Your Government Is Failing You

This article from Matt Taibbi in, of all places, Rolling Stone, is too good to excerpt. You simply have to read it all; in fact, it should be mandatory. Taibbi follows Rep. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) as he tries to pass four amendments to legislation in Congress. All of them pass with broad bipartisan support; none of them end up in the final bills. I defy you to read this and not have your head pop off with rage.

To be honest, after reading this piece, seeing the scads of money larded upon big business by compromised Congressmen on both sides of the aisle, seeing how nothing is done in Washington with the best interests of the people in mind, I almost shut down this blog. Of course that would be the exact wrong thing to do. Shedding light on the dirty dealings of politics is precisely what is needed right now. I agree completely with Kos that corruption is a nonpartisan issue. You're either ethical or you're not. It doesn't matter what side upon which you line up. The Democratic establishment at the top has lived off the same kind of cheap graft that the Republicans are now feasting upon themselves. Neither of them are right. The right-blogosphere response to this that I've seen is "both sides are doing it, so nothing's wrong," essentially. My answer is "both sides are doing it, so everything's wrong," and if you read Taibbi's article, you'll understand why.

It's foolish to think that power won't corrupt. But it's corrupted so absolutely and so systematically over decades and decades that the only real solution is a Watergate-style referendum on politics as usual, on the left and right. My DD is seeing it in the potential rise of "Iraq babies," veterans of the Iraq War, most of them Democratic, returning home to challenge incumbents and the status quo. That's what we saw in OH-2, where Paul Hackett almost pulled off the miracle in one of the reddest districts in the country.

I truly believe that the party that looks inside Washington and spreads truth to power about the rot in the halls of the Capitol will have the opportunity to win and win big. I don't think we'll see this out of the GOP. And if some of the big guns on the Democratic side fall in the wake of this sea change, big deal. They weren't helping out anyway.