Planet Earth is in mourning today over the untimely death of Senator Cuddly Teddy Bear Kennedy, the greatest statesman the world has ever seen.
The youngest brother of legendary cock-dipping President John F Kennedy, the heroic Edward Bear first came to public attention in 1950, when he was thrown out of Harvard for cheating. A stint in the US Army followed, in which he earned the respect of his superiors in Paris for his fearless single-handed assaults on the mimeograph machine while his less well-connected compatriots were dying in droves in Korea. Concerned that his son and spare back-up presidential candidate might succumb to a lethal paper cut, his bootlegging, Britain-hating father explained to the Harvard authorities who he was, with the happy result that Little Ted was readmitted to the faculty, graduating summa cum easy in 1956.
When young Edward Bear's philandering brother became President in 1960 - where he would carve himself a special place in American hearts, bravely forging a new era of world peace by launching a failed invasion of Cuba, bringing the world to the brink of nuclear Armageddon and sending tens of thousands of 'military advisors' to Vietnam - their father Joe succeeded in persuading the governor of Massachusetts to allow a family friend to keep the freshly-vacated Senate seat warm until Little Ted was old enough to sit in it, rather than going through all the fuss and bother of giving it to somebody with a different surname. Cuddly Teddy duly inherited his place in the Senate in 1962, and remained comfortably superglued to it until his death.
In 1964, a twin-engined plane in which the fresh-faced senator was travelling crashed on landing, killing the pilot and an aide. Edward Bear was dragged from the wreckage, still glued to the senatorial seat - the weight of which may have caused the crash, according to some conspiracy theorists who doubt the official explanation of lightning unaccountably bringing down the unearthed plane. The impact left the backup Kennedy suffering from lifelong spinal weakness - which was to resurface spectacularly on the night of July 18, 1969.
On the fateful night, Edward Bear was attending a party on the small Massachusetts island of Chappaquiddick when he suddenly realised he was very tired and had to leave so suddenly that he was unable to wait for his chauffeur to finish his meal. A young aide of his brother Robert, Mary-Jo Kopechne, was also struck with a sudden overwhelming urge to leave the party (and her hotel keys and purse), and gratefully accepted a lift. Shortly afterwards, their Oldsmobile left the road to the Edgartown ferry, driving along a dirt track whose bumps and hollows went unnoticed by the tired but capable Senator Kennedy, until it missed a bridge, slid into a water-filled channel and sank upside down, taking the 22-year-old Kopechne to her death.
After struggling free from the wreck, the brave Cuddly Teddy was suddenly troubled by a recurrence of spinal weakness and decided - after sitting down for fifteen minutes to consider how best to rescue his drowning passenger - to stroll back to the party for assistance, declining to knock on the doors of four houses along the way in case they were inhabited by Republicans. When he and others returned to the scene of the accident some time later, they heroically decided to do nothing, leaving Senator Little Ted to swim back to the mainland, check into his hotel and call it a night, somehow forgetting to ring the authorities and report a fatal accident. When he woke the next morning he tried to phone the police, but somehow kept misdialling and getting through to various sympathetic friends.
Eventually, two fishermen notified the police later that morning that there was an overturned car in the creek. A police diver found the drowned Kopechne inside, where she had apparently survived for several minutes with her head in a pocket of air before dying - long enough to be rescued - while Edward Bear was heroically collecting his thoughts. Senator Kennedy was traced as the owner and taken to Edgartown Police Station, where he dictated a statement to his aide Paul Markham, apparently mistaking his employee for a police officer. He was subsequently charged with leaving the scene of an accident after causing injury, rather than third-degree murder, perjury and driving to endanger - charges which might well have inconvenienced his father - and sentenced to two months suspended. The Kopechne family decided not to take legal action following a damning inquest, claiming that "we figured people would think we were looking for blood money." Instead, they accepted $90,904 from Little Ted and $50,000 from his insurance company.
Unfortunately for the saintly Edward Bear, the incident was unfairly raised by Republicans, Communists, anarchists, liberals, devil-worshippers and people with long memories when he stood for the Democrats' presidential nomination in 1979. Tragically for the Kennedy dynasty - and, by extension, America - the party decided that even lame-duck president and failed jogger Jimmy Carter was less of a liability, and went on to hand the leadership of the free world to a third-rate amnesiac actor from Hollywood.
Undaunted, Cuddly Teddy went on to single-handedly bring peace to Northern Ireland, frequently appearing in Irish pubs clutching a tankard of Guinness as far from his nostrils as possible whilst waiting for photographers to appear. In fact, the senator often took valuable time out from his re-election campaigns to visit Northern Ireland for a pint of ditchwater and a few holiday snaps for the folks back home.
He recently appeared at President Barack Obama's inauguration ceremony, coincidentally inspiring numerous commentators to compare the forthcoming presidency to the golden days of Camelot, but without Marilyn Monroe jumping out of a cake before dying in mysterious circumstances.
Little Ted's untimely death from a brain tumour now leaves a Kennedy-shaped hole at the heart of American politics for the first time since the 1930s, although it is probably only a matter of time before younger members of the patrician family rise again to remind Americans of their increasingly-diluted genetic link to the greatest dick-waving president in history.
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