Friday, January 08, 2010

Ben Nelson Has Near-Death Experience, Film at 11...

...and now he regrets his pro-Healthcare vote on the Senate floor, you know, the one with the great, big bribe, the infamous Cornhusker Kickback, in it?

Nelson has seen Chris Dodd and Byron Dorgan decide to jump ship before they suffer the (rightfully-deserved) ignominy of electoral defeat, but he doesn't have the same sense of self-preservation to do what they did and quit. He apparently still believes he might survive this vote, electorally, and now he's beginning to walk it back in the hopes that attention spans are short, and memories shorter. He believes he can rehabilitate himself in the minds of the electorate.

In this way, Senator Nelson is like the absolute monarchs of old, men like Constantine The Great, for example, who professed a belief in Christianity, but who reserved the sacrament of baptism until they were on their dead beds. In this way, they could sin as much as they pleased in life, only to claim absolution from their sins at the very last moment -- in effect, robbing God of his right to judgement, while they had the blood of thousands washed from their hands by the baptismal water -- in a last, great fit of Royal Arrogance.

I'm an agnostic, so I don't believe in concepts like the divine forgiveness of sins, or God's final judgement, but if there were to be a God, I rather doubt Constantine would have gotten away with it. She's probably too smart for that old trick (it's my opinion that if God exists, it has to be a woman, because only a woman could weave that many logical contradictions into a religion, and then demand to be worshipped with a straight face). Senator Nelson shouldn't get away with such a cheap trick, either. Neither should Blanche Lincoln or Mary Landrieu (who, as of this writing, is the subject of a nascent recall campaign against her).

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