I held my silence following the death on Saturday of Orrin Hatch, the former long-serving Republican senator from Utah.  One doesn't rush to speak ill of the dead.  And besides, Senator Hatch had some redeeming qualities.  He was unfailingly gentlemanly, and on many issues, he was squarely in the same camp as I.

But he was also far from a conservative warrior.  He was, in fact, part of the uniparty establishment, and he pulled his punches on many key issues.  For a scathing look at Hatch's record, check out Michelle Malkin's essay at Vdare.com:

The unvarnished truth is that Orrin Hatch was an open-borders globalist who served Big Tech oligarchs, U.S. Chamber of Commerce traitors and U.S. government careerists while stabbing American workers and citizens in the back for his entire public life. He was a prototypical wheeler-dealer driven by self-preservation, not by principle. His political wisdom was of the wet-finger-in-the-wind variety, claiming a Reagan conservative mantle during election cycles and then throwing constitutional conservatives under the bus once comfortably back in his well-worn Senate committee seats.

Hatch preached "civility" for all his liberal Democrat Senate buddies but attacked grassroots Tea Party conservatives as "nuts." Collegiality only applies to the wealthy and powerful.

To wit: Hillary Clinton paid tribute to Hatch by praising his "willingness to find common ground." She reminisced about how "When I was first lady, he worked with me and Ted Kennedy to get SCHIP done; as a fellow Senate colleague, he reached across the aisle to serve Utah and the country." As I've long documented, Hatch became the alcoholic Chappaquiddick swimmer's best Beltway barnacle pal during his 42-year tenure in Washington. Their State Children's Health Insurance Program monstrosity was a health care Trojan Horse for Obamacare that is now a $20 billion-a-year entitlement.

Twenty years ago, Hatch and Kennedy were also original open-borders co-sponsors of the illegal alien amnesty for millions of border-crossing invaders known as the "DREAM Act."

There is much more.

Hat tip: John Dale Dunn.

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore.