Bipartisanship Manifests

See? It's not just Republicans who are lying, corrupt scumbags. And I'm not even (directly) talking about Rod Blagojevich, whose scumminess, corruption, and veracity deficiency have been well documented already.

Indirectly, he's in the news again -- turns out that Senator Ronald Burris kind of didn't exactly tell the whole truth when he swore under penalty of perjury that he had no contact with then-Gov. Blagovjevich, who had the plum to pass out of a Senate appointment to fill the vacancy left by President Obama.

What Burris said then: I had no conversations of any kind with Blagojevich or any of his staffers or relatives or his dog groomer. No deal was made, money was never discussed at all, with anyone, ever. I was just sitting at home doing nothing political at all, just reading my copy of the Saturday Evening Post when out of the blue comes this phone call and next thing I know, boom! I'm in Washington and Harry Reid is all "Talk to the hand" but I'm like, Mr. Smith and stuff so I'm cool.

What he says now: Well, actually, I did have, I think, three conversations with his staffers and his brother and I promised to raise funds for him, but when I tried to raise funds for him I couldn't do it. So, hey, it's cool because I only promised to try and get other people to pay for my appointment and it's not really corrupting me if I use other people's money. It's not like I'd reach into my own pocket to buy off a corrupt Governor, come on, what, do you think I'm stupid? Oh, and please direct all further questions to my attorney.

And in other news, the FBI raided a lobbyist's office and found something like two bankers' boxes worth of evidence indicating illegal campaign contributions going to John Murtha, the chairman of the Defense Appropriations subcommittee, and his minions in the House. Comparing the list of campaign recipients to the recent stimulus bill, over a hundred line items are earmarked for projects benefitting clients of this lobbying firm, costing taxpayers billions of dollars. Now that's some juice!

If I may paraphrase from The Simpsons: Two hundred years ago, the land that is today called "Washington, D.C." was a swamp, a stinking, disease-infested morass along the Potomac River, populated primarily by the bloated bodies of corpulent beasts feeding upon the decayed remains of others, enmeshed in a misasma of corruption that no other way of life could have seemed scarcely imaginable to them. And it remains substantially the same today.

It's almost as if this sort of thing is just hard-wired in the nature of these people. Partisan registration is clearly not a matter of the remotest significance here. Meet the new bosses. Same as the old bosses.