How to lose friends for little gain
Rarely has a cowboy castrated himself in public like Ben Nelson, the senator from Nebraska, who becomes an object lesson in how a United States senator easily trades his “convictions” and “principles” for perfectly legal bribes from cynical party leaders.
When the inevitable howling erupted in Nebraska, all the senator could come up with was a variation on the oldest excuse in Washington: “I didn’t do it, and maybe I won’t do it again.”
Huh? Â That’s got to go right up there with “I voted against it before I voted for it”, and “It depends what the meaning of is, is” in the political doublespeak hall of fame.
Every president mirrors in ways large and small the politics he learned back home, and the administration’s use of the battering ram in behalf of a scheme that grows more unpopular day by day reflects the down-and-dirty politics of Chicago. Richard Daley the Original lives and breathes on Capitol Hill.
It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good, and the senator’s colleagues can be grateful for the diversion of attention from the actual outrage. Max Baucus, the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, told the Senate that ObamaCare is so convoluted that no one (not even the dozens of lawyers who wrote it) actually understands it. The president insists that the change nobody believes in will reduce costs for everybody….
Nevermind. The president has the reform that does less and costs more. Earl Long, the late governor of Louisiana, once boasted that he could take a hundred-dollar bill and get anything through his legislature “and buy you a steak dinner with what I’ll have left over.”
President Obama goes that one better. He did it with a bribe of somebody else’s money.
It’s not change that the Chief can believe in.