It would be nice if we could blame it all on muddle.

It would be nice if government grows because everything's so complex that muddle begets muddle, and governments balloon — "evolve" — out of the booming, buzzing confusion of any mind set out to grasp it. It would let so many people off the hook. We could say, "forgive them, for they know not what they do."

But that's not quite the case.

Recently, a clash first between Senator Patty Murray of Washington and Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, and then a clash between Ted Stevens of Alaska and that very same, persistant Oklahoman, brought the Senate to a rare moment of clarity, where it became obvious for all to see why government grows.

It grows because our politicians want it to grow.

Senator Coburn had this idea. He wanted to bring some semblance of balance to federal spending, so he took the occasion of increased spending for disaster relief to urge cutting some recently approved pork-barrel spending. Why not just delete a few earmarked spending items? He cited a sculpture garden in Washington state, an art museum in Nebraska, and a Rhode Island animal shelter as, er, good candidates for local, as opposed to federal, spending.

That's when Patty Murray spoke up. She fiercely defended the dominant congressional ideology that many wrongs make everything right. She made it quite clear that were her sculpture park pork singled out, she'd attack other "earmarked" items. Those marked for other senators.

Now, before I go on to the consequences of Ms. Murray's threat, I'd like to digress a moment. No one has ever fully explained to me this business about "earmarks." When I earmark a passage in a book, I fold over a small corner of the page. It flaps over like a dog's ear, and is thus duly marked.

But that turns out not to be the term's meaning. As Merriam-Webster puts it, an earmark is "a mark of identification on the ear of an animal."

How agricultural! It's gratifying to learn that the Senate's euphemism for "pork" is, well, a pig-raising-related concept.

And, of course, the Senate is in the business of raising pork. It's what senators trade — with special interests, the people who fund their re-election campaigns. So no single-minded career politician would allow his own earmarked livestock to be gored. Hence farmer Murray's threat.

Which was very effective. Senator Coburn's proposal was voted down, 86 to 13. "The miracle," noted the Wall Street Journal, "is he got 13."

A crushing defeat. But did that stop Coburn? Nope. Later in that same day he suggested that the Senate take the hundreds of millions set aside for the notorious Alaskan "bridges to nowhere" and give it, instead, to repair a bridge over Lake Pontchartrain, in Louisiana. The Twin Spans Bridge, after all, had been damaged by Katrina, and was used by an awful lot of commuters. One of the Alaska bridges would replace a seven-minute ferry ride for the 50 or so residents of Gravina Island, the other goes from Anchorage to uninhabited wetlands. Seems a reasonable sacrifice, no?

After Coburn proposed this amendment, Senator Stevens took the floor. Stevens angrily told his freshman colleague that, if the Senate killed his bridges, he would resign and "be taken out of here on a stretcher." The 81-year-old, 36-year veteran of the Senate, well-esconced as chair of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, said that the mere suggestion was "an offense, a threat to every person in my state." Continued...