Occasionally, I run across a news article or post, crediting our current leader Lump with “disintegration of trust” or otherwise creating the conditions for the corruption of our federal government. These annoy me because, unfortunately, cronyism, corruption, deception have been baked into our democratic government over the course of many decades.
If you want to blame anyone, blame the founding fathers who wrote the constitution and neglected to provide any real accountability for elected officials. Yes, yes, we have a “system of checks & balances” but one that has been easily corrupted. Two-branches of government are comprised entirely of elected officials and the third branch is appointed by one and approved by the other, so it might as well be elected. Perhaps the founders, being mostly of rational and earnest minds couldn’t conceive of politicized appointments to the judicial branch, but that’s nearly as short-sighted as their lack of consideration for non-whites, non-men and non-landowners.
I can’t unravel how we got to, as a society, a place where specious statements are the norm (I suspect it has a lot to do with the internet, but not entirely, as newspapers and textbooks included some counter-factual stories well before the start of the 21st century and dawn of the modern internet). However, I can easily explain how politicians came to speak speciously with regularity. It’s because there’s little-to-no consequence for doing so.
Continue reading “He didn’t start the (dumpster) fire”