Ezra Klein Exposed Former Senator Evan Bayh as an Example of Congress’ Never-Ending Supply of Nation-Damaging Hypocrisy

© 2011 Peter Free

 

17 March 2011

 

 

Pretended-ness from yawning mediocrities

 

When the press used to mention Senator Evan Bayh (Democrat, Indiana), I often wondered why.  The man contributed nothing of much substance to anything senatorial that I can remember.

 

Like so many of us generally, he proved to be a forgettable intestinal wind.

 

Less easily dismissed is Bayh’s course after leaving the Senate.  His occupational path diagrams what is wrong with Congress.

 

The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein recently exposed the former senator for the professionally opportunistic hypocrite he is.

 

Klein recalled that Bayh had castigated Congress when he retired from the Senate, stating that its polarization could be overcome by requiring 35 senators to initiate filibusters.  The former senator recommended that only 55 votes should be required to defeat filibusters.

 

Bayh also wanted enhanced financial disclosure requirements, including a rule that corporate donors appear in the advertisements they finance.  And, he said, law should prevent government contractors and bailed-out financial institutions from spending money on campaigns.

 

Following Bayh’s post-senatorial career, Klein dryly noted that:

 

Bayh had no record of leadership on any of these topics.

 

He waxed rhapsodic over his time teaching at Indiana University’s Graduate School of Business. “It was real, it was tangible, and it was making a difference every day,” he said.

 

But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods.

 

And who does McGuire Woods work for?

 

“Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site.

 

He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm.

 

And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor.

 

It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.

 

© 2011 Ezra Klein, The sad, hypocritical retirement of Evan Bayh, Washington Post (15 March 2011) (paragraphs split)

 

 

These Fat Cats’ servants smile through their hypocritical charm, while picking our pockets and diminishing our futures

 

That’s Congress and the Executive branch in a nutshell.

 

 

Does Hypocrite Bayh rise to the level of an illustrative bad example?

 

Probably not.  Even on that spectrum, he is still run of the mill.

 

Congress is mostly comprised of bad examples.  So Senator Bayh’s professional mediocrity and his demonstrated hypocrisy sink him to the level of being an average representation of low-life, but culturally-accepted, political ethics.

 

Cockroaches of the same species and hypocrite humans look pretty much alike.

 

They symbolize the ecology of citizen despair.