First an editorial note from the Curmudgeon:
Events have overtaken me. Daily politics get overwrought so I try to let the fetid air disperse before commenting. I wrote about “Corruption Niches” well after the trifecta of suck which included “the IRS scandal”. I obligingly scheduled the post to sit for a few days before going live. The better to let the initial dust settle. I had a point to make that went beyond “the guy in the big chair is corrupt”. Sadly it didn’t time out well. Scandals have been oozing out of Washington DC en masse. Predictable scandals? Yes. Did we see them coming? Of course. Are they clustered and numerous? Surprisingly so. Are they currently orbiting one particular politician and his regime? Yes. The last one doesn’t do my theories any good. It’s hard to ponder the inevitability of systematic corruption when a singular and overreaching fountain of misdirection is pulling strings from the Oval office.
I originally made a second “Corruption Niche” post (scheduled to go live today). It listed a random assortment of what I perceive to be corruption niches. It was my way of saying “don’t hyperventilate over the IRS because, being the wise adaptive person you are, you already knew the IRS was corrupt”. You did know that didn’t you? If not, consider yourself informed. For the most part I presume everyone who reads my blog knows that power corrupts.
Sir John Dalberg-Acton (1837 to 1869) Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
I don’t mean to be cynical. I mean to be realistic. Find solace in predictive capacity. Thinking ahead is why we don’t need to stick a scorpion in our jockey shorts to know it’s a bad idea. Some folks haven’t yet figured out that the aggregation of power creates it’s own evil. Why this isn’t obvious is something of a mystery to me. I suppose some folks really need a scorpion in the shorts to learn? For a few of the naïve but teachable the last few weeks was their personal a scorpion moment. If you’re recently disillusioned, welcome to the world of reality. There’s nothing wrong with being a slow learner so long as one learns.
At any rate I figured the trifectca of suck was enough to suit my corruption niche article. The Bengazi situation (which was not caused by a YouTube video), the “IRS scandal”, and the tapping of AP press phones were all as corrupt as they were crude and pointless. They were the actions of small people given big power.
The fact that things tanked further; collecting information on every Verizon cell phone and dutifully monitoring Grandma’s facebook update on the grandchildren… That’s what happens when you give up even the pretense of discretion. When this is all over and done Nixon’s tapes are going to look practically benign. After all, Nixon never tapped my phone but Obama’s folks did. Bad news is coming down a bit faster and uglier than I’d have liked but such is the nature of corruption.