It is the duller kind of newspaper editor, pressing for a disinterested source, that is to blame for the banalities of political science professors polluting the public prints. Neither the editor nor the professor has a clue about what is going on, which makes them perfect for each other, if not for the fast disappearing readers. The prigs think news is unseemly and try to avoid it, but they are right to be suspicious of people who know more of the score, because those lobbyists, lawyers, PR people and political apparatchiks are not in the truth business, and sometimes spin so automatically that they confuse themselves. They are, however, the people who get done whatever does get done.
As for the politicians .... Well, take a couple of bipartisan examples. Assembly Democrats have spent the past 10 years complaining about charter schools, which they and other legislators created at the end of 1998, after minimal debate in the middle of the night. They approved this and a couple of other bills sought by the Republican governor in a straightforward exchange for a raise, which would seem to meet at least part of the definition of prostitution.
As for Senate Republicans, what they really take relish in now is ever more shameless pandering to the interest groups they used to disdain but came to depend on. I fondly recall witnessing an exchange between Dean Skelos of Rockville Centre, then deputy majority leader, and Sen. Eric Adams, D-Brooklyn. The Republicans had maneuvered the Democrats into suppporting Gov. Spitzer's proposal to trim hospital spending, which the GOP was going to vote down. And so Skelos, with a straight face and unctuous countenance, reminded Adams, who is black, that the Reverend [Al] Sharpton was supporting the Republican position on this bill.
Reporters, although they try to be neither prigs nor prostitutes, do have an interest: they need sources. At some point they may need or want other things, too (wink wink, nudge, nudge), especially given the decline of the news business. But the art of a courtier is not easy, as Ashley Dupre could have testified.
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