Check out my rant on the Rumpus on my former life with politicians

You can go here to read it there ... Here's an excerpt.

If We Try, We Can All Push California Into The Ocean

I have a terrible admission to make. I used to work for a bunch of politicians.

And not only that. Part of me enjoyed it.

I didn’t enjoy the way my various state, federal and local bosses would fly off the handle at me for typos in letters and memos. I also didn’t care for the constant state of fear I lived in, worried that a mistake on my part would ruin my career or finish off an endangered species forever (both almost happened, the former more than once.)

But I did enjoy the power — specifically power over other people, especially those I disagreed with strongly. There’s some terrible part of me that really got off on screwing over my enemies. Admittedly, my enemies at the time were mostly Bush administration lackies, and a lot of them deserved it for screwing over various groups (mostly homeless vets, the poor and disabled people), but often the people I screwed over didn’t do much more wrong than say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time.

There’s a laugh — a laugh I’ve only ever heard from those who work in politics — that’s somewhere between a witch’s cackle and a little kid’s secretly giggling in the back of a classroom. The mouth is half open, the k-9’s are showing, the person laughing sits back in his chair, his smile a little bit crooked, and little bursts of air come out through the nose and mouth at the same time. It’s the laugh of knowing an enemy has been totally ruined, or sometimes it happens in the planning stages of ruining someone. For a while, I lived for that laugh, as did many of the people around me. It, sadly enough, is what that part of my life was about. And it is also, I fear, what politics — and California politics in particular — is about. ...