McIlheran Watch: Wrong answer on corruption

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel's Patrick McIlheran, in just about a year or so of regular column writing, has become as predictible as, say, Old Faithful. If I were more enterprising, I could go back through the archives of his columns and create one of those charts: one bad joke from column A, one misstatement of fact from column B, and one Republican talking point from column C, and let people write their own Pat McIlheran columns.

Robola has gone me one better, and re-written this week's McIlheran as a series of haiku. But McIlheran's column today needs more than just clever poems; it deserves a wider fisking.

Except, there's nothing to fisk. There is so little of substance in today's mess that I can tell you why he's wrong just from working on the title, "If government's for sale, try downsizing the store." No, you idiot: If the wrong people (read: lobbyists) are buying government money or services that they shouldn't, we should put safeguards in place to make sure that it doesn't happen. We didn't make Walgreens stop selling Sudafed because some people make crystal meth with it, did we? No, we put rules in place to make it harder for the meth-makers to get a hold of it. The solution to government corruption is not less government, but less corruption. As I said: idiot.

I told you McIlheran was predictible. Thinking back over all of the McIlheran Watch pieces I've done, I can say that generall P-Mac blames everything, no matter what the subject of the day is, on one of four things: high taxes, big gubmint, liberal Bush-hatred, or unions and all they stand for. Today's culprit is not the lobbyists or corrupt politicians, but big gubmint.

And as for the chart idea proposed above:

Column A, bad joke: "Lobbyist Jack Abramoff apparently distributed money via Washington's water supply, so widespread was his largess."
Column B, misstatement of fact: "[N]ote that even Sen. Russ Feingold, the Gandhi of reform, got $1,600 in Abramoff-linked money, according to the senator's campaign." [Feingold returned the money--money that could not be connected to Abramoff except by the Kevin Bacon game--while Wisconsin Republicans have not returned conributions many times larger from the same people.]
Column C, Republican talking point: "What government can't do, it can't do to hurt you." [So let's just not let gubmint do, then, right?]

And that's it--that's a whole column right there, in sum. Column A, B, C: the McIlheran formula.