Thursday, May 13, 2010

Government is Good, Government Is Great

Decrying the widening public distrust of, and disdain for the government, the White House's current tenant recently gave a speech about all the good things that the government does.

Prominently mentioned were the roads on which we travel . . . but the sadly deteriorated condition of those roads somehow went unmentioned.

That omission though was a relatively minor one. 

A brief and cursory look at our federal government's record in recent years shows that is not just a pitiful helpless, profligate, and wasteful entity but also one that regularly fails in the performance of its principal purpose and is a clear and present danger to the country's citizens.

Just a few years back our drug warriors targeted a tiny aircraft in Latin America and had it shot down. The little Cessna was carrying an American missionary and her young daughter. Both were killed.

Shortly thereafter, federal agents in Idaho killed the unarmed wife of Randy Weaver. She was shot in the head as she stood in the doorway of her home, carrying her infant child. The shooter was an FBI sniper who was reputed to be capable of hitting a quarter at a far great range than the shot with which he killed the young mother. Through a wondrous example of legal legerdemain, the government was able to rescue its sterling marksman from Idaho's criminal justice system and any other accountability.

These episodes escaped widespread notice and the feds even were able to persuade much of the public -- though apparently not Timothy McVeigh -- that the 70 plus men, women, and children whom they a few years later gassed and incinerated at Waco, Texas, brought that massacre on themselves.

But people began to notice when the government consistently failed to deliver on its solemn pledge to bring to justice those who murdered Americans in a wave  of attacks around the world, and those attacks and failures culminated in 9/11 . . . and that failure of the government to discharge its primary duty -- the protection of the country and its people -- was too spectacular to escape notice.

The response of the government was to reorganize, creating a larger and more complicated bureaucracy that is too lacking in initiative, innovation and imagination, as well as over staffed, muscle bound, and inflexible, to be effective. 

More recent onslaughts are making the statists' worst fears come true. The onslaughts that failed -- from that of the would-be shoe bomber to that of the Detroit bound underwear bomb wearer to the effort of the Time Square smoldering SUV doofus -- did so only because of the ineptitude of the attacker and/or the alert responsive actions of of ordinary citizens. In each instance, the government stirred itself into action only after the fact. As a police officer friend observed, "the Homeland Security people are like the guys who after the shooting stops go out onto the battlefield and bayonet the wounded."

Our government leaders even work themselves (together with their media and academic satraps) get hip deep in hysteria, working themselves  into frenzies, when a state steps in as Arizona has to fill the dangerous gap created by the feds longstanding failure to protect the nation's borders, allowing drug traffickers and whoever else wishes to do so to enter  and spread mayhem through the country.

Unless and until the government can do Job 1 -- adequately protecting the country and its people -- it deserves to be viewed with distrust, disdain, and even loathing. Until then it should minimize the diversion of time, effort, and resources to peripheral matters . . . and we should be spared lectures by those living large at the public trough about all those peripheral and supposedly good things they are doing with the enormous amounts of money they extract from the country's productive private citizens and businesses.

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