The American news media is too busy worrying about Jon and Kate Gosselin and Susan Boyle, but across the pond the Really Big News is that there’s a scandal taking down politicians all over the place. Two weeks ago, the Speaker of the House of Commons said he would step down from that post later this month over reports that he had improperly claimed personal expenses such as a duck pond at his home as parliamentary expenses. His resignation, which came after immense pressure from all the main political parties, is the first time a House Speaker has been forced out in three centuries.
But the “Expenses Scandal” isn’t going away. Today, the Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, has also stepped down from her cabinet position as a result of her involvement and a bigger reshuffle of the cabinet is expected later in the week. Conservative and Labor MPs alike are dropping like flies, so it’s not exactly a one-party debacle.
So I found this piece at the British libertarian website Spiked! a little amusing because it has a terribly British take on the scandal. The argument, made by the editor, is that this whole expense scandal has come about through the posturing of the two biggest political parties over notions of transparency and honesty in government, and since Britain has done perfectly well without them all this time, it seems ludicrous to start asking for them now. He says “who cares” if a politician skims a little off the top of his expense account; if you insist on these people being squeaky clean, you’re going to force all the good ones right out of office and find yourself stuck with a Parliament full of Tony Blairs — clean-cut and bland, but politically useless.
And he has a point, because that is EXACTLY what happened in the United States. Contrary to our woefully underfed knowledge of our own history, American government, especially at the national level, was long the province of scoundrels and scalliwags, intent on enriching themselves and their supplicants at the public trough. But the politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s took the tack of both sides trying to out-goody-two-shoes one another, fueled in no small part by Watergate, resulting in the current crop of boneheads and shysters who fill the halls of Congress today, the empty suit in the White House, and the non-stop media torrent of scandalmongering, fear-baiting, and outright foolishness that has totally replaced any sort of real discussion about serious issues.
So, let the Right Honorable Member from Puddlington-On-Marsh claim his girlfriend’s Botox treatments as “legitimate expenses” as long as he does a good job. And let’s bring back people like former Illinois congressman Dan Rostenkowski, who stole stamps from the Congressional Post Office and did time in prison for it, but was a helluva legislator and knew how to get things done in Washington. The Republicans can even have back some of their scoundrels if they’ll promise to stop being such immense doo-doo heads.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
