Arlen Specter is Guilty of Political Treason
US Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) announced this week that he was switching political parties. Initially he said that he was doing so because he didn't want to be "judged by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate," the same electorate he courted in his last election. But later, after he realized his statement depicted him as an ungrateful political opportunist, he said his decision was based on the idea that the Republican Party – which has moved more to the center in recent years – has “moved too far to the Right.” The truth is that Specter is a political opportunist who has literally thrown his constituency under the bus just to save his political career. In the political sense, he is a traitor.
The element of surprise surrounding this announcement comes in that he chose a time when the Republican Party can least afford to lose even one from their ranks. With anti-American, neo-Marxist Al Franken likely to be seated as the junior senator from Minnesota and the two Independent senators, Joseph Lieberman (CT) and Bernie Sanders (VT), voting with Democrats on social issues, President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have their “last man needed” to advance social programs that will redefine the authority of the American government and literally cripple the economy. Arlen Specter has handed Barack Obama the total of his agenda for at least the next two years and there isn't a damn thing the Republicans can do about it.
In Specter's formal announcement – in other words, after Specter's political spin doctors crafted an excuse for his narcissistic, self-serving party switch – he said:
"Since my election in 1980...the Republican Party has moved far to the right...I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans."
Really? The current Republican Party is now more to the right than during the Reagan Era? The spendthrift Republican Party of the 2000-2004 Era is more to the right of Newt Gingrich's Republican Party of the Conservative Revolution and Contract with America?
Is anyone buying this line of garbage?
The sad, despicable truth of the matter is that Specter switched parties because he was going to have his butt handed to him on a platter in the Pennsylvania Republican Primary Election, courtesy of Pat Toomey, former president of the Club for Growth, an organization that promotes a low-tax and limited-government agenda. Specter's political treason had nothing to do with ideology, but has everything to do with political longevity.
Not too long ago, former DNC Chairman and current Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell, let it be known that Democrats had been courting Specter to switch parties. Rendell is even quoted as saying that he, Sen. Bob Casey (D-PA) and Vice President Joe Biden had all tried to persuade Specter into turning his back on the Republican Party. At the time, Specter responded that “he didn't want to see Republican moderates vanish from the face of the Earth.” With Specter's announcement, it would be fair to assume this sentiment was based in opportunism and advanced as pure rhetoric.
Republicans were already well aware that he was less a Republican and more a Democrat. He voted for the stimulus package, which was vehemently opposed by all but three “Republicans,” and over the years Specter amassed a voting record that found him voting with the opposition party almost 50% of the time. And he begged to ride President Bush's coattails in 2004 for the fact that he was so disliked by core Republican voters in Pennsylvania. But Republicans were in no position to be subjected to defection after November of 2008. With an almost super-majority in the House and now a virtual filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, nothing stands between Barack Obama and the realization of some of the most fiscally irresponsible and constitutionally destructive legislative measures ever to be imposed on our nation.
Like it or not, the United States of America is now a one-party government run by the radical Left. And while, in the end, the blame for this predicament rests with those who were distracted by the “bright shiny thing”; who naively voted for the hollow rhetoric of “hope” and “change,” we could have had at least a fighting chance through the use of the filibuster to maintain the liberties and freedoms, the rights bequeathed to us to safeguard, had the traitor Specter honored the Pennsylvania electorate's ballot determination. With his political treason – and that is exactly what it is when you consider the fact that Pennsylvania voted in a Republican senator in Specter – he has usurped the authority of the people and the authority of the ballot box to further his political career, electorate be damned.
One has to wonder how many political “pieces of silver” the traitor Specter received for selling out his constituency for a political party.
Sign up for the OV Daily Newsletter
OV Social
Poppycock. The Republican party has become a party of Christian Reconstructionist deniers of he separation of church and state ; of anti- abortion obsessed creationists and of anti-intellectual global-warming deniers. Most of all the GOP is a party of absolutists who allow no room for dissent from their narrow sectarian views. As Rush Limbaugh, the unacknowledged grand poobah of this gaggle of fanatics and fools stated clearly, Arlen Specter "can take John McCain and his daughter with him."
The Republican Party has become a group of nasty, narrow-minded and vicious losers, whose main platform apart from Fundamentalist Christian absolutism is denial of the political reality that the country has moved past them. They can't get past the fact that President Obama, by openly and honestly communicating his attempts to deal with the mess George Bush left, is earning the trust of a deeply depressed and divided nation, while their "leadership," repeats slap-stick talking-points..
Newt Gingrich would have been a great politician before the age of video tape. He is brilliant and makes powerful points. His problem is that he has no conscience or no memory (which I doubt). His is the flexible morality of the always expedient answer. He sounds great and often has very good ideas, until one learns that Newt believes in nothing. He is routinely caught on tape - not merely in contradictions, but in diametrically opposing statements that are rationally irreconcilable. Yet, of all the available Republican leaders, Gingrich is the only one with a first class brain; the rest are, embarrassingly, third-rate. Except of course for Karl Rove, who is despicable, discredited and, probably, soon-to-be indicted.
There is no room remaining in their party for what they call "moderates." Those of us who are socially libertarian and fiscally conservative have been insulted by arrogant twits, on the basis of faith-based ignorance. As an early member of Republicans for Choice, I've watched this sick inter-mural drama play out for decades. The more people who are unwelcome the more that the freaks can have the little party that's left all to themselves. After being a big John McCain supporter in 2000 and watching how they party fixed the nominations to elect an ignorant, incompetent idiot, I joined RINOs for Obama.
Now we are told errant nonsense, like "nothing stands between Barack Obama and the realization of some of the most fiscally irresponsible and constitutionally destructive legislative measures ever to be imposed on our nation." That absurd analysis is from someone who presumes to speak for a party that rubber-stamped the war in Iraq, which is a national disgrace as well as a national, moral and fiscal disaster; from the party of the religion of deregulation (not that there is no blame to share there); from a party with a platform of fanatically antisocial anachronisms. No one is going to take this party seriously until it grows up, takes responsibility for the abject failure of the Bush presidency and tempers the untempered teenage-rage of its rhetoric, which makes the party both unattractive and untrustworthy.
The new chair of the GOP in Delaware said it right: The party has a choice "a big tent or a small coffin." This party has chosen to go down into the ground snarling. I say: Good riddance.
I came into the Republican Party to campaign for Senator Goldwater. "The Conscience of a Conservative," remains one of the most important books in my library. These young Republicans should read what a principled Conservative sounds like. Senator Goldwater lost an election on principles for a party that came back powerfully; John McCain lost a campaign built upon bigotry, ignorance and backwardness. There is no quick comeback from that position.
I'll close with a quote from my former Republican congressman Pete McCloskey, who NO ONE can accuse of opportunism, Pete left the GOP after 59 years, citing eloquently the defects of the party and the party's lack of will to honestly address or repair it's disordered opinions. Pete said: "I say a pox on them and their values." I'll let it go at that.