Don Surber notes a couple of articles bemoaning the stinginess of politicians on both sides of the aisle.

Following up on a MyDD post by Chris Bowers, which begged for Democrats with safe seats to come to the aid of challengers in other districts, Brownstein reported: “Bowers has identified 69 Democratic incumbents without serious opposition whose combined campaign treasuries total roughly $50 million.”

But these rich Democratic incumbents ain’t budging. Money is power and they expect something more than genuflections for the dough they earned the old fashioned way -- by sucking up to fatcats. Hey, junior, you want $50 million, you hit the rubber chicken circuit.

Republicans are no better, which brings me to my point.

I just read a quote of John Cole (Balloon Juice) on Greg Prince's blog that as the usual indignant hippie crap about the "establishment". Let's remind him that those same hippies are the one's with the padlocked wallets, the tax lawyers and the sweetheart deals at the expense of the little people. Making corruption a party issue is incredibly naive, because --face it, politicians are as a class, a sorry bunch of assholes.

There are exceptions, but I doubt they're anyone we know.

Its been a while since I've noted my long-time observation that the political system demands the kinds of politicians it gets.

Consider how the legal profession works. Like everywhere else in the country, some of the finest commercial realestate in the region consists of buildings owned by law firms. Where do law firms get those kinds of bucks? By suing people for lots of money. The more money you have, the more likely it is that you'll be sued. Years ago I was involved in a small business that was eventually sold. Not surprisingly, the law suits started appearing out of nowhere the minute we were part of a larger corporate entity. What happened? From one day to the next, nothing fundamentally changed in the business except the ownership. The new owner was "deep pockets" and some lawyer somewhere saw a downpayment on an office building.

Its an incredibly cynical business, and the culture is tailormade to spill over into the political arena where the real money is.

Is it a coincidence that so many politicians are lawyers? I wrote at length about Harry Reid's extensive land-swap involvement on behalf on what can only be describes as "clients". Reid was doing in politics what he had done in law practice, but now he had the ultimate cash cow--the federal bureaucracy. He of course didn't "sue" the federal bureaucracy, but he did find ways to extract significant concessions on behalf of his clients, making them, and of course himself, very rich (you can build a nice place for 1.2 million...)

What you are doing when you vote for a certain politicians is essentially hiring a lawyer to represent your interests, either to screw some other hapless constituency, or to defend you from politicians trying to screw you.

'K' street has been getting a lot of flack lately, but frankly, they are the noblest enterprise in Washington--truly representing their constituencies with a single-mindedness and purity. That some express shock that they buy the favors of politicians is absurb--absolutely everyone is for sale on both sides of the aisle and its just a question of whom we will buy and for how much.