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By Repair Man Jack Posted in Congress — Comments (11) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

A piece of literary criticism entitled “Honor In A Noir Universe” summed up the role of Congressman Jeff Flake in our current U.S. Congress. Its author, C.S. Thompson, writes crime novels for a living and articles in noir webzines for personal enjoyment. He may write extensively about evil people, but his piece describes perfectly the dilemma of Congressman Flake, one of Washington’s last good men.

C.S. Thompson’s article header quotes another critic’s description of the Noir Hero.

"That is the noir character. Alone, a loner in a world he knows he can’t fix.
Alone in a world that has turned bad, full of betrayal, deceit, dishonesty,
crime, and vice. Maybe it always was bad. Yet, he keeps his own personal code of honor. It is the only useless thing left for him to hold onto."
—From an anonymous online article on film noir

That was Jeff Flake, the last man standing on 4 August, as congress prepared to pass a slew of wasteful earmarks and then bolt town for a month of wasteful, taxpayer-funded junkets. Flake took to the floor to fight the wasteful inclusion of over 1,000 earmarks in the latest defense appropriations act. He probably didn’t even know Robert Novak had coverage of the floor session. Congressman Flake certainly doesn’t take these lost causes off of Saint Jude’s hands to improve his standing amongst his own party’s caucus.

Read on . . .

In real life, Horatio never quite holds the bridge, and that sling-shot given to David, doesn’t properly discharge hand grenades. Flake could do what was right, but that didn’t mean the man stood a prayer. Flake was given one hour to debate the multitude of earmarks in a floor session chaired by the always thrifty and parsimonious Congressman Murtha.

Flake’s fellow Republicans, Jerry Lewis of California, and Bill Young of Florida, pitched in to help. They helped Jack Murtha ridicule Congressman Flake for wanting congressional spending to become more transparent. For members of a party that just lost congressional control at least partially because of dodgy ethical behavior, this truly must have rankled.

Young and Lewis give Murtha precisely what he wants, a paid minority. Republican leading powers that will trade Democrats an easy path to their agenda in return for two or three exits from an interstate and a wink and a nod. These men don’t represent America; they represent an elite cartel that leeches off America. Congressman Flake correctly identifies these men as the enemy; not as his fellow partisans.

Where does this leave Jeff Flake? He is an outsider, a man without a home. Someone unwanted, because he fights for something better than what we have now. Shosaburo Abe, a master swordsman of Meji-era Japan, described well what it was to be a dying breed like Congressman Flake.

"In the changing of the times, they were like autumn lightning, a thing out of season, an empty promise of rain that would fall unheeded on fields already bare."

Maybe earmark reform has no chance. Perhaps the Murtha-Pelosi-Lewis Axis has bipartisan agreement that taxpayers are permissible sources of income for totally useless pork-barrel spending. Even Libertarian Hero™ Congressman Ron Paul filed for $400 million worth of the pork pills. Oh well, who is John Galt?

So there stands Jeff Flake. Joined only by Freshman Republican Congressman Campbell from California and Democrat Jim Cooper from Tennessee. They won’t remind anyone of The Three Musketeers, but they are the best we’ve got, when it comes to government integrity. They perhaps stand up to the hideously elegant national corruption of our elite because someone has to.

As Novelist Raymond Chandler said of his character Phillip Marlowe,

"Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. … He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it."

Our Congress is corrupt, our media lies, and our scientists are dishonest hacks in service of their own petty agendas. Yet as long as the temperature in the universe remains above absolute zero, there will always be good men. It doesn’t get colder, more debased or more corrupt than our current US Congress. But in the face of this, Jeff Flake perseveres and so should we.