Discussion: Kobach Letter Against US Divesting From South Africa Amid Apartheid Resurfaces

IBM rather liked the way people were controlled by the Nazi organization. Making money was just icing on the cake for them.

True.

Like the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, the Third Amendment, the Fourth…

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Trump: Kobach’s letter against The Blacks is a very nice touch. Its a feature, not a bug. My supporters are very happy with my administration.

My recollection of that time are the same. It about the time that I began to notice that all, and I mean, all, Republicans were spouting the same weak argument. It was the beginning of the Right Wing Echo Machine, only we were years away from calling it that.

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This. Every word.

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You know, it’s weird to think about it, but once upon a time, long, long ago, long before he was in leadership, even Mitch McConnell actually had a moral principle and scruple or two banging around in the vast empty box where non-sociopaths keep their consciences. He really did. So did Hatch.

Long gone, beyond all hope of recall. There will never be a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” moment where shame and self-loathing recall their better selves, because there was never much “better” in them to start with. But they once weren’t the utterly unscrupulous power-for-power’s sake, say anything, do anything monsters they are now.

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And because the stakes have gotten so much higher in their own lifetimes. By “stakes,” of course, I mean money.

If you have seen any of Howard Fineman’s work on McConnell over the years it’s quite illuminating. Fineman covered him for years for the Louisville Courier Journal. McConnell worked for a Republican senator who was a moderate Rockefeller type and a stalwart on civil rights as well as a stickler about senatorial order and procedures. The question is what went wrong with him.

I remember when he first beat Dee Huddleston by running a bogus commercial flogging (that old standby) missed votes in the Senate–most of which were paired absences, of course. And I swear mostly he was just being rewarded by Kentuckians for entertaining them with a hilarious commercial, and it was devastatingly funny. They got a lookalike (from a distance, and Huddleston was quite distinctive) and did the old escapee running from the bloodhounds schtick. And this guy running across the hills in a suit with the yelping hounds, yeah, it was funny.

And for about twelve years, he was basically indistinguishable from Huddleston except for his vote for majority leader. But that’s back when the Senate was still a club, still a place where heterodoxy was the norm and expected and raw partisanship was viewed as a tolerable eccentricity.

What happened to him? Power. Because the platitudes are true. It is corrosive. There ought to be a label on it: “WARNING: MAY EAT YOUR SOUL!” It takes enormous integrity, or at least strength of will and purpose, to not be corrupted by it, turned into a seeker of power for power’s sake and the more you get the harder it is to remember why else you’re there.

This is the reason I roll my eyes at people who think they are cynical and worldly wise because they always say “follow the money!” as if money is the only thing (or the most important thing) that motivates people in the capital of a nation. They’re ignoring even the genesis of the phrase: “follow the money.” It wasn’t an admonition to look for avarice and who was feeding it. It was a clue, dropped by Mark Felt to Woodward and Bernstein, on how to find their way into the heart of the conspiratorial cabal that was the Nixon Administration, men who were as power-oriented as a dog or a pig is fixated on food. Money was a mere means to an end to them. Sure, they liked living an affluent lifestyle, who doesn’t? But it was all about power, in the raw, undistilled, unsullied with anything like principle or, really, any other urge excepting only NIxon’s personal, and, yeah, almost pathos-inducing, desire to be liked despite his own sense of unworthiness and inferiority.

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