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Not Guilty By Reason Of Being Kennedy

PeterK asks, “Do members of the Kennedy family ever take responsibility for anything?” Here’s what he’s talking about: She’s a mom, a human-rights leader — oh, and another fatherless Kennedy. Testifying in her own defense at her drugged driving trial Wednesday, Kerry Kennedy wasted little time before playing the “Daddy” card. “Daddy was the attorney […]

PeterK asks, “Do members of the Kennedy family ever take responsibility for anything?” Here’s what he’s talking about:

She’s a mom, a human-rights leader — oh, and another fatherless Kennedy.

Testifying in her own defense at her drugged driving trial Wednesday, Kerry Kennedy wasted little time before playing the “Daddy” card.

“Daddy was the attorney general during the civil rights movement and then a senator,” the 54-year-old testified, supposedly explaining why she grew up in Virginia, but coyly invoking the memory of her slain father, Sen Robert F. Kennedy.

As if jurors needed yet another reminder that a member of the American royal family was slumming right in front of their eyes.

“I have 10 brothers and sisters. My mother raised us because my father died when I was 8,” she said. Her lawyer, Gerald Lefcourt, asked how her father died.

“He was killed while running for president,” she reminded.

Even the judge told her to knock it off, that this was irrelevant to the charge, which is that she was driving under the influence of Ambien when she crashed her car. Kennedy claims that she took the Ambien by accident, mistaking it for another pill, and that after 10 years of taking Ambien, she had forgotten how fast it makes her sleepy.

She may be testifying truthfully, but I’m skeptical. I’ve been taking Ambien for six years, and I’ve never mistaken it for another pill. Believe me, when you depend on it for sleep, you know what an Ambien looks like. And boy, do I ever wish it made me sleepy. By this point, my tolerance is so high that Ambien doesn’t make me sleepy; it makes it possible for me to sleep. Big difference. I wouldn’t drive on Ambien by any means, but the quick and deep sleep it provided the first year of use turned into a period of grogginess in the second and third years, then turned into the need for Ambien just to feel normal at bedtime. I highly, highly recommend to you all never to use Ambien if you can help it. You’ll become so dependent on it that normal sleep without it is impossible. Everybody I know who has used it for more than a year is in the same place as I am with the sleep drug. I’ve tried to wean myself off of it, but unless you have the time and the patience for enduring several miserable nights of insomnia, you’re not going to succeed.

Point is, after 10 years of regular use, Kennedy is habituated to Ambien, and is either a) not as affected by it as she’s claiming in this trial, and b) ought to have been all too familiar by this point with how the drug affect her. But maybe her Ambien mileage varies. What does not vary over the generations is that Kennedy sense of entitlement.

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