The Specter spectacle

Boston Globe ^ | November 18, 2004 | Ellen Goodman

[Tumbleweed_Connection]

DOES THIS mean that I have to rise to the defense of Arlen Specter? If the enemy of my enemy is my friend, is the target of my enemy my hero? Do I have to rally whole paragraphs around the senior senator from Pennsylvania? Puh-leeze.

In the aftermath of the election, the ayatollah wing of the Republican Party has insisted that their opposition to issues like same-sex marriage and abortion put the president back in office. That's their story, and they're sticking to it.

Now it's payback time, and the folks who already own the White House and Congress are itching for the last piece of property on the Monopoly board: the Supreme Court. The real fight won't come until and unless ailing Chief Justice Rehnquist resigns his post. But the wrangling over the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee is a pretty good warm-up.

Just days after Specter won a bruising reelection campaign in a state that the president lost, he was asked about court appointments. Specter offered his opinion that any candidate overtly ready to overturn Roe v. Wade wouldn't make it through the Senate. This rather ordinary analysis was interpreted as a threat to winning over the Supremes.

In short order, James Dobson, the patriarch of Focus on the Family, called him a "big-time problem" and said he must be "derailed." Conservative petitions were launched with the stern warning: "Do not allow this chameleon of a charlatan to become chairman."

Next, a less-than-supportive Senate leader, Bill Frist, called Specter's comments "disheartening." And on Tuesday, conservative Christian groups held a pray-in outside the Senate Office Building.

[Once-Ler]

Don't bet the farm on that, friend. No one can say for sure, but I think he would have won, as did Santorum.

Since Santorum campaigned for Specter during the primaries I'm guessing Santorum thought Toomey couldn't win.

[Radix]

"Even Ellen Goodman finds it hard to like Specter. In fact, nobody likes him."

I know that I do not like him, but it seems evident that people in Pennsylvania continue to vote for this ahole.

I am just as confounded about voters when I have to recognize that most of my neighbors still vote for a murderous drunken fat slime ball who just might be related to Michael Moore, namely, Ted Moore Kennedy!