On the Size of Government

President Bush has presided over the largest overall increase in inflation-adjusted federal spending since Lyndon B. Johnson. Even after excluding spending on defense and homeland security, Bush is still the biggest-spending president in 30 years. -- Stephen Slivinski, Cato Policy Analysis #543

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys. --P.J. O'Rourke

There's nothing dumber than a big spending Republican. In fact, I'm starting to think wwould have been better off letting Bill have another 8 years. As a Democrat, he was downright frugal. It's one thing to have a redistributionist government that simply takes your money and gives it to the undeserving. It's quite another to have the government spend your money on dangerous things, like more bureacrats, homeland snoopiness, and alphabet soup (SEC/FCC/FDA/BATF/NSA) busy-bodying.

I'd like to say I gave up on the Republicans in 1975, and then again in 1989. And it seems like I have to give up on them about every 2 years. The only thing worse, I'd tell myself, is Democrats, and I find it increasingly maddening that these are the only two choices we get. My goodness. What is it going to take to get a constitutional government? (Short of colonial minutemen, that is).

And then the other choice is John Kerry? He got 50 odd million votes, not based on his voting record, which was quite possibly the worst possible of any presidential candidate; but because people felt anything was better than this. Maybe they were right.

Sympathy for the Devil

"IN ONE OF THE FOUNDING TEXTS OF SOCIOLOGY, The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Emile Durkheim set it down that "crime is normal." "It is," he wrote, "completely impossible for any society entirely free of it to exist." By defining what is deviant, we are enabled to know what is not, and hence to live by shared standards. This apercuappears in the chapter entitled "Rules for the Distinction of the Normal from the Pathological."" --Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1993, Defining Deviancy Down)

The third shoe has now dropped on the whole Abu Graib thing for me this week. First, we have Ted Kennedy celebrating the first anniversary of Abu Graib, as if he thought the whole affair were something worth remembering (I wonder if he also visits Mary Jo's grave once a year).

The second shoe was the rubble kicked up intentionally by Isikoff and Newsweek to try and paint a picture of Gitmo guards dumping the Koran down the crapper.

Then, we get a London tabloid tossing out pictures of Saddam in his underwear.

You know what? I've had it. So some Arabs get their burnoose in a bunch over hurt feelings. I really can't muster any sympathy for that. If Muslims were taking care of their own criminals, they wouldn't find themselves and their people exposed to the idiosyncracies of western cultures; albeit primarily pure fabrications. So what if some of their citizens get humiliated, sneered at, and denigrated. That's nothing that hasn't happened in a US prison. Or at a Dixie Chicks concert for that matter.

I have to wonder if the people who have a problem with this form of free expression have the same problem with those who would burn a US flag or spray paint a fur coat.

Defining deviancy up, for the purpose of gaining sympathy for the devil is the work of the devil himself.

Mortality

One of the reasons I write this blog is give a glimpse to my three sons of things that I believe in strongly enough to write about. It's a very selfish reason, and I indulge myself with the knowledge that if and when they read it, they do it of their own volition, and that they absorb whatever they wish from these writings.

It was not my intent to make this blog a treatise on life or philosophies thereof, but there are some things you cannot escape; much as we'd like to compartmentalize things and stash them away for processing at a later time.

Recently, my sons lost their beloved mother. It's a time for reflection for each of us, and to contemplate the rugged aspects of mortality. I hurt for the boys, and I pray that there's a hidden strength that God can grace me with to help them through it.

Suffice to say that I gladly bear the burden, if it will ease theirs. And if sometime in the distant future they have occasion to read this, I can only offer that they made her extremely proud, and they were her only true joy as the years went on. God rest her soul.

Billyism #2

Learning is the key to all your answers.

Wizer OneLiner #3

Proving yet another adage wrong, this morning I sat on the edge of the bed and put my pants on two legs at a time.