Many Americans complain there's no difference between the two major parties. But their dismissal of the parties' individuality is a prima facie laugher, easily refuted.
Republicans' primordial drive is to upend democracy and impose a dictatorship of incompetence. However when Democrats depart from The Benevolent Work of the People, they do it the old-fashioned way. That is to say, their corruption is of the traditional sort — good old graft. Simply put, Republicans wish to defile the country at large, while Democrats think only of themselves.
Sen. Bob Menendez of New Jersey is, of course, only the latest example of Democratic debauchery. He went big. Reading about his plunder is like reading about Tony Soprano, also of New Jersey: nearly $500,000 in cash "stuffed throughout the house in envelopes" and in the senator's coat pockets, more than $100,000 in gold bars and a $60,000 gifted Mercedes-Benz. Menendez also has two exercise machines at home, neither of which, it is plain to see, does he use.
Senator Bob went traditional, yea, even biblical, in yet another way — he was the sordid tool of a wily woman, oh she was wily; he played Adam to Nadine's Eve. Ms. Menendez, a.k.a. Ms. Arslanian, was downright giddy about her matchup with Bob and materially insatiable. By her husband's hook and crook she managed to secure a mafia-like "low-or-no-show" job at an Egyptian meat company, and then complained whenever she wasn't paid.
In addition, Nadine founded the "consulting" firm of Strategic International Business Consultants LLC, which federal prosecutors say was merely a conduit for "tens of thousands of dollars in bribe payments." Furthermore, the meat company's owner paid "about $23,000 to Ms. Menendez to help her stay current on her mortgage while she was in foreclosure proceedings."
Mr. Menendez, meanwhile, was engaged in international nefariousness on top of his more mundane domestic corruption. You don't get a half-million bucks in bribes for doing nothing. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee he greased the sale of arms to disreputable Egypt and attempted to "interfere with criminal investigations into [Nadine's benefactor's] web of business associates."
As for the allegations against Senator Bob, he responded in a truly Democratic way. He played a race card. "It is not lost on me how quickly some are rushing to judge a Latino and push him out of his seat," he declared in a Friday night statement.
Incidentally, not that banana-republic Republicans will ever acknowledge this, but so much for that awfully partisan two-tiered system of justice they're always bitching about.
Anyway, next time someone foolishly complains to you that there's no difference between Democrats and Republicans, just whip out a copy of this post.