Actually, I'm Kind Of OK With My Taxes Going To Prosecute Roger Clemens

Walk, Perp, Walk

So Roger Clemens was exonerated today in every court but the one of public opinion, which means that we're all supposed to forget about the over- whelmingly likely probability that he abused performance enhancing drugs to achieve what he did in the field of play.

Which led, of course, to the knee-jerk contrarian viewpoint of how awful it is, how much money has been wasted, on a guy who cheated while throwing a ball. When there are so many more and bigger problems we could be solving with our tax dollars, not the least of which is the fact that there are taxes and those dollars could have stayed with us, dammit.

Well, kids, I'm here to be the bad guy, the counter-cynic, the black fly in the Rocket's chardonnay. Because, well, there are literally *THOUSANDS* of things that governments do that I find more distasteful than trying, and failing, to put this dirtbag behind bars for the (alleged) lying, malfeasance, and general coarsening of the culture.

Right now, as I type this, there are honorable Americans in harm's way in Afghanistan. My tax dollars are paying for that. I'd much rather that they didn't.

Right now, Antonin Scalia and John Roberts and Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and Anthony Kennedy sleep in relative luxury from their taxpayer paid salary, having ruled that corporations are citizens and that our campaigns just weren't benefiting from enough fat cat donations. Instead of, oh, I don't know, slowly drowning in a supervillain-style death trap where coins slowly fill an enclosed space, burying them alive. Yeah, that'd work.

My tax dollars pay for nuclear weapons, oil company subsidies, a ruinous agricultural policy, a thriving penal system. Guantanamo Bay and predator drones. A military industrial complex that ensures that we pay too much for arms that we'll feel compelled to use, since they are the only real vestige of superpower strength we have left. Clean coal and highways over mass transit and bridges to nowhere and so on, and so on, and so on.

And it has always been this way, and will always be this way. The only difference between public wasteful spending and private wasteful spending is that we actually have a reasonable chance to hear about the former. (You pay for the latter, too. In the marketplace, especially where companies have managed to thwart the free-market by, well, a past ability to succeed in the free market. But I digress.)

So, we've spent a lot of money trying to nail a liar who made an ungodly amount of money in stadiums that frequently were paid for by the public? In a culturally relevant industry that helps to frame the public health mores of children?

GOOD.

We didn't get him arrested?

Oh well.

We at least caused him some serious anxiety, right? Made his eventual Hall of Fame walk look all kinds of perpy? Gave everyone a good look into the dregs and lowlifes he surrounds himself with, dragged his legacy and numbers through a pig sty or six? Set up his future life to be a sort of walking shamble through lower and lower-rent card shows and appearances, until he finally slips up in a thoroughly predictable OJ In Vegas situation that will make whatever Blogfrica looks like in 2025 squee with delight?

Yeah. Our tax dollars, yours and mine, did that.

Still feel so bad about the purchase?