More on A. Specter, Aside

I first became aware of A. Specter and his schtick in 1989, during the impeachment trial by a Senate committee of which he was a member and which was directed at a federal judge named Alcee Hastings, which I watched with great interest on C-span -- a proceeding that echoed the highly dramatic Watergate hearings on Richard Nixon earlier and that preceded the same sort of process for President Clinton a few years later.

 All three events were difficult, grueling, and sickening affairs, and they didn't exactly drape the people who held them with robes of glory (except for Barbara Jordan of Texas in the Nixon thing).  That probably goes far to explain why, with that so fresh in so many memories,  there was no stomach in Congress for putting the same screws to GW Bush, even though he deserved to be officially pilloried even more than Nixon.  And meanwhile the attempt to oust W.J. Clinton didn't in any way compare, because it was so totally unnecessary and ridiculous.  I paid as little attention as possible to that, and as a consequence  I think that today I am -- unlike the mass of American citizens who watched and listened with their tongues hanging out -- better off for that avoidance.

Because the authorities can too often represent a criminal element in and of themselves, as the GW Bush administation showed in profusion and as a town in Texas   is showing now by having joined in infamy the enormous list of police robberies and shakedowns throughout history, not giving them the actual facts is sometimes justified, and it definitely was in Clinton's case.   Did the people in this country really need to know all that junk about his purely private doings?  By now the verdict must surely be that we definitely did not, regardless of how much people love to refer to sex acts that they were not present to observe but in which they would  very much have liked to have engaged themselves..  

Twenty years ago, however, I wasn't nearly as detached about political figures like A. Hastings who happened to be Rainbow, i.e. "black," as I am now, because up to then they had been denied the right even to exist, much less to win anything, for so many generations, except in the smallest of numbers.

Of course I knew that they were fully as capable of bad behavior as anyone else. I had never had to look any farther than what appeared to be the majority of the potentates in Africa, where the great hopes of the numerous newly liberated countries were so often dashed almost as soon as the English, Belgian, French, and Portuguese colonizers had left, and instead corruption, misrule, and outright cruelty seemed to be the rule rather than the exception -- a situation that in its ferocity and its frequency continues to this very day.

But in 1989 the pressing need to think better of those of people of my hue who had managed to achieve things in the political and other arenas that they had  had no opportunity to do in earlier times trumped everything else by a long shot. Those who would equate this kind of  "racial pride" with being "racist" would give this attitude the latter name, but they can have no idea of how incredibly powerful aspirations are in situations like this.

So, though he was a distant Floridian and I knew nothing about him, I was highly disposed to give Judge Hastings the benefit of the doubt regarding the accusations of corruption and perjury with which he was charged, though most of the members of that committee obviously didn't feel the same way.

I can't resist mentioning here that the main thing I remember about those hearings was not so much the issues involved as it was that they featured something that a person is likely to see only once at most, in that period when they have the patience to make a habit of looking at C-Span.  One of the witnesses happened to be a woman whose outward aspects were, at least to my extremely discerning eye, so spectacular that a rating of "10" for her still wouldn't have been high enough.   She resembled one of the backup singers that the Canadian balladist Leonard Cohen used to have, and she had, in spite of all her obvious pulchritude -- I hope not because of it -- the same sullen facial cast.

She was some sort of assistant to Judge Hastings, and for a  dazzling young woman on center stage  she was surprisingly unimpressed on finding herself sitting in the national spotlight -- an attitude that I could appreciate. Her expression and her responses, which were cold and perfunctory at best, left no doubt about her deep resentment of  having to defer to and even to answer the row of crusty, ugly old men facing her and who didn't share her kind of origins and who had the presumption and the goal of depriving her boss of his great job and so also doing the same to her.

Hastings seemed to feel that one of the Senators, the flimsy-sounding one from Pennsylvania with the unfortunate name that brought ghosts to mind, was an exception to the general tone of the committee, and in search of an understanding voice, he made a special appeal to A. Specter. But it seemed to me that Specter didn't respond with much understanding or sympathy, and, unlike in the case of his assistant,  I wondered about Hastings' judgment there.

 I didn't like Specter's manner. He seemed constantly limpid and hesitant and as if he wasn't quite sure about exactly what was going on or about anything else, though he would try hard to sound as if he did.  Even worse, he didn't strike me as being a man with whom a person could really know how he stood, and I didn't expect that he would be of any help to Hastings, and Hastings was in fact easily found guilty and removed from office, only the sixth such official during the nation's existence to be thus ejected from  that high variety of perch..

I had forgotten this (if I ever knew), but history recorded that two Senators who are still very much on the scene voted contrary to the majority in their party. P. Leany (D) of Vermont, a well-known liberal and advocate of many worthwhile causes,  voted to convict the judge, while, in spite of how, because he was so happy to be a member of that exclusive and vaunted senatorial "club," he had not seemed to appreciate having the defendant see him as being fair-minded, A. Specter (R) voted to acquit.

Besides taking Hastings off the bench, according to Wikipedia the Senate could also have stripped from him any right to hold national office again, but it didn't.

 I don't know whether Specter had anything to do with that, and history also records that Hastings didn't just retreat to spend the rest of his days on a Florida beach,  salving his wounds with a martini in his hand and that amazing assistant reclining beside him..  Instead just three years later, in 1992 Hastings demonstrated how his impeccable taste in one direction was exactly counterbalanced by a total breakdown in another.  After several tries he managed to gain entry into a realm where unmitigated and constant ugliness wrapped in false civility is equaled only by that to be found in courtrooms everywhere.  He got himself elected as a U.S. Congressman from Florida, a position in which he still serves,  with something that is commonly called "distinction," and little was again heard of or from him, which figures.

--Until in the just ended elections -- by which time his aesthetic eye  in the one direction had obviously undergone some severe modification -- he struck some short-lived sparks because of a remark he made concerning another woman whose outward appearance similarly put her in a position to be specially favored, though not on the scale of that assistant.  Being a politician, this latterday woman wouldn't have been caught dead without always showing some sort of a smile, regardless of the damage that it might do to her teeth.  She was  that supposedly vanquished Star of Politics Today whose light nevertheless refuses to blink out, the always interesting if questionable  recent Republican candidate for Veep from Out of Nowhere, the Alaskan, S. Palin.

 I think Hastings' words are worth repeating, because they express just the kind of feelings that caused many to be aghast when Ms Palin first emerged from the Denali shadows into the public spotlight. Hastings just happened to string together some ordinary terms in a highly noticeable order and with a vehemence that most likely wouldn't be foreign or even distasteful to Ms Palin herself, if she didn't feel always constrained to perform in several different guises all at once.

He said, "If Sarah Palin isn’t enough of a reason for you to get over whatever your problem is with Barack Obama, then you damn well had better pay attention. Anybody toting guns and stripping moose don’t care too much about what they do with Jews and blacks. So, you just think this through."

A lot of people are still enjoying trying to do just that.

Following his comment Hastings gave one of those apologies that you just know are not sincere, and in my opinion are rightly so and so shouldn't be given, and instead the offender should just live with it because the person meant it and still means it.

Meanwhile do Hastings and Specter ever encounter each other in the halls of Congress these days?   If they do, what runs through their minds?

A lot of water for all concerned has flowed over the dam since those '89 hearings, especially for A. Specter.

For instance, though he said he had been assured that he would retain all his massive seniority in Congress after switching parties,  a few days ago his fellow senators voted to return him to a state of definite juniority (and at his age!) -- at least till they see how the upcoming elections turn out.   But then some of the Democrats decided to give Specter the chairmanship of an important Judiciary subcommittee on crime, though, a little later still,  the chairman of the main committee said, "Hold up there!   Let's look at this some more."   And who was that ingrate blocking Specter's way, though maybe only temporarily?  None other than his collaborator in going against the grain in the Hastings verdict, the said P. Leahy, of Vermont.  

What does Specter think now?

The most important question, though, about all this is, what ever became of such a noteworthy assistant and supporter as that one that Hastings could enjoy having at his side when he was a judge?

Meanwhile, in courtrooms and in Congress that memorable last line of Clint Eastwood's "Magnum Force" -- "A man should always know his limitations" could easily be adapted  to say as well, "A man should always be aware of his priorities," and we can be sure that A. Specter has heard  the latter if not  the former.