US Senator Ben Cardin (D-MD) says he’s “angry, disappointed” at a staffer — make that former staffer — for producing video of the “adult” variety in his off hours. The Daily Caller released the video of a sexual encounter, apparently shot in a US Senate hearing room better known for judicial confirmation hearings, on December 15.

If the employer was anyone else and the workplace anywhere else, I guess I could sympathize with Cardin’s take on the incident as a “breach of trust.” In most cases, sex at the office is a bad idea and filming it is a worse one.

But the employer isn’t anyone else, and the workplace isn’t anywhere else. That staffer worked for an organization that spends every day enthusiastically doing to the American public what the staffer’s companion was doing to him (I’m sure you can figure that part out), and doing it in, among other places, that same hearing room.

The Capitol Hill complex would no doubt take first place in any ranking of America’s raunchiest BDSM clubs. It’s somewhat exclusive as far as formal membership goes (536 members), but boasts thousands of staff members to see to those members’ needs, and proudly televises many of its orgies. In fact, C-SPAN should strongly  consider adopting “A Subsidized OnlyFans for Masochists” as a tag line / branding play.

This incident may well constitute the first event in Hart 216’s history where only one person got screwed.

Unwise, immature, and inappropriate as it may have been, the whole thing didn’t rise to anywhere near the filth level embodied by Congress’s daily operations.

Remember, these are the people who seize one out of every four dollars you earn and blow the money on a never-ending bacchanal of global murder, domestic police statism, and corporate welfare.

Unfortunately, the media and public thirst for “scandal” tends more toward pearl-clutching over the peccadilloes of individuals who get caught while still low enough on the ladder to be thrown under the bus (sorry for the mixed metaphor there) than toward skeptical analysis of what our Very Special and Important rulers constantly attempt to sell as “legitimate” and “dignified” proceedings.

This story will likely enjoy a shorter shelf life than Bill Clinton’s  blue dress wardrobe malfunction or Eliot Spitzer’s escort service escapades (both among the least of those two’s sins). As it should. At least we didn’t have to see Mitch McConnell or Chuck Schumer naked.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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“A Confederate memorial is to be removed from Arlington National Cemetery in northern Virginia in the coming days,” the Associated Press reports, as “part of the push to remove symbols that commemorate the Confederacy from military-related facilities.”

For years, I’ve been of two minds about the movement to remove these memorials.

On one hand, I generally object to the idea of “government property” being used for such purposes. In fact, I object to the very idea of “government property,” but if there’s going to be such a property claim I want its allowable uses and purposes to a least be very narrowly defined. So yeah, take down the memorials — all of them, not just the Confederate ones.

On the other hand, I’m a fan of history, and the memorials in question illustrate the history of (and the history following) America’s single greatest and most violent convulsion, a “Civil War” resulting in several hundred thousand deaths.

Arlington National Cemetery is part of that history. It’s situated on land confiscated from Confederate general Robert E. Lee, and several hundred Confederates lie among the Civil War dead buried there.

While the 1914 monument erected to those Confederates bears certain features the present generation may find offensive (e.g. a slave following his “owner” to war), it also bears the inscription “they have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks.” It is, in fact, a monument to reunification, not division, and to peace, not war. What’s not to like about that?

What was the Union premise for the war? That the United States was “one nation, indivisible.”

If that premise is correct (I don’t believe it is, but IF), then the Confederate dead are American dead, and precisely as entitled to  American honors and memorials as the Union dead.

During the Mexican War, later Union general and US president Ulysses S. Grant wrote to his fiancee: “If we have to fight, I would like to do it all at once and then make friends.”

The post-war era didn’t really accomplish that. After “Reconstruction,” the south largely recreated the former slave system in all but name, leaving its demolition to the civil rights movement of a century later, and to this very day, southern “Lost Cause” revisionists and revanchists keep the flames of Confederate sympathies burning.

But the Union, not the Confederacy, won that war — a war it fought on and for the premise of a single America including the former Confederacy and former Confederates.

Desecrating the graves of the Confederate dead, denying them commemoration on land seized from their most esteemed commander, sends exactly the opposite message. It’s an attempt to preserve, not end, the divisions the war was all about.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

“More than one country has descended into riot, revolution, coup or civil war territory over disputes about the integrity of its elections,” I wrote in 2016. “Think it can’t happen here? Think again.”

At that time, Donald Trump was busy making preemptive excuses (“we are competing in a rigged election”) for his expected loss in the 2016 presidential election. His opponent, Hillary Clinton, played the same game, whining that her prospective loss raised  “national security issues” because the rigging gear was Made in Moscow.

Seven years later, American politics remains awash in “rigged election” rhetoric.

That rhetoric usually ignores the obvious, “rigging” by the nation’s two “major” political parties, which work overtime to prevent third party and independent candidates from even appearing on ballots. Instead, Democrats lean heavily into complaints of Republican “voter suppression,” while Republicans claim large-scale Democratic “voter fraud.”

As an outsider and anarchist who believes the US is in its period of terminal decline, I can’t bring myself to care very much which of those “major parties” runs the show or what dirty tricks it uses to get and keep the job.

On the other hand, few of us, no matter how pessimistic or cynical, really like the idea of riot, revolution, coup and civil war. Like God in the old saying, those things don’t care if you believe in them — they’ll wreck your day without regard to your political sentiments.

Two presidential elections after I called out that potential, the “rigged election” tune seems to be segueing seamlessly into its second verse: The advent of the strongman.

Even as he cracks wise about it and muses that it might just be for “one day,”  former president and current Republican front-runner Donald Trump’s recent campaign schtick leans heavily into some Americans’ fear of — and others’ longing for —  a totalitarian dictatorship, complete with revenge prosecutions of political enemies and mass roundups/detentions of immigrants and malcontents.

Trump’s likely opponent, incumbent Joe Biden, sticks more to themes of “democracy” and “the soul of America” when on the stump. But he’s given the imperial presidency he inherited a steroid injection. He’s already on the job of  revenge prosecutions (of, among others Trump), bolstering the immigration police state, and instituting censorship in the name of “fighting disinformation.”

It’s difficult, at this point, to envision a freer, more peaceful, and more prosperous America within the confines of the existing political system. We’re sliding down the pole of history toward tyranny, as most polities do, and we’ve reached the portion of the pole that’s greased.

If we end up with a man (or woman) on horseback, our rightfully fraying faith in elections will be the horse. Politics will end up breaking us, unless we break it first.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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