As you all know, I absolutely cannot stand the Washington Beltway insider establishment. They all make me sick. Even the handful of people that I know personally who are a part of it, they make me sick too. I'm talking about all of them: Congressional staff, media people, lawyers, lobbyists, administration officials, campaign consultants, think tank scholars, bureaucrats...all of them. They're all horrible, disgusting people. I actually like Wall Street people, with whom I also familiar, more than I like Beltway people. At least with Wall Streeters the motivations are clear. Spend some time around both groups and you'll agree.
But when I read this piece by quintessential beltway insiders Mike Allen and Jim Vandehei attempt at self-reporting, the level bile building up in my throat couldn't be kept down by my morning coffee. Just listen to them:
Talk about incestuous: A top Obama official cashes in with a top corporation with the help of a top Washington fixer and gets top-shelf treatment from one of Washington’s top journalists (who also happens to be the co-byline on this piece.)
Yes, its so awful you want to throw your tablet at some "strategist" right? Well hold on to it because it gets much, much worse:
Haddad may regret it, too. Leibovich asked a lot of questions about how the former TV producer courts the powerful. He focused on Haddad’s relentless promotion and fundraising for CURE (Citizens United for Research in Epilepsy), founded by Susan Axelrod, the wife of David Axelrod. Leibovich portrays this as a blatant effort to curry favor – a bald execution of the theory that you build connections to the powerful by finding out what interests the people around them.
David Axelrod is distressed by the expected portrayal and told us: “Tammy has been a great friend to Susan and me, and I think very sincere about it. She has never asked me for anything in return.”
Haddad did not give Leibovich a formal interview but the two recently had a clear-the-air lunch at The Jefferson hotel. Leibovich seemed suspicious of Haddad’s presence on Air Force One when Jon Meacham of Newsweek, then one of her clients, had an interview with President Obama. But Haddad has told friends it’s perfectly normal to accompany clients to interviews she has helped arrange. She declined to comment.
For what it’s worth, Haddad is a friend who has thrown parties for us. Come to think of it, she has thrown parties for virtually every other person and cause we know.
This doesn't deserve analysis. This deserves nothing but the purest forms of hateful insults.
These people are the problem in our nations Capitol. Washington has come to be dominated by an elite class of tightly connected social-climbing nihilists. They promote inertia, because inertia is their gravy train. Their kids go to the right private schools, their salaries paid by an ever growing list of people who move effortlessly between government, the press, and corporate employment justified by their expensive connections made in college, thanks to their parents...who are also people just like them.
If you decide you want to be civic minded and run for office, you too will run into these people. They'll be sent to you by a party campaign committee. Then, if you can get successfully trained by handlers (same people) to say the right things, they'll use their connections to get you interviews with the media, who are also the same people. Then you can spend many hours of your day calling donors, who also have staffs of people who know your people. Then you'll use the money you raise to pay other people, who are also friends of theirs, to run your campaign. And if you win, those people will introduce you to other people who will run your office. And those people will make sure you meet other people so that you get the right assignments, so that those can people can then tell other people that they have influence over you. Because they do. And if you do this for two or three terms in office, you'll cycle through a bunch of people like these whom you will see far more than any of your constituents. Then one day, you'll look up at a committee hearing, reading a statement prepared by your people, telling you what to say and how to vote. And you will have totally forgotten why you decided to come there in the first place, having accomplished little to nothing, while watching all your people get rich in the process. And then you will retire and decide its time to get yours. You will become your people.
This is why all of them make me want to vomit.