The rot
By 
There’s a story in the NYT this morning about how Elon Musk is poised to make billions of dollars from the eventual granting of “competitive” government contracts to his companies, despite all that sweet efficient slashing of other parts of a $6.3 trillion dollar budget.
In the Before Time this would have been enormous scandal, even for a Republican administration. For a Democratic administration it would be considered — you’re not going to believe this — even more scandalous than lying about a consensual affair, in a deposition in a phony sexual harassment suit, brought for no reason other than to set this precise perjury trap.
But now it’s a big nothingburger, because of the rot. The rot is everywhere, in affairs big and small. Here’s a characteristic example:
Many college basketball fans questioned the integrity of the NCAA Tournament selection committee on Sunday after it awarded North Carolina an at-large bid in the Big Dance. The move was particularly suspicious since North Carolina athletic director Bubba Cunningham was the chairman of the selection committee.
Although Cunningham reportedly recused himself from the conversation when the selection committee discussed North Carolina receiving a spot in the NCAA Tournament, not everybody is convinced Cunningham didn’t influence the final decision. On Thursday, TNT’s Charles Barkley tore into Cunningham and North Carolina.
“You had Harry Houdini on the committee, had a bonus and a check for putting y’all in the tournament. Never trust a guy named Bubba,” Barkley said to North Carolina legend and co-host Kenny Smith.
This is a pretty trivial scandal, but it’s also completely symptomatic. What happened here is that North Carolina’s basketball team had, by its historically lofty standard, a bad season, losing 11 of 12 games against good teams, with the result that almost nobody had them in the field for the NCAA tournament. But UNC’s athletic director was the head of the selection committee, and even though he “left the room” when the Tarheels were discussed, they magically ended up appearing in the field.
The Age of Trump chef’s kiss here is that good ‘ol boy Bubba Cunningham’s characteristically grotesque contract pays him an extra month’s base salary if UNC’s men’s basketball team makes the tournament, even though merely making the tournament is the definition of something other than a catastrophic season by historical standards in Chapel Hill (He also has a bunch of other equally bogus “performance incentives” that bumps the likely value of his current contract to close to two million dollars per year).
I don’t want to go all Feech La Manna on you youngsters, but in my day this kind of thing would have been treated as obviously corrupt on its face. You can’t head a selection committee that legally requires your employer to write you a check for a month’s extra salary on top of your already obscene comp package if the committee selects your team — and also has a bunch of other huge bonuses if UNC were to make the final 16, final four, or win the tournament, btw — because that’s what was known as, to use a phrase which has apparently fallen out of the English language altogether at this point, an incredibly egregious conflict of interest.
Again, this by itself isn’t the biggest deal in the world to put it mildly, but it’s this times 100,000 or a million or who knows how much? It’s the dismal tide.