The Ongoing Snow Job: Don't Be Conned

SEE HERE I've always been annoyed by the shifting sands of congressional voting. Things like votes for cloture and votes on the bill, and votes to table and votes to amend and votes to clarify or all the myriad of votes that are conducted in the course of business.

My first real experience of this was some years ago when Tom Hagedorn was running to be reelected to his seat in congress as one of the Minnesota congressmen. I don't remember who he was running against but I went to a couple of the meetings that were held where he and his opponent debated. Hagedorn tied his opponent, who was much less schooled in the art of politics, in knots over what he supported or didn't support. The problem was that Hagedorn had voted on both sides of everything at one stage or another. So when his opponent said he was against something Hagedorn had the ready answer that "No he had voted to release the bill from committee." I remember his opponent would get angrier and angrier and then would go into meltdown, which was of course the idea. Hagedorn was playing to the opponent's lack of experience and frustrating him until he got angry. At the time I thought this was in some deep sense an evasion of the issues. But if you're going to play in politics you have to realize that this is common. It's mostly about being reelected and only rarely about principles or advancing the good of the whole. I think that is tragic in some ways, but it is the reality.

RedState is just highlighting one more example of "politics as usual." The republic is ill-served, but so it has always been. To change this dimension may required the redemption of man, something largely above all or our job descriptions, although we need to strive always for the greater good.