what Mary Jo Kopechne would have had to say about Ted's death" and concludes "Who knows — maybe she'd feel it was worth it." The ex-lawyer Lafsky knows that the dead cannot sue. De mortuis nil nisi bonum indeed.