And There You Have It. Bribery Is Legal in the U.S.

by Gaius Publius

Former Governor Bob McDonnell will no longer be prosecuted for public corruption and is being cleared of all charges. Bribery of public officials is now legal in the U.S. unless the perp is dumb enough to be spotted agreeing to a direct trade. From the Washington Post:

Prosecutors will drop case against former Va. governor Robert McDonnell

Prosecutors will not attempt to retry former Virginia governor Robert F. McDonnell and his wife Maureen on corruption charges, ending a four-year saga that rocked the Commonwealth’s political class and cut short the rise of a Republican star, according to a court filing.

The filing Thursday asks that the case be sent to a lower court, where prosecutors will formally file a motion to dismiss.

The decision is a major victory for the former governor, who has always maintained that he did nothing illegal in his relationship with a nutritional supplement salesman. It’s a blow to both the U.S. Attorney’s Office — which had recommended pressing forward with the case to Justice Department higher-ups — and advocates for strict enforcement of anti-corruption legislation.

To be clear, McDonnell was found guilty by a lower court...

McDonnell and his wife were convicted of taking more than $175,000 in loans and gifts — a Rolex watch, vacations, partial payments for a daughter’s wedding reception among them — in exchange for helping Richmond businessman Jonnie R. Williams Sr. advance a dietary supplement his company had developed.

The McDonnells arranged to connect Williams with state officials, let him throw a luncheon at the governor’s mansion to help launch the product and shape the a guest list at a mansion reception meant for health-care leaders.

...but the Supreme Court (in a unanimous decision, by the way) narrowed the definition of bribery after his conviction to the strictest quid pro quo standard — if there's no proof of a deal, it's not corruption:

However, clinical tests of the product at state universities were never conducted despite Williams’s prodding. The Supreme Court ruled that what McDonnell did for Williams fell under the standard business of a public official helping a constituent.

“Conscientious public officials arrange meetings for constituents, contact other officials on their behalf, and include them in events all the time,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote.

You can read the Supreme Court ruling here (pdf). As Chris Cillizza wrote in covering it: "The Bob McDonnell Supreme Court ruling makes convicting politicians of corruption almost impossible."

That bribery of public officials is legal in theory has now been confirmed in fact. McDonnell has been cleared of all charges and will not be reprosecuted. No smoking gun, so no quid pro quo and no corruption. Just business as usual in these United States.

(I credit my headline above to David Swanson. He's exactly right.)

Public Corruption: The Use of Public Power for Private Purposes

I've written, endlessly it seems to me, about Rule of Law and how we don't have it in practice.

In particular, it's clear that there's a circle of immunity from prosecution that, starting with the president in the Nixon pardon, widened to include not just the president and vice-president (Agnew was prosecuted before Nixon was pardoned), but all of his top advisers (the pardons of the Iran-Contra gang) — until finally a straight-up crook like Jon Corzine (a former senator, governor, Democratic Party fundraiser, and Goldman Sachs CEO) couldn't get indicted for actually stealing actual money (the MF Global affair).

You didn't see Bush indicted for war crimes (torture among them), nor any banker indicted for the obvious and blatant fraud that led to the 2008 economic meltdown, or for continuing fraud since. Now we're defining "quid pro quo" as the only standard that indicates corruption, and defining it very narrowly at that. But what is public corruption really? One of the more common definitions is this one:

Corruption is the use of public power for private purposes.

Here's how Zephyr Teachout, a law professor, author of the book Corruption in America and candidate for Congress in New York’s 19th District, put it in the Washington Post (emphasis mine):

How the Supreme Court gets corruption totally wrong

...While quid pro quo is, in fact, a Latin phrase, that’s the extent of the rightness of his argument. The phrase comes from contract law, and traditionally was used to describe a relatively equal exchange between parties to a contract. It is not historically a phrase from corruption law....

Our founding generation understood that corruption happened whenever those in public power use public power for private ends. They also understood corruption as the central threat to the survival and flourishing of our country. During the Constitutional Convention, the Founding Fathers debated the corruption implications of dozens of Constitutional provisions, and George Mason described their job as protecting against corruption lest the country “be at an end.” Alexander Hamilton described the convention as a project in enacting “every practical obstacle to corruption and cabal.”

We know the Founders weren’t just talking about direct exchanges of money for official action, because as Professor Larry Lessig has shown, only five of the 325 mentions of “corruption” in the debates around the ratification of our Constitution referred to what would now be considered criminal bribery. The rest referred to instances where those in public power used that power for private, selfish ends. The fact that the narrow quid pro quo definition has replaced the traditional idea of corruption is not just bad history; it’s a dangerous misunderstanding.

"A dangerous misunderstanding." (Teachout is being kind here. The Court's decision itself may be corrupt by her definition, especially if a justice was groomed and promoted by the wealthy and their political retainers to make just these decisions.) The argument formerly (but no longer) employed by Democrats and progressives against the Citizens United decision, and later McCutcheon v. FEC, was that quid pro quo arrangements were not the only, or even the most dangerous, forms of corruption. A quid pro quo, especially for money, was was formerly thought by Democrats to be among the least dangerous forms of corruption.

For example, if give you something you want (a Presidential pardon, say) and you give me something I want (elevation to the Presidency) — that's corrupt by any definition, even if a deal was never discussed. And not a dime changed hands.

But corruption can be more amorphous; it often includes just a network of mutually beneficial relationships, each passing gifts, held in the public trust, to the others. A former governor and current senator of a state, say, West Virginia, might use his public influence (a) to make sure his daughter's career saw significant advancement, and even (b) to make sure she got a state university degree to which she was otherwise unentitled. He might not even have had to make the phone call to get her the degree, so long as the university president knew who she was.

The first example could easily describe Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Did they make a deal? Did they even have to discuss it?

The second could well describe Joe Manchin's shepherding of his daughter Heather Bresch's career — including the part about the degree (my emphasis):

Mylan CEO Heather Bresch ... isn’t some ordinary greedy pharmaceutical executive. She’s the daughter of US Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV). She finished her BA in political science at West Virginia University (WVU) and was hired by Mylan in 1992 after her powerful father spoke to former CEO Milan Puskar. She rose through the ranks at Mylan, eventually serving at Director of Government Relations from 2002-2005, while her father was WV Secretary of State. In 2008, there was a controversy at WVU after she claimed to have an MBA. The university initially disputed the claim, but then awarded her an MBA despite only completing 22 of 48 credits required. After public embarrassment, WVU rescinded her degree and the university president, a former consultant and lobbyist for Mylan, resigned in disgrace.

Joe Manchin was governor of West Virginia in 2008, yet there's no smoking gun, so no proof as such. Just a network of relationships — Mylan, Manchin, Bresch, a Mylan lobbyist-turned-university president — and the power of public offices used for mutually beneficial gain.

See how that works? If proof of a direct connection is the only standard, how do you ever get a conviction? Answer: You don't. By that standard, you couldn't convict a shooter of murder so long as the shooter wipes the gun — even if the shooter, the corpse, the print-free gun, and a big wide smile were found in the same locked room.

Or consider this. It's now easier to be convicted of murder in the U.S. than for any form of public corruption. It's officially all for sale. Let the games begin.

GP
 

Republicans Are People Too-- Or So They Once Claimed On The TV

This week Rand Paul took a lot of heat for saying aloud something that everyone already knows: the GOP Brand sucks. Speaking in Detroit, Paul said, "Remember Domino's Pizza? They admitted, 'Hey, our pizza crust sucks.' The Republican Party brand sucks and so people don't want to be a Republican and for 80 years, African-Americans have had nothing to do with Republicans."

OK, he has a point, but is it really the Republican Party that African-Americans are so wary of? Or is it the toxic conservative ideology that the party embraces? And that conservative ideology isn't owned solely by Republicans. And it isn't mistrusted solely by African-Americans. Just over a week ago the Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, said it was unacceptable to allow his successors to be chosen in open elections, in part because doing so would risk giving poorer residents a dominant voice in politics. His blunt remarks reflect a widely held view among the Hong Kong elite that the general public cannot be trusted to govern the city well. Do you think its any different from the view American conservatives hold?

Thursday another running dog of the conservative capitalist elite in Hong Kong, Laura Cha Shih May-lung, the chairwoman of the Financial Services Development Council, told poor people to be patient. "American slaves were liberated in 1861 but did not get voting rights until 107 years later, so why can't Hong Kong wait for a while?"

The anti-democratic nature of conservatism transcends national boundaries and transcends partisan politics. The essential nature of conservatism is simple: maintaining the economic and social status quo so that those with the most wealth and power remain the ones with the most wealth and power (and get to pass that along to their offspring). Yes, that simple-- and everywhere on earth and across historical eras. Historian Rick Perlstein touched on it-- and the beginning to the Republican Party descent into madness-- when he surveyed the post-Nixon resignation Ford Administration in the 1970s in his new book, The Invisible Bridge. During a meeting of Big Business lobbyists from the Conference Board to discuss how the very idea of "social responsibility" was slowing down profits, one executive mused aloud, "One man, one vote has undermined the power of business in all capitalist countries since World War II." One of his colleagues couldn't agree more-- and sounded very much like today's Hong Kong elites: "The have-nots are gaining steadily more political power to distribute the wealth downward." The Conference Board types were determined to do something about it-- and they have... in a major way.

Before explaining the infamous headline above, Perlstein mentioned a journalist tried-- to no avail-- to persuade random Americans to sign the Declaration of Independence around July 4th. "Commie junk," one called it. Another threatened to call the cops on him. A third said, "Be careful who you show that kind of anti-government stuff to, buddy." And: "The boss will have to read this before I can let you put it in the shop window. But, politically, I can tell you he don't lean that way. He's a Republican."

The roots of the Great New York City Fiscal Crisis lay in recession: the economic downturn of 1974-75 hit the Northeast with a speed and force all out of proportion to the rest of the country. New York had always supported a program of middle class entitlement unlike anywhere else, a sort of socialism in one city: subsidized housing and day-care centers, free college at the world-class City University of New York, free museum admission, nineteen municipal hospitals, many of them world-class, free directory assistance-- amenities that seemed only natural for a metropolis transforming itself, in the boom years after World Wat II, into the greatest city in the world. "I do not propose," Mayor Robert F. Wagner pronounced in his 1965 budget message, "to permit our fiscal problems to set the klimits of our commitments to meet the essential needs of the cities." Neither, indeed did the city's investment banks who all but begged the city to keep borrowing money, because municipal bonds paid high interest rates, were exempt from federal, state and municipal taxes-- and seemed to entail negligible risk. It took two to tangle a city in unsustainable debt.

...In December 1974 Mayor Beame made a pilgrimage to Washington, D.C., to meet with Treasury Secretary William Simon. Beame explained the actions he had already taken to correct the city's fiscal imbalances, including freezing most city hiring and merit pay increases; he them argued that, given that America's greatest international city had to pay higher interest rates than any municipality in the country, it would be in the national interest for the Treasury Department to loan New York the money it needed by buying municipal paper directly.

The Treasury secretary flipped.

"Mayor," he said, "if we did that the taxpayers would end up financing the campaign promises of every profligate local politician in the country."

There was something disingenuous in the reaction. Bill Simon had formerly been senior partner in charge of government and municipal bonds at Salomon Brothers, and a member of the investment bank's seven-man executive committee-- that is, one of the very people responsible for lending so much money New York in the first place... [T]here was plenty of blame to go around. But other motives, other assumptions, lay beyond Bill Simon's recalcitrance as well. They were ideological. [He wrote] "nothing has destroyed New York's finances but the liberal political formula... Liberal politics, endlessly glorifying its own 'humanism," has in fact been annihilating the very conditions for human survival."

He spoke for his class. As a staffer wrote in a memo proposing language for First National City Bank's president to use in discussion with the mayor, this crisis was an opportunity: "many things"-- he cited higher subway fares, cutbackks in the city workforce, and budget cuts generally-- "can be done even if they are not technically possible." Technically possible, he meant, if interest groups like the municipal unions, the board of education, or municipal hospital administrators were afforded their traditional political deference. Well, they had been deferred to long enough. "The time," the staffer insisted, "is now.:" Now it was the capitalists' time to be deferred to.

...On May 29, Beame complied, announcing an austerity budget calling for the immediate elimination of 38,000 jobs-- more than 12 percent of all city employment, a four-day municipal workweek, reductions to CUNY admissions, and library and health center closures... [Simon:] "We're going to sell New York to the Shah of Iran"... Simon spoke of "parasitical" municipal workers, conceptually separate from the "productive population." They drew, he said "appalling" pensions though for what it was worth the pension of the average retiring New York City policeman-- $9,000-- was $3,000 less than in Chicago, $8,000 less than Detroit, and less than half that in Los Angeles and San Francisco. City teachers and firemen also earned less in salary than in all of those cities, with a considerably higher cost of living.

... Republican councils were obsessed with the poll showing that only 18 percent of the public identified with the Grand Old Party. Informally, there had been talks about whether to change its tainted name. Another public relations idea was a joke book, Republican Humor. Every Republican congressman would be asked to contribute. "Probably some of them won't have anything funny to offer," a staffer observed. What the Grand Old Party settled on instead was three half-hour fundraising TV specials featuring everyday Republicans who want to tell why they have stuck with the GOP." The series, coordinated with accompanying lapel buttons for the party faithful to wear to work the next day, was titled Republicans Are People Too! The second installment ran on July 1, up against M*A*S*H on CBS and a Tuesday Movie of the Week on ABC about a talk radio host who specialized in insulting his audience, laughing off a caller who said she was about to commit suicide-- and then she did. The GOP show's them, more cheerful, was "Republicans are people who care." It cost $124,000 to produce. It brought in $5,515. The announced third episode never ran.

2013 in Review -- A Prayer to the Janitor of Lunacy,* Part 4: A great anniversary approaches!

Plus more "Quote of the Year" nominees

[*TO MEET THE JANITOR OF LUNACY, SEE PART 1]



by Noah

One of the greatest anniversaries in our nation’s history will happen this year. Forty years ago, on August 9, 1974, President Richard Nixon resigned! It was either that or certain removal from office via impeachment, and it was bipartisan. That’s how bad it was. If Nixon wanted to retire with a pension and perks, it was the only way.

The anti-semitism. The racism. The criminality, the paranoia, and the screaming down the halls of the White House. Psychosis. "I am not a crook." Yes you were, Richard, and worse. What a horrific human being! We can be thankful that he is gone, and we can be very thankful that he wasn't the president during the Cuban missile crisis or we wouldn't be here at all.



True story: One day, back in the early '80s, I went to the Fifth Avenue Doubleday record dept. here in NYC. It was on the second-floor mezzanine. When I got there, I immediately saw Tricky Dick at the counter with his daughter and son-in-law Julie and David Eisenhower. No one else was in the department except two very large bodyguards, who always managed to place themselves between me and His Evilness (I discreetly played with that one a bit). Here's the kicker: Nixon was buying blank tape! Tape! The very thing that had sunk him!

There was just one employee, a young kid who was nervous as hell. The kid was so nervous that he dropped all the boxes of cassettes all over the place. Nixon, in an unexpected (by me, at least) display of humanity, said in his distinctive voice, "Ah, that's all right, young man." I will say that other than the irony of Nixon buying tape, I was struck by the fact that he was very charismatic, but then, many psychotic bigots and war criminals are. They always said that Zodiac and Ted Bundy were very charming, and that Adolf dude could sure give a speech!

But there he was, wearing an expensive royal blue overcoat. I wanted to scream, but I knew I’d be thrown over the balcony or something. So all I did was mutter “war criminal” within earshot of one of the bodyguards as I walked out of the store. My desire to purchase anything was gone.

I had seen the man, in person, who, in an act of treason, sabotaged the 1968 Paris peace talks that President Lyndon Johnson was working on to end the Vietnam War. LBJ’s tapes reveal that he knew of the treason that would lead to tens of thousands of addtional American casualties, but he and his VP, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic Party’s 1968 presidential nominee, did nothing. They didn’t want to expose some wire-tapping. Humphrey thought he was going to win anyway, and LBJ was also thinking that America couldn’t handle the knowledge that a presidential candidate was guilty of treason. LBJ was wrong, just as he had been wrong about our ability to deal with the truth of JFK’s murder.

Sleazy cover-up artist Gerald Ford

Not only had the Paris peace talks been wrecked, Nixon -- who said he had a “secret plan” to end the war -- was elected president. Eventually he got some of what was coming to him, but so many got so much that they didn’t deserve. A sleazy cover-up artist named Gerald Ford was handed the presidency, and he in turn pardoned Nixon of any and all crimes, famously saying that no one wants to see the former president in jail. Really?

So many families were destroyed, all because one lunatic had to be president at any cost. I spit on your grave, Dick Nixon.

There’s huge irony to be seen as we look back on the Nixon presidency. The irony lies in the fact that he was a Republican and there is no way he would ever be able to be in today’s Republican Party. Here’s why:

1. Nixon improved Social Security benefits. He increased some taxes on the wealthy, and he also championed finding a way to guarantee a minimum income.

2. Nixon supported a Clean Air Act and affirmative action.

3. Nixon created the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency.

4. Nixon created OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

5. Nixon’s top economic advisor, Herb Stein, is on record as saying, “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon Administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

The man had well-documented issues. The tapes and the eyewitness accounts don’t lie, but if not for the complete evil of the treason for which he should have been hanged, or at least jailed, Nixon would be considered a socialist by the lunatics that inhabit the Republican Party today -- not just a liberal, a raving socialist. They would treat him much like they treat President Obama today. That’s a measure of how sociopathic and psychopathic today’s Republicans are. Obama and the Conservadems? They would fit in fine in the Republican Party of the early 1970s. The Janitor of Lunacy is in full force.


Note the blue-penned time and initials from the witness, the bouncing-off-the-walls Nixon's companion of his final days in office, Henry Kissinger.


NEED MORE EVIDENCE OF THE INGRAINED
LUNACY OF REPUBLICANS? HERE ARE SOME
MORE "QUOTE OF THE YEAR" NOMINEES

1. Judge Edith Jones, U.S. Fifth Court of Appeals, Reagan appointee

Sigh, where do the Republicans keep coming up with these troglodytes? Well, in this case, while Judge Jones may “serve” in Louisiana, she’s from the ultimate loonyland, Texas!


“[C]ertain racial groups like African-Americans and Hispanics are predisposed to crime and prone to commit acts of violence.”

And: “Some groups seem to commit more heinous crimes than others.”

Really? Really? If I didn’t know that she had already made it clear that she was talking about African-Americans and Hispanics, I might have thought she was talking about 20th-century Germans, Nixon’s napalm, Stalin’s Russia, 16th-century Spaniards pouring molten gold down the throats of Incans -- or Texans aiming their trucks at Mexicans on their highways, for that matter. Who or what brought this cretin up? And what kind of people invite such a person to speak? This is a judge -- on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, no less? This horror show of a throwback to the Civil War, a Reagan appointee, was even on the short list for promotion to the Supreme Court under both Bushes. Well, no surprise there, is there?

She said this in a talk before the Federalist Society at U. Penn’s law school. I guess she felt comfy as she gazed out into an audience of sheet-wearing Republican morons. What’s next? “Why, I hear them darkies loves pig's feet and fried chicken. And they love our prisons, for the free meals and other free stuff”?

Really, where do they get these people? I guess Judge Judy wouldn’t take the job.

A couple of hundred years ago, people in Europe thought you could tell a person’s criminal proclivities by measuring the size and shape of their skulls. In Republican World, it is still a couple of hundred years ago.


2. John “Where’s My” Boehner, to CBS’s Bob Schieffer


“Well, Bob, we should not be judges on how many laws we create. We ought to be judged on how many laws that we repeal."

Rrrriiiight, John-boy. Damn all them laws and regulations. They just get in the way of Republican free expression. Now those folks in Florida, they’ve got it right. See a black kid in a hoodie? Blast him! Voting rights? Hah, who needs ‘em? No one important anyway! Employee pensions? Follow the lead of Michigan’s Governor Snyder: Declare the cities bankrupt and steal the workers' pensions and give that money to the corporations! We don’t need no stinking laws. Do the same with Social Security! Obamacare? Why do we want those people to live anyway? They don’t vote for us.

I wonder why.


3. $en. John Cornyn, $enate Republican whip

From a bizarre place called Texas (which translates loosely from the Mexican as “Land of Los Locos”), comes yet another apparently peyote-button-induced word jumble from the $enator. Cornyn seeks to prove that, while Texas has given us straitjacket candidates like Rick “1-2-?” Perry, Louie “The Bestiality Guy” Gohmert, Canadian-born Rafael “Ted” Cruz, and Steve Stockman, the guy who thinks Cornyn is a liberal, nobody does wackobird better than he, his sun-baked self.

Heeeere’s Johnny as he follows the Fox lead in resurrecting ACORN in another deep-digging desperation attempt to destroy Obamacare, orchestrate more deaths by cancer, increase the infant mortality rate, and do all the other fine things on the Big Republican Wish List. They’ve tried everything else except claiming that Obamacare caused Fukushima.


“We’ve already heard some anecdotal reports about Obamacare navigators, including a woman who had an outstanding arrest warrant at the time she was hired, along with former members of an organization known as ACORN . . . . ”
   
Maybe Obama hired that “Cadillac-driving welfare queen” from the mind of Ronnie Reagan too! “Anecdotal reports”? Some guy who knows some guy who knows some guy who got the real story from the Bigfoot family that live in the treehouse in his back yard. Hey, Cornyn, you want true crime? Take a look around you on the $enate floor. While you’re at it, the House of Representatives is just down the hall. You can find someone with a legal problem in any group of size.

You know it’s bad when people reference something they got from Fox “News” as if it were actually factual. Consider the source. We already know what righties think of “community organizers.” They buried three of them in an earthen dam in Mississippi back in 1964.
   

4. Rep. Blake Farenthold (R-TX) and Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI)

I started this post with Dick Nixon so why not end on an impeachment theme too? I’m putting these two together because they’re really just two cheeks of a horse’s ass.

Notice that we have yet another twit from Texas. We'll let him go first.


“If we were to impeach the president tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it.”

I’m sure Boehner would drink to that, but wouldn’t Ol’ Cheez Doodle Face drink to just about anything?

Now, the guy from Nugentland gets his say. Ain’t free speech grand?


“If I could write that bill and submit it, it would be a dream come true.”

I have to say that if I were a congressman, writing a bill that would create jobs or alleviate poverty and hunger or give people a shot at health care or help children get an education would be my dream come true. I have to admit that I’d also be tempted to write a bill that would send cretins like these two into space -- to one of the big gas giants like Jupiter, where they would be at home. No need to be cruel about it.

And I’m sorry, I don’t really mean to insult horses. That’s just not fair of me. I should have compared these men to cockroaches, the kind that have imbibed too much insecticide and just race around in circles accomplishing nada. If that isn’t an apt metaphor for the current poison-fueled House of Representatives, I don’t know what is.

Oops, there I go again. Sorry, cockroaches.

#

NOAH'S 2013 IN REVIEW --
A PRAYER TO THE JANITOR OF LUNACY*

Part 1: Take a bow, Repugs! (*including Nico's "Janitor of Lunacy") [Monday]

Part 2: Remember when Reagan cut funds for insane asylums? (Storms, guns, bombs, free stuff, and the secret gay life of Obma: Some top Republican lies of 2013) [Tuesday]

Part 3: No Cruz control (Rafael "Ted" Cruz in his own words) [Wednesday]

Part 4: A great anniversary approaches! (Nixon's resignation) (plus more "Quote of the Year nominees") [Thursday]

Part 5: Everyone's a critic, including me -- Some people really try my patience (Bill-O, Howie Kurtz, E. W. Jackson, et al.) [Friday]

Part 6 (and last): In the words of Dan Quayle, "What a waste it is to lose one's mind" (Exploiting tragedy for a buck; Miss America's not American?; "Quote of the Year" winner) [Saturday]

And don't forget Noah's recent --
"Need a last-minute Christmas gift suggestion?" [12/22]
"50 Years Ago Today: The Beatles" [12/26]
"A Tale of Two Popes -- the one in the Vatican and the one in North Carolina" [12/27]

#

Glenn G remembers Jerry terHorst's resignation after the Nixon pardon as something "that would not happen today"

Let's see, at last count the total number of Obama administration officials who have quit in protest of White House retention and enforcement of Republican policies is . . . er . . . wait, let me check my notes . . . hold on . . . um, roughly zero.

"The principle in which [Ford press secretary Jerald terHorst's] resignation was grounded -- that the highest political elites should be held to the same standards as ordinary Americans when it comes to breaking the law -- is one of the most widely mocked and explicitly rejected ideas in our current political culture."

-- Glenn Greenwald in his Friday Salon.com post,

"Things that would not happen today"

by Ken

I'm just catching up with Glenn Greenwald's Friday post, "Things that would not happen today," spurred by news of the death of Jerald terHorst, who served as White House press secretary for 30 days after Gerald Ford succeeded the resigned-in-disgrace Richard Nixon as president in 1974 -- until he resigned the day after President Ford issued his blanket pardon of Nixon, writing in his resignation letter:

As your spokesman, I do not know how I could credibly defend that action in the absence of a like decision to grant absolute pardon to the young men who evaded Vietnam military service as a matter of conscience and the absence of pardons for former aides and associates of Mr. Nixon who have been charged with crimes -- and imprisoned -- stemming from the same Watergate situation.

More power to Glenn for jumping on this. As he writes:

It's virtually impossible to imagine anyone undertaking an act like this in contemporary Washington. Indeed, the principle in which his resignation was grounded -- that the highest political elites should be held to the same standards as ordinary Americans when it comes to breaking the law -- is one of the most widely mocked and explicitly rejected ideas in our current political culture (Look Forward, Not Backward -- for Elite Crimes). Beyond that, anyone who sacrificed a position of political power, and did so based on an announced principle, would be derided by our power-worshiping political media as UnSerious, UnSavvy, and an overly earnest loser.

Ain't that the truth? The post obviously struck a nerve. The last time I looked, it had drawn 438 comments. I haven't even tried to read through them. I have a pretty good idea what they're saying, and I agree. Here's one near the beginning of the procession from commenter Ed Miller: "Politicians vet their underlings for moral integrity and disqualify them if they have any. They need people with more flexibility."

The case of former Secretary of State Colin Powell comes up, I note, on the ground that he eventually revealed that he thought about quitting over the Bush regime's campaign of lies about Iraq. In fact, the Powell case is a perfect illustration of Glenn's point. Powell gets no points, zero, for thinking about quitting. He had his chance to quit, and chose not to. Maybe it wouldn't have made a difference, but we'll never know. At least Powell could have claimed to have some principles.

As Glenn writes (with abundant links onsite):

A decade of government radicalism and lawbreaking that included torture, aggressive war, indefinite detentions, and illegal domestic surveillance did not generate a single resignation of this kind. We had a handful of truly brave whistle-blowers, but other than that, the most that happened was that officials were willing to reveal and condemn the corruption in which they actively participated -- only long after it happened and once they needed a way to sell a book and rehabilitate their reputation.

Interestingly, in his updates, Glenn records reports of "a couple mid-level resignations" in the Bush regime "in protest over the core unfairness of the military commissions system -- notably from members of the U.S. military who apparently took concepts of 'honor' seriously," and another, similar example in " the recent resignation of former Marine Capt. Matthew Hoh in protest over the futility of the war in Afghanistan," adding: "It is interesting that such conscience resignations occur among mid-level current and former military members, but not among the political class."

This all rises a level or two of chillingness when Glenn raises his speculative stakes:

Then again, it's virtually impossible to imagine Richard Nixon being forced to resign in today's political culture. After all, a federal court just ruled that the prior President violated the criminal law in how he spied for years on American citizens, while the current administration did everything possible to shield those crimes from judicial review (by claiming they were "state secrets"), and it barely caused a ripple.

For today's pols, getting caught in a sex scandal or a financial one can trigger the unraveling of a career. (Note that I say "can trigger," not "will trigger" career demise. While John Ensign seems on political death watch -- if not headed for the slammer, for his parlay of sex + financial scandal -- David "The Diaper Man" Vitter continues to mouth loony-right faux pieties as he slithers his way to reelection.) Short of that, it's all a question of how good your P.R. operation is.

Sigh.

#

The dope on the dope: Princess Sarah not only isn't a Lincoln, she isn't even a Ford

"It’s not just the fact that Republicans are now posing as staunch defenders of a program they have hated ever since the days when Ronald Reagan warned that Medicare would destroy America’s freedom. Nor is it even the fact that, as House speaker, [Newt] Gingrich personally tried to ram through deep cuts in Medicare -- and, in 1995, went so far as to shut down the federal government in an attempt to bully Bill Clinton into accepting those cuts. . . .

"No, what’s truly mind-boggling is this: Even as Republicans denounce modest proposals to rein in Medicare’s rising costs, they are, themselves, seeking to dismantle the whole program."

-- Paul Krugman, in his NYT column today,

"Republicans and Medicare"

by Ken

I suppose everybody has signed up for all those "newsletters" washingtonpost.com offers free, synopsizing the site's latest news and opinion offerings (and whatever else you may be interested in). And I'm happy to have them. My attention is called to all sorts of stuff I might well miss otherwise.

The only thing is that lately there seem to be more and more of these bulletins aimed at keeping me informed what the most popular stories and opinion pieces are. Presumably this is designed to protect me from the embarrassment of revealing myself to be out of touch with what real folks care about in the paper when I venture out into polite society. Please!

It deepens from annoying to downright depressing, though, when they're celebrating sludge like David S. Broder (or, more properly, the Broder Monkeys who've been writing his stuff the last 20 or 30 years) earnestly informing us how Sarah Palin's message could just be a winner for her, or some such swill. Not that I don't entertain dark fantasies of the sort myself, but the thought of getting the ultimate Village-insider take on a phenomenon that, whatever else it is, is aimed squarely at the imperial Village shuttered behind those Beltway walls, well, that's just too much.

Another piece that has been at the top of the WaPo hit list is the cackling of some right-wing hyena about how us leftists think we know everything but he's here to show one and all how wrong we are. I didn't have to read that one either to know that this guy's full of doody, a cynical opportunist preying on the ignorance so many Americans have chosen as their way of life, aided and exhorted by the colluded forces of darkness around them, starting with the fortresses of mind-controlling Crap Christianity.

I don't suppose there's any point in saying it over and over, but I don't see any way of avoiding it. I'm not saying that Princess Sarah is stupid, or that the people who stupidly admire her are stupid. What they are is ignorant. The difference is simple. It's not that their brains are incapable of taking in and processing real-world information, but that they have shut their brains off and cut themselves off from actual information, choosing instead to be force-fed a diet of lies and delusions by cynical manipulators who know how to plug into their bedrock prejudices. And the various cults of the Right keep getting better and better at enslaving their charges in their ignorance. (Hey, it's not as if we've put much effort into maintaining a competent public education system that might counter the forces of ignorance.)

You keep looking at it and wondering, "How can it get any worse?" and every day brings a new answer. Just today Paul Krugman is registering astonishment that Republicans have -- against all odds and all vestiges of reality -- made a winning issue out of "protecting" Medicare, when in fact they are are targeting their crusade to destroy it.

The cult of ignorance is hardly a brand-new invention in public affairs. I think back to the presidency of Jerry Ford, when -- at an embarrassingl advanced age -- I had to have that distinction between stupidity and ignorance explained to me. But at least I had a good explainer: then political correspondent (and now distinguished political historian and commentator, nationally syndicated columnist and author of many fine books) Richard Reeves, who believed strongly that the distinction was crucial to understanding Ford, who was the subject of his very first book, A Ford, Not a Lincoln. (Can you make out the book's subtitle, by the way? Or Why There Are no Leaders in Washington. This was in 1975.)

The man wasn't stupid, Reeves insisted. He just didn't want to be burdened with any more than he absolutely needed to know to get through the day.

Even as president, our Jerry insisted (as I recall the details) that any memo that came to him requiring a presidential decision -- in other words, the basic modus operandi of government -- be no more than a page and present no more than two options, with an implicit understanding (or could it have been explicit?) that it would be clear which option was "correct." This was as much as he wanted to know about "issues," as much as he was prepared to take in. And at that, as the lovely Mike Keefe cartoon above suggests, it's more reality than, say, Princess Sarah appears prepared to take in.

And it seems to me that Jerry Ford in his years in Congress, and in particular his time as House minority leader, has to have had a basic familiarity with the workings of government and the urgencies pressing on it that's positively professorial by comparison with (again to pick a random example) Princess Sarah. She has chosen to live her life free of any intellectual clutter more demanding than some easy-to-grasp ultra-right religious wackadoodlery and a store of folksy "wisdom" that's almost all mindless gibberish.

Now the Broder Monkeys want to tell us that she could yet be a contender? Well, I guess it takes news awhile to penetrate the Beltway ramparts.

(Note: I'm assuming the Broder Monkeys weren't suggesting it's a good thing that Princess Sarah could be a contender. Now that would be something I really don't want to know.)



SHAMELESS PROMOTION DEPT.: COMING UP
IN TONIGHT'S SUNDAY CLASSICS PREVIEW

This week's Sunday Classics composer is Edvard Grieg, and if I do say so myself, I'm darned pleased with tonight's preview, which posts at 9pm PT. (That's midnight ET for those of you who haven't gotten the hang of this time-zone thing yet.) [Oops: I managed to confuse myself over the post times. Oh well. Sorry about that.]

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