Watching politics in Louisiana is similar to watching a tank rupture at a waste treatment plant. The collapse of simple sense is followed by a flowing torrent effluent sure to taint the numbnuts blowing up the structure.
Vitter is being slammed for a soiree into the depths of prostitution’s gutter years ago. His wife has forgiven him. Who is Angelle, or Dardenne or John Bel Edwards or any of the other political operatives to not have a few skeletons in their collective closets? Nobody’s discussing issues. They just take cheap shots at each other.
Admittedly, negative research and campaign smearing is the street these people travel down daily. It’s the route they professionally take to bamboozle the voters so they can misdirect attention away from the illegalities, moral collapses and/or personal controversies tainting their personal histories.
Billy Nungesser is attacking John Young. John Young is counter-attacking with ferocity. Nowhere does this activity do either candidate any good. Everybody carries the stench of the effluent stuck to their business suit’s pants cuffs. And these are the people coming to us with open arms, allegedly clean hands and asking we kiss their rings in supplication.
They’re all disgusting. Politics is disgusting. The main and simple reason is that Political Hypocrisy is the norm.
Each candidate, from the applicant for the Dog Catcher position to the Presidency tells lies to get the job. If there’s a political element involved; a need for endorsement, commendation or validation from those already involved in the political process, there will always be a certain amount of hypocrisy moved around in the candidacy. This is because politicians paint their efforts and expectations for their service with broad brushes. They speak as though they alone can expose the hypocrisy of their opponents. They weaken the foundation of their personal integrity by attacking the character of the opponent. The attack shows the shallowness of their perceived saintliness.
The “golden rule” is severely tarnished. They do unto others as they don’t wish done to them.
When this political season started I warned this would become a serious problem for all the people involved in trying to select worthy people to represent them. The politicians would come out from the behind the woodwork like roaches and start attacking each other; sullying the political process with lies, misdirections and verbal sleight of hand to assure the issues are never addressed.
There’s an old saying in Journalism (I make no claim to being a member of the Fifth Estate other than as an outlier): “If it bleeds it leads".
This means if it’s sensational, if it is dynamic and possibly prurient, if it has an edge of derision dropping the previously exalted backward into the cesspool they claim to have climbed out from to the heights of where they are at this moment: then it’s going to be publish in a type font reminiscent of God writing his commands on the tablets. Such is the way of the self-righteous when they try to direct us toward their agendas.
I will now paint with a broad brush and ask the forgiveness of those capable of proving the statement false. All politicians are hypocrites. There; I said it and anybody got a problem with it can kiss whatever part of my body leaves the room last.
Politicians campaign with that broad brush firmly in hand and wield it like second rate Michaelangeloes trying to cover the most surface area in the Sistine Chapel. As the old joke goes; ”I could have done it faster with a roller.” But “rollers” don’t get into the cracks and corners of a campaign. The candidate must appeal to as many people as is necessary to bypass the ballot count of the opponent. Therefore, the candidates will keep you looking at the left hand while they adjust their rhetoric with their right hand. Sooner or later the politicians have to sell out the desires of somebody to please somebody else.
Sooner or later they must step off of the straight and narrow line they claim they walk to capitulate to realities of the moment. No longer do they challenge each other to explain the logic behind a political stance; they capitulate to the needs of the party and do things not good for the people. They claim to be representatives of the people but hypocritically succumb to the directives delivered from on high in the particular dogmatic structure of the Vox Politicana.
Politics and politicians suck. They create the vacuum we’ve come to know as deliberative, democratic republicanism. Nothing good can exist in a pure vacuum, not even in the space between the politicians’ ears.
Thanks for listening
