Phil D’Agostino writes for the American Thinker about politicians who live by the rule: Good for thee, not for me.
If you’re from the Southeastern United States, you are very familiar with hushpuppies, and I mean the food, not the shoe. If you’re not, they are a blob of cornbread dough about the size of your thumb that has been deep-fried to a golden brown. They are delicious. Tradition tells us they were often used by Southern farmers as snacks thrown to their dogs to keep them quiet while sitting down to supper. Thus the name hushpuppy.
Politicians, it would seem, have developed their own breed of hushpuppy, thrown at their constituency to keep them (us) quiet while they sit at their tables and divide up the spoils from their charade of pretending to care about the same things we do. Theirs isn’t fried; it’s raw. Theirs isn’t delicious, it’s bitter and revolting. But, it seems to still do the job, namely, to keep us at bay and hushed. And, this political hushpuppy comes in two flavors; hearings and investigations.
Over and over, we are assaulted with what seems to be blatant criminal behavior of politicians, their family members, or their cronies. (The word “friends” is too soft to use here.) They make edicts, mandates, laws, regulations, codes of ethics, and even off-handed commentaries relating to proper “thought etiquette” and virtue-signaling, by which we are expected to live. Their claim is that these are by which we are all to live. Yet they do not seem to be able to remember them when applied to themselves. Like a steal from a Steve Martin routine (when you make a million dollars, don’t pay any taxes on it, and the IRS comes calling, simply say, “I forgot!”), they claim they made a mistake. They didn’t understand their own rules. They never saw anything in their own misdeeds as relating to the law. Oops!
