Captain Renault: Oh no, Emil, please. A bottle of your best champagne, and put it on my bill.

Emil: Very well, sir.

Victor Laszlo: Captain, please...

Captain Renault: Oh, please, monsieur. It is a little game we play. They put it on the bill, I tear up the bill. It is very convenient.

-- Casablanca (1942)

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The appalling, unconscionable circumstance of a political elite class, lawmakers and political executives alike, collusively creating a self-serving bubble of legal immunity for their official acts is another consequence of the transformation of national politics into a para-corporate service delivery system. It's cronyism writ large-- so large that it's apparently gone right over We the People's heads.

I don't wish to bore or annoy by restating the various observations and arguments that have put such wear and tear on my soapbox during the past few years. But must repeat my view that our political process has slowly transmogrified in plain sight from an imperfect and flawed system predicated on ethical, principled conduct, or at least conduct amenable to ethical and principled behavior, into, well... Organized Crime.

My opinions began crystallizing around small and seemingly-trivial phenomena: Congressmen like John Conyers, David Obey and Barney Frank, still viewed by Democratic loyalists as "good guys" who work(ed) hard to support the common citizen against depredations by the rich and powerful, began responding to those all-important attempts to hold their cloven hooves to the fire on issues like ending the invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, and impeaching the Misfeasor(s) in the Executive Branch, with naked superciliousness, arrogance, and hostility.

Obey viciously snarled at a soldier's mother who demanded that he stop funding the Iraq debacle, then ranted about "idiot liberals"; Frank excoriated critics taking him to task for these same issues, and his unwillingness to advocate for transgendered rights in his pet LBGT legislation with a withering observation that these critics were "living in Oz..."; Conyers had Cindy Sheehan and others arrested when they refused to accept his discouraging doublespeak regarding the necessity to impeach President Unitard.

Scientific method has, wrongly and unfortunately, denigrated "anecdotal" to mean "utterly devoid of useful truth or deeper significance". Be that as it may, after considering incidents like these, it flashed upon me that these politicians sounded very much like mere technocrats: corporate middle managers or executives denouncing unhappy shareholders as clueless amateurs who didn't understand the system, the way government "really" works. In each case, the politicians were obviously personally affronted and infuriated that their putatively honorable and skillful performances as professional power-brokers were not respected and applauded by even their supporters-- who had, somehow, suddenly become an ignorant and preposterous rabble of critics.

And their outbursts-- including Conyers' twinkle-eyed understated outbursts-- invariably boiled down to declarations that the business of Congress is business. Not just in the narrow sense of acquiring, accounting and disbursing revenue, but in the broader sense of Taking Care of Bidness by ensuring that the quotidian wheeling and dealing proceeds with bipartisan comity. In their collective view, it would behoove the few noisy citizen nobodies swarming around them like gnats to stay the hell home or immerse themselves into the entry-level business of modern politics.

Sure, arguably politics has always been about the benjamins, from Benjamin's lifetime and before. But my point is that high office now requires each individual office-holder to function as a wholly-owned subsidiary, preoccupied with managing and enhancing money streams to guarantee that they'll keep their place in the Going Concern of politics. Didn't someone say that the love of money is the root of all evil?

So much for not repeating myself.

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Another "anecdote" that I often cite because it seems so seminal to me is an interview with Bill Clinton after his presidency that made blood ooze from my ears and eyeballs. (I keep meaning to Google it, but for now just trust me, it's there.)

In response to the question of why Clinton hadn't pursued open DOJ investigations into serious illegal activities related to the Iran-Contra and Savings & Loan scandals, Clinton unhesitatingly acknowledged that yes, he had made a deliberate decision to pull the plug on such investigations. His rationale was that he had a "mandate" from a public fed up with political bickering and gridlock, and was tasked to fix the malfunctioning process of government by restoring a convivial bipartisan working relationship.

Pursuing outstanding investigations that might involve and implicate highly-placed Republicans could only impede Clinton's reforms, by perpetuating "hard feelings" and obstructionist backlash from the Republicans. Thus, it was simply the better part of valor, and common sense, to let bygones be bygones.

The striking aspect of Clinton's rationalization, which certainly sounds sensible and appropriate (that's why they call him "Slick Willie"), was the utter absence of appreciation for social justice and the rule of law. It just wasn't on the radar! In my view, this is because achieving social justice is fundamentally a question of principle. And, despite the oxymoron "business ethics", commitment to abstractions like social justice is simply bad for business; it's inefficient, tedious, and a risky expenditure of political capital.

In these parlous times, only wild & crazy throwbacks like Cynthia McKinney or Ralph Nader or Cindy Sheehan run as Old School non-technocrat politicians. And so we are encouraged to dismiss them as surds, narcissists-- losers.

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Which brings me back to the topic. I view the obscene trend to place politicans above the law as a logical outcome of a status quo in which elected politicians from both sides of the duopoly, ostensibly beholden to We the People as defined in the Constitution, instead pass Through the Looking Glass and become a protected elite class of technocrats-- a neo-feudal aristocracy dividing citizen from politician as the serf was divided from the lord of the manor.

It's Might Makes Right, and overlords naturally are accorded a droit de seigneur a legal license to murder, rape, and pillage the lower classes with impunity, as long it doesn't infringe on their peers.