Outside The Beltway

Want a representative reason why the Pennsylvania senate race between Donk challenger Bob Casey and incumbent Republican Rick Santorum is tightening? The Casey campaign has been caught peeping in Santorum's keyholes:

The charges and countercharges in the Pennsylvania Senate race also have revived questions about where Santorum, his wife and six children live - a three-bedroom, 2,100-square-foot home in Penn Hills, PA, or a house in Leesburg, VA, that's more than 5,000 square feet.

Santorum launched radio ads on Monday that contend that a Casey operative admitted to "trespassing into the Santorums' home in Penn Hills, peering into the windows looking for campaign dirt."

What the size of the respective houses has to do with anything is, from a logic standpoint, anybody's guess, just as it is, in reality, a wholly unsubtle link to the "Republican culture of corruption" canard. The ASSociated Press is so relentlessly consistent, isn't it?

The Caseyoids followed the standard Clinton denial template:

Ed Vecchio, whose wife is a local Democratic Party leader in Penn Hills, told the TV station [WDKA] that he had a right to contest Santorum's votes from last week's primary because, "He doesn't live here. The house he's registered to vote out of, is vacant, no curtains, furniture, nothing in there."

Vecchio said he never looked into the windows of Santorum's home.

...That means he had an underling do it...

The Casey campaign said Vecchio does not work for them and denied that anyone from the campaign trespassed at the house.

To quote the noted philosopher Bart Simpson, "I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything!" Just like Don Clintone, always do dirty work through proxies who will stonewall and, if necessary, fall on their swords on your behalf. Not unlike the way Al Capone sat all fat & happy at his Miami estate while his henchmen were carrying out the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in Chicago.

This clinches the Casey campaign's guilt:

They also accused the Santorum campaign of trying to shift attention from the fact that Santorum primarily lives with his family in Virginia.

How dare Santorum distract public attention from our irrelevant smear to the dirty tricks we had to pull to perpetrate it! What NERVE!

I'm feeling better about this race all the time. And why not, given that even the gloomiest Pachyderms are now saying that the worst the GOP will do on the Senate side is break even?

It's not what they deserve. But it does open up the opportunity for ideological recovery if they can muster the humility to recognize it.

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I was going to comment on New Orleans Mayor Ray "School Bus" Nagin and Louisiana Governor Kathleen "Babbling" Blanco "kissing and making up," but that mental picture is proving exceedingly difficult to get past without acute nausea.

Besides, celebrating getting away with their criminal negligence in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina would be a better description. And why shouldn't they celebrate? The Extreme Media framed President Bush for their failures, and Bush meekly capitulated to the smear. That was the point where his second term careened off the rails and it hasn't gotten anywhere near back on track since.

Doesn't exactly make Nagin and Blanco the new Bonny & Clyde, but it isn't unfair to state that they have washed the blood of the hurricane victims they killed in Dubya's reputation. And those are unjust stains that may never be cleansed - especially given his tempermental disinclination for doing "laundry."