Those who aren't completely corrupt can't compete with those who are. [...] In the context of the United States, we can pin down the exact moment when this predation finally completely took over the Republican Party, and thus the whole country. It was on November 22, 2000, exactly three years ago, when the 'Brooks Brothers Riot' - the use of violence by Republican Party operatives under the direction of James Baker to disrupt the vote recount in Florida - formally ended any pretense that politics was a game played by rules, and thus completely changed the United States forever. Politics fell into line with commercial morality, and we can now see the culmination of the process in the completely unembarrassed way the Bush Administration caters to the predator class. Unless you decide to become a predator yourself, you are doomed to become prey.
Three years ago today Republicans removed all constraints of rules, laws, or even the human conscience from politics in their slavish devotion to wealth and power.
But three years and one more day ago, there was no mutual fund crisis, no corporate governance crisis, no Ken Lay dictating energy policy, no international alliance crisis, no American reputational crisis, no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, no deaths of one-weekend-a-month reservists, no oil CEOs in the White House, no multibillion dollar conflicts of interest, no Bechtel and Halliburton in Iraq, no $400 billion annual deficit, no $350 billion tax cut for the wealthy, no anthrax, no Office of Homeland Security to play local politics for Tom DeLay in Texas, no worldwide antiwar protest in advance of unilateral American invasions, no environmental crisis, no crisis in first responders, no nationwide state budget crisis, no talk of tax-free dividends, no tax deduction for luxury SUVs, no inexplicable energy blackouts, no John Ashcroft and no Patriot Acts, and, yes, the World Trade Center was still standing.
