If you’re going to dream, dream big. Personally, my favorite involves being elected absolute dictator of the world, where my first official act would be to order Broder and Hiatt broken on the wheel.

I wonder if the Ultimate Warrior supported his candidacy.

Just a thought.

I’m no business whiz, but even I know more about negotiating than this. Doesn’t he know that it can sometimes be an advantage not to have the final authority? That having the power to say a final no but not a final yes can give you leverage? It lets you play good cop and bad cop at the same time. “Look, I want to close this deal right now. We’re both on the same page here. But I gotta go back and deal with those guys in Congress, you gotta give me a little more.”

But this does require subtlety and intelligence. No wonder Bush can’t be bothered.

David Broder: “You can say that again.”

Due respect, but I think you meant Michael Savage. Or perhaps you think that the people are regularly reading about ben-wa balls, anal beads, and what to do about your straight boyfriend who really, really wants to suck a dick.

Due respect, but I think you meant Michael Savage. Or perhaps you think that the people are regularly reading about ben-wa balls, anal beads, and what to do about your straight boyfriend who really, really wants to suck a dick.

Huh? No, I must have misread that. Hang on, lemme read it again.

[Shakes head]

People. Nation. Seems to me the nation is kazillion tons of dirt between a couple of oceans. It doesn’t have an interest. It doesn’t have needs. The people who live on that dirt are what constitutes America. It’s interests are their interests. And the whole idea of representative government is that the people will elect to positions of power politicians that will execute THEIR will. I didn’t know this was so hard to grasp.

As far as campaign finance/electoral reform, great but we need to come up with Plan B. The problem is electoral reform laws must be passed by a sitting congress, made up entirely of cynical, jaded, power hunger incumbent politicians. You ever notice how aggressively law enforcement organizations resist community oversight? Same deal. People might want it, but the very organizations that would have to implement it have very powerful self-interested reasons not to.

So while it would be the right answer, it will never happen, so we need to sneak some kind of trojan horse solution past ‘em…

mikey

Thanks a lot, old dudes with wigs…….

Seriously – read Federalist 10 and mentally substitute “me and people who think like me” every time you see the term “faction”. These people have *never* wanted hoi polloi like us near power and government.

What Broder really sounds like is an 18th-century aristocrat carping about the storming of the Bastille, and he comes complete with the aristocratic cluelessness that the anger of the rabble is in reaction to the excesses of the aristocracy. And he could have shown some acknowledgement of the limits of a fucking asshole lame duck president who has squandered all his political capital on an immoral war and the rape of the nation’s coffers (and I mean the US, not Iraq). But then Broder sees the Iraq war and the rape of the US as a feature, not a bug.

I lull myself to sleep at night with dreams of being rich enough to buy WaPo, just so I can fire Broder, Fred Hiatt, and the rest of the corrupters.

Me, too. You know it never occurs to Broder that Bush has been giving Congress the bird for six years now–maybe, just maybe eliminating the fast track authority is Congress finally saying, “Oh, yeah? Fuck you, too–and the unitary executive you rode in on!”

I’m all for public financing of campaigns, and I agree that redistricting is better than term limits. Two other things I’d like to see happen are

– closing the revolving door between K Street and government. Too many people look at government service as a “stepping stool” to consulting and lobbying. So senate staffer X greases the skids for Company Y, then amazingly, Company Y just happens to have a job for Senate staffer X! What a happy coincidence! That’s just asking for corruption, isn’t it?

– Forcing candidates and political appointees to submit a freaking resume and pass a basic “government operations” test before running or being nominated. Gods, I’m so tired of listening to Congressmen who don’t understand the Constitution or have never read the laws they are trying to pass much less understand the implications of them.

Why, oh why doesn’t the largest employer in the US have a fucking human resources department?? Why are there no minimum requirements posted for every fucking job in the government?

Why are people with no experience in finance allowed to rebuild the Iraqi stock market? Why are people who don’t speak Arabic set up as foreign service officers in the Iraqi embassy? Why is a guy with no public administration and no crisis management background allowed to head up FEMA?

Why are these people–people who would get laughed out of the human resources office, whose whisper-thin resumes would get circular-filed without a second thought, whose profiles wouldn’t even come up in an employment website search–why are these people allowed to be in charge, dammit?

I mean, given the above, and Broders and virile oil men are winning half the time, which is better than half of the baseball teams out there. So what the Hell, do they want to win all the time? Wouldn’t that just push the country into a Marxist fantasy, all Upton Sinclair-like?

It won’t.

tender regards,

Lady MacBeth