If You Give a Congressman a Cookie<\/a>. In it, they attempt to guide readers from the superficially flashy Abramoff scandal to the not-totally-unrelated matter of the Republican Party’s betrayal of the norms of Congressional behavior. I was glad to see it, not least because I find the outrageous behavior of the Republican leadership on the House floor<\/I> to be more arresting than the murder and millions of the corrupt lobbyist. They say that “If you can play fast and loose with the rules of the game in lawmaking, it becomes easier to consider playing fast and loose with everything else, including relations with lobbyists, acceptance of favors, the use of official resources and the discharge of governmental power”. I don’t think that goes far enough, and I think it shows an unduly institution-based filter in their perception.\nFrankly, to me it’s more about the people. The same people<\/I> who acted dishonestly in the Medicare Prescription Drug fiasco acted dishonestly in the Abramoff crimes. It should not be surprising that people who negotiate dishonestly with the opposition Party, that people who campaign dishonestly for votes and suppress voting for the opposition, that people who legislatively loot the treasury of the country to put into the pockets of their friends (and often their erstwhile and future business partners) also take bribes. Changing the rules about bribe-taking, or even changing the norms in Our House, will not work as well as getting rid of the dishonest people<\/I>. Not that you will get honest people in their places, of course. Well, some of them will be honest, more or less, but sure, some of the replacements will be bad ’uns, too, perhaps even to the astonishing level of venality we are currently seeing, but then who said being a democrat was easy?\n
Digression: For some reason, the scale of these bribes is what outrages me. Oh, sure, I understand that organizations with business in front of the Senate will hire the relatives and friends of Senators in order to curry favor, and it wouldn’t shock me if a Kennedy or two had said to somebody that there was a nephew or an aide or a mistress who would be just perfect for that job that happened to be open. That sort of thing happens all the time, and doesn’t strike me as a sign that the politician in question in particularly dishonest or venal. On the other hand, telling such an organization that it would be a good idea to hire a particular lobbying company for a hundred thousand bucks, said company employing two or three former aides, wives and business partners, and implicitly the legislator himself, well, I understand that the difference is in scale, not in kind, but whoo-boy, it seems like a whole nother deal. End Digression.\n
It seems relevant to repeat the two antithetical joke-definitions of an honest politician. The old British joke is that an honest politician is one who stays bought, that is, one who can be expected to always vote in the interests of his true constituency, whoever that is. For some, the buying will be cash (or, like Sen. McCain, luxury trips for him and family), and for some, the buying will be (as James Madison intended) continued political support (as for politicians owned by labor, by religious groups, by business interests, by regional interests, etcetera, etcetera). There’s a good deal to be said for predictability, and Your Humble Blogger has certainly said a great deal for it, and will do so again, later. But there’s the other definition, the Texas one, that says that an honest politician is one who can shake their hands, take their money, smoke their cigars, drink their whiskey, fuck their wives, and then vote the other way. It ain’t predictable, but there’s a good deal to be said for that, too.\n
What I think, I suppose, is that (i) most politicians are, at heart, honest enough, although their position requires them to make compromises that most of us find repugnant and also makes unethical activities that most of us find routine, and (b) there are dishonest politicians, who use their position to increase their own wealth and power and that of their friends, and (3) it’s more difficult to tell the difference between the two than you might think. Further, I don’t think that a number of dishonest politicians (by any definition, judicial or jocular) do much to make the difference between good and bad government. However, when dishonest politicians are in charge of the majority Party, when they are unrestrained by political opposition or their own rank and file, when they can loot and cheat with impunity, then whatever you think of their Party’s platform, those people must go.\n
Once upon a time, the Democratic Speaker of the House took some money from supporters via a sweetheart book deal, and his wife took a $18,000 sinecure, and we ditched him and he was never heard from again. He was, by the way, a real Texas politician, not that other kind.\n
Your Humble Blogger has been saying for some time that Our Only President has betrayed rank and file Republicans and other Conservatives far more than he has betrayed people like me. I have not, on the whole, been saying that of the legislative leadership. That was an oversight. Really, though, it’s clear that Tom DeLay and his associates (including mentors Dick Cheney and Dick Armey, Grover Norquist, Rick Santorum, the ARMPAC folk, the K Street project lobbyists including Jack Abramoff, TRMPAC and the Texas folk there including Rick Perry) as well as Denny Hastert under whose watch all this occurred, need to answer to Republican Party members. Oh, I am still being shocked (again, by the scale more than anything else), but then they are not claiming to be my leaders. And, of course, whatever the moral and ethical rights and wrongs, it seems clear to me that purely as a political matter, my Party should be emphasizing how the Republican leadership have failed their followers.\n
Can we get on that, please? And please, Senator Reid, Representative Pelosi, don’t take Left Blogovia seriously enough to ignore our tendencies to obsession over detail. Blogovia is good at detail. Without obsession over detail and a total lack of perspective, we wouldn’t have Fisking. And, Senator, Representative, your actual job, legislating, if the governing Party would let you do it, is all about detail, and I appreciate that. But thirty posts on one topic in the L. B. usually means we’ve lost the plot, and you can ignore us until we remember what’s really going on.\n
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the casual reader of Left Blogovia (or, indeed, the causal one, I suppose), it\u2019s become easy to now perceive the scandal about Jack Abramoff, bribery, embezzlement, murder, organized crime, casinos and the Legislature as being, ultimately, not about what…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nytimes"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17666,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10125\/revisions\/17666"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}