I’m not drunk, officer. I just don’t stand for anything.

A Bob Filner or a Ted Kennedy can be tolerated because he is part of the anointed—their intentions are good, so their actions are interpreted in that light. Someone who is not part of the anointed—who does not share their policies or who persists in doing what works rather than what is well-intentioned—must have bad intentions, and their actions will be judged in light of their bad intentions. — Jerry Stratton (The Vision of the Anointed)

On the night of April 12, 2013, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg, head of the Texas Public Integrity Unit, and Democrat, blew a .238 blood alcohol level after being stopped by police and then arrested. Her blood alcohol level was almost certainly higher while she was driving: she refused to take the test, even refusing to take the field sobriety tests; so her BAC wasn’t tested for over an hour after her arrest. In video, she can barely stand; when driving, she weaved so far that she entered both the bicycle lane and the oncoming traffic lane. She lied to the arresting officer about her drunkenness, tried to convince every officer she came in contact with that her political stature and connections entitled her to be let go, and threatened that she would use her office and connections to punish them if they did not.

Don’t you know who I am? I’ll have you all in jail. I’ll have all your badges.

Common sense says that such a person should not lead the state’s Public Integrity Unit, and, conversely, that a Public Integrity Unit with such leadership is rudderless and corrupt, and should be disbanded. Common sense says that such a person is unfit to decide who gets charged and who goes free under the state integrity laws.

…the very commonness of common sense makes it unlikely to have any appeal to the anointed. How can they be wiser and nobler than everyone else while agreeing with everyone else? — Thomas Sowell (The Vision of the Anointed^•)

But common sense is anathema to the anointed.¹ While Texas is generally thought to lean conservative, Austin is the capital and thus attracts to itself the political anointed who think themselves too important for the law—even when they enforce it. Austin, because it attracts such people, is extremely left.

When Texas Governor Rick Perry said that he would veto funding for the Public Integrity Unit unless Lehmberg stepped down or was removed², she and the Travis County Commissioners refused. When he followed through and vetoed their funding, they chose to divert other funds to keep the Public Integrity Unit funded—and then promptly investigated the Governor for corruption, the theory being that vetoing funding for a corrupt integrity office and saying why is itself corrupt.

It is not ironic that something called the Public Integrity Unit would be so corrupt. It is the nature of the concentration of political power. Political power attracts the anointed, and personal responsibility is not something the anointed take seriously. In the past, capital cities may have been a necessity of geography. But that’s no longer the case. There is no reason legislators today cannot work from their home districts, using telephones and the Internet, and the great conferencing and video-conferencing software we have available to us today.

It may be that there will always be corruption in politics. But there is no reason we should encourage the corrupt to concentrate in a single area and take over the political bodies there. Capital cities are an anachronism. Texas would be served well to simply end theirs.