This is not a post about politics, per se. This is about criminal malfeasance, the sucking undertow of corruption in Washington D.C. that is shortly to drag the country down with it. If you’re wondering where the respect for the Constitution and the rule of law went, well our congress hasn’t had it for a long long time. We have created a self-entitled, self-important, self-aggrandizing political class that swear allegiance to nothing but their own position of power. They are a true ruling class, one to whom the rules of the common people do not apply. Perhaps you suffer from scandal fatigue, but think about this:
There are 435 seats in the House, 100 in the Senate. That is 635 people. Now take any random workplace in the country (assuming it’s a legal enterprise paying everyone above the table) having the same number of workers. How many of those people do you think engage in, say, real estate fraud? One? Two?
Ok, in the Congress we have Reps Pete Stark (D, CA) and Eliot Engel (D, NY) who both tried to skirt tax law by claiming their million-dollar Maryland residences as their permanent address. Then you have Charles Rangel’s laundry list of issues around real-estate, including forgetting to report 75K of rental income over a period of three years. Then we have Chris Dodd who has been desperately trying to blame the administration for language he put into the stimulus bill that seemed tailored explicitly to allow the AIG bonuses everyone’s in an uproar about, making almost everyone forget those wonderfully choice Countrywide perks he got back when there was no real-estate bubble. (Funny thing, AIG donated over a quarter million to Dodd’s campaign fund, but that’s probably just a coincidence.) And just to throw some republicans in the mix, we have California Rep. Gary Miller who’s being investigated by the FBI for trying to avoid a 31% tax on $10 million dollars worth of real estate transactions. We also have Arizona Republican Rick Renzi who has graduated from investigation to indictment last year, on 35 counts connected to land deals.
Following up on last week’s Jon Stewart vs. CNBC, it reached its apotheosis after my last blog post:
And apparently, according to the AP, (and Burgermeister Meisterburger) old books are still going to murder your children:
Sheketoff said she heard of just two libraries that started to restrict access to children’s books last month. One roped off the children’s section; the other covered children’s books with a tarp. Both libraries, which she declined to identify, stopped after being contacted by the association, she said.
I love conspiracy theories. My favorite book is the Illuminatus! Trilogy. UFOs, the Grassy Knoll, I’m there. Of course, as a connoisseur of the form, I am most fond of those conspiracies that are actually plausible. (The ones that actually happened are best of all.)
I’ve just run across a fantastic theory.
A lot of modern conspiracy theories often require the principals to be acting against their own self-interests for no discernible reason, or spend huge amounts of effort and treasure to do something that could be done much easier in a direct fashion. This one just makes sense. It explains the facts without resort to logic pretzels, and, in fact, makes the “official” explanation of events look like an implausible conspiracy theory by comparison.
Think of this: The official explanation of the “war on terror” is that a six-foot tall expat Saudi millionaire built a group of highly trained fanatic terrorists and with them became the single greatest threat to American hegemony since the end of the Cold War, and continues to control things from a cave somewhere in Pakistan, where we’re never quite able to finish him off.
Think about that. It sounds like the plot of a bad Bond film.
Consider the following possibility. We haven’t been able to “get” Osama because, in some sense, he doesn’t really exist. Or, more accuratly, that expat Saudi prince and his movement was co-oped to be a figurehead, a misdirection by the state sponsors who are functionally running the actual attacks. An Islamic “beard” on covert ops that are waging indirect war against the US. It’s scary because it is so frakking plausable. Read this and tell yourself that the offical sotry-line doesn’t start sounding like a mimeographed Lyndon LaRouche pamphlet. (Found via here.)
Remember how the election was going to change everything, how our foreign policy was going to undergo a sea-change, and everyone was going to love us again? Remember? Well, first off, about that little war thing in Iraq. . .
Jon Stewart week here, blame this blog for that.
Ok, well, so we have zero substantive change on Iraq policy. Still, with the specter of George W. Bush out of the White House, our standing with other countries can only improve, regardless of that whole war thing. Right? We’re not going to be the swaggering lone superpower, shooting from the hip and into our foot, pissing off our allies. . .
Unless that ally is Great Britain. After all, what better way to cement the special relationship between our countries than to give a visiting head of state a stack of DVDs that don’t even have the right region code to play in the UK, giving back a bust of Churchill they gave us, and going out of their way to piss all over the “special relationship”.
Ok, it’s a new White House, some gaffes are possible as people learn the ropes. But this kind of display of dismissive arrogance on the part of our government implies stupidity on a epic scale of Bush’s “we have to destroy capitalism in order to save it,” or a deliberate calculation to sever our ties with the UK. Either possibility is shameful.
Ok, they aren’t really mugging churches and pocketing from the collection plate, or hitting foster kids up for their lunch money. That would be wrong. That kind of behavior is only appropriate when you do it to rich folks. Rich folks, in this case, being those making 250K a year. What they’re really doing is finding all the “rich” people who are dropping money into the collection plate, or giving that foster kid his lunch money, and saying, “you know, we need a bigger cut of that so the government can spend it for you, thank you so much.”
You know, when a major point of your “fairer” tax code is giving a major shaft to private charities, amounting to what could be a few billion dollars. One starts to think you aren’t really all that interested in this whole compassion thing. Just saying.