One of the biggest scandals in the US is how districts are drawn to benefit the party in power, to give them legislative representation that is much greater than their share of the vote merits. This is because the party that controls the legislature at the time of the drawing every ten years pretty much gets to draw the lines as it wishes as long as the area is contiguous and contains roughly equal numbers of voters. They thus can draw the most outlandishly shaped districts in order to concentrate most of their opponents’ votes into a few districts. Only the grossest abuses, the ones that use race as the main factor, get rejected by the courts, because race gets the highest standard of scrutiny. But if race is not an obvious factor, you can with impunity shepherd the supporters of the opposing party into a few districts.
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That politicians can be bought by rich people, businesses, and lobbyists is no secret. What is surprising is how cheap they are. Sometimes it seems like all you need to do is give them a vacation or even just an expensive meal with plenty of alcohol to get them to do your bidding. The latest example of this are the charges brought against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara who seem to be not only cheap to buy but extremely brazen about the fact that they are for sale.
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Schadenfreude (taking enjoyment in the troubles of others) is not a quality to be admired but I have to admit that I am thoroughly enjoying the predicament that US Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell finds himself in. He is a truly awful person, a liar and a hypocrite, who would piously invoke the need to cut deficits in order to oppose spending to help poor people or to create jobs when the president was a Democrat, but then abandon that goal as soon as the president was a Republican, when he was willing to spend money like a drunken sailor to give tax cuts for the rich. He viciously opposed expanding health care to middle and lower income groups. And of course, he prevented president Obama from appointing a qualified middle-of-the-road Supreme Court justice in order to put a right-wing extremist on the bench.
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During Margaret Thatcher’s reign of terror in the UK, she and her allies condescendingly referred to those who opposed her hardline polices as ‘wets’. One of the features that so endears Donald Trump to his most ardent supporters is that he sticks to his guns and appears to them to never back down, i.e., that he is not a ‘wet’. This is because he simply denies that he has ever changed his mind or reversed himself on anything, whatever the facts are.
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The Republican party seems all over the place over what to do about their Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore. Leaders in the party have said that if the allegations are true, Moore should step aside. This is significant in that they are allowing for the possibility that the allegations may be true. I would have expected them to close ranks and decry the story as fake news and a fiendish Democratic plot aided by the fake news liberal media. Part of the reason may be that the avalanche of sex abuse revelations by prominent people has suddenly shifted the center of gravity of the discussions, so that women’s charges that they were abused are no longer summarily dismissed.
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