Everything I am – for good or ill – I owe to "The Machine" at the University of Alabama.

Really.

The Machine gave me my wife, in a way, so it gave me my kids too. It put ink in my veins and got me a career. It even honed this pathological distrust of power and politics and presumptuous privilege that has served me so, um, well.

I'm grateful. I am. If not for Theta Nu Epsilon, that secretive bunch of fraternities and sororities that controls campus politics and trains future politicos in the finer points of dark political arts, I'd be somebody else entirely.

It all came flooding back this week in all the news out of Tuscaloosa. Machine -backed fraternities and sororities have apparently ventured off campus, providing limos and booze, among other things, to members who went out to vote for Machine-backed candidates in Tuscaloosa school board elections.

Dang.

The Machine has always endorsed candidates on campus and fined members for failing to vote. Now it has taken it off school property and perhaps stepped over the line into voter fraud. In a municipal election.

That's a new one. We've seen those guys burn crosses in disobedient sorority yards and break into non-Machine SGA offices, Watergate style. I've heard non-Machine candidates claim they were run off the road, seen the evidence of intimidation and coercion. It bleeds into the real world, because Machine politics, let's face it, is the perfect farm club for Alabama's imperfect politicians.

It is Alabama's training ground, and Machine alumni are ... everywhere.

Sen. Richard Shelby was Machine. And former Gov. Don (federal inmate 24775-001) Siegelman. So were Alabama icons John Sparkman, Lister Hill and Bill Baxley. Convicted bond dealer Bill Blount was a Machine-backed SGA president, as was Joe Espy, a university trustee and lawyer to Milton McGregor (and the operatives at The Matrix.)

But the butterfly effect of the Machine doesn't just change those in the Machine. It changes those who oppose it.

George Wallace, contrary to popular belief, was not a Machine candidate. But it did beat him twice at Alabama. Wallace – as Wallace did – learned from those beatings.

The Machine is real, and it is timeless.

When I was in school in the mid '80s, a kid called Joey Scarborough fought it out with the Machine. He didn't win. He dropped out of a race for president to give another kid a better shot to beat the Machine. But Joey went on to Congress. Today they call him MSNBC's Morning Joe.

I was editorial page editor at the Crimson White then. When the Machine started to change my life.

It started across the street from the SAE house, as CW Editor Jan Crawford, now CBS News chief legal correspondent, and Alecia Sherard, now my wife, staked out a clandestine Machine meeting.

It was cloak-and-dagger stuff. We'd watch and snap photos as Machine reps from various houses arrived. All hell broke loose when they realized what we were up to. The reps covered their heads with coats so they couldn't be recognized in pictures. They were shuttled off two-by-two to waiting cars.

It wasn't my story. But it hooked me anyway. Especially when the press ran, and frat guys circled the building in an effort to steal our newspapers.

Alecia wrote the story that identified those Machine reps by name and affiliation. It was a journalistic winner, but it didn't go over well with the folks at her sorority.

So Alecia's Phi Mu alumni advisor gave her an ultimatum. She could quit the Crimson White, and break up with me, or she could turn in her pin.

Alecia didn't give her the pin. But she did give her the finger.

So I fell in love. With her. With the business. And with the idea of raging against all those machines that take advantage, that cheat the system, that hijack the process, that resort to tactics – like those employed in Tuscaloosa this week – that simply aren't right.

John Archibald's column appears in the Birmingham News, and on al.com. Email him at jarchibald@al.com