No less a personage than House Speaker Nancy Pelosi solemnly assured us in 2006, before assuming office, that the Democrats "intend to lead the most honest, the most open and most ethical Congress in history. . . " And, not content with having promised it in 2006, she repeated the same promise earlier his year, when the first clouds over Rep. Charles Rangel (D-New York) were gathering on the horizon -- notice how she interrupts the reporter to assure him that she is fulfilling her promise right now:
As you can hear in the video, she noted for the record, after the House Ethics Committee had admonished Rangel for taking lobbyist-funded trips to the Caribbean:
“Obviously, they have other issues to deal with,” Pelosi said at her Friday press briefing. “But I thank them for taking this action. I hope that they will have other action soon. But they did not take action against him. They just said he did not willfully break the rules. But we’ll just see what happens next, what comes out of the committee next.”
That was in February -- now we are in August. And Nancy Pelosi's "most ethical House ever" is already, even before the November elections, a lame duck. Both Charles Rangel and the latest member of Congress to be charged with ethics violations, the Hon. Maxine Waters (D-California), insist that they will have their day in court. Well, good luck -- it may well be that the "most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history" will somehow manage to waddle and waddle in its deliberations over what must be tried and decided until after the November elections, in the hope that no one by then will remember what the Speaker said.
In the meantime, in order to keep memories fresh, blogs should continually rerun this video of the Hon. Maxine Waters lambasting then-Speaker Newt Gingrich over his "ethical violations", back in 1995. (Sorry, no embed is possible, but check out the link at C-Span.)
What goes around, comes around: "What's good for the goose is good for the gander" -- eh, Ms. Waters? It looks as though it is now your turn to be on the spit, and for good reason.
The name for this phenomenon is "poetic justice" -- than which there is nothing sweeter under the sun.
Both the Democrat and Republican politicians in Washington, D.C. serve the same master: mammon. And the higher one goes up the chain of puppet politicians, the more compromised they are by the national security state, i.e., the military-prison complex (the military-industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us about in his farewell address is a bit quaint now, as there's not much industry in the U.S. nowadays; whereas the U.S. leads the world by a wide margin in prisoner population, both in terms of absolute numbers and in terms of per capita numbers). The U.S. intelligence apparatus holds so much dirt on these politicians that they wouldn't dare become servants of the American public. I call this ancient intelligence blackmail technic MAC: Mutually-Assured Corruption, in terminological analogy with the Cold War nuclear-war policy of MAD: Mutually-Assured Destruction. It's only a terminological analogy, since in MAD, both sides are destroyed, whereas in MAC, the blackmailer holds all the cards. Whether it's sexual peccability (oftentimes with children), drug-use, kickbacks, bribe-taking, or other illegal emoluments of office, the security state has its puppet-politicians by the gonads. Nowadays, the only way one is allowed to rise to the top (whether in business or politics) is to be so compromised as to be owned by the establishment. There's no need to blow off the back of a president's skull nowadays for getting out of line and serving the American public.
ReplyDeleteRon Paul is the only Constitution-abiding politician in Washington, D.C., and one would be hard-pressed to find a politician as principled as he even on the county level, let alone the State level. Hence the reason his own Republican Party leadership have often actually supported his Democrat opponents. The Democrat and Republican Party leadership may sometimes have slighty different rhetoric, but in the end they are a united front against the American people. As the American public are cattle to be mulct.
Mr. Haley, your introductory sentence reminds me of the following humorous but truth-laden quote:
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I date the end of the old republic and the birth of the empire to the invention, in the late thirties, of air conditioning. Before air conditioning, Washington was deserted from mid-June to September. ... But after air conditioning and the Second World War arrived, more or less at the same time, Congress sits and sits while the presidents--or at least their staffs--never stop making mischief.
""
From the essay "At Home in Washington, D.C." by Gore Vidal, in Armageddon?: Essays, 1983-1987 (London: A. Deutsch, 1987).
James Redford, thank you for your comment. If you have not read this recent article on "The Ruling Class," you certainly should. It's along the same lines as your comment, but with even more detail and application to the present day.
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