Apparently the House Ethics Committee has slipped past their logjam, and are now going to get down to work. It’s a simple equation: Give the Ds a Bob Ney and give the Rs a William Jefferson.

I think this just might work. Kind of. Sort of. Not really. Somewhat.

Line up the Corrupt Democrats — Ethically challenged, soaking in blood, who conceptualize their seat of power as nothing more than a conduit to the monied interests that have propped them up.

(1) William Jefferson of Louisiana. There’s not a whole lot of surprise that there’s a corrupt Democrat popping out of Louisiana. Huey Long casts a long shadow in that state.
(2) Alan B. Mollohan of West Virginia.
(3) Oh, there’s probably some Representative from Illinois that churned out of Richard Daley’s Chicago Machine, or somewhere around there.
(4) Is there some protege of Torricelli floating up there, from the great state of New Jersey (another bastion of Corrupt Politicos)?

All of this adds up to the “Culture of Hypocrisy” that one political party is levelling at the other political party for charging them with the “Culture of Corruption”.

Turn over to the Republican side of the aisle.

Perhaps the House Ethics Committee is beside the point. After all,

(1) Tom DeLay of Texas has been bumped out even with all the stalling in the world. I note for all the world to behold: he had the levels of control with the Dominant Political Party in Washington. This is the very definition of “systematic”.
(2) Duke Cunningham of California was bumped out, with nary a word uttered by such a thing as a “House Ethics Committee”. The comedy with Duke Cunningham is that he is, quite literally, by the measurement of personal use of public goods, the Most Corrupt Congress Critter in American History.

It is at this point that I admit that these two have, by some means and perhaps the means are less important than the result, been dealt with. But never mind, we are just going to have to grandfather these people into the “one for one” equation. I suggest the possibility that everyone who is more or less a subordinate to these politicos (on both sides) should be court martialed in this little game… but that would toss out maybe 227 of the 232 Republicans.

(3) Bob Ney of Ohio. Also Known as “Representative #1”, because when you release anonymous name in court documents you need some placeholder to allow a person to say something instead of “Blacked out”.
(4) John Doolittle of California.

It is at this point in time in which we have reached a Democrat to Republican equal ratio, even as I tossed up two unnamed hypothetical but plausible Democratic examples that have not materialized that a little digging might unearth, if the Republicans care to pass out the line of “Culture of Hypocrisy” against the Democratic charge of “Culture of Corruption.” Tit for tat. Tat for tit. If things become a bit shallow on one end, so be it. Maybe I can grandfather James Trafficant into this equation, but I don’t feel like it — a Democrat that voted for Hastert for House Speaker — whether this makes him a better or worse guy than Zell Miller, who voted for Tom Daschle over Bill Frist and Trent Lott, and then proceeded to confer with Frist and Lott, I do not know.

(5) Charles Taylor of North Carolina.

It is at this point in the game that the Republicans can give us their investigations into — um — Jim McDermott of Washington and — um — Cynthia McKinney of Georgia. The former Doc Hastings says he’s looking into, the latter Tom DeLay says he was going to file one against for her infamous incident with House Security — such as that was — though it appears he won’t — probably whatever amusement comes from this petty little fit of frustration has faded.

The reality is that the Democratic Party in Congress can’t hope of becoming as corrupt as the Republican Party in Congress until they gain any power, by simple definition corruption requires Power. Wait a decade and the revolving door game might be able to be played. But only sort of — does anybody remember what the Corruption of the lingering into the early 90s Democratic Congress was like that Newt Gingrich railed against, anyway?

It’s been a while since I’ve ventured into the realm of Lyndon LaRouche, so I will go ahead and venture into that realm.

The LaRouchites were standing on one of their standard corner in downtown Portland yesterday. I neglected to check to see what their “provocative” sign said. There was a man arguring passionately with the LaRouchites. I wondered about this. What could be said, what could be had, what could be accomplished? Did he leave the scene feeling as though there had been a meeting of the minds or a fruitful and productive exchange of ideas — or did he leave the scene feeling flustered and frustrated?

Meanwhile, in Houston, history is being made. Corruption having been uncovered, the head of Enron passing the buck in every direction he can think of, and the court case proceeds apace.

As closing arguments began Monday in the trial of former Enron Corp. chieftains Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, a prosecutor described the defendants as arrogant and self-serving executives who acted as if they alone owned the company they had helped to build.

But in fact, Assistant U.S. Atty. Kathryn H. Ruemmler told the jury, it was thousands of Enron employees and other shareholders who owned the energy company and were entitled to honesty and fair treatment from Lay and Skilling — not the “outright lies” and accounting “trickery” the government alleges they got. Of the ordinary shareholders, including three who testified during the 15-week trial, Ruemmler said: “It was their Enron. It wasn’t Mr. Lay’s Enron. It wasn’t Mr. Skilling’s Enron.”

And the LaRouchites prove that they are not entirely worthless.

At lunchtime, a group of about a dozen supporters of frequent presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr. serenaded the defendants and others exiting the courthouse with a surprisingly tuneful song mocking Enron’s downfall.

I hate to say this, but in what is supposed to be a straight unbiased news article, some editorial comment has slipped through… that phrase being “surprisingly tuneful”. I suggest that there is no surprise… the LaRouchites practice their tunes at LaRouche Camp — Chior Practice is part of their regiment, it would appear.

As these things go, from the sphere of the Michael Medved Show, On one show last week, I heard him try (respectfully) to understand the position of one caller who reminded me of the LaRouche people I run into every few years (he mentioned BCCI, which I think the LaRouchies still care about, and something else rang a bell).

BCCI. Enron. Who cares about BCCI these days? It’s possible that you’ve never heard of or have long forgotten about BCCI. I only know about it from reading a bit into the political career of John Kerry during his presidential run — one of the few highlights of an otherwise staid and unremarkable career. In a number of years, we may shirk Enron into the same land of fogotten arenas as BCCI. The Larouchites, for what it is worth, are good at at least tossing names that fade away into the past of importance to the sphere of the development of our current World Politic. It is part of LaRouche’s pshyce of imagined grudges. What the world needs now is to remember Zbigniew Brzezinski. At any rate, there’s this degree to which Enron may reveal a facade to the entire American Economy. BCCI exposed a facade in the entire Global Economy. They matter, to some extent, though I guess it is hard to keep railing against them. Something new will come down the pike in a few years.

Meanwhile, I have a correction to make to this editorial about the good fortunes of Senator Bill Nelson in ending up with the Republican opponent Katherine Harris, and the desparation of the Republican party in trying to nudge an “Allan Bense” into the race instad:

Uh, Allan Bense, a candidate with less name recognition than the state’s executioner and starting with less money in the coffers than Lyndon LaRouche, would have ended the race as the Anne Boleyn of the Panhandle with his head handed to him by Nelson.

Lyndon LaRouche is actually quite wealthy, and nearing the dawn of the Iowa Caucuses and New Hampshire primary was either first or second (I don’t remember, but Harper’s Index made note of it) in total campaign donations and funds. He has a cult following, you see.
……………….

UPDATE: I accidentally deleted this comment message:
Do you type LaRouche in the Google search engine everyday? Damn, your
obsessed man, when are you going to get it over with and join thier
movement already. 🙂

The answer to that question is — I have his name keyed.

Dan Saltzman ……………. 55,072 57.81%
Amanda Fritz …………….. 23,500 24.67%
Sharon Nasset ……………. 5,425 5.69%
Chris Iverson ………… 4,906 5.15%
Lucinda Tate …………. 2,902 3.05%
Michael Casper ……… 2,241 2.35%
Watchman ……………. 1,224 1.28%

I look at these election results for City Commissioner, and I say, do you realize what this means?

One Thousand Two Hundred Twenty Four People looked at the ballot and said, “You know who can really move this city forward? That Watchman! Who we need is Watchman!”

It’s a riddle wrapped in a puzzle bumping up against the darkness.

Of a gate.

WASHINGTON, DC—In a press conference on the steps of the Capitol Monday, Congressional Democrats announced that, despite the scandals plaguing the Republican Party and widespread calls for change in Washington, their party will remain true to its hopeless direction.

“We are entirely capable of bungling this opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate and the trust of the American people,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) said to scattered applause. “It will take some doing, but we’re in this for the long and pointless haul.”

Sounds like a parody, but alas:

Indeed, some Democrats worry that the worst-case scenario may be winning control of Congress by a slim margin, giving them responsibility without real authority. They might serve as a foil to Republicans and President Bush, who would be looking for someone to share the blame. Democrats need a net gain of 6 seats in the Senate, and 15 seats in the House. “The most politically advantageous thing for the Democrats is to pick up 11, 12 seats in the House and 3 or 4 seats in the Senate but let the Republicans continue to be responsible for government,” said Tony Coelho, a former House Democratic whip. “We are heading into this period of tremendous deficit, plus all the scandals, plus all the programs that have been cut. This way, they get blamed for everything.”

I have this image of Nancy Pelosi and Ron Emanuel, sitting hunched over at DCCC headquarters election day. They have the numbers tallied up as election night runs over to the Pacific Time Zone — Alaska and Hawaii are assured, and all of California’s results come in. Piling up the numbers, they find Republicans — 217, Democrats – 217.

They stare at the results of Washington State Congressional Race #5, where Cathy McMorris is the Republican incumbant against Democratic candidate Peter Goldmark. They fret when Goldmark takes they lead, their hopes spring eternal when McMorris pulls ahead. At the end of the day, when the margin is, say, 34 votes that requires a recount procedure, the DCCC frets about to figure out how to create a PAC organization that would obscure the ties to the Democratic Party, to fund McMorris’s recount fund.

Sigh.

As these things go, the answer is “I guess”, but it’s really not how you proceed in a political game. Perhaps the best outcome is to get a majority of one (which I guess means Goldmark will just have to win after all) in the House, than have Henry Cuellar switch to a Republican, thus ending up in the minority by one with the Democrat that was, at this time famously in the liberal part of the political blogosphere sitting on the Republican aisle during Bush’s State of the Union speech, a newly minted Republican. In the Senate, the ideal would be to win FIVE SEATS… you win every piece of elected government in 2008.

Sigh again.

Float us back to the last time the Democratic Party supposedly would have been better off losing than winning: 1976. By way of explanation, Tim Vanaugh has a review of the book Decade of Nightmares : The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America in the latest issue of Reason magazine. By way of explaining the book’s furor:

We know now that inflation was on the verge of being whipped, that double digit interest rates were a relic of practically medieval economic thinking, that urban decay was a passing phase in the renewal of American cities, and that the Soviet Union was one Yakov Smirnoff routine away from the old folks’ home of history. But at the time, such problems seemed chronic, and they were joined by countless smaller terrors to create a sense of chronic dread. A nation of latchkey kids was either being driven mad by angel dust or getting abducted by brainwashing cults. Intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic were mutilating cattle in the country-side, while in urban areas the 60s problem of “white flight” had escalated into a vision of American cities in violent, unmanageable, apocalyptic decline. Iranian maniacs weren’t just keeping 52 US citizens in captivity, they were, in the hysterical phrase that made the career of the supposedly unflappable newsman Ted Koppel, “Holding America Hostage”.

[…] It was this mood of compounding horror, as much as the standard explanations of stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis that made stout Reagan more attractive than pusillanimous Carter. Again, Jenkins brings back a nuance lost to history; the brimstone, apocalyptic strain that underlined Reagan’s famous sunniness.

Frankly, every era has its fire and brimstone shunned just below the surface. That era we call the 1950s, remembered fondly by cultural conservatives and thought of as an age of peace and security and Economic Prosperity, was an age when Everybody was out to get you, subversives were everywhere, Subversives were EVERYONE with any slight difference than your Wonderbread white self, and the Ruskies were going to bomb your house and your neighborhood (so maybe we better bomb them before they get around to the “We Will Bury You”). As for the 1990s, I like to say that there was this sort of giddy half-self aware of its falsity nature of its apocalyptic nature — nobody really believed in the Y2K bug, and we all smirked at the X-Files and Art Bell, entertaining the notion but not buying it.

Popular history largely ignores the important policy linkages between Jimmy Carter , the deregulating architect of the anti-Soviet proxy war in Afghanistan, and Ronald Reagan, the bumbler behind the “Reagan Recession” and the disasterous mission in Lebanon; but in retrospect there are important ways in which Reagan’s revolution preceded his presidency. […] Much of the working class not only drifted from the Democratic Party but turned passionately against it — a development liberals lament and conservatives applaud, neither considering the degree to which these voters remained unchanged in underlying habits and attitudes.

Keep in mind the continuity, and…

One contrafactual Jenkins doesn’t consider is that had Wategate not irradiated the Republicans, it’s likely the GOP would have remained in the White House through the end of the 1970s and paid the price for the decay of the period.

Since Nixon was incapable of not being a corrupt vindictive paranoid bastard and was incapable of not involving orchestrating the Watergate burglary, a better historical “what if” is, if Ford had squeaked by Carter instead of Carter squeaking by Ford, the GOP would have paid for the price of the disasters that fell upon us all during that period, and the organization, whatever that is, of the Democratic Party would have been in better shape in the 1980s.

For what that is worth. But only maybe.

Now, the problem with this “Losing By Winning” strategy is that it’s coinciding with the attack on the Howard Dean “50-state strategy”, the suggestion that the Democratic Party run in and out of areas where the Democratic Party has become dormant and decayed, and try to build it up into something. The now famous quote from Paul Begala is “What he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose.” It’s the Professional Baseball analogy passing by an impressive trade for an all-star in favour of trading to beef up your Farm System.

As it were, you would think it would be embarrassing for the Democratic Party if they picked up — say — a mere half dozen seats in a year where the Congress has an approval rating in the twenties. You would think they would realize how these things look.

The problem here is that there appears to be a mentality within the Democratic Party to do neither, and amble forward awkwardly, consolidating nothing but their modest levels of power within the system. Theoretically these politicians believe in stuff and believe that the nation would be better served with specific political tenants in place. Say, for example, you would think they would believe that Goldmark would better serves the fifth Congressional district of Washington State than McMorris — as an example of that absurd situation I postulated back a ways on where their mentality would take us.