Senators, Sex and Sellouts

Dear Friends,

My younger son, Ich Bin Ein Oberliner, brought a post to my attention on the Daily Kos by Hunter entitled "No Bread, but circuses". (here)  It was such a great article that I wanted to just reprint the whole thing in this post, but it is better if you follow the link and read the whole post.  Here are the first two paragraphs.

We are gathered here in Las Vegas today to discuss the one place in America where prostitution is 100% legal, unregulated, and can be broadcast on national television. I am of course speaking of the United States Senate, where every senator can act as his own pimp, can perform outrageous acts of gratification towards his patrons, and where the money flows freely.
We have only one senator "known" to frequent actual prostitutes. His name is David Vitter, and he benefits greatly from the bigotry of low expectations. The behavior of some of our senators is so bad that merely visiting with hookers hardly rates. After all, it's what Jesus would have done, except for the paying money for sex part, and Vitter feels comfortable enough in the role of martyr. Despite twenty years of preaching, and being horribly outraged, and asking what we were going to tell the children, and generally getting the vapors over all things sexual, the GOP decided that this particular outrage did not quite rise that historic level. I would make here a comment about how things might be different if a Democrat was caught frequenting prostitutes -- but now I have lost interest in this whole train of thought, because nobody wants to think about U.S. senators having sex.

Hunter continues to describe the process of buying Senators and its relationship to conservatism.  He then discusses how this leads to a dysfunctional Senate.  The following paragraphs explain why a dysfunctional Senate is a disaster for our country.

The end result is, currently, a dysfunctional government. That is a rather profound thought: here we are, still mired in war, in a time of social and class-based upheaval (caused largely by having the audacity to elect a black man as our leader, as well as general shock among the right that their policies, once implemented, turned out to be a bungle on top of a fiasco and wrapped within a boondoggle) and -- most critically to the Senate -- the worst economic conditions to hit the country since the Depression, that Depression, that big one that everyone always talks about as being the worst of all possible worsts -- and we have a Senate that is not capable of governing. Trying to claw our way out of the previous Great Depression involved acts of remarkable boldness: we have no such options. America at present simply has no such government capabilities. We will not have it at any point before the next elections; we will not get it afterwards. 

No matter how long or how deep our economic disaster, there will be no jobs programs. There will be no push to invest in a new American future, whether it be new infrastructure, or new energy, or new manufacturing. There will be little or no help to state governments so strapped for cash that even some of the most basic services are being shuttered. We could have saved a literal fortune by crafting genuinely competent healthcare legislation: thanks to the most loyal set of whores an industry could possibly ask to hire, such an action was off the table from the very beginning. We still could institute a truly miniscule transaction tax in order to put the brakes on the worst of market-crashing speculation (and gain a few bucks back in return for saving the banker's hides at our nation's expense), but it seems you might as well propose putting a colony of talking dogs on the moon, for all the good it will do.

Hunter continues by discussing the applicability of the phrase "Bread and Circuses" to American politics today. 

You really should read the entire post.  It is great, and I have not done justice to it here.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal