Dawn Is Me

You know, never mind having ethics or morals.

If nothing else works to keep you on the straight-and-narrow, consider what happens when you get caught.

I’d say Jack Abramoff is learning, painfully, that it hurts to hit bottom when you get knocked off your pinacle.

The rest of us are learning, or should be, that the deep and profound personal connections that constitute friendships don’t come any easier with money and power.

Au contraire, as a matter of fact.

No, I don’t feel especially sorry for him. I do feel sorry for his kids, partly because of this humiliation the family is enduring and partly because I shudder to think what kind of values they’ve been taught during their formative years.

Then again, maybe the kids can be salvaged, if they’re paying attention to what’s happening to their dad.

In which case, you might say that Jack still has his uses.

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* From The Devil’s Right Hand by Johnny Cash (lyrics by Steve Earle)

Occasionally I come across something that actually makes me sorry — well, for a minute or two, anyway — that I don’t watch TV anymore.

I could find it in my heart to wish that more members of the mainstream media would take O’Reilly to task for having the nerve to call his propaganda service an example of journalism.

(Gracious props to Judy for the link.)

Today, John Dickerson wrote something in Slate that got me thinking.

Here’s what he wrote:

This president was never going to let anyone peek into his private conversations with Miers. But Bush and his advisers never thought they’d have to. They assumed that Bush’s backing Miers’ résumé (including her religious credentials) and her gender would allow the president to push her though.

If you think about it, that’s a revealing statement.

It kind of suggests to me that he believed that stuff like religious credentials and especially gender matter more to his political opponents than qualifications. After all, this reasoning goes, that must be how they got people like Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsberg onto the High Court in the first place. So, if it worked for those other people, though Mr. Bush, it’ll work for me.

All of which assumes that everybody else is as ideologically driven as he is and that nobody else cares about qualifications (because he doesn’t).

It takes a stunning kind of intellectual arrogance to assume that everybody thinks like you do. Because when you make that assumption, you remove any motivation to exert yourself trying to understand the thinking of your political opponents. And that makes reasoned discourse impossible because, at that point, you have to assume the reason they disagree with you must be because they’re just evil.

Which pretty much describes the American political scene of the past five years.

Really, sometimes when I think of the scope of the economic, political and societal damage that has been wrought by this one man, I do wind up thinking like him … because I can’t help concluding that he’s the anti-Christ.