“I’d just as soon not have that many Democrats, they’ll be difficult to control.” — Representative Sam Rayburn. Or is it Representative Rahm Emanuel? Eh? Eh? Huh?

Maybe that makes sense.

I listened to Thom Hartmann yesterday morning hyping a dailykos diary about voter purges in Ohio — and three unnamed states. The most fascinating moment came when Hartmann running the story behind local Congressman Earl Blumenauer, who predictably enough deflected and massaged away such conspiracy theories.

The nation’s built off of electoral fraud, and even escaping that our politicos in charge are picked out for our choice behind closed doors. The alleged Ohio shenanigans have the virtue of making more sense than the court case winding through Ohio with a frivulous and technical challenge to Democratic candidate Tom Strickland’s ballot access under the purview of the office of Republican Candidate and current Elections Official Ken Blackwell. And it is nothing new in American history.

And certainly intimidating letters aren’t new, harkening back to the worst sort of faux Democracy which didn’t even really even attempt to give the pretense of Democracy.

Lyndon Johnson’s initial Senate victory was a sham. I’ve been looking for the photograph of the group of Texas big-wigs grinning while holding the ballot box full of stuffed Johnson votes — a plan I’ve had to change the top photographs of this page around. I can’t find it.

You can’t quite call Harry Truman’s intial Senate victory a sham, because it would have been a sham if he had lost. It was a fight between the Kansas City Democratic machine and the Saint Louis Democratic machine, and which city could create more votes. Pendegrast won, and Truman — Pendegrast’s twelfth choice in this slot — won. But Truman outlasted the political machine that put him in power — winning his re-election in 1940 right after Pendegrast was exposed and destroyed — so it’s all awash.

Think of the presidential election as an election for title of “National Mob Boss” and a certain amount of corruption and ties to powers that you wish weren’t powers becomes not so much tolerable as desirable. The Congress is a little trickier to fathom.

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