Steve Jobs recently told a little anecdote about former Apple CEO Gil Amelio to explain Apple’s problems in the years after Jobs was fired and before he returned. Amelio supposedly used to say: “Apple is like a ship with a hole in the bottom leaking water and my job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.”

I think of that quote when I see somebody explain that what we need right now is more and better Democrats. Why do we need more Democrats in particular, I wonder? I myself would be happy with more and better Republicans, Libertarians or even Green Partiers. I don’t care what party you belong to as long as you don’t bomb Iran or torture people or spy on us.

Who cares who we vote for in the next elections, anyway? What is it about watching elected officials get away with desecrating the Constitution that makes you think we can solve that problem by shuffling the electoral deck chairs a little more? After years of Democratic huffing and puffing about hearings and investigations of Bush’s blatantly illegal un-Constitutional conspiracy to spy on everybody in the universe, Congress just legalized the whole thing. What did the Democrats do about that? Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi whined about Republicans. As if the Senate Majority Leader and the House Speaker are powerless. As if the Republicans minority in both houses of Congress somehow managed to pass a bill without any help from Democrats. That shit is just not supposed to happen. Congress should not pass obviously illegal laws. If they do, the President should be there to veto them. If he doesn’t do that, the Judiciary should be there to overturn them. I suppose there’s still an opportunity for the Supreme Court to rule against this new law. Ha ha.

How many elected officials in our federal government do you suppose know which branch of the government has the Constitutional power to declare war? How many would admit to knowing?

Our prisons are crowded with people whose only crime was to inhale or ingest or inject certain substances into their bodies. You aren’t legally allowed to do what you want with your own body.

A man was recently sentenced to four years for counterfeiting Microsoft Windows. The protection Microsoft’s intellectual property is more important to the government than four years of a person’s life.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

This shit is not supposed to happen. Evil people should not be able to seize the power of the state and turn from noble to evil ends. A system of government that can’t prevent that is not a viable system of government. Electing government officials who aren’t evil only delays the inevitable.

Is there any viable form of government, then? What government conceived by humans has ever prevented authoritarians and fascists and dictators and emperors from seizing the power of the state and grinding the rest of us to gristle beneath it? Not one of them has ever done so. Most of them have been intended to do the opposite, and on rare occasions when we come up with a form of government that isn’t deliberately evil we never manage to keep it going for more than a few centuries. There’s no hope. Unless….