No one is talking about "normalcy." We're all talking about whether you should be offended or not.

goobster didn't quite get to this point, but here it is:

if you're competent at what you do, and you want to live a normal life, you're going to find a job where you're paid what you're worth.

I have never been so close to voting Republican as when I spent a year dealing with local elected officials. They suck. The guys I'm dealing with cost me an easy $100k through pure incompetence. They're doing their jobs badly and my community is suffering as a consequence. In theory, government belongs to the people who can fix things or at least keep things running. In practice, unless you can attract people who don't suck you're going to get the guys who can't get hired to do anything else.

Meanwhile there are regulations upon regulations upon customs upon boobytraps to keep people from profiting while in office. This is right, this is just, this is good. But the regulations that they write and change and advance and rescind and alter and reinforce alter the fundamental flow of commerce and while your senator makes a pretty good dayrate, your county councilman does not.

What it comes down to is that our capitalist system handsomely rewards the capitalist lobbyists and capitalist industrialists who want to change the laws, and punishes the socialist bureaucrats and socialist enforcers who carry them out. If governing made a better living than petitioning the government there'd be no tension here... but we're more likely to induct Kapital into the constitution than we are for that to happen. So what we're left with is people howling at the moon that the most powerful man in the world for eight years, the first black president in history, might actually get paid by rich people to talk to them.

And make no mistake. ANY amount of money at ANY point from ANYONE would have EVERYONE howling at the moon. There is no scenario in which OB or any of his ilk would not be offended.

And that's why this shit pisses me off.