Senator Ted: People Suck

On a more serious note, I couldn’t help but pause when I heard this nugget from Ted last night:
“There’s a reason why this land was called ‘the American experiment.’ If dedication to the common good were hardwired into human nature, we would never have needed a revolution. If each of us cared about the public interest, we wouldn’t have the excesses of Enron. We wouldn’t have the abuses of Halliburton. And Vice President Cheney would be retired to an undisclosed location.”
Leave aside the tortured rhetorical right-turn into Cheney-bashing, and just focus on those first sentences. The good Senator expresses a rather grim view of human nature, doesn’t he?
If you truly believe that each of us has no interest in the common good; that we don’t care about the public interest — well, I guess some of the nanny-state policies so dear to the hearts of Democrats actually do start to make some sense.
Me, I’ll stick to believing that most people are basically decent, and that left to their own devices they’ll generally do just fine at behaving like moral people with some concern for their fellow citizens. And I’ll thank Senator Ted for the illuminating — if disturbing — glimpse into his own dark view of humanity — and himself.