Deliberations

A few news nuggets out of or related to the U.S. Senate:

Scott Brown will not run in the U.S. Senate special election in Massachusetts to finish Secretary of State John Kerry's unexpired Senate term; the former nude model decided that running in three Senate elections within four years is too much, and he finds the new Senate to be even more partisan than the old one that he went out of office with last month.  Speculation now centers on the possibility of him running for governor of Massachusetts in 2014.  U.S. Representative Edward Markey is expected to win the Democratic nomination for the special election and then win the election itself.  Because of his strong liberal stands on the issues, Markey is expected to be an exceptional senator.  Because of his well-known windiness in the House, Markey is expected to make people feel like Kerry never left.

My senator, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, has been accused of not repaying a friend and donor for trips to the Dominican Republic - totaling $60,000 - in a timely matter.  Oh yeah, and the senator may have had sex with Dominican prostitutes.  Menendez has denied the sex allegations, and he insists that he did properly reimburse his friend and donor - a Dominican-born eye doctor - but that of course will not put an end to the story unless he changes parties.  As a Republican, the recently re-elected Menendez would get away with wrongdoing if it's true.  Ask David Vitter.

Meanwhile, talk show host Geraldo Rivera has expressed interest in running for New Jersey's other U.S. Senate seat as a Republican in 2014.  He promises to be at least as entertaining as noted violence peddler Linda McMahon was as a U.S. Senate candidate in Connecticut.  Can he win? Of course.  New Jersey loves ribald, loudmouthed ethnic types who talk out of both sides of their mouths.  Look whom we elected as governor.      

Former Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska was expected to disarm Republican critics who were once his colleagues with his toughness and wit in his confirmation hearing before the Senate Arms Services Committee to be Secretary of Defense, but after enduring a relentless barrage of questions relating to Iraq and Vietnam but no questions about the current state of the Pentagon, he ended up displaying neither.  My diagnosis is that Hagel has attention deficit disorder.  After all, one symptom of ADD is being easily distracted by irrelevant stimuli.  Hagel was distracted by John McCain and Lindsey Graham.   

The United States Senate is too august a body to be infested with scandal, trivia, political theater, idiocy and embarrassment.  In other words, it's not supposed to be like the House of Representatives.