The vitriol Blender

Migod, but American politics is strange. Weird, exciting, bizarre, unpredictable, amateurish, fiercely poisonous, you name it. From Jesse Ventura to Richard Nixon to Sarah Palin to JFK, you never seem to know what rough beast is going to arrive in Bethlehem next. In the last month, we've had

• One Governor own up to adultery with a staff members wife (but not resign)
• One Governor disappear without trace for 5 days, then own up to adultery, or possibly multiple adulteries (but not resign)
• One Governor resign, with such an incomprehensible resignation statement that noone can work out why she has resigned.

Plus of course, already this year, we had another governor actually impeached and forced from office for the most mind-blowing and blatant corruption you could imagine.

Given that there are only 50, what are the chances of completely running out of governors by the next election cycle? And, bearing in mind that all three of these most recent ones were mentioned as possible presidential candidates for the Republicans in 2012, if the Democrats have a secret agency knocking off potential opponents, they deserve a bonus. A big bonus.

But, no, this is actually just an ongoing cascade of the typical arrogance of power: the 'I can get away with anything' mentality, or as I'd label it, the Muldoon mentality. It's something that seems -currently- more prevalent amongst Republicans, which I'd attribute to 8 years of rotten corruption of the Department of Justice by the Bush administration, turning it from a relatively independant bureaucracy to one with innumerable republican apparatchiks embedded, and carefully taught to only pursue the 'enemy' ... i.e. the Democrats.

It's hard to credit that people could be so egregiously one-eyed, even if they trained as lawyers. But after checking through several hundred different complaints and cases (these just the ones that are available online, from bloggers complaining about them), a really grotesque prejudice is evident, not just anti-Democrat, but blindly pro-republican even in the teeth of clear and blatant evidence. Truly, it is beyond shameful, and - even given the enormity of damage the Bush administration caused in foreign & domestic arenas - this is probably the single most poisonous and damaging legacy.

Hopefully this will change with the new administration, but it will be a slow process, as many of the appointees are in nominally non-political slots, and so not required to offer resignation at the change of administration.

And, of course, there's a possibility of just seeing a reversal of polarity, rather than a return of somewhat even-handed justice: but I doubt, very much, if the Democrats can muster that many mean-minded, petty, vengeful adherants (not that they don't have their faults, but they will be more, hmm, ideological in nature).