The Arrogance Of Power

Lord Acton once said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.  How, then, is it possible that those already flagrantly and irredeemably corrupt manage to get elected to power anyway?

Take Barack Hussein Obama's crusade against Countrywide Mortgage ("Countrywide is on your side!") for its alleged role in the subprime lending collapse.  First it came out that one of his veep vetting committee, Jim Johnson, the ex-FNMA head who ran that agency into the ground and picked up a handsome golden parachute for his efforts, was the beneficiary of several sweetheart lending deals from....Countrywide Mortgage, forcing False Messiah to cut JJ lose.

Turns out Obama's Johnson wasn't the only Donk appendage receiving tender, loving care:

Time and again, the Senate is bedeviled by its own clubbiness, its lost sensitivity to how ordinary people live their lives. So it is with Christopher Dodd and Kent Conrad, who turned up on the “Friends of Angelo” V.I.P. list at Countrywide Financial Corporation.

Countrywide, a home-loan powerhouse, figures prominently in the subprime mortgage crisis, which has put hundreds of thousands of Americans at risk of losing their homes. The revelations about Mr. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, and Mr. Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota, are particularly troubling since the two senators are principals in trying to pass emergency legislation to address the damage from the mortgage crisis.

"Principals" as in Dodd chairing the Senate Banking Committee and Conrad ranking high on the majority side of the Senate Finance Committee.  Small wonder that their "emergency legislation" takes it so easy on subprime lenders, in blatant defiance of Donk class warfare orthodoxy.  Can you say, "conflict of interest"?

OTOH, maybe Dodd and Conrad double-cross Countrywide; but that would reveal them to be even more corrupt in betraying both sides and walking away with the whole pot, secure in the knowledge that corporate supplicants will have no choice but to continue to do so because with the Dems in power for good, they'll have no place else to turn.

Now you may say that that's just two Donk senators, and they don't necessarily represent the whole.  But you can't behold this story and say the corruption isn't institutional and party-wide:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, along with several prominent Democrats, met with a number of key lobbyists Wednesday in an attempt to change the political culture on K Street, Washington, D.C.’s major thoroughfare known for its numerous think tanks and advocacy groups that exercise influence in the nation’s capital.

According to a report in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Reid, Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus, D-MT, House Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel, D-NY, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-MD, are pushing K Street to abandon its allegiance to the GOP and are pressing major lobbying organizations and trade groups to accept the new majority.

What is this?  Didn't His Holiness proclaim lobbyists to be the spawn of the devil?  Did he really mean just Republican lobbyists, while their Democrat counterparts are like missionaries trying to gain ingress into the K Street cannibals' village to bring them all to saving faith in Barack?

And make no mistake, the ground floor is NOT where Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry want their minions to enter:

They claim the bulk of Democratic new-hire positions with lobbying firms, trade associations and individual companies in recent months are mostly low- and mid-level, leaving Republicans entrenched at the top of most prominent firms.

Reid and the other members of his party say that even with the hiring of a few token Democrats, much of the business community continues to take its lobbying, advertising spending, and policy research cues from the GOP.

Work their way up?  EARN the top spots?  Fughedaboudit.  If youse people knows whats good fer ya, you'll put our boys in charge - capeche?

While administering this group hammerlock, the Donk Politburo is dangling the big carrots in front of their prey as well:

In an effort to assuage the adversity on Capitol Hill created by a Democratic-controlled House and Republican dominance on K Street, Reid and his party’s leadership are throwing their weight behind a new bill designed to offer a package of tax extenders that would favor many business and manufacturing interests.

But there will be not just iron strings, but outright steel tentacles attached to each prooffered legislative morsel:

Reid and other members of the majority party expect companies and trade associations with an interest in the bill to make a concerted push for it similar to one they made for Republican initiatives during the GOP’s reign.

“I think they haven’t come to terms with what happened two Novembers ago,” says Senator Bob Menendez, D-NJ, who says that while Democrats are willing to meet with Republican lobbyists, the lack of a common philosophical and policy background makes it hard to communicate and build consensus....

Menendez and others warn the business community on K Street to proactively work with Democrats to move legislation. He says businesses that don’t move quickly to alter the political composition of their lobbying shops will find an increasingly inhospitable environment on Capitol Hill.

Or, in other words, businesses that don't move quickly to act against their own interests, and pay for the Dems' "generous protection" will be "taken for a ride," never to return.

Leaving aside the conventional wisdom that "Big Business" is supposed to be an eeeeevil GOP constituency, I have to ask a question that has already been long forgotten: What about the "culture of corruption" that these same Democrats ran against two years ago?  Weren't these the "good government" crusaders that were going to "clean up" the "cesspool" that Republican-run Washington has supposedly become?  No more pork, no more lobbyists, complete transparency, the whole nine yards?  Since these paragons of civic virtue have taken over, swine flesh has flooded through the Beltway like a tsunami with less openness and honesty than ever before, and now they are not so subtlely threatening lobbying firms to switch sides "or else" in a manner with all the gentleness and grace of the Mafia.

Maybe Republicans had grown inured to the perqs of power, but it was never anything other than the spirit being willing but the flesh being weak.  With the Democrats, there IS no spirit.  Just an  an unquenchable greed and insatiable lust for power, which renders them heedless of the garish hypocrisies they toss off with no thought to how it makes them look and sound.  It is the arrogance of a party that believes it can do and say anything without fear of political consequence because it has so completely fooled the electorate into swallowing their cartoonish demonic caricature of their opposition.

And you know what?  They're almost certainly justified in that view.  A goodly portion of the electorate that brought the GOP to congressional power fourteen years ago is gone, replaced by youngsters who haven't learned what disasters wait to be perpetrated by the perveyors of an irrational, malevolent ideology that doesn't work save for the power it concentrates in their grubby, grasping hands.

In a democracy, no victory is ever permanent.  But some lessons should be expected to last beyond the next election cycle.  Unless the lights come on in voting booths across the country in a big, big hurry, a whole lot of hard lessons are going to have to be learned all over again - this time at an even steeper price.

Can democracy survive another Democrat hegemony?  I wouldn't bet on it, even if they would leave me with so much as an opening ante.