Kane antagonists complain of slowness of due process

There’s a growing recognition that AG Kathleen Kane isn’t going quietly anytime soon

by Bill Keisling

When Gov. Tom Corbett lost big at the polls this last November, Corbett and hundreds of his patronage appointees were sent packing by the state’s voters.

Now Corbett’s out-of-work appointees, with no state jobs and too much time on their hands, are hopping mad. Who do they blame, instead of themselves, for their unemployment, and loss of insider status?

They blame state Attorney General Kathleen Kane.

But their anger is misplaced.

It’s true that Kane called for an investigation of Corbett’s mishandling of the Jerry Sandusky case, and followed through with an investigation that found hundreds of pornographic emails sent between Corbett cronies.

But voters knew something was wrong with Corbett’s multi-year mishandling of the Sandusky case, and the subsequent cover-up by Corbett’s apologists in the old-line press — with or without Kane’s investigation, and with or without the porno emails.

Still, Corbett’s out-of-work appointees, and their chums, the newspaper reporters who have lost their old-boy insider sources, need someone to blame but themselves.

In other words, they are sore losers.

So they have issued increasingly feeble and bizarre calls for AG Kane to quickly resign, without benefit of a fair and open trial, without any due process whatsoever, and without the presumption of innocence.

But now there seems to be a growing recognition among some of them that Kane isn’t going to go quietly anytime soon, that they can’t bully her into resigning.

The latest former political insider to call for AG Kane’s head is Dennis Roddy.

Roddy is a one-time reporter who used to work for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, before he jumped ship to write speeches for Gov. Corbett.

So Roddy represents both groups most angry with AG Kane — old boys, and old newspapers: Roddy’s an out-of-work Corbett appointee who used to work for a newspaper.

Now that Roddy is without a state desk to call his own, the Harrisburg Patriot-News has hired him as a columnist.

And judging from his latest Patriot-News column, Dennis Roddy sure is angry with Kane.

You’d be hopping mad too, if you got the boot from the statehouse after a single term, before you were eligible for a state pension, and you now had to write for the Patriot-News. I know I’d be hopping mad, and embarrassed too.

So what’s Dennis Roddy’s beef?

Almost at the bottom of his April 16 Patriot-News column, Roddy complains, “Kathleen Kane sought office promising an investigation of the governor.”

For this cardinal sin, Roddy wants Kane gone now.

The trouble with court proceedings, Roddy seems to complain, is that, well, fair and impartial justice takes so damn long.

The Montgomery County DA into whose lap the Kane/Daily News/Inquirer burnt source flap has fallen, Risa Ferman, “has been slow off the mark to prosecute this case and little wonder,” Roddy writes. “She is also running for Judge of Common Pleas in Montgomery County and the surest path to the bench is to win both the Republican and Democratic nominations in the same primary.”“A Republican prosecutor charging the first Democrat to hold the office of Attorney General might be a tougher sell to Democrats,” he goes on.

As Roddy himself seems to be suggesting, these angry calls for vengeance against Kane, for the most part, have fallen on deaf ears with the public-at-large.

As far as Pat-News columnists go, Dennis at least is honest.

He’s saying Democrats (read large swaths of the public) aren’t buying this politically manufactured assault against Kane.

Roddy’s solution?

Someone, like the corruption-plagued state supreme court, should, Roddy suggests, further rig an already rigged system by appointing an “independent counsel” to hurry things up and, euphemistically speaking, drive a stake through Kane’s heart, carve a scarlet letter on her forehead, submit her to a trial by dunking, and burn her at the stake — all before the old boys get any more upset while playing another round of golf.

Trouble is, despite months of pounding by the old-line newspapers, and months of secretive court proceedings against Kane brought by Corbett insiders, there doesn’t at the moment seem to be a groundswell from the public-at-large, or among Democrats and independents, to see Kane resign.

That’s no doubt in part because Kane’s political antagonists have, by design, kept so much of their “case” against her secret.

In other words, they have again, predictably, shot themselves in the foot with their own insider hanky-panky and, yes, incompetence.

In many ways it’s déjà vu all over again. Corbett’s guys are demanding that Kane resign without any due process or fair and open hearings. This same unfair demand didn’t work out too well for Corbett and his bullies in the case of Joe Paterno. It’s doubtful it will work out any better now.

What’s amazing is how little Corbett’s guys have learned and how small and petty they remain. Decency and fair play are unknown to Corbett’s minions and their newspaper reporters.

You have to give Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane’s credit: she’s managed to get the right people mad at her.

Incompetent and dishonest Republicans have lost their jobs. Old boys have been caught sending hundreds of porno emails to each other. Their long-time defenders at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Patriot-News seem increasingly ineffective at swaying public opinion.

“The potential cost of proving this case is growing exponentially as time passes and alibis are sharpened,” Roddy frets. If Kane is allowed to keep fighting to defend herself, it means the case “drags” on, he writes.

God forbid, fair due process might also let Kane off the hook, and throw egg all over the faces of her out-of-work detractors, and the hacks at the Inquirer and the Patriot-News.

It’s starting to look like the “case” against Kane will drag on into 2016, when Kane stands for reelection.

What’s wrong with that? That’s what happens in Pennsylvania, as the old boys and their bumbling sycophants in the press know all too well.

Pennsylvania doesn’t have a justice system; we have a political system.

Our gravest political missteps are judged at the polls, by voters, and not in the courtroom, as Tom Corbett found out.

This is by design of the lawmakers. After all, they made the state attorney general’s office political in the 1970s.

So let the voters decide.