Following Money

"Contact the police ma'am," Tim Keller, coordinating

Watergate was the singular political crisis of my formative years. Despite Woodward and Bernstein, despite the court battle over Nixon's tapes, despite John Dean, despite Liddy, despite the Gerald Ford pardon "for the sake of the country," despite the film, the narrative arc of Nixon's paranoia is not entirely cogent. I lived it, and after the JFK/RFK/MLK assassinations, the notion of a conspiracy nation came of age, despite the fact that McGovern was a political neuter, the dust of history hasn't made my grappling with the high crime of the break in any easier, and corruption has since grown quieter, more systemic.

The more I learn about the staff of politicians, the more I am tempted to go "suck up power in the streets," to channel Patrick Stewart playing Lenin (bad casting choice but who cares, I can imagine a hard driving and virile Stewart to the point that he can slice ham for money at his discretion; I know he has children and is a divorced knight of the Commonwealth and the only way I'd ever set eyes on him is if Yahoo News gave me a terminal disease story and the old man sighed and said "jolly good, I will do the bloody dying cripple bucket list, but I get a Tonight slot for it!")

This is the carcinoma that drives independent living center exploitation of the most vulnerable populations in this country: the corruption of the Medicaid dollar. Policy regulators know it, so does the coordinating staff here. And the police have better things to do than to freeze disability center accounts simply due to the fact that I can get investigators to the cadavers, even if I do not know the exact location of the graves.

I do not want to alienate Sims; he is my state legislator and has a civil rights background, and I have been through some significant, sometimes even heavy duress. Maybe he can assist me in unraveling some of that damage despite the fact that I have chilled my heels on gay equality. Ditto for my other representatives, especially Toomey. If Toomey's aids have checked out my online footprint, they might conclude my liabilities outweigh any asset I may pose to them, but damage due to continuous trauma does not mean that I am wrong: Consumers are made expendable by IL policy and governance all the time, maybe made worse in the rust belt than elsewhere, although CA may be just as bad. I am the real thing, and if I am the real thing, this gives Toomey the cover he needs to roll back on some of the corruption that is to some degree insulated by the threat of litigation due to that favorite GOP buzz saw: the federal mandate.

I cannot say I became loyal to WaPo because of their seminal exposure of a national disgrace, but like Woodward once was before he turned himself into a presidential portraitist, I am hungry. Whatever its problems, and it has them, the Post whets this appetite. Journalists make excellent sociopaths, excusing Kathleen Parker's aptitude for fuzzy wuzzy was a bear. National mainstream media needs that type of voice, one which doesn't command respect. Keeps power players off their guard.