Would Arlen Specter's hypocritical bloviating be less obnoxious if he had any real principles besides self-adulation?

A photo not from the senator's website -- where none of
the pictures seem to have been taken in the last 20 years

by Ken

Do you wonder sometimes what some of our pols see when they look in the mirror?

I'm thinking just now of the ever-inscrutable Republican senior senator from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Arlen Specter.

Okay, I suppose Senator Specter isn't that inscrutable. He used to be what was known in those quaint times as a "moderate Republican." In those bygone days he was kind of hard to predict, because you never knew where he would choose to take a stand on his famous principles -- because in those days, sometimes he did actually take a stand and, you know, follow through.

Then his party went galloping off into the dark sunset of the Oh So Far Right (No, Righter, Righer!), and the senator came to his senses. Oh, he often talked about principles, but there was rarely any question any longer where his real priorities lay: perpetuating his own prestige and, especially, power.

I imagine I'm not the only one for whom the turning point came when he assumed the role of ringleader of the gang rape of Anita Hill during the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas's Supreme Court nomination. It was perhaps the first time I appreciated the stark contrast between the goals, and not just their strategies, of Ds and Rs on the Judiciary Committee.

Faced with Professor Hill's reluctantly proffered accusation of sexual harassment during her association with the nominee, the Ds -- led by then-Chairman Joe Biden -- obsessed over trying to determine the truth of the matter. Pathetic wretches! As if the truth mattered! The Rs, by contrast, focused on the only thing that mattered to them: winning.

I assume that, like the rest of us, the Rs had a pretty good idea that Hill was telling the truth, which gave them all the more reason not to be suckered into the fool's game of truth-seeking. No, they went straight for character assassination, and nobody did it better than our Arlen, who deployed his full prosecutor's bag of tricks in what was, as of then, the vilest public performance I had witnessed in the U.S. Congress. (I'm not counting the film of Sen. Joe McCarthy in action. But if that's where Specter enthusiasts have to reach to surpass their guy's vileness, I think their case is lost.)

Of course, those were more innocent times. Modern-day Republicans have made that sort of gutter-wallowing their model, and built on it (cf. the 2008 presidential campaign of Young Johnny McCranky, and for that matter most every Republican race across the country).

Of course I respect Senator Specter for his heroic struggles against cancer. But when you look at the use he has made of the additional leases on life he has won, well, "respect" isn't a word that pops to mind.

It was hardly surprising that when it came to the real crunch, which is to say the long darkness for truth, justice, and the American way that was the Bush regime, there aren't many pols who behaved more abominably than our Arlen. Most of the Bush rubber-stampers were at least open about their degraded values. Our Arlen, however, often continued to profess loyalty to the Constitution and legal system that the regime was so ruthlessly dismantling. Every now and then he would make noises that were made to sound like actual acts of defiance of the regime, as in the matter of the blatantly illegal Bush military tribunals. But in the end he always caved. Always, without exception. He racked up what in baseball parlance is known as an ohfer -- 0 for the Bush regime. It's hard to believe that any of the regime malefactors lost as much as a moment's rest over his theatrical posturing.

As the top-ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, he can said to have presided over the systematic destruction of the Justice Dept. and the perversion of the federal justice system by people who whose every waking effort was devoted to destroying the country's legal fabric, transforming it all into the enforcement arm of Karl Rove's White House political operation. The confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney general was bad enough. Who knew that the regime would find him too principled, and come up with a replacement, Idiot Al "The Torture Guy" Gonzales, whose incompetent and corrupt tenure will be studied by historians and legal scholars for decades if not centuries to come?

While the Justice Dept. was being run by America-hating sociopaths and staffed at all levels -- up to the highest -- by thugs, dilettantes, and idiot children whose legal skills wouldn't have qualified them to take orders at Burger King, Arlen Specter sat on his fat, lazy, self-important, corrupt ass and let the good times roll. Remember that for the majority of the Bush regime's existence, he wasn't ranking minority member but chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Every depradation, every breach of justice and trust perpetrated by the Bush Gang had either the active blessing or the passive I-don't-give-a-fuck sign-off of master hypocrite Specter. Just as everyone involved in the running of the Justice Dept. at least under the Gonzales Reign of Legal Horror should now be under indictment, so should their master overseer and enabler, Arlen Specter.

Now the Senate's Lion of Injustice has announced his intention to throw a monkey wrench into the confirmation proceedings of Eric Holder to be attorney general, if not actually jeopardizing the nomination then at least significantly delaying the start of a task so monumental that there's no time to lose: rebuilding the Justice Dept. from the wreckage left behind by the marauders of the Bush regime.

The goniff Specter has announced that his exalted principles require him to look into Holder's role in the pardon of Marc Rich. Now the Rich pardon was far from the Clinton administration's finest hour, but it wasn't Holder's idea, and if President Clinton and his advisers were determined to do it, it's doubtful that Holder could have stopped them. Moreover, the Obama transition team is said to have sounded out the appropriate officials, presumably including Senator Specter, about the appointment.

What it comes down to, I guess, is our Arlen living up to the Grandstander's Pledge: to always do everything possible to draw attention to himself while solemnly promising never to attempt to accomplish anything of substance. The man who sat by and watched the Justice Dept. be dismantled by thugs and goons has gall beyond imagining to say "boo" to Eric Holder. Instead, he ought to take a good look in the mirror and try to figure out what to do with a man who did as much as anyone on the planet to destroy justice in the United States.

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