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So a little earlier in the week I'd heard that Bob Ney (R-Ohio) had stepped down from office out of sheer shame.
I was confused. Really, the move had taken my by surprise. Resign out of shame? No one resigns over shame anymore, and definitely not a Republican. It's a lose-lose proposition. Better to just spin the media and milk the office for all it's worth until the ride's over. Turns out I heard wrong, though. He didn't resign -- he was asked to not seek re-election in 2006. The Republican party thinks they're have a more suitable candidate in someone not tainted by scandal. Go figure. Ney will continue to squat on his seat in the House of Representatives until replaced, though. A fact which is a little funny since he got elected replacing a predecessor who resigned after admitting he had hired his mistress as his secretary (in 1976 you still resigned in shame). A little bit of work did lead to a little more confusion though, as after the Abramoff scandal broke Ney did step down from being the chairman of the House Administration Committee (a post his predecessor held with such a ruthless iron fist that he's cut the air conditioning to offices of officials who defied him). Still, what's got me confused is that it's just not done any more. Resign in shame? The resign-in-shame gene is missing from these people. They just don't get the concept. They're just... just... shameless. That's the word I should be using. I'm sure the resign-in-shame gene is recessive, but you get a couple of shameless politicos together and you can get a whole brood of shameless children. Look at the current generation of Bushies – George H.W. and Barbara begat George W., Jeb, Neil and the rest. And where as other goes-nowhere does-nothing recessive traits like blond hair are just going to get rarer and rarer with each global generation, shamelessness is a damnable survival trait. Take Barbara Bush's contribution to the Katrina Relief Fund, with specific instructions that all her money must be spent on educational software, purchased directly from her son Neil's company. Heck, look at George W's brood -- currently Jenna seems to be on deck extending the shameless gene into the next generation with the son of tobacco executive John Hager. Now some of you might be quick to compare this sort of shamelessness with the personal carelessness that comes naturally to, say, a socialite hotel heiress. Shamelessness in the "fashionable" celebrities is something else altogether. The subset of them that are having children are either adopting or engaging in such fanatical inbreeding that soon they'll be a effective as most modern royalty. Upperdooperdoo... But really, at the end of the day, it's a question of scope. At one end, when the socially shameless decided they really really want to do something, the worse that happens is that we get another insipid pop song that the top-40 stations attempt to shove down our throats. When the politically shameless really really want to do something, we get a 8.5 trillion dollar national debt, imbedded in an stupid ego-driven war, and a gutting of all the basic civil liberties our country was founded for. |