Well, Bill Weld, former governor of the Commonwealth (God save it!), really shot the moon to begin the week. Appearing on MSNBC, Weld made it plain. From the Washington Post:



“Talk about pressuring a foreign country to interfere with and control a U.S. election,” Weld said during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

“It couldn’t be clearer, and that’s not just undermining democratic institutions. That is treason. It’s treason, pure and simple, and the penalty for treason under the U.S. code is death. That’s the only penalty...The penalty under the Constitution is removal from office, and that might look like a pretty good alternative to the president if he could work out a plea deal.””



Well, all right, then.



Here we all are, piddling around with why Nancy Pelosi won't release the hounds in the House of Representatives, and waiting for some poor bastard in intelligence to come forward with what he really knows, and with a vulgar talking yam still in office. Meanwhile, Bill Weld has cut right to the heel of the hunt. You think you can't scare this guy? Put the gallows in his eyes. I mean, wow.



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Speaking of treason, while I was putting together last week's Last Call newsletter—a benefit if you pay for extra writing here in the shebeen, and if you think I'm ever going to use the word "content" in regards to what I do, you're out of your damn mind—I came upon a very interesting artifact from our previous Gilded Age. In 1906, Cosmopolitan magazine, which admittedly has gone through some changes down through the centuries, hired a novelist named David Graham Phillips to write a groundbreaking nine-part series of articles about the money power and its corruption of our democratic institutions—specifically, the United States Senate, which was still made up of corrupt people appointed by the really corrupt people in the state legislatures. Like Weld, Phillips didn't mince any words. The series was entitled, The Treason of the Senate, and it shook the ground beneath the government. In fact, it was for this specific series that President Theodore Roosevelt coined the phrase, "muckraker."



One of Phillips's main targets was a senator from Rhode Island named Nelson Aldrich, the chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee and the grandfather of Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, the 41st Vice President of the United States. Phillips put Aldrich on a spit and roasted him over a slow flame. But Phillips wasn't just a button man. Through Aldrich's career, Phillips put the entire system on trial and found it guilty...of treason. To the founding principles of the republic, anyway.



The greatest single hold of "the interests" is the fact that they are the "campaign contributors"—the men who supply the money for "keeping the party together," and for "getting out the vote." Did you ever think where the millions for watchers, spellbinders, halls, processions, posters, pamphlets, that are spent in national, state and local campaigns come from? Who pays the big election expenses of your congressman, of the men you send to the legislature to elect senators? Do you imagine those who foot those huge bills are fools? Don't you know that they make sure of getting their money back, with interest, compound upon compound? Your candidates get most of the money for their campaigns from the party committees; and the central party committee is the national committee with which congressional and state and local committees are affiliated. The bulk of the money for the "political trust" comes from "the interests." "The interests" will give only to the "political trust."



Our part as citizens of the republic is plain enough. We must stand our ground. We must fight the good fight. Heartsick and depressed as we may be at times because of the spread of graft in high places and its frightfully contaminating influence, we must still hold up our heads. We must never lose an opportunity to show that as private citizens we are opposed to public plunderers.

More than money can be plundered. And, in the general sense, treason doesn't necessarily require an enemy at war. That's where we're at as the week begins.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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