Mimsy Were the Borogoves

Editorials: Where I rant to the wall about politics. And sometimes the wall rants back.

The moose should have told you

Jerry Stratton, October 2, 2013

There’s an old saying, I think by Thomas Sowell, that if you put the government in charge of the Sahara Desert in five years you’d have a shortage of sand. Not sure you’d find better proof of it than during this shutdown. If you put the government in charge of a free Twitter account, in five years you’ll find that it won’t run during a shutdown.

Now, yes, I know that the First Lady probably normally has hired someone to tweet for her. But if you’re going into a shutdown, you don’t have to pay that person to announce that they are not going to tweet. The First Lady still exists, whether we pay her proxy tweeter or not.

And the whole closing select national monuments by the White House is crazy. Areas of Washington, DC that are normally wide open without any restrictions or even employees half the time, are being closed down. The White House has chosen to hire people to put up barricades to block areas that normally not only did not have restricted access but didn’t even have guards or other security for the simple reason they don’t need it. They’re concrete and grass.

The White House did the same thing during the sequester—shut down little things that tourists enjoyed (such as White House tours) while continuing the expensive stuff (such as sending his dog in a private plane). The sequester, remember, is still going on. It was supposed to be the end of America; America is still here and now the President is taking credit for the reduced spending that the sequester mandated.

October 15, 2013: Nice park you have there; shame if anything happened to it.

I keep hearing the Democrats and the media talking about how the Republican attempt at funding a continuing resolution is “extortion”. Give what we’ve been seeing in DC, that’s an interesting choice of words. Extortion isn’t the House following its constitutional requirements to originate funding—especially when everyone knows that if the White House or Senate Democrats were to merely open up negotiations the House would compromise, as it always does.

Hell, does anyone really believe that if the White House gave them the opportunity to just pretend that they’d compromise, that the House Republicans wouldn’t fold like a three dollar chair?

Of course they would. If Democrats were to make even a token effort toward compromise, they’d get everything they want. The first round in what should have been the start of negotiations is not extortion.

Even after the Democrats refused to negotiate at all, Republicans began to look for areas of common ground where both sides could agree that funding was essential—veterans care, cancer research, Head Start, the WIC Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the FDA, and FEMA, even the District of Columbia. Senator Reid hasn’t even scheduled a vote on them. Yet, this is what every family in the US does when funds get tight or there’s disagreement on how to spend income—identify the most important expenditures and try for a consensus on spending within them. That’s not extortion, it’s common sense.

Extortion is spending extra money and extra manpower during a shutdown to block off an open-air stone memorial at the National Mall—when it normally is fully open and often unstaffed during the regular course of the day. Extortion is shutting down a football game that operates without government funding.

Extortion is trapping seniors in a building and not letting them leave—and then forcing them into a bus, all so that they can’t see natural beauty that will be there regardless of the federal government. Extortion is forcing people at gunpoint to leave their homes and businesses—again, at extra expense, and while leaving businesses frequented by administration officials and donors open. It’s blocking off public parking spaces that might provide a view of national monuments.

Extortion is the President saying that even though the US has enough revenue to meet its obligations, its going to default anyway, and “Wall Street should be concerned”.

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