Senate's Grumpiest Old Man Faces Charges

The proponent of the "Bridge to Nowhere" may be going somewhere after all. Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska was indicted on seven counts of corruption today involving doubling the size of his home at the expense of lobbyist friends.

They literally raised the roof of what is called Stevens' chalet by lifting the building onto stilts and putting an entirely new first floor under it.

For someone of my generation, the decline and fall of the irascible 84-year-old is a sad reminder that aging is no protection against self-destructive behavior.

Stevens started out as a World War II pilot who received the Distinguished Flying Cross for two years in the China-India-Burma Theater, supporting the "Flying Tigers" and Chinese combat units behind enemy lines.

Now, after 38 years in the Senate, during which he has grown increasingly ornery in pursuit of pork for his constituents, the Alaska Senator will be going on trial for making false statements on his Senate financial forms.

Long before he faces a jury, those constituents will be rendering a verdict on Stevens' continuing in the Senate in November.

While West Virginia's Robert Byrd, who turns 91 that month, is still going strong, the Stevens indictment raises questions about term limits in the Senate. Maybe 40 years is enough.

Bring Back the Gong Show*

If the war in Iraq and the ’08 election campaign were TV series, they would have been canceled by now. Both have been running too long and have no surprises left, as the Democratic debate tonight showed.

The only news in this latest chapter was the slippage of expectations about getting out of Iraq, now being discussed in terms of years rather than months by everybody but Richardson, Kucinich and Gravel, the bit players in the drama.

As surreal as the event at Dartmouth was what happened earlier in the day in Washington when the Senate approved a first step on the slippery slope to attacking Iran, designating its Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization by a vote of 76 to 22.

The bill had Joe Lieberman’s name on it as co-sponsor, and in an echo of 2002, Hillary Clinton was one of the majority, and ancient Robert Byrd was in the minority again.

The sense of déjà vu is so deadening that viewers may soon be doing what they usually do with reruns, tuning out. At least the Larry Craig show keeps coming up with surprises every day. Now that’s entertainment.

*In the late 1970s, the Gong Show featured awful amateur performers being gonged off the stage by a panel of pros.

"The Civil War Nobody Voted For"

OpEds come and go, but there was an unusual one in the New York Daily News the other day. Titled “This Is Not Our Fight,” its subhead read, “Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for.” The byline: “Robert Byrd & Hillary Clinton.”

Its final paragraph: “As Bush admitted in his State of the Union address in January, ‘This is not the fight we entered in Iraq.’ We could not agree more. This is not the fight Congress authorized, Mr. President. If you want to continue to wage this fight, come to Congress and make your case. Otherwise, bring our troops home.”

This was a collaboration by one Senator who wrote an OpEd (in the New York Times) in October 2002 opposing the resolution to allow Bush to invade Iraq and another who, while expressing admiration for his warning, voted for it.

Its appearance signals the seriousness of an effort this month to introduce a resolution to withdraw the 2002 authorization.

Of the myriad of proposals for bills to bring home the troops, this one offers the best hope for a Congressional challenge that, if passed by a veto-proof two-thirds vote in each house, would provoke a Constitutional crisis that might end up in the Supreme Court and test whether or not Justice Anthony Kennedy has become a permanent member of a conservative majority.

The OpEd itself, appearing in a major newspaper that has been gung-ho for the war, is a sign of the times. If a tabloid can change its mind, why can’t Congress?