McCain: home of the conservative lobbyists.

Want to know who will run the government in a McCain administration? Here, from Kevin Drum, is your answer:

That brings to five the number of campaign workers McCain has had to fire recently. Here's the complete list:

• Thomas Loeffler, lobbyist for Saudi Arabia and various defense contractors. CEO of The Loeffler Group.
  
• Doug Goodyear, lobbyist for the military junta in Burma. CEO of DCI Group.
  
• Doug Davenport, also works for DCI Group.
  
• Eric Burgeson, energy lobbyist, works for Barbour Griffith & Rogers
  
• Craig Shirley, works for anti-Hillary 527 group that's not allowed to coordinate with presidential campaigns.

This is ridiculous. Except for Shirley, whose sins are a little different, all of the other four headed up or worked for big lobbying outfits. The press is reporting this as if it's just one embarrassment for McCain after another that he keeps finding out he's got lobbyists working for him, but that's not the story here. The real story is that McCain obviously knew these guys were lobbyists long before anyone pointed it out to him. You don't hire the CEO of the DCI group without knowing that the guy is a lobbyist.

There is your McCain government. All lobbyists, working for special Republican interests. These people are not working for American interests, just for their own.

Vote for McCain and you get a Republican government bought and paid for by special interests who don't give a damned about most Americans. They are with McCain to feather their own nests, nothing more. And McCain allows them into his inner circles until he and they are caught.

Clinton is wrong to take lobbyists' money

Sunday Edwards and Obama went after Hillary for taking campaign money from lobbyists. Clinton defended the practice by saying (in effect) that lobbyists do important work for all of us by bringing our issues to the attention of the politicians holding office.

Mark Kleiman makes the very important point that since the lobbyists are giving money to the politicians and at the same time asking that the politicians do something for them, the distinction between a campaign contribution and a bribe is nothing more than the belief in the politician's mind whether he or she has been bought or is actually just using another source of information to come to an unbiased decision.

Are we challenging the politician's personal integrity when we disagree that they took money from a lobbyist, clearly returned what the money-giving lobbyist asked for, and thus the politician was bought no matter what they say? Of course we are, and if the politician thinks he or she was not bought, she is simply fooling herself.

Sure we are challenging their integrity - but they are politicians, after all. Who are they to get all huffy about it? Unless they totally personally finance their campaigns out of inherited money from an old fortune, they were bought and paid for the day they started to run for their first office. The only way to avoid the challenge to her integrity is to simply refuse to take money from any lobbyist. Period. Full stop.

The lobbyist may be doing nothing more than merely buying face-time so that they can make their case to the politician, But Hillary's argument was that we are all represented by lobbyists who try to convince her, and it is only right that they should be allowed to represent various parts of the public.

OK, but is it right that some lobbyists get more attention because they bought it? Money-for-access is another way a politician is bought. If a lobbyist for my cause gets second-rate access because I do not provide a budget that allows my lobbyist to buy face-time with a politician, that politician is NOT representing me. She is representing those who buy her time.

Clinton is playing politics in the big league, and politics there are played dirty. She has decided that to win she has to play dirty with the rest of them, rather than to attempt to change the dirty system. It may make her a winner, but it certainly makes her no better than Sen. Stevens of Alaska or Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California. She is wrong to take contributions from lobbyists.