With Ted Stevens' Tragic Loss, the Good Old America Is Gone Forever

It's official, and it's a national tragedy: Ted Stevens has lost his Senate seat to some Democrat, in Alaska.

Stevens has been serving in the U.S. Senate since 1968, back when two-month-old Barack Obama was probably wearing Indonesian diapers and palling around with Jane Fonda and the Beatles or whoever.

Today, on his 85th birthday, the convicted felon and old white Republican Ted Stevens has been voted out of the office -- voted out of office by Alaskans.

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In the good old days, there were three Americas: rich white people, poor white people who hopelessly identified with rich white people, and everybody else such as minorities and native peoples or whatever. The "everybody else" part of this country has been restless and troublesome from the beginning.

Back in Thomas Jefferson's day, people who didn't own land wanted to vote. Next thing you know, women wanted to vote. Then slaves wanted to be free -- that may have been before the women-wanting-to-vote thing, history is unclear -- and then minorities wanted to vote! Native Americans and even native Alaskans wanted "rights." At some point, Germans and Irishmen wanted something, although it was never clear what.

In many ways, Ted Stevens began his Senate career at the end of White Male America. Like Frank Sinatra or Richard Nixon or the Elephant Man, Ted Stevens was a nostalgia act even at his peak. He did what powerful old white politicians always did, which is eat a lot of steaks and shovel a lot of money back home. But this wonderful empire was ending.

Stevens worked in the Eisenhower Administration's Interior Department, back when "Interior Department" meant oil wells and wolf hunting, until both the oil and the wolves were gone. He helped make Alaska a state!

And now, he has lost the Senate seat he was first appointed to in 1968, after losing the GOP nomination for Alaska's other Senate seat to the mayor of Anchorage, and watching weird Democrat Mike Gravel win the general election, and then seeing the other Democratic senator magically drop dead. Tragically, the Senate seat Steven loses tonight is also lost to an Anchorage mayor, current mayor and known Democrat Mark Begich.

But there is another strange element to Ted Stevens' heartbreaking story: He wasn't born a rich white Republican. In fact, he grew up in a poor single-parent home, after his father bailed on the family during the Great Depression. Little Ted was mostly raised by his mother and later his grandmother, who lived an exotic life in Redondo Beach, California.

Stevens worked his way through undergraduate studies in Los Angeles and then attended Harvard Law School. He had a keen mind that was noticed by professors and judges. And before long, he was a rising star in Washington.

Wait a minute! This sounds 100% exactly like Barack Obama's personal history. Could Ted Stevens maybe be a secret Muslim? If so, then maybe he could be part of the new multicultural Democratic America after all -- if he wasn't an 85-year-old convicted felon, anyway.

Good-bye, Senator Stevens! Sorry you have to spend your last days living in shame and probably having to talk to Sarah Palin. Ugh. You have our sympathy.

Ken Layne is the editor of Wonkette who weeps, tragically, for what has become of the Real America.


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