I can recall being shocked when I read the novel as a teenager and puzzled when I watched the movie as college boy who travelled to Washington parties 1968-1971.  Did everyone in government have all this money and these big houses filled with comfortable furniture and liquor cabinets?  Maybe so.  Did everyone have secrets on Cabinet members and presidents?  Maybe so.  (Tet Offensive, Pentagon Papers, Nixon to China, Watergate all happening around me.)  Now that I am much less curious about Washington, I can see that the opera of state requires these buffoonish, loutish, ruthless players, and that men and women from all over the country come to the roles voluntarily and eagerly.  They call it elected office, but it is more role-playing.   Do the senators truly think they are superior actors?  That is the funny part to me.  Watching the senators on the Finance Committee, I am convinced that they are completely unaware of their inadequacy, that humility and doubt and modesty are lost to them.  They act as if they know what we do not know.  They must think that they do.  Astonishing.   Blackmail is about all the affairs of state that they can manage, and that would be on good days.  I am reading Melvin Urofsky's rich biography of Louis D. Brandeis, elevated to the Supreme Court in 1916, and all around him, comic characters called senators.  Then I think, we do have a senator for a POTUS and a senator for a VPOTUS and a senator for a StateSec....