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You are here: Home / Most Ethical Congress Ever
Decided FenceSitter
Well as a Virginia Resident (and I refuse to call myself a Virgnian), I’d like to take this time to state that Mr. Moran is VA’s version of William Jefferson (D-LA). We all know he’s corrupt, and yet we never manage to vote him out.
S.W. Anderson
This looks and smells bad, all right. Still, I’d like to see Moran get a chance to explain or see a little more context.
That said, and assuming Moran’s as bad as he appears, what sense does it make to condemn all of Congress or the Democratic Party? The reality is that political parties don’t come with a guarantee of 100 percent purity. You go with the one that most consistently backs your ideas and causes, and has fewer bad apples.
Should Democrats discipline or try to get rid of their bad apples? Sure they should.
But then you realize how anxious they are to come up with the votes to make a difference on larger issues, like not wasting more of our troops on a few more months of dismemberment and death in Iraq, so George W. Bush won’t have to preside over the defeat his stupidity has ensured.
Sorry, but it’s not all black and white and neat and tidy.
The Other Steve
Perhaps they should make Moran the Majority Leader…
then they could be as corrupt as the Republicans.
Zifnab
Thank god. That “Democratic Stupidity” label was getting way too much dust. Although, I think its more rightly reserved for the “we don’t like the war but Bush made us give him our milk money” bullshit coming from the giant pussy wing of the party.
Tim F.
He sounds like an asshole, not a criminal. But on general principles let’s have the Ethics Committee invstigate him anyway, along with whoever sits to his right and left. Plus the five lucky winners of a weekly random draw. I say investigate everybody.
ThymeZone
The poor bastards already have to work about half as many hours as the rest of us. It isn’t fair to criticize them.
But I’d be in favor of putting them in the public square for ritual humiliation, Donkey or Elephant, whichever is being bad today.
Bucky
I used to live in Arlington and am humiliated to say I voted for that clown. He is a complete moron. . .he said some dumb things about Isreal awhile back. I wish he would just go away.
jenniebee
Look, you guys who are complaining about having Moran up in NOVA just count yourselves lucky you’re not represented by the likes of Bliley and Cantor like we are down here in Richmond.
Anyway, that’s not how I read the Moran quote in the Times. To me, it looked like he was saying that the party may be legislating on the one hand to try to shut off the money faucets, but they’re expecting reps to pay up contributions to the national party all the same. He’s not shuddering about having to be in contact with his constituents, he’s restating the lawmakers’ dilemma that we’ve all known about for years: campaigns are getting more and more expensive every year and elected officials on the national level have to live in a constant state of fundraising for the next cycle.
Rome Again
It sounds like he needs to remember what the word Democrat implies.
Bubblegum Tate
And they do less work for much more money, too, the poor dears….
Rome Again
The poor bastards already have to work about half as many hours as the rest of us. It isn’t fair to criticize them.
Excuse me, TZ, but I work more hours than you do, and I spend most of it these days buried in paperwork too. Just sayin’! ;)
Tlaloc
Dems need to clean up. Duh.
That’s harldy a surprise, the democratic party’s major grace is that they are *marginally* less corrupt than the GOP.
On a side not we should retire the “most ethical congress ever” phrase. No modern congress will ever compare to those that were held before concepts like lobbying ever existed.
Rome Again
Excuse me, TZ, but I work more hours than you do, and I spend most of it these days buried in paperwork too. Just sayin’! ;)
Rome Again
Sorry for the double post, didn’t think the first one went through, and then I noticed I missed the blockquote too.
My mistake, all this paperwork is making my head spin today.
Temple
It’s interesting and little sick to have David Sirota and yourself equate interacting with constituents to raising money. I put my mouse over the link and saw the url and thought I was going to see something incredibly elitist about having to mingle with the riff-raff. Instead it’s a person saying he doesn’t like cold-calling people asking for money. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Do you realize how long that would take?
And yes, I realize I’m not talking about the main lobbyist point, but the bigger point than that is, there’s too much money in politics to begin with. I may vote for the guy who spends the least -and makes it to the ballot – just on principle.
Rome Again
Was he expecting to make all those calls himself? Most politicians have a staff for that sort of task.
Enlightened Layperson
I haven’t seen the Democratic stupidity label recently, either, but as the Democrats gain more power, they will undoubtedly gain more opportunities to disgrace themselves with it.
sidereal
I’m all for bidomicilic poxen, but come on. That’s a a margin you could drive a Mack through. Under Gonzalez the Justice Department has been working the Democrats over like rented mules and so far they’ve come up with. . uh. . William Jefferson and his cashcicles.
Meanwhile, under a Republican DoJ and despite firing every relevant prosecutor, the Abramoff/Delay/Ney cartel is going to bring down a huge chunk of the GOP Congress.
The current GOP is a thousand times more corrupt than the current Dems, in large part because they’ve been in power (and more attractive to powerbrokers) and in large part because the GOP has been selecting for sociopaths for about 20 years.
And judging from early returns, there are significant elements of the Dem base that aren’t going to turn a blind eye to any recorruption of their party. They will, of course, fail in the long run. But it highlights how debased and complacent the GOP base was. . watching half their crew steal from the public coffers and hand out contracts to cronies while they chanted zombie-like “the Democrats are wooooooorse. . the Democrats are woooooooorse”.
Just had to get that off my chest.
demimondian
I’m glad to see this use, actually. I want to see the ethics system fixed — even though it isn’t in the interests of incumbents to need to worry about ethical lapses, it is in the interests of their constituents.
Do you hear me, Rep. Inslee?
demimondian
Best new tag suggestion of the year. C’mon, John, we’ve GOT to have “Bidomicilic stupidity”.
Bubblegum Tate
That’s not what my favorite wingnuts (have been paid to)say. And these guys got a favorable quote for their book about political corruption from Tom DeLay, so you know they’re on point.
BIRDZILLA
Most ethical congress ever yeah sure and the RMS TITANIC was unsinkible
The Other Steve
BTW, David Sirota is something of a alarmist moron.
sglover
What the hell is Moran’s problem? Given his frequent and well-known problems managing a checking account, I would think he’d welcome the opportunity to call his constituents, and maybe hit them up for the “loans” that he seems to need so often….
Zifnab
Yeah, that works right up until you start asking who is doing the investigating. Maybe you forgot the glory years of the nineties, when Clinton couldn’t fart without Congress convening a delegation to determine if he was sending methane-based smoke signals to China, but I will appreciate it very much if Congress sticks to investigating shit that actually matters.
At the end of the day, its a matter of trust. And it seems like no one can actually garner it these days. Who the hell is going to bust Virginia’s William Jefferson when we can’t bust William Jefferson? Everyone is a fuckwit. It’s exhausting.
Andrew
I would be very happy to see Moran in a jail cell. He’s a real piece of work.