DaschBag

I'm often given to unnecessarily flowery prose, ignoring Ben Franklin's admonition to "eschew surplus verbiage" like it was my job. But let me be very concise about this: Tom Daschle is a piece of shit.

When Tom Daschle was in the Senate, he was the guy in charge of writing the tax code. This being income tax season, this story is especially relevant. If you're like me, you wonder who it is exactly that decides that a quarter of my earned income should belong to them and that the remaining 75% of my income will be subjected to further taxation when spent, saved, or invested.

Well, for a while, that person was Tom Daschle. If you don't remember the election in which Tom Daschle ran for Extortionist General or Supreme Allied Tax Imposer, that's because he was never elected to be the tax chief.

To Daschle's credit, he was elected as Senator from South Dakota. But I don't live in South Dakota. And neither do 99% of my fellow citizens. Nonetheless, in our "democracy", Tom Daschle was granted the authority to decide how much of my property would be better of in his hands to disperse as he saw fit.

THAT is power. That's more power than all the guns or bombs in the world, because you can't tax dead folks' incomes. So, Tom Daschle had a level of power whose breadth and scope would've made any "absolute" monarch from the Europe of old cream his pants.

He got to decide how much money to siphon from the richest society in the history of the world.All that being said, we learned this week that Tom Daschle failed to pay 150,000 dollars in income tax over a three year period when he was in the Senate.

There are only two possible explanations.

The first possibility is that the tax code is so complex and arcane that even its very authors don't understand it. The second possibility is that Tom Daschle is a piece of shit.

I've seen video of Tom Daschle sanctimoniously pontificating about how tax evaders should be punished to "the full extent of the law". Well, Tom? We're all waiting. Bend over and give us two good coughs.

Tom Daschle willingly and knowingly withheld 150,000 dollars in income tax over three years. What would lead him to do that? Why would he think he'd get away with it? Well, this is a prototypical example of the worst strain of "Progressive" politicians, who use the salt of the earth as salt for the wounds imposed by their own narcissism.

Tom Daschle will decide how much tax you and I pay, but he will not follow the rules he wrote for us. Because, you see, he's separate from us. He's one of the "experts", one of the "best and the brightest". He's not "expendable", unlike the rest of us. He operates on another plane, from which he can see what's best for all of us, even if we can't see it for ourselves.

It reminds me of the Boston busing controversy in the 1970's. Liberal lions like Teddy Kennedy just couldn't sleep at night knowing that public schools weren't integrated to their liking, so they mandated that children be bussed all over Boston to accord with the liberals' desires.

So, Kennedy and others decided that Irish kids in Southie had to wake up at 5 in the morning to be bussed to predominantly black schools in Roxbury, where they would get their asses kicked as a matter of course. Kids in Roxbury, of course, were shipped sleepy-eyed into Southie, where they were met with bricks and spit.

Now, you might think this is the best idea in the world, but does any one of us think for a second that a Kennedy kid ever set foot in any public school in Boston or anywhere else? Of course not. Don't be vulgar.

That same mentality apparently is at play with Daschle. And I'm very disappointed in Obama's nomination of the DaschBag. Even before the tax "issue" (or the "no tax" issue), this was a terrible choice. What happened to "no lobbyists"?

After Tom Daschle left the Senate, he gave speeches to health insurance companies. He was paid hundred of thousands of dollars for these speeches. Now, given the fact that Tom Daschle is the boringest person on this continent, we can assume that "speeches" was short for "access and open ears".

There something so infuriating about this man, something so profoundly despicable, that it undermines my faith in the theoretical soundness of our system more than one might suspect.

It feels like the last decade has been a never-ending charade where the rule-writers are exposed as incalcitrant rule-breakers, which raises the question: "why should ANY of us follow the rules?" What greater disservice could "leaders" ever perform?