LET’S MAKE A DEAL TO SAY WE HATE MAKING DEALS

1/11/11

Among the parade of platitudes that passed for an Inaugural address by Governor Pat Quinn (no relation) was this whopper:

“I’m here to say that we’ve restored integrity and honesty in the office of governor. We have replaced a government of deals with a government of ideals.”

And people ask why I don’t waste valuable time listening to such drivel. But I digress. At the very time that Quinn (no relation) was uttering these banalities, he was engaged in a deal to help his new boss, House Speaker Mike Madigan, force the largest tax increase in Illinois history (See my 1/7/11 post YOU MEAN ALL THAT STUFF GOVERNMENT DOES TO US ISN’T FREE?! and my 1/8/11 post “SOMETIMES A CIGAR IS JUST A CIGAR.”) through a lame duck session of the state legislature.

Hmm…

There is nothing wrong with deal making in politics; that is how things get done, especially in this state, and our governance in this country has suffered from the, in recent years, predominance in power of a pack of poltroons who piously and pedantically proclaim their opposition to such presumably perfidious practices. But to engage in such deal making while simultaneously proclaiming that one has “replaced a government of deals with a government of ideals” is both rank hypocrisy and an indication that, in Pat Quinn’s opinion, the voters of this state are a bunch of imbeciles. The latter might have a degree of validity; after all, we elect people like Pat Quinn (no relation), Rod Blagojevich, George Ryan, and the legislators and other “public servants” who have spent this state into bankruptcy. But my larger point is that since we are dealing with Governor Pat Quinn (no relation), neither hypocrisy nor a low estimate of the intelligence of the voters (while never hesitating to intone on how wise he thinks we are; more hypocrisy, which is fast becoming Governor Quinn’s most salient trait) should come as a surprise.