And only when we try.
As an experiment I will now attempt a reasonably short post which will include a number of different thoughts. A week ago the comic strip Prickly City was having a go at the pork-happy, entitlement-drunk, earmark-stapling, kick-backing lobbyist-partying, spendthrift congress. Bastards! Of course the minor problem here is that the House and the Senate are solidly in republican hands. Have been for a while too. So the strip was forced into a curious circumlocution that they were actually republi-crats, or something. The notion being that they were democrats in sheeps clothing. If they were behaving badly, they were not real republicans but democrats or they had caught from democrats the democrat disease. It is nothing of the sort. They are behaving the way they want to behave. The way the people who placed them in office want them to behave. Spending the money they want to spend. They have had numerous wake-up calls to reassess things. To reform, set ethics standards. They have energetically avoided allowing anything of the sort to actually happen. The current corrupt dysfunctional legislature cannot be fantasized away as democratic conspiracy
When the House Could Clean Itself - washingtonpost.com. I try to give comic strips a pass, my niece thinks the coyote and little girl are nice, but this week I caught a Prickly City strip that seemed to be coyly suggesting, by referring to Air America's financial difficulties, that they were morally bankrupt as well. Enough! If you want a glimpse of moral bankruptcy Mr. Stantis buy a mirror look at yourself. Today I saw several reports that Fox news - on Bill O'Reilly's show - repeatedly aired a visual naming Rep. Foley (R. FL) as a democrat
Fox News Solves This Whole Foley Mess. There is a certain disinclination to face things here... Josh Marshall's Talking Point Memo has pointed out that Rev. Dobson is already on record as suggesting it's all about America's obsession with sex. The culture of virtue and personal responsibility are only for those things we desire to be responsible for. Otherwise we are defenseless against the environment. Next, Marshall suggests, will come a move to lay this all at the feet of a cabal of log cabin republican staffers. Converting all liabilites to a dismissible them. All to avoid coming to terms with the fact that the house leadership
Hastert Rejects Calls To Give Up Leadership preferred to overlook Rep Foley's inappropriate behavior for years rather than risk any embarrassment or loss of a seat. Still as others have pointed out
Relative Scandals (via Scripting News) the greatest failing of this congress is not to identify our democracy as being in our laws and institutions where it was placed with care and daring, fallaciously assuming it to lie innately within us. So that our laws, our concern for due process, and for rights can be thinned and rewritten without harm (let alone the notion that this somehow will fix us stronger). This is to mistake the virtue of habit, for the virtue of examination. It comes from relying on myths of who we are rather than an understanding of who we are. We are only human.
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