Reading the news these days you'd think that politics was an awfully complex business. House bills and Senate bills, reconciliations and filibusters, amendments, White House pressure, signing statements, committee votes and floor votes, pro tem and ex officio – as Lenny Bruce used to say, "yada yada". Keen students continue to read Locke and Rawls, Montesquieu and Dworkin, Burke and Smith and Rousseau and the rest of the gang, searching for information and enlightenment on this seemingly intractable subject.
In truth, nothing is simpler than politics. The entire field boils down to a single infallible and universally applicable rule. A first iteration was articulated by that underrated philosopher, lyricist Bert Kalmar, as interpreted by Groucho Marx in the 1932 classic, Horse Feathers:
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