I just finished up Matt Taibibi’s excellent “Four Amendments & a Funeral,” from the current Rolling Stone. The author spent a month tailing Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, learning how things work in Congress.
How do things work in Congress?
It’s ugly. It’s really, really ugly. Taibibi waivers between abject horror and determined cynicism throughout as he plays tour guide to the reckless abuses of Bush’s Republican Party, reviewing CAFTA, the energy bill and the highway bill and explaining how such obviously-harmful bills became law. He describes the House Rules Committee as “where some of the very meanest people on earth spend their days cleaning democracy like a fish,” Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) as “the majority lawmaker in whose scaly womb the Patriot Act gestated” and “your basic Fat Evil Prick,” and Congress on the whole s being in “a kind of permanent emergency in which a majority of members work day and night to burgle the national treasure and burn the Constitution.”
As is clear to anybody who takes the time to read the article, these criticisms are well-deserved. The entire process is in no way in the best interests of the United States. The stranglehold that Bush Republicans have on American government has led to brazen corruption that they make only the token efforts to conceal. Which is fine by me — the wax will melt, they’ll fall to earth, and Democrats will reign supreme again. Ultimately, Rep. Sanders is the only person who comes off well in this sausage-factory documentary.
Which reminds me. At Harrisonburg session of the Sorensen Institute, during a tour of the Virginia Poultry Growers Cooperative, we actually saw sausage being made out of turkey. A conveyor belt brought in the carcasses of the turkeys left over after the meat had been carved off — bones cages with loose strips of flesh dangling from them. These were dumped, at the rate of one every few seconds, into a giant, silver vat that ground them up and forced the bone/marrow mixture into 3″ tubing that ran up to the ceiling and into a huge pastry tube. Out of the bottom of the tube, perhaps eight feet in the air, the thick, pink mush squeezed out of the anus-like opening into another container, bound for another part of the factory, where it would be forced into casings and packaged as sausage. Now, if that ain’t one hell of a metaphor, I don’t know what is.
In Rolling Stone, Taibibi documents how Congress (the anus) packages damaging bills (turkey scraps) as something palatable (sausage) that we can tolerate, provided we don’t pay too much attention to what we’re eating.
Be fair. Congress was corrupt when the Democrats had a stranglehold, too. This is not caused by Bush or Republicans. It is caused by special interests groups and apathy from a majority of citizens.
No matter what they try and teach you at the SI, the good people are eaten alive. The system we have does not reward hard work and honesty. It does not reward ingenuity, compassion, or the greater good. It rewards how many votes can I get back home by screwing the people in the rest of the country.
Congress was corrupt when the Democrats had a stranglehold, too.
Oh, I wouldn’t argue otherwise.
That said, the Bush Republicans have taken it further than it had ever been taken before. Perhaps the best example is Norquist’s order that Republican Congressmen may only work with Republican lobbyists. That’s one of the most little-known, amazing overreaches that the RNC has attempted in their relationship with Congress. The result is that Dems heads’ were rolling on K street, and lobbyists are now heavily Republican. Historically, of course, lobbyists were nonpartisan or irrelevantly partisan. The effects of that move will ripple outwards for years.
Anytime that a single party controls all three branches of government (Republicans have Congress and the White House, and the SCOTUS, while not partisan, is, of course, very conservative), corruption is inevitable. Bush Republicans in Washington, however, seem to be taking this to a new low.
“Bush Republicans”
…as if they’re all appointed by Bush?
No, I use the term “Bush Republicans” to refer to those Republicans who both support Bush and subscribe to his administration’s philosophy.
It would be both inaccurate and unfair of me to describe all Republicans in the terms in which I have described “Bush Republicans” in this blog entry and elsewhere.
Have you noticed that the party out of power has used the “all new low” to describe the in party before. When Clinton was POTUS, Republicans said he had brought the office to an all new low – think Lincoln Bedroom and “I did not have sexual relationships with that woman.” Before that Democrats were having a field day with Bush 1 and Gulf War 1. Let’s not forget that they were just beside themselves that we elected a man that was once in charge of the CIA.
If we honestly believe that with each new president we hit an all time low, I have to ask at what point have things gotten too low and what do we expect “normal” to be?
If we honestly believe that with each new president we hit an all time low, I have to ask at what point have things gotten too low and what do we expect “normal” to be?
I think when a third party candidate wins the White House, and both Democrats and Republicans have been shamed accordingly, that’s when (I hope) “normal” will be recentered at a higher point.