The System

You know, I've always looked upon our political system and its attendant bureaucracy as a sort of machine. A big machine. Sort of the kind of big machine that was in that stupid remake of the Wild Wild West... you know, a sort of clumsy, fire and smoke belching metal arachnoid creature populated by barely human troglodytes attended to by incongruously beautiful women. Drawn to power, I suppose.

The machine in the wrong hands will do nefarious things, while in the right hands, will... stomp all over your flower garden and probably run up your coal bill. I guess it is the true "off-road" vehicle, but who really goes "off-roading"? The only time I ever see any "off-road" vehicle going off road is to enter a parking lot to pick up groceries.

So I guess the point is that machines aren't precisely evil, but if you get one in the hands of a monster with a fucked up pile of facial hair and a wheelchair welded to his ass, well, I don't suspect you can expect that machine to pet puppies and kiss babies.

Er. Something like that.

But what a machine we have in our government. And just a little overlubricated. I guess it's all those greased palms pulling the levers. This machine is not inherently evil, but I'm a little concerned that we lack the ability to identify whose hands are the right hands anymore. Previous occupants have left a few rivets out here and there, a few flywheels spin without transmission of power, and the gearbox has thrown an awful lot of teeth. And there are a lot of curious "bolt-ons" here and there which never make much sense or have much obvious purpose (and make it seem a lot easier to gum up the works).

For example. Riders.

Riders are little provisions they tack onto bills to get funding for this or that or concessions for this or that. The rider itself isn't really constrained by any rules, so you can pretty much tack any rider you want to any little bill. And apparently, you don't have to go in and actually announce that's what you've done, or if you do, you just whisper in a really soft voice when the only people in the congressional chambers are you, the janitor, a stenographer, and the dullard gentlemen from Jabib who might object to your little augmentation if he wasn't two IQ points shy of "moron".

So, if I, a buttweed congressman decided to tack a rider to give tax breaks to serial killers onto a crime bill (just to revel in the irony), I could.

Then, if I am challenged, I could point to my opponents saying they're soft on crime.

Brilliant! Now let me just put this cheese on my head. Whuh. I smell feet.

Of course, this is a major "duh", and we all know what the response is:

The President needs a line-item veto!

Yeah, right. Let's just presume, for a moment, that the President is just as much of a fucking shithead as I, the Distinguished Gentleman from the Third Circle of Hell.

Now, President Suckhole decides to take his red pen out and veto every line BUT the one for the tax-breaks for serial killers! Now isn't THAT a story to tell!

And, um, do you think we should be giving the good old President any more latitude than he's already assumed? I didn't think so.

No, kids, the only answer is for people to avoid being persuaded from such bait-and-switch maneuvers and that requires assiduous attention to detail and near superhuman vigilance. I mean, look at the numbers:

There are upwards of 700 people who, if they decided to stick a screwdriver into the drivetrain of government, could really mess up the works for the rest of us. And that's not to mention the myriad of special interests who have boxloads of screwdrivers of various shapes and sizes more than willing to equip these tools with the tools they need to do it.

So the System (TM) may not be fucked up, but it certainly looks like something to which Rube Goldberg might say "Hmm. This looks unnecessarily convoluted to me!"

Anyone got any ideas? Or is this just the sort of convolution thing that is intended to give Beltway Unfamiliars the sort of frustration that makes them not offer them up?