Their feces don't smell

I'm kind of surprised at the attention the closing of comments on the Washington Post bog has gotten. They didn't know their left-wing readers have turned into foul-mouthed moonbats? That the Democrats are so touchy these days you can't talk to them?

And they're accusing conservatives of hate speech. I never saw the more profane comments. The cache at Yahoo! had been cleaned up when I saw it. Most of the posts were just angry that anyone would accuse the Democrats of being tainted by receiving money from Abramoff's clients. Yeah, they're only the piano players!

The fact is that the whole lobbying industry is a scandal and a shame, and that both parties are responsible for it. Legislators don't need lobbyists to inform them. That's why they have hearings, to let interested parties provide information. That's what policy making is all about. The Republicans may be the ones on the hot seat at the moment, but every legislature in the country is corrupted to some extent by lobbying and their blandishments and by the practices of pork barrel spending and logrolling. When the Pork Busters project started, I was not sanguine about its chances, but it has been more successful than I expected, and that's good. The main trigger has been the conjunction of this initiative, the indictments of Tom Delay (even though he's probably not guilty of anything the Democrats haven't been doing), and the prosecution of Jack Abramoff for defrauding his clients. The angry commenters who caused the Washington Post to close it's blog comments are either blind or self-deceived if they think that Abramoff didn't send some money the Democrats' way, but what we all need to recognize is that he's not being charged with lobbying and benefiting politicians with his clients' largesse. He's charged with misleading his clients, Indian Tribes who paid him to keep Congress from hurting their gambling casinos, about what their money would be used for.

I may be cynical, but it always seemed to me that if the people really cared about all this slimey behavior, it wouldn't be happening. Politicians use earmarking because it helps them raise money and the money helps them get re-elected. I received a mailer from our Congressman, Jim Matheson, boasting about having brought $13,000,000 of federal spending to our district. When this kind of stuff costs a politician instead of earning him support, it will end, but not until. It might just be an inevitable result of democracy, people being what they are, but I hope we'll see some candidates who make an issue of it.