The Patriot Post® · Political Musical Chairs

By Albert Maslar ·
https://patriotpost.us/commentary/17585-political-musical-chairs-2013-04-08

Politicians continue to prove their opportunistic tendencies when after not gaining political office in their own states, play musical chairs, and shop for another locale to run for office from the newly adopted domicile. How dumb can the electorate be? Don’t ask. Defeated former Mass. Senator Scott Brown threw up a trial balloon suggesting he might run for Senate in New Hampshire. Say what?

A most notorious switcheroo was engineered by Arlen Specter who lost the Pennsylvania Senate seat he held for six terms but quit the Republican Party to become a Democrat, which in fact he always was, despite his running on the Republican ticket, but as a Democrat. Confusing? Catastrophic for the country?

Specter officially switched parties in April 2009, giving Democrats the 60th vote needed for implementation of the Senate Cloture Rule 22, the only formal procedure for the Senate to break a filibuster, thus enabling ObamaCare to proceed to a full vote and eventually to become the budget-busting law of the land. Without Specter’s 60th vote, there would be no ObamaCare to divide and gridlock Congress and the country.

Specter, having enabled ObamaCare to proceed to a full vote then cast the 50th vote for ObamaCare, thus guaranteeing passage because as President of the Senate, in the event of a tie, Vice President Democrat Joe Biden is obligated to cast the deciding vote.

Little remembered is the effect of Conservative Rick Santorum in 2004 who backed Liberal Specter against Conservative Toomey – another reason that Santorum, who could not keep his own Senate seat, also could not muster backing necessary for being on the 2012 presidential Republican ticket. All the more reason to reject the unknown wannabes from confounding the primary balloting process that only help the opposition.

But the 60th Senate vote also got an assist when Al Franken won the Minnesota Senate seat in the 2009 election despite disputes and challenges involving the deciding votes to have been found in unsecured and unsubstantiated ballots in a car trunk after the election, not so curiously, all of them for Franken; surprise, anyone?

Franklin Roosevelt supposedly quipped that “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.” And so it is that devious people, particularly politicians, who seem always to have a back-up or Plan B, ever-present in the performance of the acclaimed greatest politician since the legendary Bill Clinton.

Hillary Clinton is the ultimate carpetbagger and social climber, having moved from her relatively backwoods Arkansas digs to New York to take Senator Moynihan’s Senate seat. Hillary’s journey took her from Illinois to Wellesley College and on to Yale before she changed her name from Rodham to Clinton.

Hillary did not permit publicly known sexual escapades of hubby President Bill Clinton to impede her own political moves to the top. Hillary became First Lady in Arkansas before becoming ultimate First Lady, and now demands more, not unlike Oliver in the play demanding more food. The remaining question is whether Hillary will get her ultimate dream fulfilled and pass her First Lady title to First Man Bill Clinton. Which one is playing second fiddle?

Hillary, paddling through thick and thin of political rushing whitewater, is no problem as she moves through troubled waters like expert kayakers. Hillary fought Obama at every political turn until he became the powers that be and like kindred spirits, for political gain, quickly adopted each other, thus lending credence to the proverb of Chinese General Sun-tzu and military strategist about 400 BC; “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer” – a notion regrettably followed by the last words in the tragedy of Julius Caesar, “Et tu, Brute,” translated as “And you, Brutus,” the last words Caesar uttered when stabbed by his best friend, Brutus.

Hillary and Barack truly epitomize “Birds of a feather flock together,” another supposedly stale saying that is actually based on the defense mechanism of birds protecting themselves by having relative safety in numbers.

The above sayings and maxims go back centuries and millenniums, proving once again another adage, “There is nothing new under the sun,” also stipulated in Ecclesiastes 1:9; “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” That makes plagiarists out of all of us, certainly including the writer, that the best we can do is regurgitate the old as though independently and brilliantly discovered.

Comparative human brilliance is less than that of a candle glowing millions of light years away, existing in its own vacuum but never to be visible to the eye of the most powerful telescopes.