In this election year, this guy hits it out of the park… Whomever he is…
I didnt write it, but I agree with it.
“My opinion: Most people enter politics from a strong need for power and control. And personal profit. Plain and simple. Politics attracts crooks.
A tiny number of people pursue political office from a purely altruistic, civic-minded desire to serve. As a rule, those folks get eaten up before they reach any office higher than mayor. Or they become the rare politician who finds a perfect match with a local constituency, and they all work together happily for many years. That’s the ideal. Apple pie in the sky, and all that. But it’s increasingly rare. Almost extinct, to my observation.
Beyond that point, however, the average person can’t afford to run for higher office without becoming part of the political marketing industry. So their sense of altruism begins to wither. They try to fight it for awhile, but eventually they sell out, and become part of the elaborately staged political theater. At that point it’s game over, at least for me. I have no faith in any current political player at the state or federal level, anywhere. They’re all part of the machine, which requires endless conflict to keep the game moving and perpetuate its profits.
I know people who get annoyed when I say the two main U.S. parties are indistinguishable. Not about issues: Both parties follow tightly scripted, issue-driven agendas carefully calculated to appeal to specific demographics. Members of both parties operate pretty much in lockstep with those agendae, ensuring constant gridlock (which, coincidentally, profits the political marketing industry). So yes, obviously I can hear the difference in the scripts they follow, and the talking points they’ve memorized. But beyond that, they’re just part of this noxious entity that has eaten the country I love. I hate it. I hate all of it. Yes, I always vote, though I do not vote according to any party line. But I hold my nose while I do it, and deposit the ballot as though I’m throwing out a bag of dog crap, because I know that at the state and federal level it’s all a load of crap, regardless of which false-binary badge a candidate may wear.
Whew. Deep breath. So yeah. I’ve had people ask if I’d ever consider running for political office. I’m thinking HELL no. I’ve got other ways I can serve humanity, I can pick up trash on the side of the road on the weekends… At least that is ‘clean’ work!”
In Asia the saying goes this way, “Better to own a politician than to be a politician.”
I second the emotion and the opinion!
Back years ago, when I was in my 30s, I ran for and won an election for Township commissioner. I think I got 312 votes. I sat on that post for 9 years. I started out deeply involved but was dismayed how much power the township solicitor. I fought for 8 years the best I could, but it was like peeing into a headwind. All for $458 dollars a quarter. In my last year, and remember this was a township commissioner position, someone would call my home after I went out for the evening for some fund raiser in a surrounding town and tell my wife I was spotted out at a bar with a blond. REALLy???
I think everyone should run, it sure is an eye opener. I would not be able to serve the NRA as well as I do, without the knowledge I learned in those 9 years.(Inside baseball stuff) But I quit. I was told I was to nice a guy.(Best compliment I got in all of those 9 years.)
Well said. It’s a filthy business which tends to attract filth. Occasionally someone with a mop and a broom charges in there with the thought of cleaning things up. They either give up in disgust or wallow in with the rest of the hogs.
‘Tis to weep.
+1
A case in point may be Leland Yee, the California State Senator recently arrested on bribery and gunrunning charges.
Yee is frequently referred to as a “government transparency activist” and his position on this issue dates back a long time.
The gunrunning thing (hard to sum up because it’s so twisty but hey, that’s California politics:) Yee’s political base is in the San Francisco Bay Area. Raymond “Shrimp Boy” Chow, Yee’s alleged partner in the scheme to buy MANPADS and other weapons from jihadis in the Phillippines and sell them in the USA is a guy who was a SF Chinatown gangster involved in a notorious gangland restaurant massacre. He then hooked up with the biggest triad in Hong Kong.
Chow has served multiple prison sentences, or at least parts of them, and has been a government informant. He purports to be a reformed character (at least until this little incident) and is portrayed in the local media as being sort of a benign community elder.
Oh, by the way… Leland Yee is a long time anti-Second Amendment activist too.
I could never run for a political office because I have more skeletons than an graveyard in my closet. Political office is not a respected position anymore yet very little can be done about it because the make the laws and the ‘less informed’ follow them blindly. Yet we still have the best country in the world.
Nail – Head – HIT!
We don’t have that problem; ours prefer smaller crimes, like going on long holidays funded by the taxpayer.
Of course, New York has a larger population. Not the state, the city. Then again, New York’s four mil. are all crammed into a tiny island.
No wonder they’re nuts.
But anyway:
I’m not really sure what to do about it.
The ancient greeks had a theory they called ‘anacyclosis’; it’s a very neat and tidy theory, and thus most likely total waffle, but it might have a bit of truth to it.
It goes like this:
People are poor and deprived. Chaos is everywhere, and people do what the strongest strongman says partly because they’re afraid of what he’ll do if they don’t, and partly because of what the people he’s protecting them from will do if he leaves. They call him the Chief.
Times get better; the Chief’s son rules partly on his father’s reputation, and partly with that whole ‘consent of the governed’ business. This man is the King.
Times get even better; the Chief’s great grandson (sometimes great-great-great, depending on how much honesty was in the family) starts grabbing as much as he can for himself and his bestest friends in all the world, and is called a Tyrant.
Things are going badly; a group of powerful men, sometimes councillors who don’t like the way things are going, sometimes generals, sometimes just powerful people, kick the Tyrant out and set up a new government, based around their group. This is called Aristocracy, or today, a Junta.
A while down the line they end up doing the same things, accumulating power and wealth to themselves, and you have an Oligarchy.
Some rabble-rouser foments a revolution and kicks them out, and you get Democracy.
When the people realise they can vote bread and circuses for themselves, and begin to listen to demagogues and become corrupted and entitled, you get Ochlocracy, or mob rule.
Eventually competing demagogues bring things to a head, and one wins, taking the title of Lord Humungus the Chief.
His son is a more enlightened chappie…
and around it goes.
It seems the romans believed it, and set up a triple government, with an aristocracy, democratic election thing and a monarch all at once, though of course they didn’t call them kings; romans weren’t very keen on kings.
The idea was that when all three were good things would go swimmingly, and when some of them went bad others would be going good- or at least, less bad -and counter them, and when they were all bad they’d be too busy knifing each other to make much trouble for the people.
Not sure where I’m going with this, but apparently the U.S. was based on that. All went out the window when Lincoln declared himself king, though, from what I hear.
Turns out HTML tags don’t work here. Need a strikethrough over “Lord Humungus”, ta.
All- Thanks for the comments!
Posted from my iPhone.
Well, I never would have thought that of Allen West, or Ted Cruz, or Rick Perry, or Sarah Palin, or Haley Barbour, or Ron Paul, or …
Now I know.
Ed- Point…
Well NFO, that is the problem isn’t it? Guys like you that SHOULD be entertaining the notion of getting into politics won’t because they would be swimming in sewage. Those that will swim in the cesspool are all rats.
Regardless, I see a distinct and important difference between liberals and conservatives and I know which of the two is the lesser evil. Those that don’t are getting exactly the gov’t they deserve.
The problem begins with the election process, which is actually a popularity contest. Think in terms of electing a homecoming queen. The qualifications for entry are easy; for winning, easily seen.
Moving right along, who oversees the watchers? The media, which is proving to be more incompetent and opinionated every single day. We don’t get news, we are treated to a rambling dialog from a group of egotistical blathering heads, none of whom have a clue. At least, not a clue they’re allowed to share with the Great Unwashed.
I could ramble on, but I see little point to it. The ultimate epitome of recent governmental corruption is probably the California electrical energy debacle, which should have resulted in criminal charges for the entire State government. This is just one iceberg in a globally warming ocean.
Glen- Way too many skeletons… AND I would NOT want to put my family through that grist mill…
MJ- Concur!
This is an eye opener
Rick- Isn’t it though…