If your son is close to flunking out of college, send him more beer money. If that makes sense, stop reading right now and go write a check to Hillary’s presidential campaign.
Since Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast, federal government programs gained an unlikely critic: Democrat politicians. Some Republicans are also joining in, but Democrats criticizing the federal machine is the shocking political equivalent of Michael Jackson dangling his baby from a balcony.
From Hillary Clinton on down, Democrats, who have rarely met a government program they didn’t like, have been crawling out of the woodwork complaining about how the government failed the people. Will their accusations and admissions of massive government failings finally put a bullet through Hillary’s utopian dream of national health care? Quite the opposite.
When Hillary and company say the government failed, they have actually stumbled on to a legitimate problem – but even a blind nut finds a squirrel once in a while. Before you think Democrats are finally starting to “get it,” consider the reason the problem is being brought to our attention: so they can apply their solution. These programs simply aren’t adequately funded, nor are there enough of them.
As evidence of the coming onslaught of illogic, Eleanor Clift has become one of the first pundits from the left to pick up the ball and run toward the wrong endzone. What Democrats are now saying is simple: The era of big government is over – the era of really, really big, colossally stupendous government has just begun.
In Clift’s Newsweek column, “Hurricane Politics,” Eleanor offers an example of why Democrats need to learn to stop digging when they hear Chinese. Writes Clift:
If there’s an upside to Katrina, it is that the Republican agenda of tax cuts, Social Security privatization and slashing government programs is over.
There you have it, and all too many Democrats agree. The “upside” to one of the biggest natural disasters in U.S. history is an opportunity for a power and money grab. I’ll bet you a FEMA gift card that, if Democrats get many more of these “upsides,” we’ll all be either broke or dead.
The message being sent by the left – Clinton, Boxer, Schumer, writers like Eleanor Clift, along with many others – is dizzying in its doublespeak, but not shocking. The government failed, so the only way to combat that is by throwing money at that failure until it succeeds.
In this particular case, Dr. Clift wants to treat a patient with chronic diarrhea by prescribing Ex-Lax and Fiber One. The hull of Sean Penn’s boat must have been made with the same material as Democrat logic, because both, in fitting tribute to the late Bob Denver, sprung a leak and sunk.
Hillary Clinton has called for a 911-style commission to figure out why government response was, in her opinion, a failure. A lot of people think the 9-11 commission was itself a failure, so the task at hand could simply be this: Duplicate a failure to investigate why a failure failed, and to tell us exactly how much additional money is needed to repeat the failure.
The government doesn’t need reform, and it doesn’t need revamping – because all these things ever succeed in doing is making the government bigger. In addition, the people charged with eliminating bureaucracy are almost always bureaucrats. Don’t pay a mouse to design a better mousetrap and then act shocked that the money was used to build a cheddar factory.
The attractive feature of monstrous bureaucracy has always been that it corners like an aircraft carrier in dry-dock, making it fairly easy for the fleet-afoot masses to outmaneuver, but in disastrous situations, this is anything but a desirable quality. This is why more incentive and responsibility need to be given to the private sector instead of wasting money trying to teach a giraffe to turn cartwheels.
Why has the performance of the federal government been below what most were expecting and is being outshined by private charities? With the exception of the military, the government is traditionally a couple of decades behind the technological, logistical and readiness curve. It isn’t that the government doesn’t want to catch up, it’s that they can’t.
The federal government is trying to win a potato sack race with thousands of people in the same bag. Hillary Clinton and her Democrat friends in Congress, along with Eleanor Clift and others, want you to believe that the potato sack moves inefficiently because thousands of people in the same bag simply isn’t enough manpower.
So many politicians are attorneys, but very few of them show interest in the law of diminishing returns.
