Sunday spin: Transparency depends on your side of the looking glass

As the state Senate descended into an extended match of political jujitsu Friday, the word of the night – perhaps the entire legislative session – was “transparency”.

It sprang so readily from the lips of legislators that it was important to remember the various sides meant something different as they claimed they had it and the other didn’t. In politics, people often use a word like Humpty Dumpty: it means what they say it means, nothing more and nothing less.

This session, transparency seems to be like one of those windows one sees on television cop shows, where officers watches through a one-way glass as a detective grills the suspect. It’s transparent from the dark little room where other cops watch but reflectively opaque to the suspect even when he walks to the glass on his side and mutters “I know you’re back there, you lousy coppers.”

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