Given Barack Obama’s thorough immersion in the Chicago machine, and the number of other simmering issues around Democratic politicians such as Bill Richardson and Charles Rangel, quite possibly. Of course, since these will be Democratic scandals, the lemming media (aka the Democratic Party PR department) won’t feel the need to shove them down our collective throat as they did with the likes of Mark Foley and Larry Craig; rather, they’ll try to keep these all as quiet as they can and play them down as much as possible. Democratic scandals are isolated incidents; only Republican scandals reveal a “worrisome pattern of conduct.” That’s the rule, from the LM’s point of view. Never mind that the whole Democratic approach to politics is to increase the power of government, which is only going to feed and broaden opportunities for political corruption. Now, I’m certainly not claiming any kind of moral superiority for the GOP here, merely trying to make the point that one can’t do the same for the Democrats either; if memory serves, the last four presidents have all come in promising a more ethical administration, and while I do think W.’s administration managed a better record that way than his predecessors, that’s not to say they did a good job. The truth is, whenever money and power are in play, some people are going to bend morally, including a few in truly alarming ways, and some will break off altogether. The content of your principles will always come in second to the content of your character; if your character is such that you violate your principles, it doesn’t really matter much in the end what those principles were. That said, I do think the Baseball Crank has a point worth considering about the logical consequences of a big-government philosophy:
Contemporary liberal/progressive ideology stresses, at every turn, that government officials should be given an ever-increasing share of public money to control and disperse, and an ever-increasing role in telling people and businesses how they can use the money and property they are left with. Government officials are, we are to believe, better able to make the ‘right’ decisions about who gets what and how businesses are permitted to operate. . . . In practice, no matter which system is used, it ends up being a short step from believing you have the right and wisdom to direct other people’s property to more deserving recipients and better uses to believing that you are one of the more deserving recipients, and a short trip from telling business how to do its business to telling it who to do business with based on the desire to reward yourself and your friends. The root of money in politics, after all, is politics in money.
In sum, the more you do to increase the amount of money government has to play with, and the degree of power it has over that money, the more you do to provide both opportunity and incentive for corruption. The apotheosis of this would be the political machine, the entrenched political system based on government money, such as the Democrats in Chicago or Louisiana, or the Republicans in Alaska. Given that our new president was the political creation of such a machine and has spent his entire political career closely associated with it (and has pulled key staffers from it, including his chief of staff), and given that he and the congressional majority are committed to increasing both the amount of money government has to play with and the degree of power it has over that money, it seems likely that whatever you think of Barack Obama’s personal integrity, there is good reason not to be sanguine about the integrity of his administration. I suspect that Rod Blagojevich and Bill Richardson will prove to be not isolated incidents, but harbingers of things to come.
I’m sorry, that’s just a weak argument. Lack of government oversight *also* leads to corruption (and possibly billions of gallons of sludge dumped all over the Tennessee valley…). I mean, do you honestly prefer de-regulated monopolies? This is also based in the misconception (IMO) that the private sector is fair, or just, or equitable – it is none of the above. The market does not just work itself out by magic – it never has, and it never will – not in a way I would call ethical anyway.
Liberals and progressives (who are *not* interchangeable I might add) view government as the arm of the people. It is the legitimate way that an average person is heard or affects change – by voting, by campaigning, by being themselves elected. Now, frankly, that doesn’t work like it should, but I hardly buy into the delusion that giving businesses a blank check leads to a preferable result. And any time someone tries to regulate a business, someone else will cry “big government!”.
Conservatives, on the other hand, seem to talk about government as if it is something someone else does. This is ironic, considering the massive increases in government spending under Reagan and Bush which shattered previous records for “big government” spending, as well as the obsession conservatives have in using governmental power to meddle in private affairs (“government just small enough to fit in the bedroom” to quote West Wing).
I can respect small government talk from libertarians, for example, or anarchists, or a lot of progressives frankly. But from the GOP? Not for a moment. The GOP doesn’t want small government, they want big government with different priorities.
These aren’t the only two options. Nor are your presidential comparisons even–remember, the House passes the budget, and both Reagan and Bush 41 had Democratic Houses. Nor can one speak of the GOP (or even conservatives) as monolithic.