How many of those people are active in politics? None. How many of those people are working on either a state or national level to get their asses in office? None.
I'm reminded that, among other things, the best baseball writers and broadcasters are those who
don't play the game,
and (with extremely few exceptions) the worst are those who
have played the game. Not to mention that the best
reporters on organised crime have never once, to my knowledge, participated in or sought membership in an organised
crime family.
I'm also reminded that William F. Buckley, Jr.
forged and held a major stake in the public argument---indeed, in the original
coalescing of the modern conservative movement---for over a decade before he was fool enough to run for mayor of New
York City. I say "fool"
not because I demur from his actual intent, entering a race he knew he couldn't win but using that
to deliver a conservative message on a campaign trail designed to repel it, considering the major party candidates---stop me
if you've heard this one before!---weren't even close to conservative candidates.
You don't
have to be a politician or office-holder of any stripe, at any level, to be granted a say in the public conversation or
to write effectively about it. Any more than, obviously, you have to be a professional politician to be elected to office. (If you
did, Buckley would have been laughed out of the public conversation when he made his famous in-debate wisecrack about
preferring to be governed by the first five hundred names in the Boston telephone book over the first five hundred professors
of Harvard University---which he made, if I recall reading right,
at Harvard, in a debate with the late economist John
Kenneth Galbraith.)
And that's
without pondering that government is and has
long been the nation's largest organised crime family.
