Our "resource"

I was going to translate Ludwig Hohl’s comparison of Jesus and Socrates for a post today – but I am bogged down in work. So bogged down that I only glanced at the Times. But it was surely worth glancing at. In the Republic, Socrates tells the story of Leontius, who was going by a field in which they executed prisoners. He tried to shut his eyes, but he found himself, in spite of himself, peeping at the corpses – and so finally he rushed over to a corpse, opened his eyes wide, and addressed his own eyes: “Look for yourselves, you evil things. Get your fill of the beautiful sight!”

This is, of course, what any normal person would feel when passing by a story of that rat and ratfucker, Tom Daschle, under the headline, “Daschle has the ear of the White House and Industry”. Of course, the headlines is slightly off – it should read, Decaying corpse of ubercorrupt ex-Senator sells service to Industry to help destroy national healthcare.

Daschle gets paid by Alston and Bird. Alston and Bird represent United Health and the Tennessee Hospital Association, and are fighting to feed ever more pork to porky med industry investors. And Daschle “advises” Obama’s neo-liberal crew – a crew obviously modeling itself on Chairman Larry Summers thought. A crew so up to its eyeballs in connections to Wall Street banks and the richest and most corrupt oligarchs on earth that their very neural wiring is bribed.

But Daschle is a noble man, an old advisor, an ooooold Democratic party pro. The man who memorably led his party to defeat and ignominy in 2002. A hunk of junk tossed out by the citizens of South Dakota, one of those plains states that has the population of a NYC neighborhood and should no more be a state than I am. He is a prime product of our broken democracy in its dog years, the Bush-Obama interregnum, as we limp into our third world economy status, with a tiny middle class, a teaming poverty sector, and a helicoptering class of the wealthy.

This man, this thing, this corruption, this mummy, this vile odious puppet, this backstabbing son of a bitch, this corporate motormouth, this ghoul, is “advising” the administration away from the public option – the only reason to have any healthcare debate at all – and towards the screw it, stick with festering fucked out system we have now system. I imagine that the Dems, in their infinite wisdom, smell a winner in Daschle – he did so much for them before! I'm astonished out at the clawlike hold the richest have on the throat of this republic.

Ah, but just to put the capper on this oozing bag of pomposity and piss, the NYT noticed that he is not listing himself as a lobbyist while he lobbies for the company that pays him. These questions were thrust upon his thingship, and this is what the ever great Daschle had to say about it:

“Mr. Daschle is not registered as a lobbyist and recently told U.S. News and World Report that he preferred to describe himself as a “resource” to those in government and industry.

“I’d like to be a resource to my former colleagues, to the extent that I can, to the administration, to the stakeholders and to people interested in just kind of knowing how this is all going to play out,” he said. “I am most comfortable with the word resource.”

Every dying culture dies first in its language. Daschle, that representative of the chancre which is in the place where Dem politicians used to have a heart, has extended his feckless corruption to English itself. How appropriate that he’s D.C.’s favorite go-between. I’d urge all my readers to have their medical bills routed to his office. Maybe he can be a “resource” for all of us.