Money Doesn’t Corrupt

Watching bits and pieces of Hannity and Colmes again tonight (it was up against a Simpsons rerun that I’ve seen many times…), and they had Lanny Davis on. He was, of all things, defending the Bush Administration (at least insofar as he thought there was no evidence that they’d done anything wrong) and was urging them to come clean on the “energy task force.”

My take is that he knows he was running interference for a criminal scoundrel in the past, he has at least the vestiges of a conscience, and that he hopes, by appearing to be “consistent” that he will somehow redeem himself.

Of course, he’s not being consistent, because in the case of the Clinton Administration, almost without failure, there was almost always a “quo” to match every “quid.” The only excuse that the Clintonistas could put forth was that yes, there was a quid, and yes, there was a quo, but we must understand that Bill Clinton was such a noble and ethical creature, that it was madness to connect the dots and think that there was therefore a “quid pro quo.”

(Quick translation for those who are Latin challenged: “quid” means “this,” “quo” means “that,” and “pro” means “for”…)

The uphill struggle that the Democrats face in making this into a Republican scandal is that while there are “quids” to both parties, there are no recent “quo”s, and to the degree that they exist at all, they only came from Democrats…

Lanny also said something toward the end that simply reinforced Glenn Reynold’s recent Fox News editorial. Lanny said, “We must pass campaign reform to end the corruption caused by all this money.”

No, Lanny, it’s not the money that causes all the corruption. Lord Acton had it right when he said it, and it remains right today.

Power corrupts.