Bad Apples
The recent death, at age 84, of Dennis Hastert, the 51st speaker of the House, who later served in prison for violating banking laws to conceal hush-money payments, points to an increasingly obvious trend in American politics.
He was supposed to be a good guy. Not so.
Hastert’s legacy was suddenly thrown into doubt in 2015, when he was accused of evading banking regulations as part of a plan to pay hush money to conceal unspecified “prior misconduct.”
Nearly a year later, prosecutors filed papers that described what media reports had suggested for months: Hastert’s alleged misconduct involved the sexual abuse of teenage boys on his wrestling team in the small town of Yorkville, west of Chicago.
The trend mentioned above is simply this: As a country, we do not elect good people to high office any longer, from either political party.
It’s almost as if we go around trying to find the people of lowest character and integrity.
Let me name a few people whom we have elected in recent years and who didn’t or don’t belong anywhere near positions of public leadership: Donald Trump, Mike Pence, JD Vance, Mike Johnson, Kevin McCarthy, Gavin Newsom, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Susan Collins, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Adam Schiff, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Greg Abbott, Jim Jordan, Lauren Boebert, Josh Hawley, Charles Grassley, Dianne Feinstein, Hillary Clinton, Ron DeSantis, Eric Schmitt and the “Ol’ Coach,” Tommy Tuberville.
I could go on because the list doesn’t end. It is one self-inflicted wound after another. In this kind of environment, reelecting incumbents is bad for everyone.
The American people have been sold a bill of goods for a very long time, though it is very clear that the buck stops with the voters.
It is going to take a while to root out the bad apples, because there are so many of them in the barrel.
Because of how campaign finance works, it is a challenge to remove incumbents, since so many are protected by “dark money,” the original sources of which are hidden from the public.
My theory is that good people generate desired results and bad ones do not.
A lot of bad people at the same time create major challenges, and we have a lot of bad people in positions of leadership. Let’s get them the hell out, via term limits, age limits and whatever else it takes.
Craig J. Corsini
San Rafael
