If It's This Cheap Being Self-Righteous, I'll take a Container Load

Sen. Ted Stevens was bribed. Flat out. By an oil company. At minimum, they rebuilt his house. They cut him in on real estate deals, had him find Native Alaskan fronts for sleazy defense contractors. Big Oil's best buddy. He took this all illegal privilege, and if he thought anything of this privilege, he thought it his fair due. Yet he was screaming all the while at the unfairness of his treatment, at the venality of people working modestly to stop the destruction of the earth, calling war opponents traitors, shrieking and ranting and whining and insulting and bullying all challengers.

Senator Stevens is a not a cheap felon. He is an expensive felon. The whole planet will bear the cost of his ceaseless, decades-long work to save gigantic energy multinationals from any responsibility for global environmental degradation. He can take all the credit he wants for building the redneck welfare state, the one where the myopic privileged reap most of the welfare. The Alaska he built spends less on higher education that before oil, sports a huge, bullying culture of public corruption, and recently featured the fastest growing child poverty in the United States. Ted Stevens took the palace of the wilderness and built a whorehouse. That Alaska is a now an international joke, notable even in a great nation that has lost the world's respect, is substantially his doing.

But the worst damage is that many Alaskans still can't* see the problem, still stick up for this troll, because this churning political cesspool has become normal.

Criminality in public office is the worst of crimes, because the damage to others is magnified immensely. Ted Stevens is a criminal, and the fact he has not resigned in disgrace is the strongest evidence of his absence of honor.

Ted's a WWII vet. I'd like to ask him if this was the system of government he fought for. I'd like to ask him if he really believes that putting the interest of multinationals ahead of his state and his nation in any way constitutes patriotism. I'd like to ask why doesn't he get the hell out of the way, and let his grandkids' generation try to get the train back on the tracks.

The answer is that Ted Stevens has an inexhaustible love of Ted Stevens.

Ted Stevens has brought decades of shame on the once great state of Alaska. But Alaska has yet to recognize it's own collective shame.


*(Of course, Can't lives on Won't Street.)