Senator Stevens Suffers Post-Defeat Depression

Poor Senator Ted Stevens.

After his pet project, ANWR drilling, failed in the Senate, and was stripped from the defense appropriations bill, Senator Stevens went into a funk.

For hours he withdrew from the Senate floor. "He had to breathe," Sen. Lisa Murkowski from Alaska said.

Washington Senator Maria Cantwell had lead the opposition to his backdoor tactics and produced the biggest defeat of many against Stevens' attempts to get drilling in the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge passed. For Stevens this was a devastating loss:

"This is the saddest day of my life," Stevens told senators after finally reappearing on the floor for the final debate.

The saddest day! Sadder than any other day of this 82 year old's life? We are to assume that it was sadder than when his first wife, mother of his first five children, died in an airplane crash that he survived in 1978. Sadder than the deaths of his father and brother, both to pancreatic cancer. Give me a break!

The fact is this big baby, who believes he can bully the Senate simply due to his advanced years and seniority in the Senate as the longest serving Republican Senator, was sulking away because he didn't get his way. For the past 25 years he's chosen to make ANWR drilling his pet project. He has been an utter failure in his attempts to get it passed, despite his latest "cynical ploy", as Cantwell put it.

Then he tried to make everyone believe he was doing it for the poor folks on the Gulf Coast rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina:

The bill would have sent billions in ANWR revenues to Gulf states for hurricane relief, as well as billions to all states for farm conservation programs, disaster preparation, border protection and low-income heating assistance, he noted.

...

Stevens said his effort to channel the future ANWR money to the Gulf Coast was a sincere effort to help people there. It grew from empathy for the Gulf residents, a feeling strengthened during a visit to New Orleans by his recollection of the 1964 Alaska earthquake, he said.

"I saw one town disappear. I saw a third of my city, Anchorage, disappear," Stevens said. "You have to have that experience to understand how I felt when I went to New Orleans.

"You people didn't believe it," he continued. "Many of you said I did this for political reasons. Just a crass thing. Picking up some money and giving it away for votes. I never asked one of you for votes. I talked to some of you about how you should vote. But I never went to you and said you ought to vote for me."

The vote, he said, was for the people of the Gulf Coast.

No, Senator Stevens, you were doing it for yourself, and your own twisted sense of priorities.

This is a man that has served in the Senate far too long. His current term doesn't end until 2008, when hopefully he will decide not to run again in a seventh re-election campaign, or Alaska will finally produce a candidate to defeat him. He is a dinosaur that cannot come to grips with the reality that the solutions to this nations energy needs must be met by a moonshot type vision that produces alternative energy sources and increased conservation, not by an oil field in an Alaskan wildlife refuge.

Meanwhile, true to his character, his sadness was quickly replaced by vindictiveness:

"I'm going to go [to] every one of your states and I'm going to tell them what you've done," he warned senators who planned to vote for the resolution to remove the ANWR language from the defense bill. "I'm sure the senator from Washington will enjoy my visits to Washington, and I'm going to visit there often."

Well, Senator Stevens, you're not welcome here if you want to bring your brand of spiteful, Big Oil leadership to this beautiful state. However, if you wish to visit your closest neighboring state with a message of goodwill and friendship, you will find that Senator Cantwell represents an open and welcoming population that deeply loves the land we live on and feels a strong obligation to protect it and those creatures that we share the land with that need our protection.