Tuesday, February 21, 2017

As if Captain Bly Hailed from Scranton

As a corollary aside to my meeting with Krawchuk, what rankles me about former AG Kathleen Kane goes beyond political dualism, to borrow the phrase from my short lived protégé Louise. I have read at the very least a dozen articles on the Kane saga and I cannot quite offer a cogent summary: it involved an adversarial relationship with Corbett, one of the worst one term governors in PA history, the fallout from the Sandusky scandal, the pornographic emails floating around the state capital of Harrisburg (I obviously have some experience there on the municipal level), Kane's investigative overreach, paranoia, which seems justified, a shaky press conference once she was indicted, her omission to the jury in relation to any vendettas she harbored with DA's. One could simply say she was out of her depth, don't over-analyze it, and yet, her downfall, and patently unfair prison term, seems to throb with my own mortal scars. The citizens elected her, but this counted for nothing once the legal machinery kicked into place to impeach, remove, put her on trial. Representative Brian Sims, the great gay "Philadelphia hope" who could not see me, not see me at all, may have been quoted in the press telling Kane "I love you!" for not defending Pennsylvania's defense of marriage act, but once the grease hit the pan, he didn't stand by her. Typical for these cases. I did not vote for the woman, but remain disturbed. The Commonwealth is still far too much the "old boy's network," and I still have a significant residual sympathy for her vanquished star. If President Obama could release the significantly disturbed Bradley Manning from federal prison, where he should have remained, Governor Wolf could and should commute Kane's sentence. She is a mother with children of her own, and we should be able to comprehend that the destruction of Joe Paterno's legacy, the scandal that rocked Penn State, should never happen again.

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