Chicago - A message from the station manager

What I Watched Last Night

By Pat Bataillon

Alright, let me get this straight: A Republican congressman from Florida is an online pedophile. He works in the Republican House in the Republican Congress under a Republican President. Somehow this
is the Democrats’ fault. It is a damn good thing I am not a political pundit these days because I would be banished from the brethren for not holding this opinion.


Everywhere on the cable news channels last night, theDemocrats were being accused of releasing these e-mail conversations for political purposes. True or not, what about the Republicans who sat on them? How have they in some way lost all responsibility for this problem?
I spent some time in politics and learned a few things about the democratic process. One was that in the days leading up to an election, all the dirt will fall out – not weeks. A message to the politicos out there: No one in the America cares about the election in four weeks. Why, you ask? Because it is four weeks away.
I worked on a presidential campaign for months and thought that everyone in America was paying attention to the polls weeks and even months out. It was only when I finally left the campaign life and read something other than politicalwire.com that I realized no else cared.
It is laughable to think that Democrats would sit on this gem of a story. I mean, look at it from the standpoint of a regular person. A man in power is masturbating with a young man over the Internet. This means that this guy is gay or at least has gay tendencies. Now, realize that this gay man is a Republican, the party infamous for intolerance of the gay lifestyle and the leader of family values. There are so many oxymorons in this story that faulting the Democrats seems perfectly reasonable – until you rejoin Reality.
What you are seeing is a central truth to politics: They all lie. And when caught, they blame someone else. And then a lesser entity is fired as a sacrifice to the power structure.
So now the Speaker of the House, our very own Denny Hastert, is blaming the Democrats for sitting on the story until now. See? Lie – “I didn’t know”; blame – “It’s the Democrats”; fire – congressman from Florida loses his job.
Let’s try another. Lie – “There are WMD in Iraq”; blame – faulty intelligence; fire – Colin Powell. Another one. Lie – “Brownie is doing a heckuva job”; blame – FEMA and local officials; fire – Brownie gets canned. Another! Lie -“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”; blame – no one but himself and apologizes; fire – Clinton wins re-election.
Aha! You can get away with lying because that is what politicians do. But the American people want pols to take responsibility for their lies. Then no one has to be fired. Except maybe the pundits.

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Posted on October 4, 2006