Yeah, I saw the 60 Minutes feature last night and it almost made we wish I lived in Texas so I could vote for him.

If I remember his remark correctly: "Politics is the only field where the more experience you have, the worse you are!"

Self-evident, but someone needs to say it--and KEEP saying it!

It takes me back to Paul Woodruff's book, First Democracy : The Challenge of an Ancient Idea, in which Woodruff describes the parts of Athenian democracy that really worked well. One of the better ideas was that public officials were not elected by a system of parties, candidates, and a popular vote (which the Athenians knew could be very quickly cobbled and corrupted), but from the citizenry at large—by lottery. This way, there could be no "professional" or "career" politicians. In Athens, public education was excellent, and Athenian citizens were charged with the responsibility—as their civic duty—of keeping up on current affairs, because they might suddenly find themselves in office, selected at random by the lottery. At the end of their term of office, a jury of 501 citizens (deemed too big to bribe and also selected by lottery) would examine the citizen-official's record in office and either honor him or ostracize him on the basis of his performance.

Athenian democracy had a lot of flaws. It was men only (women not allowed to participate, although there were many men at the time who said that this was not only wrong, but an egregious waste of intellectual power) and some wealthy Athenians kept slaves (there were also those who protested against this). But what they did well, they did very well indeed!

Worth thinking about.

Don Firth