This week’s Misanthropy will be delayed until my work schedule gets slightly less ricockulous.  To tide you over ’til then, I’m going to make fun of Charlie Rangel.

Suppose for a moment that I’d failed to report $75,000 worth of income to the taxman.

No, back up for a moment.  Suppose first that I make at least $75,000 per year.  Now suppose that I failed to report $75,000 to our dear benevolent friends* the government thugs with shotguns Tasers shotguns and Tasers.  You’d be surprised, mostly because you’d expect some horsie cop to have shot me thrice in the back of the head (in self-defence, of course) or at least stuffed me in a prison cell without Internet access.

We have thus established that you, dear reader, don’t think I’m an elected official.

• Rangel tries to explain back taxes on villa (New York Times)

WASHINGTON — Representative Charles B. Rangel said on Wednesday that “cultural and language barriers” had hindered him from understanding the finances of his Dominican Republic beach house, and vowed to repay several thousand dollars in federal taxes he owes after failing to report $75,000 in rental income from the villa.

Okay, fair enough.  So far, so good.  There’s a grand and glorious tradition in what started out as and remains a reasonable approximation of a free country — namely, America (fuck yeah!) — that one is permitted to earn money and (I know, this is stretching credibility a bit, but bear with me) keep it.  Rangel, being a Congresscritter, should be expected to set an example for his constituents (if not the rest of the nation) — so it’s reasonable for him to want to safeguard his earnings from the aforementioned thugs with shotguns and Tasers**.  In different circumstances, I might applaud his intransigence.

In these circumstances, however, I just point and laugh.  See, Rangel is one of the people who writes tax law in the United States of America.  And he has been one for over thirty years.

But hey: it’s not like he’s a bad person — as far as he’s concerned.

“I personally feel I have done nothing morally wrong,” he said. Pressed by reporters about how, given his position and background, he could be ignorant of the tax rules, he answered: “I never had any idea that I got any income.”

(I’m somewhat less than convinced.)

Honestly, though: I’m with Rangel on this point.  I don’t think he’s done anything morally wrong in not reporting his income.  Living under the protection of privilege while he passes laws that force his constituents (and the rest of the country) to surrender their income — sure, that’s morally wrong (on both counts).  But if Rangel wants to take on the risk of owning a rental property in a different fucking country, and dares to ask a reward for renting it out to people (like that champion of the downtrodden, Bill Clinton — no, seriously; read the article), more power to him.

Of course, all this talk about ethics is missing the point.

The congressman nonetheless said it was unfair to judge his long career in public service based on the ethics complaints. Hours before the news conference, he was included on a list of the 20 most corrupt members of Congress released by the group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, an action he called “sad and unfair.”

Y’see, it’s not about ethics at all — it’s about seniority.  He’s had a long career; he’s fucking earned the “right” to dick around and flout his own laws.  God dammit, y’all, he deserves to skim a little off the top of the public-funded trough… by virtue of the fact that he’s never been caught ’til now!

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* I know it’s hard to believe that government thugs with shotguns and Tasers are our dear and benevolent friends.  Nonetheless, Christians have been okay with the idea that their omnibenevolent god will send them to Hell for an eternity of torture if they jizz on the ground for about the past six thousand years — and Christianity isn’t exactly pushing the boundaries of religious credibility.  I therefore expect the idea that government loves us and wants us to be happy to be an uncontroversial one.

** Well, I suspect that in the States it’s more common to have one’s earnings confiscated by thugs with M4s and Tasers.  But let’s not quibble.