Posted by
VBushmills on Wednesday, July 22, 2009 8:00:33 AM
The last thing we want to do is bring the environmentalists over to our side...
...unless they are first willing to hang the Constitution as the first fixed star in their heaven, and acknowledge that it was written on behalf of the liberty and reciprocal mutuality of Man, and not for tree frogs or trees for them to hide in, or for the bark that wild horses to chew on.
That said, it would still be nice to neutralize them, and in one of my "Duhh... as if" moments I can't help but wonder why the GOP doesn't see the natural enmity that exists between rank and file environmentalists and Bureaucratism.
We've long known the partiality the state pays to its front office, almost always at the expense of the front lines. When there's a crunch, it's always Marx's vaunted worker the state kicks in the end, while the paper-hangers are protected under the guise of keeping the "system" intact, even while no longer operable, against that day, a need for them should arise again.
Recently, Virginia looked into closing all of its interstate rest areas, which cost $21M to run each year. In the end they backed off and only closed half, thus putting out of work all the crews and workers who kept the grounds and bathrooms, etc, clean, but dispensing with none of the front office jobs, which accounts for up to 45% of the budget. See how it works?
(For the most curious of reasons, I suppose, the GOP gubernatorial candidate, Bob M'Donnell, an alleged conservative, came out for re-opening them immediately, quickly followed by the Democrat, Creigh Deeds. The correct conservative position would have been to demand they all be closed, and, if elected, keep them closed til the next Democrat could assume office. Only when we return to Depression-era travel habits, all the exits closed, will a stop for a free pee be needed. Oh well, an opportunity missed, a secret moderate supplication of the heart of the heart revealed. But I digress.)
Similarly, we've read little reports here and there about small clauses in the proposed health care bill, such as the one that would require elderly folks (not exactly defined, which will no doubt require a commission once enacted) to have regular check-ups...creating a need for an entirely new army of bureaucrats to design forms, and create a paper chain running from the patient/citizen/victim through several levels of agencies and boards, and at which time some one of them will decide Ol' Mitch is only to be prescribed aspirin.
Point: Consider how many trees will die needlessly.
Also, consider the recent House legislation (not yet law) to spend $700m, (That's almost a billion, which used to be a lot of money) to expand the range and protection of wild horses in the West. Although homeless, in the human sense, none of the money goes to either housing and feeding the horses, or finding them employment, or even new job training. (A recent poll among the horses as to whether they had any real use of this money, and the vote was overwhelmingly "Naaay.")
Our question: why should so many trees in the Pacific northwest, Canada, or Brazil, die just to keep some pettifogger with a clip board in Wyoming employed counting horses, astride his Honda four-wheeler? And will this field agent, and his staff, be native Wyomeens, or will they immigrate from Dartmouth, thus changing the entire political demography of this once solidly red state?
Somewhere, some place, someone has calculated how many trees die in order to feed the needs of one bureaucrat. Go find that number, and blow the horn. It requires four falsified names from ACORN to replace one doubting environmentalist.
Even they know it better to deal with the devil you know.
Vassar Bushmills