“Nothing is significant for long, everything is episodic, and old scandals are regularly knocked out of the headlines by new ones. … If there are too many scandals for any one of them to seize our attention for long, all of them taken together allow what are potentially very unpopular policies to take root without much scrutiny. … at a moment when we need politics to be thoughtful and engaging, we have a government whose profound swampiness only further deepens public doubts about democracy. Also consider this: Budget director Mick Mulvaney last week made a brash admission about his time in Congress. “If you were a lobbyist who never gave us money,” he said to an audience of banking executives, “I didn’t talk to you.” In a more innocent age, this confession would have provoked sustained indignation over how our political money system fundamentally corrupts our politics. (And imagine if Hillary Clinton had said such a thing.) But Mulvaney’s words just seemed to slide by.”