The Best Government Money Can Buy
Jerry Brown lamented it, so did John McCain. Campaign finance, even reformed, will still be a means of getting your name on a list that that’s the winners know you’re a “good guy.” Sheriff Rove won’t even talk to the bad guys who, in this case, aren’t the outlaws – they’re the ones who don’t ante up in the political poker game. That would be the rest of us.
We’re left to kibbutz or root for one of the high rollers in much the same way we cheer the local football team. Our involvement is limited to waving a pennant and wearing a logo sweatshirt. That’s you too, Bubba. Unless you have a K-Street office representing lawyers, insurers, or drug companies, your participation in democracy is officially relegated to a passive role. You can’t even get a seat for the game. You’ll have to watch it on TV. It wasn’t ever meant to be this way. Once again a link to Nicholas van Hoffman, the man who smelled the dead rat in the kitchen of the Nixon White House many years ago…
The attempt to limit the influence of big money has failed. In fact, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that all attempts over the last century to effect political reform—defined as limiting the power of money—have failed. Money is as much the king of American politics now as it was in the time of Mark Twain’s Great Barbecue.
Last week ended with a flurry of reminders that it was the 40th anniversary of the JFK assassination. There were a few, but not many reminders that the 140th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address was just 5 days earlier. Here are the final words of that:
…we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
Sorry, Abe.
2:40:37 AM 
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