Swag

Well, there’s one good thing. Maybe, maybe, maybe, now at last the news media will start calling bribery ‘bribery’ instead of ‘fundraising’ and ‘campaign contributions’. That would help. I don’t know, maybe the Beeb is different, maybe they’ve been calling it bribery at least some of the time all along, but US news media sure haven’t. It’s been driving me stark staring mad for years, hearing NPR reporters blithely referring to fundraising when what they’re talking about is simply solicitation of bribes, and campaign contributions when what they’re talking about is simply monetary payments to powerful elected officials in the expectation of favours in return. The whole incredible shocking disgusting deeply corrupt mess has been treated as normal and routine and therefore okay by our supposedly adversarial, liberal, suspicious, investigative, activist news media. Why? Why? Why? I seriously don’t understand it, and never have.

Surely it must look grotesque from the other side of the pond. We not only elect ignorant buffoons, we elect them by means of endemic bribery! They can’t even get elected without bribery. Everybody knows the equation – we hear it all the time – tv ads are expensive, you can’t get elected without tv ads, so obviously the only possibility for an aspirant to elective office is to demand large sums of money from people who have large sums of money. Gee, what a great system. It means we end up with corporate lobbyists actually writing legislation. [bangs head on desk]

But maybe the Abramoff thing will finally make it so obvious what a cesspool it all is that – oh, who am I trying to kid. No it won’t.

And people wonder why some of us saw some point to Nader. Which is exactly my point. Endemic corruption has become so normalized and routinized that putative liberals and leftists don’t even think it’s a reason not to vote for someone.

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