How slimy are politicians?

Let me start this post with "Goodbye, Senator Spectre. You were a piece of shit when you were a 'Republican,' now I have an even better reason to hate you. I hope your brain cancer comes back."

Now that I've gotten that out of my system....

Let's talk about how a politician can be slimy. I mean, there are COUNTLESS ways--see Rod Blagojevich--but I'm talking about subliminally slimy...things that are really low class and shitty, but cause us, in this country, to simply shrug and say "that's politics." Spectre gave us one example today--switching parties while still in office.

You know, it's okay to have a conversion, come to Jesus or whatever and realize that your current party affiliation doesn't work for you personally and it's time for a change. But don't be so disrespectful of the people who elected you to switch horses mid-stream. Yet, it happens and we shrug. The "Arlen Ambush" was even more egregious because it was SOLELY motivated by politics--he saw the "Pat Toomey is going to treat me like a bitch in a primary," writing on the wall and jumped ship to save his sorry, old, political hide.

And this isn't ugly because Spectre jumped ship from the Republican party--it was his choice of time to execute his party switch. The truth is, he needed to go--he wasn't a conservative at all and the party is far better off without him. In Louisiana, there have been a couple of notable Dem-to-Republican conversions--but Buddy Roemer and Mike Foster had the class to do it while they were not in office.

Another slimy aspect of this--and a Republican president would have done the same thing; that wouldn't make it any less slimy--was Obama falling all over himself to embrace Spectre, promising fundraising, etc...when we all know, full good and well that the two would not have been seen in the same zip code with a finite pool of dollars just 24 hours earlier. And we still shrug and write it off to politics.

You know, our politicians are just a magnification of what's wrong with all of us...and it's getting uglier all the time.