Mitch returned from a weekend in the country and was telling his friend about it. “We played a game called cornhole and I didn’t like it at all,” he said.
“Why not?” his friend asked. “Couldn’t you get the beanbags in the hole?”
“Beanbags?”
I believe it was humorist Finley Peter Dunne, writing more than a hundred years ago, who coined the following phrase:
“Politics ain’t beanbag.”
The phrase is almost self-explanatory.
It isn’t a game, more accurately a blood sport. It might actually be more accurate to call it cornhole, the unpleasant kind.
Especially these days, when there is so much money at stake. Back in the day (which by the way was a Tuesday), there really wasn’t any legitimate way for politicians to become fabulously wealthy. Now anyone serving a long term in Congress can become rich almost through osmosis. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was worth something like $3 million when he came to Washington. Now he’s got more than 10 times that much.
Donald Trump has collected more than $100 million dollars from donors since losing the 2020 election. And since the money was donated to a Political Action Committee, Trump can use it as he sees fit, including for personal expenses.
In the end, it might be that the Supreme Court decision that will wind up doing the most damage to our country is the 2010 case Citizens United v. FEC, which essentially wiped out nearly all the limits on campaign donations and election spending. Fifty years ago, it was considered almost scandalous that a Senate campaign in a good-sized state might cost $1 million.
Now, heading into the last two months of the campaign with Republican Senate candidate J.D. Vance in trouble in Ohio, the word is that Republicans will dump $28 million into the state for campaign advertising.
Yes, $28 million in Ohio.
Not for the entire campaign, but just for the last two months.
In fact, we have reached a point where billions of dollars are spent in an election cycle, particular in years we are electing a president, a third of the Senate and 435 members of the House of Representatives.
When so much money is involved, things become cutthroat, and when unscrupulous people like Trump are involved, people get cornholed — at least figuratively.
We truly live in a graceless age, a time in which winning has become so important that the ends seem to justify the most outrageous means. Will things change when Trump is gone from the scene? Sadly, I doubt they will change for the better.
When it comes right down to it, Trump is something of a joke.
The next guy will be just as bad — and he’ll be competent.
Then cornhole will get real.