Here at OMT, as our loyal readers have come to know, we hate Republicans. We loathe them with an intensity that simply defies reason. We know that it’s probably irrational; we know that it affects our judgment, and our sense of balance and fair play.
We don’t care … we just go with it.
And as we so love hating them, authoritarian freaks that they are, it should come as no surprise that the defection of our own Senator Arlen Specter from the ranks of the Rushpublican Party to the Democrats just might be enough to bring us back from our time in the wilderness, ripping us away from our quiet reflection and compelling us to set about re-opening the long-closed OMT office suite once again.
While we were gone, we watched with ever-increasing glee as the GOP continued to slide down their slippery slope to implosion. It seemed that there was just one insane move after another.
Like the way they stood up en masse and said, “Hell no, we won’t help America” when it was time to vote for the stimulus bill.
Or watching their leadership cower under Rush Limbaugh’s fat (albeit short) thumb, as Republican after Republican first challenged and then kissed the feet of the great radio billionaire, from Congressmen and Senators to the party’s nominal leader, token extraordinaire Michael Steele.
Listening to Michelle Bachmann prove with her every utterance that, while you don’t have to be certifiably insane to be a Republican Congresswoman, it certainly doesn’t hurt.
Seeing Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal give his “response” to the President’s State of the Union Address, a performance that was better than any Saturday Night Live sketch of the past 10 years. Even the take-off of it done by 30 Rock’s Kenneth the Page couldn’t hold a candle to the original.
Watching as our old girlfriend, Sarah Palin, marshals her forces for the big run in ‘12, while her almost son-in-law, Levi Johnston and his wacky family reveal more dirty Palin laundry than all of those used designer clothes Sarah and her family ran up on the Republican’s tab and then left in a dumpster. Not that any of this matters much to our girl Sarah … it’s on to 2012!!
Then, another Republican governor, Rick Perry of Texas, openly suggested that Texas should secede from the union. Here at OMT, we wonder why we are the only news organization that is pointing out that this is an open act of treason, which, in time of war, as we are, thanks to the Republicans, is punishable by death.
Of course, now that Texas is on the front lines of swine flu coming up from Mexico, Governor Rick seems to have had a change of heart about Texas striking out on its own, as he’s now clamoring for federal assistance for vaccines, surgical masks and other measures to fight the flu. Unfortunately, one of the pieces of “pork” that the Republicans insisted be cut out of the stimulus bill was any assistance to the states for fighting potential epidemics, like swine flu. Ol’ Rick must be fit to be tied.
Tied and hanged, like the treasonous bastard that he is.
And let’s not forget the Republican’s plan to rebuild an economy that they themselves shattered — with, guess what … tax cuts for the rich — that was openly ridiculed by everyone from the Democratic caucus, to Jon Stewart, to their very own Newt Gingrich.
And what of Newt, that anti-intellectual pseudo-intellectual, who pedals long-discredited theories, economic and otherwise, that sound good to people who cannot think, and who has positioned himself as the “alternative” to Rush, Sarah, and Bobby Jindal.
These are the choices ?
And now, as the next logical step in the transformation of the Republicans into a regional party, we learned today that Vice President Joe Biden has finally convinced his old friend and Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter to step off the sinking ship of fools, and come on over to the Democratic Party.
It’s been clear for some time now that moderates like Arlen are no longer welcome in the Republican Party. And Arlen Specter in particular. We remember back during the reign of President Shit-for-brains, when the Republicans held a majority in the Senate, and Arlen, up for chairman of the Judiciary Committee, made the intemperate remark that George Bush shouldn’t expect that his committee would simply rubber-stamp Bush’s choices for the courts, especially the Supreme Court.
Well, the leaders of the party descended on poor Arlen as though he were a foreign organ introduced into their body and they were the immune system. They threatened to strip him not only of the chairmanship, but his very membership on the committee.
Arlen responded by creating the prototype that today’s Republicans now use when they mistakenly criticize Republican Party Chairman Limbaugh.
Specter held on to his judiciary committee chairmanship, but it was clear that the right wingnuts were in complete control of the party. A condition which not only persists until this very day, but which has become even more deeply stained into the fabric of the party. And all the OxyClean in the world won’t get it out, no matter how much Billy whats-his-face shrieks.
Here at OMT, we have never, never cast a vote for a Republican in the entire time since we first registered to vote, at 19 in 1971, the year that the 18-year-old vote made it into law. It’s a matter of principle with us, and we’re nothing if not steeped in principle.
Now, this doesn’t mean that we always vote straight Democratic, by any means. We’re not afraid to cast a vote for a third-party candidate if we feel that they reflect our positions more than the Democratic candidate does. And we’re not afraid to write in a candidate’s name either. We even once wrote in our buddy Skippy’s name for a judgeship. He didn’t win.
But we’ve never voted for a Republican.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There was one time.
Back in 1992, when Arlen Specter was running for re-election, the Democrats, in one of their moments of periodic lunacy, nominated Lynn Yeakel, a woman with a Palin-like intellect, whose primary qualification for the United States Senate seemed to be indignation over the previous year’s confirmation hearings of Clarence Thomas for the US Supreme Court. Specter, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, played a prominent role in those hearings, dishing out some pretty tough questioning to Anita Hill, a former clerk of Judge Thomas, who had come forward at the 11th hour with sexual harassment allegations against Thomas.
It was an ugly affair, in the main, and while we have a pretty high threshold of disgust, most of America was shocked and appalled by United States Senators talking about “penises”, photographs of naked people in flagrante delicto, and a gentleman who went by the name of “Long Dong Silver”, a name which we discovered subsequently was most apropos, to say the least.
Throughout, Anita Hill stood her ground, while Arlen, compelled by the other members of the committee to dust off his old prosecutor’s hat, peppered her with question after question in search of the truth, which unfortunately came off as though he was beating up on her.
For his part, Judge Thomas came back to testify, pissed off as all get-out, and made his now famous “high-tech lynching” speech, live TV cameras whirring, the nation transfixed before their screens.
In the end, the committee recommended that Thomas be confirmed (but it was a very tough decision, we have no doubt), and he went on to be confirmed by the full Senate. Anita Hill faded from public view, but has earned an asterisk in American History for her trouble.
Arlen took a lot of criticism for his role in this national psycho-drama, and since he was up for re-election the following year, the Democrats saw their chance to capitalize on the whole ugly mess.
So from out of nowhere comes hopelessly underqualified Democrat Lynn Yeakel, mad as hell, and not wanting to take it anymore. She got a lot of media attention, but when the reporters started asking her substantive questions, she either answered in ways remarkably like the way we saw Sarah Palin answer questions in last year’s Presidential campaign, or she changed the subject back to Arlen’s beating up of Anita Hill, which turned out to be Yeakel’s version of “pallin’ around with terrorists”.
Now, we were sympathetic to what Anita Hill had gone through. And we were fully prepared to vote against Arlen Specter for re-election. He was a Republican, after all, so it should be no problem, right?
Wrong.
Bullshit is bullshit, whether it comes from Republicans or Democrats, and Lynn Yeakel’s candidacy was bullshit. If the Democrats wanted to make a point by running a woman against Arlen Specter, and maybe even defeating him for re-election, the very least they could have done was to have found someone even remotely qualified to serve in the US Senate. You cannot tell us that in a state of over 11 million people, the Democrats couldn’t have fielded a female candidate with a stronger background than Lynn Yeakel for the Senate in 1992.
You just can’t.
Soon we were thinking that Specter wasn’t all that bad, as Republicans go. After all, isn’t it true that he used to be a Democrat? Sure, Ronald Reagan had been a Democrat once too, but Arlen Specter seemed to have a brain that was capable of functioning at a high level, something that Reagan missed out on completely.
And then there was the question of his incumbency. Rick Santorum had just been elected to Pennsylvania’s other Senate seat for the first time the previous year, in a special election to permanently fill the seat of the late Senator John Heinz. In light of this, did we really want the Commonwealth to lose Specter’s seniority in the Senate, and wind up with both of Pennsylvania’s Senators at the bottom of the pecking order? Not to mention having both of Pennsylvania’s Senators being underqualified idiots?
These were among the issues we were grappling with as the election approached that year.
Ultimately, we came to feel that the Pennsylvania Democratic Party had put us in an impossible situation in 1992. Ordinarily, we would have just skipped casting a vote in the Senate race. But after watching a campaign for the Senate that offended us in ways that all of the salacious smut that was bandied about in the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings didn’t even approach, we decided after much soul searching to break with our long tradition.
So in November of 1992, right after we pulled the lever down for Bill Clinton for President, we pulled down the lever for Arlen Specter before finally pushing the big red button.
We remind you that this was not an easy decision for us.
We never voted for another Republican again, for any seat, and in subsequent Senate elections, we always voted for Arlen’s opponent.
This one black mark on our record troubled us for years.
So you can understand why now, along with President Obama and the Democratic caucus in the Senate, we at OMT welcome Arlen Specter into the ranks of the Democratic Party with open arms.
Because what this means is that the one time we strayed and voted for a Republican has been now wiped clean. He may not have been a Democrat at the time we voted for him, but he had been once, and he is once again. So we no longer consider that to have been a Republican vote, and we urge you to recognize that fact.
It’s like having a criminal record expunged, you know? Our perfect Democratic voting record is restored.
And we don’t even have to make an Act of Contrition. We’ve always thought that the Act of Contrition was one of the most zany prayers in the entire Roman Catholic canon (no pun intended). But that’s a post for another day.
Welcome home, Arlen …
