Novelist Joyce Carol Oates brings her pretentious prose to the death of Edward M. Kennedy. In doing so she illustrates how leftist intellectuals really are different from the rest of us, and not in good ways. Here is her macabre calculus regarding the vulgar life of Ted Kennedy and the Kennedy-shortened life of Mary Jo Kopechne:

Yet if one weighs the life of a single young woman against the accomplishments of the man President Obama has called the greatest Democratic senator in history, what is one to think?

Another left-winger on The Huffington Post was thinking in the same obscene vein, speculating that because Kopechne was a civil-rights activist that she’d approve of Kennedy’s later career, never mind that he left her to drown to save his ample behind:

Who knows — maybe she’d feel it was worth it.

These are not normal people.