lame duck (Online Etymology Dictionary)
mid-18c., "any disabled person or thing;" especially Stock Exchange slang for "defaulter."
A lame duck is a man who cannot pay his differences, and is said to waddle off. [Thomas Love Peacock, "Gryll Grange," 1861]
Sometimes also in naval use for "an old, slow ship." Modern sense of "public official serving out term after an election" is recorded by 1878 in Amer.Eng., from an anecdote published in that year of President Lincoln, who is alleged to have said, "[A] senator or representative out of business is a sort of lame duck. He has to be provided for."
Lincoln did not know the half of it. He was speaking at a time when the government and the people governed were intimate; when the government was an extension of the people. But those days are long gone. The modern politician knows the world far better than we poor souls and the lame duck period allows him free range to inflict the nation with his vision of truth without having to worry about those pesky little problems like responsibility to the voters. It is no accident that this Congress passed so many controversial laws; this gaggle is much more comfortable when given free rein.
The political lame duck is one of democracy's great defiant and arrogant Bathoes; when he acts, it is the democracy that is disabled and "waddles off".
mid-18c., "any disabled person or thing;" especially Stock Exchange slang for "defaulter."
A lame duck is a man who cannot pay his differences, and is said to waddle off. [Thomas Love Peacock, "Gryll Grange," 1861]
Sometimes also in naval use for "an old, slow ship." Modern sense of "public official serving out term after an election" is recorded by 1878 in Amer.Eng., from an anecdote published in that year of President Lincoln, who is alleged to have said, "[A] senator or representative out of business is a sort of lame duck. He has to be provided for."
Lincoln did not know the half of it. He was speaking at a time when the government and the people governed were intimate; when the government was an extension of the people. But those days are long gone. The modern politician knows the world far better than we poor souls and the lame duck period allows him free range to inflict the nation with his vision of truth without having to worry about those pesky little problems like responsibility to the voters. It is no accident that this Congress passed so many controversial laws; this gaggle is much more comfortable when given free rein.
The political lame duck is one of democracy's great defiant and arrogant Bathoes; when he acts, it is the democracy that is disabled and "waddles off".
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