...“Is everybody corrupt?” asked Janine.

“I don’t know everybody,” retorted Danny.

“You can make a joke out of it if you want, but scraping your head on the carpet towards that jerk Erik Grendel in any way, shape or form should be reprehensible to a human being.”

“Oh fine,” he replied, “I’ll throw away a bigger contact merely because Grendel is a slimebucket and Joe Carteret is a crooked and tendentious party robot? Oh sure I will. Then we’ll all sit around, braid our hair and paint our toenails. By the way, human beings don’t get into politics.”

“If you in actual fact cared about the Party…”

Danny shot her one of his exasperated know-it-all sighs and said, “Cared? Cared? Listen closely,” and she did. “Bugger the Party. Political parties are repulsive collections of well-heeled dinosaurs, talentless bootlickers and middlebrow prostitutes. They serve an above average fundraising or direct mail function, but that’s it. In this show you dance with who brought ya’ and the Party never made me a nickel. They think people like me are trespassing onto their exclusive game preserve and they treat us accordingly. Simple, Machiavelli, chapter nine: never trust the nobles.

Remember, when a party functionary splutters ‘Sure’ it means ’Probably not’, when they say ‘Maybe’ it means ‘No’ and when they say ‘Let me see what I can do’ it means ‘Naff off.’ Unless you are connected to a campaign contributor, that is. Then every line is translated into ‘Let me see how quickly I can get on my knees for you.’ Looking for staffer slots after election victories taught me this lesson. So, I owe them nothing. My loyalty is to who signs the checks.

I hope you don’t think the Republican Party machine is any different from the Dem one? No way. They both stand for nothing but getting their people in. No ideals, no principles, cold, hard power. The GOP ‘the Party of Opportunity’? Hah! The opportunity to vacation in the Caribbean if you’ve got the cash. If not, you don’t exist. The Dems ‘the Party of the Working Class’? Double Hah! They have millionaires in the Senate who piously weep tears for people they’d set the dogs on if they ever came near their estates. Nah, both are repellant, both are crass and both contain certifiable idiots who couldn’t fight their way through a political drizzle and who are in the show just to siphon off money from the fundraising spigot. The people who are supposed to be afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted? Turning a glaring spotlight on this guttural avarice and stupidity? Our pals the media? Most of them are in bed with the same people they cover on a daily basis. Their egos can’t handle just reporting so they take sides and then gradually get co-opted by one side or the other. Whores, the lot of them.

You see, the whole system is a con, an extortion racket. Not a shining city on a hill but a tasteless exurban development built on a dung heep.

Upset? Get over it. There’s not a damned thing you or I can do about it. Why? Because the bad guys and the idiots employ people who have all the really scary guns and the even scarier lawyers.

Are we clear on that?”

Janine nodded; she knew at that point, when he was on a rant, it was an argument for a different day.

“Thus endeth the lesson. Next on today’s list?” asked Danny.

That, in relation to political parties, was half the story. It always appeared to Danny, after working for both parties, that the Republicans were generally good on the issues but smoothly gutless in that way of theirs, while the Democrats were usually wrong but ballsy. On the personal side, the Republican leadership (though with exceptions) were not the most unconventional or spontaneous people on the planet and tended to place much emphasis on whether or not their Dad knew your Dad at prep school.

And he wasn’t that cynical about the system, he just talked that way because he thought it made him sound tougher.

It was also a matter of perceptions. Republicans thought most Dems were either effete crypto-socialists or hippie retreads who congregated on either coast. Dems thought Republicans were either mouth-breathing rural truck trash or plastic suburbanites who lived in places called “Land Rape Estates.”

Both were right, to a point.

For as Pat Buchanan had correctly analyzed at the ’92 Convention, this was the modern equivalent of a civil war. The sides were still culturally about the same, but the locations had changed.

The Rebs had moved to places like Pennsylvania and suburban Atlanta was chock full of cultural Yankees. Order versus freedom, faith versus humanism, the land versus the city, the arguments hadn’t changed as much as the players had.

Danny was caught in the middle. A cosmopolitan patriot, a smartass conservative, a culturally reactionary lover of intellectual freedom, poxes from both their houses were thrown his way...