but were afraid to ask.

I realize I just gave out a homework assignment in my last blog entry, but dammit, this one's just as good. Must-read stuff.

In perhaps his most heart-rending song, "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)," Bob Dylan wrote/sang, "Money doesn't talk, it swears." Perhaps this New York Times story is what he meant.

Just check out the story's first three paragraphs:
By DAVID JOHNSTON and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

"WASHINGTON — In 1992, Brent R. Wilkes rented a suite at the Hyatt Hotel a few blocks from the Capitol. In his briefcase was a stack of envelopes for a half-dozen congressmen, each packet containing up to $10,000 in checks.

Mr. Wilkes had set up separate meetings with the lawmakers hoping to win a government contract, and he planned to punctuate each pitch with a campaign donation. But his hometown congressman, Representative Bill Lowery of San Diego, a Republican, told him that presenting the checks during the sessions was not how things were done, Mr. Wilkes recalled.

Instead, Mr. Wilkes said, Mr. Lowery taught him the right way to do it: hand over the envelope in the hallway outside the suite, at least a few feet away."

If you care at all about this country, the knowledge that the above sequence of events happens each and every day, a hundred times over, in Washington is gut-wrenching stuff. Something very basic and very needful has been stolen from each and every one of us when this is what it means to live in our democracy, to live in America, to be a citizen of this country. We the people are being controlled by vermin. It's as if the nuclear war that everyone feared during the Cold War has already happened. Or at least, it may as well have. Because either way, the cockroches are ruling the world.

Additional note, 8/9/06 -- By the way, the recorded version of "It's Alright Ma" on 1965's Bringing It All Back Home is excellent, but if you want to hear a jaw-droppingly outstanding version, check out the Halloween 1964 show at the Philharmonic Hall in New York, widely available as a bootleg for years, though an official release came out in 2004 as Bootleg Series Vol. 6. That version of the song is quite indescribable. Guaranteed to induce weeping in the overly sentimental -- and most others, for that matter.