November 17, 2005

Tired of hearing Democrats accused of ‘spend and borrow’ politics? So am I. The accusation is absolutely correct, but now the cat is finally out of the bag and we’ve got Republicans, particularly neocon Republicans, in our sights as well.

The Reagan-Bush-Bush administrations have been unmitigated financial disasters. Fiscally, Ronald Reagan’s ‘smaller government’ took a deficit that required the entire history of the nation to compile and tripled it in eight short years. So much for smallness. The current Bozo-Republican ‘smaller government’ tribe has taken what Reagan crafted and, unbelievably, doubled that in five years and threatens to double it again in the remaining three.

Someone bring a bucket of water---the schoolhouse is on fire!

The congressional school-house is as out of control as the worst inner-city classroom. Senators and Congressmen throw erasers, spitball one another and drop their pants to have any available orgy with lobbyists in the cloakrooms. No matter what president, Democrat or Republican, in jogging clothes or three-piece suit, comes in to stand at the head of this disreputable class, the congressional rebels no longer respond. And they are all rebels, not a Jimmy Stewart among them. Authority is a thing of the past, as is honor, civility and the common sense that God gave a goose.

It’s a money game. Graft and political war-chests are the drug of choice. Congress has the ethics, morals and willpower of cocaine users, along with a winner-take-all mentality that hungers to keep the good times rolling until their next fix. They fidget and roll their eyes waiting for their lobbyist connection, ready to give him whatever he wants, kidding themselves they can kick the habit, lying to the folks back home.

The latest bait and switch, this week’s bald-faced piece of fiction has to do more with bringing home the bacon than stripping the pork. The headline is “G.O.P. Strips Mandatory Funding for Two Alaskan Bridges,” which would lead the unsuspecting to believe that the pin-up pork bridge to nowhere had finally run aground.

Not while there’s a breath in an Alaskan legislator.

In hard-headed and glinty-eyed negotiations, House-Senate co-conspirators ‘stripped’ the mandatory funding for those stupid bridges, but left the $432 million in place to be ‘spent as Alaska sees fit.’

Wow. Great headline, high-fives all around and absolutely no candy taken away from the errant children.

Last week in the Senate, the honorable Ted Stevens, who represents Alaska in that animal house they call the United States Senate, threatened to ‘resign from the Senate’ if his bridge to nowhere got axed. There hasn’t been an opportunity like that in years, but the other 99 co-conspirators hadn’t the guts to call his bluff and they folded on the cut.

So much easier to take some safety-net benefit away from the poor or the displaced, who haven’t sense enough to hire gold-plated lobbyists.

If I sound angry by all of this, I am. I am uncharacteristically ticked-off at that collection of toadies we keep sending to Washington, Kennedy as well as Lott, Frist as well as Reid. There isn’t a one of them worthy of the office, not a single Democrat or Republican who’s not on the payroll of this or that special interest.

I’m not crazy about George W. Bush, but Jesus Christ himself couldn’t bring order to this uncontrolled and uncontrollable batch of two-faced, paid-off, strutting and posturing gangsters we call the United States Congress. It will serve this country admirably when the threads of conspiracy and graft running from Jack Abramoff tie each and every one of them like Gulliver.

A hundred years ago, Mark Twain said “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” That was correct in his day and there has been a sharp decline in the intervening years.

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