Bruce Moomaw, in a comment at TPM Cafe, alerts me to George Will's column on the Abramoff scandal. Will's conclusions are, um, interesting:
There are two reasons why rent-seeking has become so lurid, but those reasons for today's dystopian politics are reasons why most suggested cures seem utopian.Let's see now. Abramoff, DeLay, Pombo--the whole damn lot of them--have one goal in common: dismantling the regulatory state. What kind of mind, given massive corruption on the part of the enemies of regulatory oversight, would conclude that regulatory oversight itself is the problem?
The first reason is big government -- the regulatory state. This year Washington will disperse $2.6 trillion, which is a small portion of Washington's economic consequences, considering the costs and benefits distributed by incessant fiddling with the tax code, and by government's regulatory fidgets.
(Answer: the same kind of mind that would say: "If geologists were to decide that only three thimbles of oil lie beneath area 1002, there would still be something to going down to get them, just to prove that this nation cannot be forever paralyzed by people wielding environmentalism as a cover for collectivism.")
Will's sleight-of-hand is sadly transparent; he throws around terms like 'big government' and figures like 2.6 trillion, then shifts abruptly from spending to regulation--hoping, presumably, that nobody notices. The goal here is to make sure people learn the same terribly wrong lesson they learned from Watergate: that it isn't Republicans who can't be trusted, but government (the 'regulatory state') itself.
Will is one of the first, but he won't be the last. This is a message they're going to push, and push hard. Be vigilant; it's the message that did us in after Watergate, and we can't let that happen again.
[That's all, folks]
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