Flight to Nowhere

Or
Down the Tubes
Ted Stevens, the anti-Al Gore, has died in a plane crash at the age of 86. Stevens was instrumental in helping secure statehood for the Last Frontier, affording himself the opportunity to rape the land and secure billions of taxpayer money for the unpopulated wilderness and hundreds of thousands for himself; all the while keeping an eye on Russia. The longest-serving Republican senator ever represented the caribou and Eskimos for 40 years before losing his seat a week after a DC federal jury convicted him on seven felony counts related to more than $250,000 in illegal gifts. This was a nice bookend to his career, as his lobbying efforts for statehood while he was a lawyer for the Interior Department were also a violation of federal law. He was defeated by Nick Begich, Jr., whose father was serving Alaska in Congress when he died in a 1972 plane crash. Stevens himself had barely walked away from a 1978 plane crash that killed his wife, suggesting a relationship between Alaskan politicians and airplanes rivaling that of Rocket Romano and helicopters. Stevens never failed to remind Alaskans they came from a meaningless backwater and would be lost without him, in part through the works of the Ted Stevens Foundation, a charity established to "assist in educating and informing the public about the career of Senator Ted Stevens." These efforts included innumerable pork barrel projects that netted more federal dollars per capita than any other state – 1,452 earmark projects and $3.4 billion since 1991, including a $3.5 million airport to service an island populated by 100 people (and a seafood processing plant that donated heavily to Stevens’ PAC), and of course the proposed $400 million Bridge to Nowhere, which essentially would have made it easier for the last two residents of another isolated island to leave. The angriest man in the Senate wore his trademark Incredible Hulk tie as he shouted down environmentalists who sought to preserve Alaska’s natural beauty, advocating drilling and clear-cutting old growth forest at every turn. He was also instrumental in helping to define the Internet as “not a big truck,” but rather, “a series of tubes.”