An Honest Politician

[goldenmyst]

An Honest Politician

I would like to thank the president
And all his staff
For the wonderful job
They're doing
And my special appreciation
Goes to the guests here at the White House
For all their contributions
To helping elect the president

Especially their monetary contributions
Without their greenbacks none of this would be possible
For money is the sacred exchange medium
Which fuels the fire of commerce
And feeds the insatiable appetite
Of neocons and liberals alike

We need you to keep giving
Give until you have no more
For we congressmen have hungers
Which are insatiable
Much like yourselves
We need prostitutes
And upscale hotels
Within which to ejaculate our currency

Nourish our needs
And we'll give you FOX news interviews
And Cspan bullshit
And guess what you'll like it!
So laden our larder
With your blood sweat and tears
And we'll give back the illusion
Of prosperity and liberty
And you'll be happy fools
Embalmed before death
By ten second news bites

[saw]

nice job john of compressing the essence of these relationships into a palatable quaff to sip as we admit something is rotten, i can smell it....

[goldenmyst]

Saw, there is an old saying a fish rots starting at the head. Thanks for reading this ramble.

John

[mtmynd]

good read, John... with lots o' truth tossed in to spice it up.

[goldenmyst]

mtmynd, much thanks. Yep for all the passionate talk of human rights and dignity and such they'd sell their constituents in a heart beat to feather their nest.

John

[mtmynd]

Hi, John...

Washington is the most powerful place in the country and quite possibly the world when it comes to buying influence. They support this corruption by calling the rose by another name, but lobbying, despite the long history of it, is bribery, plain and simple - I give you $$$, you give me what I want. Buying laws for the powerful only makes the powerful more powerful and the citizen's who vote their representatives into office end up deaf and dumb to their elected officials, drowned out by the clamor for money.

What to do, what to do..?

[mnaz]

you said it. the system is largely broken-- both government and mainstream media-- at least in terms of any truly meaningful sense of "representative democracy." Is it all totally beyond recovery? Maybe not. Are other places worse? Probably. But our system seems to rate higher on the (sold-out) sham index every year...

[mtmynd]

sure, there are worse places when it comes to bribery (Mexico, for example) and places where corruption is too powerful to seemingly ever stop... but it seems from this side of the fence our own officials are seeing that level of corruption and thinking they should too... our govt is overrun by bribes and money, more than ever because there;s more than ever money

[stilltrucking]

This is my third attempt to reply to your poem. I deleted the first two.

John thank you for the poem. I tried to reply but I wound up wandering way off topic maybe. But worse than that I replied twice. The second reply trying to explain the first reply.

In a nutshell what I said was

The definition of an honest politician

An honest politician is one who, when he is bought, will stay bought.
Simon Cameron
US financier & politician (1799 - 1889)

We can only hope for more dishonesty among politicians.

[goldenmyst]

Stilltrucking, a very pertinent reply. I didn't catch the other two, but am sure they'd have been interesting too. That quote fits the poem perfectly. Yes we can hope for dishonest politicians.

John

[stilltrucking]

Till then will have to hope for honest poets.

I think I will treat myself to one of your books.

yours truly
stilltrucking et al

[mnaz]

I suppose I can live with it all (I mean, what's the alternative?-- form a giant citizen's militia and storm DC or something?), but I wish we'd stop pretending our system is something it ain't-- so "righteously democratic."

And there's always the outside chance "good" corporate interests might purchase our politicians from time to time... uh huh...

[stilltrucking]

And there's always the outside chance "good" corporate interests might purchase our politicians from time to time... uh huh...

You mean like "do no evil" Google