Commenting on the report that President Bush has declared Washington, D.C. a Federal Disaster Area (no… really, no kidding) in order to make it legal for FEMA money to be available to help pay for the Inaugural Infestation, Mark Steyn comments on our permanent state of routine emergency.
I’m not worried about “change” so much as creep. The Obama administration doesn’t have to do anything terribly transformative, overnight socialization of health care, etc. In fact, it doesn’t have to do anything at all. It could just sit there, and America would still drift remorselessly, incrementally left, inch by inch. Eventually, you reach a tipping point: At some point in the next four years, we will reach a situation where the majority of Americans pay no federal income tax but are able to vote themselves more goodies from those who do. The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it. We now have a government offering trillion-dollar rewards for bad behavior to the financial system, to the housing market, to the auto unions and to individual voters. And the heirs to those Connecticut town meetings that Tocqueville regarded as the best form of government ever devised by man now underbudget their snow-removal costs, secure in the knowledge that the Feds will pick up the tab.
We’re now told that the problem with the last New Deal is that it was too small, so Obama’s new New Deal has to be even bigger. That’s like telling New Orleans that the problem is they’re not far enough below sea level so they need to dig deeper. If Washington is now a federal disaster area, it would be nice to think of Barney Frank and the gang waving from the roof of the Capitol until they can be evacuated somewhere safe, like one of the outlying South Sandwich Islands or Charley Rangel’s vacation property in the Dominican Republic. But, alas, Washington is one of those disaster relief cases, where they get the relief, and the rest of us get the disaster. As the incoming president has said, this is the worst crisis since …oh, at least the great Vernon, Conn., snowfall of 1996. To facilitate the stimulus, I urge him to declare every American his own individual federal disaster area.
Clearly, this misses the point. Right-wing war monger that he is, Steyn has completely missed the boat… again. Bush didn’t declare Washington, D.C. a federal disaster area so he could funnel money to buy more Brie and caviar for Obamamaniacs passing through on holiday for a mid-winter night’s dream. Instead, he has a secret plan to use the order to control federal troops around the capitol so that when all the Lefties breeze into town (those few that haven’t lived there for decades) he can arrest them. Guantanamo is about to get LOTS bigger. Most Democrat Senators aren’t worried about it…. they’ve been to Gitmo and seen these guys living it up at Club Fed. They only want to close it because they’re jealous. The donkey-kissing legislators (think about it) don’t really care, as long as they can be waterboarded with Dom Perignon, a shortage of which certainly would be a national emergency.
I hear that a certain Congressman from Massachusetts is actually looking forward to meeting his new cellmate, Muhammed Muhammed Bubba Abdul. Somehow, I don’t think he’s related to Paula.
Go Bush! Four more years!
H/T: Daily Kos
