I don’t watch a whole lot of TV, but one of the three shows that I bother watching is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (the other two: House and Heroes). If they showed it here, I’d add The Colbert Report to that list, but not every show makes it over to Sweden, unfortunately. Anyhow.

Jon has a lot of politicians on as guests, and it seems to me quite a few of them have written books. All of three remaining presidential candidates, for instance, and quite a few of the ones who dropped out - or maybe even all of them? So while I’m sitting there watching one of them promote their books on family values or what their dad used to be up to or whatever else it is they’ve written about, I ask myself “when did you find time to write it?”

I’m not American, so I have no say in how senators spend their time, but it seems to me that if I elect someone, I’d rather they spend their time doing whatever it is politicians should be doing, than writing a book. Or do the proceeds from the books - that I’m pretty convinced was written chiefly on government computers, on government time - go to the state they’re from, or something like that? Or do they take a pay-cut from the senate equal to the income they get from the book?

The first time this came up for discussion was when there was a big fuss about how the new Democratic house/senate leadership demanded that sessions actually started on Mondays and ended up Fridays (instead of starting Tuesday afternoon and ending Thursday morning so that the poor congressmen didn’t have to actually be at work on Monday morning or work at all on Fridays) and they got a lot of crap about how they were trying to destroy the senators’ family lives or whatever. It seems to me that if you’re a family man from Oklahoma who wants to spend time with your kids, don’t take a fucking job in Washington DC.

And don’t you dare complain about that change while simultaneously promoting a book that you wrote during work hours.

Grrr.

/FP

PS. This hypocrisy presented to you in this particular blog was written during work hours. DS.