-By Frank Salvato
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.
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Frank Salvato is the managing editor for The New Media Journal . He serves at the Executive Director of the Basics Project, a non-profit, non-partisan, 501(C)(3) research and education initiative. His pieces are regularly featured in over 100 publications both nationally and internationally. He has appeared on The O’Reilly Factor, and is a regular guest on The Right Balance with Greg Allen on the Accent Radio Network, as well as an occasional guest on numerous radio shows coast to coast. He recently partnered in producing the first-ever symposium on the threat of radical Islamist terrorism in Washington, DC. His pieces have been recognized by the House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict. He can be contacted at oped@newmediajournal.us
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