Over The Hill

Ah, the price of keeping food on the table and my online empire afloat is sometimes more than I can stay awake for. But as they say in the professional wrestling business, once you catch the "sickness," you'll never be cured.

Which, for me, hasn't really proven true vis-a-vie pro wrestling. But that's a story for another day.

***Remember how the Democrats squalled to the heavens about the "Republican culture of corruption" in the last election cycle? Remember how they ran on a vow to "clean up" Congress?

C'mon, not ALL of you can have fallen for that BS, right?

Powerful Democratic chairmen and subcommittee chairmen have relied on lobbyists to raise money during the first three months of this year, according to recent fundraising reports, which cast light on the strong opposition to lobbying reform legislation scheduled to reach the floor today.

Conservative Democrats in the Blue Dog Coalition have been particularly leery of legislation that would require lobbyists to reveal in public reports the total amount of contributions they raise or “bundle” for lawmakers. Many Democrats voiced concerns at a closed-door caucus meeting on the lobbying reform bill last week.

“Instead of passing a bunch of little bills, I would rather have people here understand they should act how their momma and poppa taught them how to act,” said Representative Allen Boyd (FL), a Blue Dog Democrat who is undecided about whether to vote for proposed rules requiring lobbyists to report the contributions they raise for lawmakers.

Well, yee-haw, Allen-Billy-Ray-Bob. Looks like you're too green to know when to keep your mouth shut, but not too green to line up for the green.

Fascinating, isn't it? The "liberal" Democrats love corruption; the Donk leadership loves corruption (and has for a looooong time); and now even the so-called "conservative" Blue Dog Dems love corruption. Whereas the GOP "corruption culture" grew up over the course of several years, the Donk variety has been around for decades, survived in minority stasis quite well, thank you very much, and was revived in January more ravenously greedy than ever.

But then this IS what the American people voted for. They knew the Democrats were way more crooked than any Republican could ever dream of being. So they threw out the amatuers and installed the professionals. And the orgy of earmarks and lobbyist cash is just the scant downpayment on the true bread and circuses yet to come in the ominously approaching Hillary! era.

I'd say I warned 'em, but I may have, in my own small way, whetted voter appetites instead.


***The testimony of Monica Goodling, a Justice Department liason to the White House, was evidently highly anticipated by the DisLoyal Opposition as the blockbuster that would finish off the Attorney-Generalship of Alberto "Speedy" Gonzales in the US attorney dismissal non-scandal. The ostensible reason is that she recognized a trumped-up perjury trap when she saw one vis-a-vie the testimony of the recently bailed Gonzales deputy Paul McNulty. Really, though, that just fueled the Dems' ludicrously leading wishful thinking that led to obscene overassumptions. It would seem that though Watergate was a personal tragedy for President Nixon and some of "his men," the Democrats have driven themselves loony trying to recapture that once-in-a-lifetime perfect scandal storm.

Regardless, they do not appear to have gotten the testimony from her that they were expecting, which would have required Gonzales to have dressed up like Snidely Whiplash, complete with curled mustache and black cape, and tied the eight ex-USAs to adjoining railroad tracks. A letdown which so annoyed a couple of Donks (Representatives Stephen Cohen and the infamous Keith Ellison (D-Jihad)) that they tried to attack her for, respectively, attending a law school founded by Pat Robertson and refusing to rubber-stamp the Christophobic bigotry vomited upon Minnesota US attorney Rachel Paulose.

Byron York sums up this pointless exercise:

Democrats, intent on finding an all-encompassing Rovian plot behind the firings, will never accept that possibility that the U.S. attorney firings were done in a manner that was so slipshod, so halting, and so pointless that nobody quite knew what was going on. But that may be just what happened. Whatever their partisan motivation, Democrats are trying to impose a logical template on events. In the end, they may be doomed to fail.

To the irrational ire of right-wing purists who demand that the President hand Speedy's severed professional head to the Donks on a spike anyway for precisely the reasons the latter don't want to accept.

There is administrative incompetence, and then there's political incompetence. Frankly, the former is far less dangerous to the Republican Party than the latter.

You wouldn't think George W. Bush would be so politically astute. And you'd probably be right, as he's sticking by his buddy Gonzales out of personal loyalty rather than public relations savvy - the same ingrained tendency that led him to try and foist Harriet Miers on the SCOTUS a year and a half ago.

Dubya provided evidence of both in the same press conference today. But that's the next post, if I'm to get to bed before the sun comes up.