Never Trust An Honest Man
I've been pretty good about keeping my mouth shut during the Spitzer thing. I thought I could move past it, but all I did was let it fester. So, here it is, and it is on.
The Sheriff of Wall Street earned his name by really cleaning up crime and making New York a safe place to do honest business. He also made a lot of enemies doing it, many of them political. So when the day came when they finally found a way to knock him from grace, he fell and he fell hard.
"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones."
From the play Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
Why else in this day and age can a guy who has done so much good get lynched for consorting with high dollar whores? He fell because he kept a whole bunch of people from making a whole lot of easy money. He also fell for being an honest man. Honest men are held to higher standards and all the good they do vanishes into little more than smoke and dust when it is found they aren't as honest as it was believed.
You can always trust a dishonest man to be dishonest. What do you do with a former coke head who dodged the draft, and got rich and powerful by making it easier for others to get rich and powerful? You try to make him president of course! If it doesn't work out you can always use rigged voting machines and hanging chads to finish the job. Sure people were upset but whats the big deal. No one was surprised. He didn't pretend to be anything he wasn't.
Now I read that the governor of New York has admitted to having affairs. No not that one. The new one. (Thanks to Fark.com for the headline.) I can only guess that this will blow over because he had no reputation for being an honest man. From what I've heard he is a guy who likes to get along. Criminals and big business people like guys who like to get along. They help grease those squeaky wheels.
There is a triangle, that defines the difference between criminals and big business people. The peak of the triangle is where a small number of big business people are while the flat bottom is where the multitudes of criminals are. The criminal only wants to get money and power and climb to the top of the triangle. Those big business people at the top of the triangle only need to try to stay there. Its an ugly but efficient system. The space between the top and the bottom is filled with politicians.
There was a time I believed that we wanted honest politicians. Now I realize that what we really need are dishonest politicians. With a dishonest politician we know where we stand. In the Lieutenant Governor's race the state employees have been getting almost daily an email from Hampton Dellinger. He has a plan. He is liked by all sorts of fluffy bunnies. He tells us every day in the emails he does. He's getting my vote. Not because of the fluffy bunnies but because he was the one dishonest enough to spam the state employees. No other candidate sends us emails. They are probably too honest to do so, or they are not clever enough to figure out who to pay off to get the email list.
He's my kind of scum, fearless and inventive.
This of course leads you to wonder about my presidential choices. Its a tough one. I was sort of rooting for Bush as dictator for life. All of the candidates seem like good people, so I will probably lean in the direction of the Republicans. As a rule they are always closest to the top of the triangle, and if McCain is as good as a man as he seems, surely someone out there will step up and pull his strings. Perhaps they are thinking he's good enough to get elected but not good enough to abuse power. That means that the Vice president will be truly a scoundrel, and they only need to wait for age to catch up with McCain. Of course, these are republicans so I can only guess they have a plan to help him along if his health suddenly improves and his goodness crimps their style too much.
Honest men have no place in modern politics.
