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Colorado is such a delightful place. Where else do you need to worry about snowstorms in August and forest fires in January? And in an effort to put those worries behind me, I called my favorite inside source in Washington, D.C.: Ananias Ziegler, a retired lieutenant colonel who serves as media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.
After the usual pleasantries, he got down to business.
I suppose you're calling about those secret
wiretaps,
he said.
That's a good place to start. I don't know why I
should be paying my own government to snoop on me,
I
began.
Wait a minute. You don't know for sure that the
National Security Agency is monitoring your communications.
In fact, you'll probably never know. So you don't have
anything real to complain about. This is just the usual
liberal whining about civil liberties and the Fourth
Amendment and all that other knee-jerk stuff. Trust me,
we'll get to the bottom of this, find out who leaked that
top-secret information to you seditious jackals in the
media, and punish them appropriately -- maybe in one of
those secret prisons that we don't have in eastern Europe.
And besides, it's a perfectly legitimate use of the
President's war-time powers.
What war-time powers?
I asked. The
Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war,
and the last time that happened was on June 5, 1942, with
declarations against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. If
we're not at war then how can he have war-time
powers?
Ziegler sighed, as if I were a child with a learning
disability. There you go again with technicalities like
Article I of the Constitution. You ought to read a little
further, like into Article II, and you'll see that the
President is your Commander-in-Chief.
No, he isn't,
I parried. And he's not yours,
either. The Constitution says he 'shall be the
Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United
States, and of the Militia of the several States, when
called into the actual Service of the United States.' That
means soldiers and sailors on active duty. I haven't been
on active duty since 1972. What about you?
Ziegler conceded that he had left the service years ago,
but we like to trot out that 'Commander-in-Chief' stuff
because it fools a lot of citizens into thinking they're
under some obligation to take orders from the President.
You'd be surprised by the poor state of civics education in
this country.
No, I wouldn't be surprised, so I asked about education.
I just read that fifteen states have sued the federal
government because the cost of new testing under the No
Child Left Behind Act is at least as much as the new
funding budgeted for the act.
Ziegler chuckled. What better way to make it appear
that we're in favor of improving education when we're
really in favor of a docile population? Or, as your hero
H.L. Mencken put it more than 80 years ago, 'the most
timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs
and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in
Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.' That makes
the Committee's vital work so much easier.
I had to concede his point, so I changed the subject,
and asked, What's the official spin on the Jack Abramoff
scandal?
Jack who?
Then Ziegler laughed. We'll put it
out that it's a bipartisan mess. And if that doesn't work,
we'll blame it all on a sad fact of human nature.
That no one is perfect?
I asked.
More than that. A lot of these guys ran for Congress
really believing in a smaller, less-intrusive government
and all that. But if we had a small federal government, it
wouldn't be worth lobbying, and our senators and
representatives wouldn't be nearly as important. So after
they get here, no matter what they might have believed
earlier, they want a big, intrusive government so they can
dole out the pork while lobbyists make sure they have ample
campaign funds to keep them in power. It's kind of sad,
when you think about it.
So that will be the official spin?
I asked in
conclusion.
Indeed. Think of them not as greedy, power-hungry
hypocrites, but as victims.
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