Legs and the Hypocritical Left

John F. Kennedy, Jr. has been gone for nearly 20 years, after having crashed his small plane into the sea while flying to a family wedding in Hyannisport, killing his wife and her sister along with himself that night.

As the son and political heir to the president, we all watched JFK, Jr. on his career, as he built a magazine (that failed fairly quickly), married, had his marital spats plastered all over the tabloids, and then lost his life in a sad event that added to the narrative of the "bad luck of the Kennedy family."

I didn't know him, of course, so I've no real handle on what kind of person he actually was, and we'll never really know that.  We won't know that in part because he was a Kennedy, the biggest family public relations firm ever, and in part because he was born into prominence, a handsome fellow cast as a prince from his earliest days and susceptible to being made by the press into something other than what he really was -- whatever that may be.

The left, despite its protestations that it hates royalty and is all about the common man, was perfectly willing to dump all that royalty-hatred to spin tales of the Kennedy family.  Royalty they were, and there is little doubt that had the younger JFK chosen a political career, he would have been swept into office on his name alone.

So it was with some interest that I picked up a magazine in a salon where my best girl was having her nails done.  The magazine was "People", which is usually great fodder for killing 20 minutes or so in a doctor's office ... or a nail salon.  It gets deeply into nothing at all, and it has nice pictures of famous people, although the older I get, the less I identify the people who are now supposedly famous.

The cover of the magazine was a picture that let us know that the feature article was going to be a feature on the younger JFK's wife, Carolyn Bessette, who perished with him in the plane crash.  She was a wonderful person, the article went on, very nice and generous and all that good stuff.  We never saw the "real" Carolyn, it told us, who was afraid of the paparazzi although her husband tolerated them, all that kind of content.

Then I noticed a reference to John Jr. having gone to Europe and meeting with Princess Diana about some charity topic or other.  It might have been in the caption of a picture of the both of them, but there, prominently, the article noted JFK, Jr. having said of the princess when he returned, "She has nice legs."

I don't know if reading that struck you the way it did me, so I'll tell you how it struck me.  Diana was the Princess of Wales, actual royalty rather than the pretend type originally foisted on us by the grandfather of JFK, Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy, the bootlegger, womanizer and seller of various items to the Nazis in the '30s.  She and JFK, Jr. have both been gone a couple decades, now.

The tone of the article and particularly the mention of the younger JFK's comment about her legs were clearly meant as a positive toward young John.  "Oh, how cute", we were supposed to have read into the comment.  "Our prince thought their princess had nice legs."  In other words, it was perfectly wonderful that he said something objectifying toward the princess.

Why?  Because he was a hero of the left, that's why.  What struck me is that if, say, Donald Trump, Jr., also the married son of a president, had said the exact same thing about Kate Middleton, the next generation's princess, well, it would have blown up in a scandal of epic proportion.  People magazine would have had it on the cover, all right, but I can bet you it would not have been in a complimentary way, and God help the person who resurrected the JFK, Jr. quote about Diana to portray the hypocrisy.

Now, to my knowledge, Donald Trump, Jr. has never made a comment about any attributes of Kate Middleton, certainly not that have been quoted.  For his sake, I hope he doesn't.  But I can guarantee you if it were ever to be said and heard, he would not get the worshipful "Oh, isn't that cute" gloss-over from People or from any other print or Web journal.

And you know that's true.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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