I can't follow your "By the secondary" point, but we never formally agreed on a defintion of "politician" and my default definition is based on running for public office. As far as I know, outside of stories like the Legion of Super Heroes' Matter-Eater lad being drafted into service as a politician on his dyspeptic homeworld of Bismoll, folks don't end up in authoritative positions without some combination of personal ambition and political skill. Please explain to me how any elected official in the US is not a politician.

p.s. I trust that you're not trying to say that anyone who consistently works for all your policy preferences as somehow 'not a politician.' But I'm a bit stumped about what other explanation you might have for the distinction.

The primary, older definition, is anyone experienced in government or doing the business of government.  The secondary, less politically correct definition, is any dirtbag that decides politics is a good profession to be in, as opposed to the actual job they're elected to.  You can look at any dictionary worth a damn and find both.

People in political office, while not being politicians, would be those contrarian bastards that break the mold by not promoting themselves instead of their constituents.  Palin may be one of those depending on just how stupid she is.  I'm at a loss for whether her actions are at all intelligent or just the workings of a broken mind.  It's possible she's a brilliant politician, it's possible she actually means what she says, and it's possible, perhaps in combination with the previous, that she's the stereotypical valley girl.  Her work in Alaska was spot on for avoiding the label of politician, she hung her own party out to dry, and rammed through legislation that cost her quite a bit personally when the shitstorm of nuissance suits hit upon her rise to the national stage.  Cheney might be at this point, but he definitely started out as a politician, he's rubbing too many people the wrong way to be concerned about a career. I'm pretty sure Bush wasn't a politician as well, just too fucking stupid for the job, but he should have known how bad he was hosing the country with that last bit of nonsense so I doubt my original conclusion at this point.  Despite my pessimism, believing someone to be that stupid just isn't working.

The guy that votes no against every bill with an earmark in it is not a politician, that's the only sure one I can think of at the national level.  When I dedided I'd rather just kill the lot of them than try sorting through things, I stopped paying attention to who was and wasn't sane in congress.  There are plenty of them, but only an idiot or a masochist like me would willingly go to D.C. without being a dirtbag at this point, so finding them past the state level will take effort.

Just so I don't get accused of what would be obvious were I a party line republican, I don't agree with anyone I listed.  The guy that votes no all the time sticks his nose into moral affairs the federal government has zero business being in, I never can remember his name.  Palin is a wishy washy moderate that went on record wanting to expand the equally unconstitutional federal programs for developmentally challenged children, something I could live with if she continued to get dirty republicans thrown in jail.  Cheney is a hard line big government type, typical of the core establishment in the republican party, an attribute I loath above all but corruption.  If it weren't simply present in larger quantities among the democratic party, I'd have somewhere to run to besides the slightly crazy libertarians.  As it is I identify as a republican purely because the alternative sucks more.  I'd rather vote for Satan's little brother than waste my vote on a third stringer aiming for 2% of the electorate and help elect the big cheese himself.

Well, it looks like we have very similar feelings about our party memberships. But I still object to a definition of politician that is fundamentally pejorative. It just seems like misguided anarchism, or rhetoric taken too seriously, or something like that. Faugh, I'm still fighting off all that nasty hope that my party was brandishing last fall...

p.s. Hat-tip to the right-wingers: my favorite new bumper sticker in a long while--"So, How's all that 'hope' and 'change' working out for you now?" I've gotten some very amusing responses from fellow Democrats to that one.

When I find more than one or two politicians a decade that I don't want to personally castrate with a dull butter knife after just a couple years in office, I'll join in your optimism.

I've yet to come up with a solution for the female politicians, especially since my traditional upbringing is severely reinforced by my own sexist views and I can't imagine hitting one...

How is all that hope and change anyway?

I see you've been brainwashed by the decrepit media...

Major companies collapse all the time, it's the natural order of things.  When K-Mart went bankrupt, nothing bad happened.  K-Mart went bankrupt, that was that.  When they came out of bankruptcy, they had new management, it was a new company.  That it has the same name is irrelevant, the company died for all practical purposes.  K-Mart is now a successful company that makes a profit, it's useful.  Dead and dying K-Mart was a drain on the economy, an unproductive entity.

If GM had gone into chapter 11, GM as a company would be gone.  The management would have been tossed.  The insane union contracts that are giving people the equivalent of six figure salaries for work any trained monkey could do would all be gone.  The infrastructure and the brands would have come back as a company under new management that could compete with the other auto makers.  Instead they have the same high costs as they used to, and the same people that ran the company into the ground, are still running it.

Even if the worst case, dreaded chapter 7 were to occur, you'd get a vast improvement over what you have.  The assets would be sold off, those assets are worthless unless they're put to use making cars.  The brands only have value making cars, the factories have less value making anything but cars.  Investors would make a fortune off the relatively cheap infrastructure, and we'd have more smaller car companies competing against each other to make high quality automobiles at a better price.  In reality, chapter 7 would be outstanding for the country.

Our preventing them from collapsing or being taken over is what has created the monstrous, ineffective companies littering our economy today.  It's why we have massive layoffs and cutbacks year after year, why their stock values are in a continual decline, and why they keep losing to foreign competitors.  The market is no different from any other organic system, death is a necessary step in the cycle.  Eventually it's going to happen, the longer you wait, the worse it will get.