…signifying nothing

Posting will be light here as I am off in another city visiting my new grandbabies. I am jotting this down between awakenings.

The bankruptcy of American party politics is on parade here. Here are the fatal flaws in the system:

• There is a presumption among all Democrats who post there that the people who are elected have any concern about public good once elected.
• There is no reward for such behavior, quite the opposite, people who actually swim upstream once elected are punished by loss of financial backing, bad publicity, and even well-financed primary opponents. Since wiretaps are common and every member of Congress is spied upon, most are subject to some kind of blackmail.
• But these Democrats are so emasculated as to think that weakly challenging an office holder in a primary is enough to set a bad guy like Baucus straight. He laughs about that, as do I.
• There is massive denial of the role of money in politics. You cannot get them to focus on it. I take that to mean that they know, recognize they are gelded, but would rather pretend to matter than not to matter at all.

Their only response is who, who who is my alternative to Baucus, but Baucus does nothing but respond to the punishment/reward system, as would his replacement. The bottom line in Washington is that moneyed interests punish good behavior and reward bad. All of the talk about who they are going to back, as if a new face is a remedy, makes them fools, strutting and fretting …