Hello and welcome to Thursday, April 16, 2026. Today is, among other things, National Eggs Benedict Day, National Orchid Day, Day of the Mushroom, and International Pizza Cake Day. I can recall when we used to call it "Chicago style," but I guess that's just me anymore.
1521: Martin Luther arrives at the Diet of Worms assembly.
1705: Queen Anne of England knights scientist Isaac Newton at Trinity College, Cambridge.
1789: George Washington heads to his first presidential inauguration.
1922: Annie Oakley sets a women's record by breaking 100 clay targets in a row.
1932: Short film "The Music Box" is released in the U.S., starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.
1935: First radio broadcast of Fibber McGee & Molly
1947: Bernard Baruch introduces the term "Cold War" in a speech; the term is later popularized by Walter Lippmann in his book The Cold War.
1972: Two giant pandas arrive in the U.S. from China.
Birthdays Today Include: Clifford P. Case, American lawyer and politician; Vince Hill, English pop singer; Mike Mitchell, American rock guitarist; Melody Patterson, American actress; Ellen Barkin; Antony Blinken, Secretary of State, 2021-25; Martin Lawrence; Peter Billingsley; and Claire Foy.
If today is your day, here's hoping it's a happy one.
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I’ve just read Mark Tapscott’s latest PJ Media column. My column today is, in part, a response to and an expansion of his thoughts. Read his column and then come back to this one.
Mark suggests in his piece that "Transparency is Big Government's worst enemy." He quite correctly offers suggestions on how to clean up what he labels the "deep corruption" in both houses of Congress and in both parties.
Consider the following quote: "Government always abuses its power by seizing and perverting the law. And with few exceptions, government always determines what is law."
John Galt offers us that bit of wisdom. (A pseudonymous author, obviously.) He wrote it in his book, Dreams Come Due: Government and Economics As If Freedom Mattered. Sadly, you can only find it in a 200-some-odd-page hardcover.
That quote precisely lays out why the founders believed government should be limited. It also strikes directly at the corruption that Mark lists in his piece.
I firmly believe our founders would have felt horrified — and yet unsurprised — at how far outside the constitutional box our federal government has ventured, and at how much abuse, graft, and waste legislators have baked into the legal cake these last many years, some of which Mark lists.
Mark mentions a post on X that I think deserves wider coverage, so I'll link it here:
I helped design the process a Congressional staffer has to follow after a member of Congress sexually harasses them.
— Peter Girnus 🦅 (@gothburz) April 14, 2026
It starts with mandatory counseling.
Not for the member. For the staffer. We call it "a cooling-off period." The staffer cools off. The member keeps voting on…
Open it up and read the whole thing. That should answer the question about whether anyone will actually hold Eric Swalwell — or anyone else — accountable for their crimes.
Bad as that is, the pattern gets worse. I urge you to read Mark's full account of all this. One can hardly avoid concluding that our government has crafted laws not to eliminate corruption, but rather to shield that corruption from exposure and prosecution. Sadly, what one can generously call political gamesmanship drives much of the reasoning behind legally protecting members of Congress in this manner. Let's step outside Congress for a moment and look at a few examples:
Consider the confirmation hearings of Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh. In both cases, politically motivated attackers launched what almost immediately revealed themselves as bad-faith assaults. In both cases, Democrats found they couldn't manage the political shift to the right, so they reached for the only tool they felt they had — they manufactured a sex scandal. Both attempts ultimately failed, but they clearly demonstrate how politicians wield such charges as nothing more than a political lever.
Dare I say it, they’ve been trying to tie President Donald Trump to various sex scandals as well. They’ve done it repeatedly, and each time, once the case was examined, it was found lacking in facts sufficient to do anything legally, but it did manage to create damage. And the true believers keep trying to hammer home scandals that have already been roundly disproved.
Scandals involving artists and entertainers, both true and imaginary, used to fill the headlines once they achieved sufficient mass. The history of such scandals is long and twisted.
Scandals involving political figures, aside from being the easiest to create out of whole cloth, also have the tendency to be the most enduring, be they true or not. I think I’d be correct in starting the list with Thomas Jefferson, who was just recently the subject of DNA verification of his affair with Sally Hemings. Since then, names like Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Kennedy have emerged. Former FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover made a career of knowing who was sleeping with whom, and after having lunch with JFK, the latter’s playboy habits stopped pretty much. Both JFK and Bobby Kennedy were reported to have shared a muse with Marilyn Monroe, whose death causes speculation to this day. Then there’s Ted Kennedy and Mary Jo Kopechne, whose affair I suppose I don’t need to dive into very deeply.
Related: The Real Source of Government Corruption
Gary "come and get me" Hart offers another example. Then, of course, there's the President William Jefferson Clinton/Monica Lewinsky/Paula Jones/Ken Starr/Henry Hyde et al affair. DNA testing there proved the charges against Clinton, and yet nobody imposed any serious consequences on him. The whole thing managed to stay under the desk, as it were.
If nothing else, this extended list reveals the public's tendency to gobble up scandalous events involving the powerful. That, in turn, explains why political operatives so often deploy such scandals against the powerful. The people who feed these scandals to the press recognize the minimal effort and maximum political leverage that such events — whether true or pure fabrications — deliver.
Fabricated scandals also erupt in both houses of Congress, driven largely by political motivation, as I mentioned, but also by financial motivation. In a way, one can view bogus or inflated charges against congress members in much the same light as insurance fraud — less than scrupulous people spotting a ripe target who will often hand over taxpayer money to squelch charges of wrongdoing. Which is not to say that such scandals don't often carry at least a kernel of truth.
As the current scandal with Eric Swalwell demonstrates.
One can understand the need to handle false accusations against the powerful differently, given how frequently they occur and how frequently they prove both false and expensive. The trouble is, the legal and financial protections designed to guard against such abuse also shield actual powerful abusers like Swalwell. Yeah, I know, I'm supposed to say "alleged." My instincts tell me that in this case, the added word is superfluous.
I would suggest that the moral issue involves as much the corruption of those whose lives brush up conveniently against the powerful as it does the powerful themselves. Of late, the scandals we've watched pouring out of Washington seem to run about 50/50 between conveniently opportunistic, politically motivated attacks and real abuses on the part of the powerful. I view all of this as a moral issue. What we see in the Swalwell case is equally immoral as false charges.
Mark makes a well-taken point that corruption afflicts both parties. That said, however, I don't think anyone can deny that the Democrats represent the larger source of corruption in our government. I've literally spent decades writing about it, and even with that focused attention, the corruption has never stopped generating fresh material. My habit, then, has been to train my sights on the larger, more problematic target. Mark says:
Accountability and transparency are the sine qua non of credibility and trust for the Senate and the House of Representatives, just as they are for the president of the United States, regardless of which political party controls any of them.
And yes, that is true, but let's not ignore that a lot of this is driven by the prurient interests of the general public, upon which many attacks against the powerful are based. That's why such attacks, both true and false, end up being so powerful. We've seen a lot of both kinds over the last several years, and we seem unable to have laws that differentiate between the two. On the other hand, consider how much of our public discourse depends on people who flatly refuse to define what a woman is, so there's that.
I think it was James Madison who quipped that:
If Men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and the next place, oblige it to control itself.
The X post that Mark and I linked explains how efforts to limit damage from false attacks can go too far in the other direction, protecting the guilty. I suspect the Swalwell case is going to demonstrate this pretty clearly, though the question of there being a legal cure for it will remain unanswered.
Thought for the day: The mightier man, the mightier is the thing That makes him honored or begets him hate; For greatest scandal waits on greatest state." —William Shakespeare
Take care of yourselves. I'll see you here tomorrow.
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