Arlen Specter and more on Edward Kennedy

I had intended to write a blog on Arlen Specter and then old Arlen proved truth is stranger than fiction.

Arlen worked in Washington once upon a time. He was a Democrat. He was a staff lawyer for the Warren Commission and devised the famous "one bullet theory" of the Kennedy assassination to force the evidence to fit the conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. Whatever the truth was, Arlen was working in the service of baloney.

Arlen was tough-on-crime District Attorney in Philadelphia once upon a time and then was celebrity defense attorney for an peace "activist" turned girl-friend-killer, the Unicorn Killer, Ira Einhorn. Ira jumped bail that had been posted by Seagram's heiress, Barbara Bronfman, and was only brought to justice in 2008.

Then he ran for the Senate. That's another story. The man's karma could scarcely be blacker. He was the big noise in the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings.

The above was originally intended to show that I can write unpleasant things about Republicans . . .and then the scum jumps the aisle.

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Now back to the sainted old lion of the Senate. Please don't look at his wife too closely. She works for a great many lobbyists (some would say crooks, gangsters and terrorists) whose seek the old lion's influence and support. Robert Bauer's book on the CIA, See No Evil, documented this. There were recent requests for her to make her tax returns and client list public and these requests were ignored. He's sick. One brother died flying in WWII. Two brothers were assassinated. His father was a gangster. His own life has been in the service of himself. Many lives are messy. Edward Kennedy's life is more messy than most.

Arlen Specter and Edward Kennedy are soul mates.

The Obama Mess really is Bush's Fault

The 2008 election results were the consequence of Bush's terrible mis-management of the 2006 Congressional elections.

If Bush had replaced Rumsfeld the day before the 2006 election, instead of the day after the election, how many voters would have given support to the Republican administration? Across the USA, how many votes went Democratic simply because voters were sick of Rumsfeld?

Ditto for Ashcroft, who was appointed Attorney General as consolation prize because he lost his bid for the Senate in 2000 to a man who had died in an airplane crash during the campaign.

Nationally, how many votes swung Democratic just because Bush and Cheney were so damn smug about themselves?

The Senate swung to Democratic control in 2006 when Richard Allen lost Virginia by 1,500 votes. Could 750 voters have changed their minds if, when confronted with a meaningless media frenzy over the use of a meaningless word, "macaca," that, in North Africa, is a disparagement . . .and Allen's mother admitted that her family had been Jewish in Tunisia generations back and had hidden it by becoming Catholic (without telling her son) . . .and dumbass Allen said, "Gee, I didn't know" where he could have said, "Gee, how about that! Isn't that great and a lesson to us all!"

Rick Santorum lost Pennsylvania for himself and the Republicans by 15,000 votes. That's after ignoring the advice of professionals to campaign on what he had done for Pennsylvania. He preferred to talk about terrorism. And the majority of Pennsylvanians thought that the Democratic candidate was the ex-governor, when the candidate was the ex-governor's son with the same name.

The result was a muddle, 2006-2008, so that voters couldn't distinguish what was Bush's fault and what was Pelosi's and Reid's fault . . .and the Dem's were happy to blame it all on Bush.

This mess is Bush's muddle, in the sense that he set the stage for it in 2006.