AT LARGE Fake News Monday: Re-animated Ted Kennedy Endorses Martha Coakley

BOSTON (CAP) - Republican officials are questioning the validity of the last-minute endorsement of Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley by the re-animated corpse of the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

"My friends, I ask you to join in this historic journey - to have the courage to choose change," said Kennedy at a rally at the Park Plaza Hotel, flanked by two large security personnel who seemed to be holding him up. "It is time again for a new generation of leadership. It is time now for ..."

At that point a voice that sounded similar to Kennedy's, but also not unlike that of Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons, shouted out "Martha Coakley!" A survey of video from the event shows that Kennedy's lips failed to move during the entire length of the presentation.

"I don't know, it just seems fishy to me," said RNC Chairman Michael Steele, whose party is banking on a Republican victory to derail President Obama's health care vote. "The way he was propped up, and didn't move his lips, and used the exact same words as his endorsement of Obama ... something's just not adding up.

"Also the rotting flesh," he added.

Still, Kennedy's resurrection and subsequent endorsement of Coakley, the state's attorney general, seems to have gone a long way toward energizing the Democratic base in Massachusetts.

"I think it says something about the importance of this race that Sen. Kennedy was willing to come back from the dead to express his opinion," said Cindy Markenson of Brookline, Mass. Markenson, a lifelong Democrat, said she'd actually been leaning toward Republican candidate Scott Brown because Coakley is "so dull that just looking at her actually makes my molars ache."

But now, the dead Kennedy has convinced her to rethink her position.

"It was very moving, his speech, and the way he would lift his arm to wave in tandem with his security personnel, and how he even took time to go water skiing from the back of his yacht even though it's January," she said. "Kind of unfortunate how he kept bouncing off those buoys, though."

[Read the rest at CAP News.]