The Daily Background

More on Senator Teddy ‘tubes’ Stevens, since his FBI raid:

The senator skipped a Commerce Committee hearing Tuesday and spent much of the day ducking or yelling at the press. When he was finally cornered by two reporters in a Senate stairway, the always volatile Alaskan barked that he did not have anything to say about the matter other than his statement Monday.
[…]
But even as fellow senators tiptoed around the issue, it is becoming clear that the Stevens investigation, following so quickly after the Sen. David Vitter scandal involving the “D.C. Madam,” has cast a cloud over a Republican conference that has been severely tested on Iraq, immigration and scandal.

“I’d like to say or think that this too shall pass, but there seems to be a pattern developing here,” said Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (Miss.). “Every week, I think, ‘How much worse can things get in the Senate?’ We are at the bottom here, and every week it gets worse.”

Of course, you have more people in the Senate defending him, or at least defending his presumption of innocence (yes, including Democrats), than you ever typically have in House corruption cases, for the simple reason, I think, that Stevens is really, really powerful, having served so long.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog