The Kennedy Name

Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz says the the Kennedy name is a source of most of Rhode Island representative Patrick Kennedy's woes, or at least the attention being payed to them in the press:

It's equally hard to imagine that the media would be going wild about his late-night car crash and prescription drug addiction if he weren't a Kennedy.

Going wild? The media have swallowed Kennedy's Ambien story whole, with nary a mention of the evidence pointing to alcohol, not prescription drugs, as the prime mover. The "name" driving the treatment of this story is not "Kennedy", it is "Democrat". A Repubican congressman in the same pickle would already have had his story torn to shreds and been forced to resign.