You know how it is. You’re up way too late celebrating, caught up in the euphoria, swept away by the circumstances. Overcome by events, as we say. Then the morning arrives all too soon, and you feel like the main character in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim:

Jim was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way… He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning… His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

That’s the way my Thursday evening went, and my Friday morning. Actually, the bad feeling on Friday didn’t arrive until I read After Lying Low, Deep-Pocketed Clinton Donors Return to the Fore, by Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick in the New York Times. It was there that I learned that despite President Obama’s efforts to limit corporate money from pouring into the past two Democratic conventions, “Those shackles were thrown off this year, waving a green flag to Washington’s influence lobby.” But that’s not the real money quote, because one of the reporters got into a big donor event at the Ritz Carlton, and witnessed this:

Outside, a protester walked with a sign denouncing big money. Inside, two stocky men could be heard debating the merits of the different ambassadorships they hoped to earn under Mrs. Clinton. Even a low-ranking posting meant having “ambassador” on a child’s wedding invitation, the two agreed, and would be helpful in wrangling invitations to sit on corporate boards.

Just consider me your ambassador to the workings of democracy. And if you ever get a wedding invitation from me, it will be signed “from Ambassador Mo.”