Sunday, October 14, 2012

Arlen Specter Returns to the Grassy Knoll

The man who knew where all the bodies were buried, and who buried them, will himself be buried Tuesday.

Longtime U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter died at age 82 Sunday from non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Or at least that's the official story.

Unofficially, Arlen Specter is the man credited with the single-bullet theory in the Warren Commission's report on the JFK assassination. The 50th anniversary of JFK's death is coming up in a year and promises to shake loose some as yet unreleased government documents, which Specter will now be unable to comment upon. Specter will be missed by conspiracy theorists everywhere.

Arlen Specter was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1980, part of the Reagan revolution that gained Republicans control the U.S. Senate for the first time since 1954. He left the Republican Party in 2009, in order to support President Obama and Obamacare.

The party switch did not work out well. Specter ran for reelection as a Democrat in 2010 but lost his new party's nomination to Joe Sestak, who then lost the general election to Republican Pat Toomey. While Specter's switch helped provide the 60 votes to break the Republican filibuster of Obamacare in the Senate, it also deprived Obamacare of the aura of bipartisanship it would have had if he had remained a Republican.

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