Was reading (via Instapundit) an article about Corruptocrat-Florida Rep. Corrine Brown, who claims that, because the FBI was expending resources investigating her, they are responsible for the Orlando massacre. As if the FBI doesn’t have other resources and can’t investigate more than one thing at a time, even if they sometimes draw the wrong conclusions for political reasons.
It made me think, once again, of this snippet from Jack McDevitt’s 2006 book Odyssey:
Back in the old days, Dryden would simply have bought Taylor. Or tried to. There would have been big political contributions. But that sort of thing had gone out two centuries earlier. The country had been taken over briefly by a corporate autocracy and hopelessly corrupt politicians. Money bought access. But the Second American Revolution had happened, people started taking the Constitution seriously again, and the practice of renting and buying congressmen had been stopped by the simple expedient of getting money out of the campaigns. Contributions of all types became illegal. Campaigns were funded by the voters. You gave money to a politician, it constituted bribery, and you could go to jail.
The world had changed. Politicians had come dangerously close to developing integrity. But as MacAllister would have said, they were no more competent than ever.
Ah, if only. By the way, I have no doubt that McDevitt was thinking of the Republicans when he talked about a “corporate autocracy” and “hopelessly corrupt politicians” leading to a Second American Revolution and renewed respect for the Constitution, and one assumes without data that he voted for Obama twice. Interesting that things seem to be turning out the other way.
(If McDevitt is, contrary to my speculations, a man of the right, I apologize. But the terms “corporate autocracy” and “hopelessly corrupt politicians” being thrown around in the mid-aughts echoes pretty identically what the Democrats were saying about the Bush Administration and the Republican congress.)