Arlen Spector battling Hodgkin's disease

I happened to catch Sen. Arlen Specter on a committee not long ago and was shocked at his appearance. He's been diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease, a form a cancer, and has been receiving radiation treatments which cause a loss of hair.



Specter has done some disagreeable things in the past, to be sure, but during his recent re-election campaign he was attacked brutally by fellow Republicans who wanted to oust him and replace him with a more malleable candidate who would jump to the White House's tune on the Judiciary Committee, which Specter now chairs.

Once elected, they continued to savagely bully and beat him up, eventually succeeding in making him promise that if they allowed him to be chair, he'd dance to their tune.

Say what you will, Specter is a man of his own mind, and by today's standard, where radical rightists are the norm, he seems positively moderate. Compared to today's fire-breathing ideologues on the right, Specter is a wise-man. He's one of the few Republicans who has a hard time going along with the more loony notions of the far right.

The Dope wishes Sen. Specter good health and a successful treatment of this serious disease.