Delicate? Indelicate? Well it’s life. Remember the first time your darkest suppositions of your parents having sex edged out the closet door and mentally you tried to close the door shut? Mom and dad . . . Doing that? Noooooo, NO WAY! However you knew they were doing it, actually facing the truth was just too gross to fathom. (I don’t think I could bring myself to face the truth of such a visually upsetting proposition before I was in my 40s, when it really became too unholy to acknowledge.) 

In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, John McKinnon (“Private-Equity Firms, as Constituents and Donors, Get Some Sympathy as Congress Weighs Tax Bill”) wrote how several of the most powerful Dems in congress have been cozying up to the financial industry. The issue provoking the article is a tax bill now being debated that would affect the industry. McKinnon writes: “So far, private-equity firms appear to have convinced lawmakers to reconsider a much bigger hit on their industry, ending the favorable tax treatment of ‘carried interest,’ the cut in future profits that private-equity and hedge-fund managers receive in big deals. This is typically taxed now at a 15% rate, rather than the ordinary income rates of as much as 35% that apply to individuals.”

Farther down, he opines that “having scored their points with the public, it’s possible that lawmakers will lose interest in the measure.”

The above is premised on what McKinnon reported mid-article: “The political clout of private-equity firms is likely to grow as the industry wakes up to new threats and spreads more of its wealth among politicians in the 2008 election cycle. Most of the leading candidates for president have attracted strong support from private-equity firms.”

He goes on to report that among those who seem to be pontificating loudest while having their heads in the trough include New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton (Farallon Capital Management & Avenue Capital Group), and Representative Rahm Emanuel from Illinois.

I know, I know. I knew about the dissembling from the left side of the isle, just as I really knew about my mom and dad. And in a way, it’s the same sort of facts of life and facts of political necessity, if you get my drift. Nonetheless I wanted to not have to be confronted with the latter any more than I’d have wanted to actually stumble upon manifestation of the truth of the former.

But this does get us to the need to confront what the hell is going on. For the past six years the American public has been shielded — as much as the administration and the conservative GOP has been able to raise the shield — from the truth of how America’s vets have been getting screwed on the mantel of “tight budgets.” But the truth of those tight budgets are exclusively the direct product of the series of tax cuts, not out-of-control/wasteful spending, that the administration and the GOP rammed through earlier in the decade. (Somehow “rammed” seems so appropriate a term, now that I think of it.)

While some aspects of the facts of life may not be what we want or need to take a close look at, those facts of present day political life demand examination and honest acknowledgement. Millions of those who put their lives and limbs on the line to defend others who are reaping huge benefits from this wonderful country have been getting . . . . Well, we all know what they’ve been getting, and we all know it’s time they got better.