I saw this at Instapundit:
QUICK, REPUBLICANS SHOULD ADD AN AMENDMENT TO INCLUDE ACADEMIC TRANSCRIPTS AND SAT SCORES: Pathetic: House Dems propose bill requiring 10 years of tax returns for presidential candidates, egged on by media.
and was reminded of this old posting (originally posted 8 January 2009):
Actually, it came in 1994, but nobody followed through.
I was reading this at Instapundit, and I thought of a line in a book I was reading recently.
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.
— Jack McDevitt, Odyssey, pp. 81-82
Jack McDevitt writes fine science fiction. I recommend him more or less unreservedly (his very early books aren’t as good as his later ones, but still fairly decent tales).
Sadly, the only thing he missed was the role of the left-wing “mainstream” media.