Well, I guess he always wanted to be remembered for making an impact on Alaska:
Former Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, died in a small plane crash in southwest Alaska that killed four other people, officials said Tuesday…
Stevens, 86, the longest-serving Republican senator in history, was among nine people on board when the 1957 DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter, crashed into a brush- and rock-covered mountainside between 7 and 7:30 p.m. Monday…
Stevens lost his re-election bid in 2008 after he was convicted on corruption charges, but the case was later thrown out because of prosecutorial misconduct… Through his long career, Stevens was chairman of the Commerce and Appropriations committees and became known for the proposed “Bridge to Nowhere,” which became a symbol of out-of-control “pork barrel” spending. The abandoned project would have linked the town of Ketchikan to its island airport at a cost of $398 million…
Former Gov. Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee, called Stevens “a warrior and a true champion of Alaska.”
They say that you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, and that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. We here at The American Jerk know, however, that “they” are morons.
It would be easy for me to spin out nine hundred or a thousand words mocking a provincial opportunist who bled the system for everything he could get his grubby hands on and who would do absolutely anything to be reelected – we know about the ugly and blatant voter “bribery”, but we can only suspect the rest based on long, lonely Alaska winters and protips from his colleagues in the Senate, and we all know you can’t spell “lilac ogle” without “collegial”.
However, with that said: the man has been out of the Senate for two years now, his pork barrel shenanigans have been safely defused, and no matter what he might have done during his career, none of it will help me drink this twelve-pack of Guinness and howl at losers on MasterChef.
Besides, Senator Ted Stevens is the rare public servant, despite his many transgressions, for whom it would be impossible to carve a more brutal and succinct epitaph than the man was capable of stating for his own dumbass self:
Here’s to Ted Stevens, who died the way he lived: believing that some laws didn’t apply to him, and pissing away public funds in a doomed effort to save himself.
[tags]Senator Ted Stevens, political humor, dark humor, satire[/tags]
