Two good rants

Two excellent rants against idiots in power caught my eye this week. The first, from the Gormogons, responded to a New York Times editorial about the Minnesota government shutdown.

We are honorable people. We believe in helping the poor and less fortunate. But we also believe in earning your keep, and in keeping what we earn. We produce and give and fund the government, yet we get nothing back but disdain and scorn. We are not your ATM. We are not your indentured servants. You no talent ass clowns work for us, and don't you forget it. We are sorry you elites are uncomfortable being asked what your value-add is. It must be discomfiting to realize you add little if anything of value to our society. Forgive us for not caring what someone who has never had to make payroll or lay off employees thinks about small business and the economy.

What of use have any of the liberal elites given our country, except backbreaking taxes and hamstringing regulation? Self-professed elites produce nothing of value, and are paid and treated as if they developed the polio vaccine. The world of ideas is nice, but the folks that are cleaning your toilets, treating your sewage, and keeping the power on are the heroes. Yet you despise them. You treat them as morons for asking why we should pay more for a broken government and its dependents.

Listen, elites. Your dreams of a big government Utopia have failed. There's simply not enough money to do everything you want. Hell, there's not enough money to do what you've already enacted. The sooner you come to grips with that, the sooner we will be able to have a functioning society again.

You want fair share, NYT? Get back to me when everyone pays taxes. Get back to me when you can't get Medicaid in New York making $66,000 per year for a family of four. Get back to me when state workers aren't getting guaranteed gold plated pensions, guaranteed for life at age 55 (or less if you're a cop or fireman). Get back to me when unemployment is under 7%. Get back to me when I'm not paying $8,000 per year in property taxes on a house assessed at $197,000. Get back to me when one -- just one -- of your economic policies actually improves something. Get back to me when you find a way to balance the budget on current revenues.

Until that time, fund your G-d damned big society welfare state your own damned selves, sit down, and shut the [heck] up.

There's more at the link.

The second is from Mark Steyn, looking at the conduct of 'big government'. Among other aspects, he tackles a scandal we've covered here before.

... consider "Operation Fast and Furious", about which nothing is happening terribly fast and over which Americans should be furious.

The official explanation is that the federal government used stimulus funding to buy guns from Arizona gun shops for known criminals to funnel to Mexican drug cartels. As I said, that's the official explanation: As soon as your head stops spinning, we'll resume the narrative. Supposedly, United States taxpayers were picking up the tab for Mexican drug lords' weaponry in order that the ATF could identify high-up gun-traffickers. But, as it turns out, these high-up gun-traffickers were already known to other agencies – FBI, DEA and other big-spending acronyms in the great fetid ooze of federal alphabet soup in which this republic is drowning. And, indeed, some of those high-ups are said to have been paid informants for those various federal agencies. So, in case you're wondering why Obama's second annual Recovery Summer is a wee bit sluggish at your end, relax: Stimulus dollars went to fund one federal agency to buy guns for the paid informants of another federal agency to funnel to foreign criminals in order that the first federal agency might identify the paid informants of the second federal agency.

Meanwhile, what did the drug cartels, the recipients of the guns, do with them? Well, they used them to kill at least one member of a third federal agency: Brian Terry of the United States Border Patrol. If that doesn't bother you, well, they also killed not insignificant numbers of Mexican civilians.

If, by this stage, you're wondering why U.S. stimulus dollars are being used to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry, consider the dark suspicion of many American gun owners – that the real reason the feds embarked on this murderous scheme was to plant the evidence that the increasing lawlessness on the southern border is the fault of the gun industry and the Second Amendment, and thereby advance its ideological agenda of ever greater gun control.

We're not talking about hacking a schoolgirl's cellphone here. Real people are dead. Yet nobody's going to close down any wing of the vast spendaholic DEATFBI hydra-headed security-state turf-war.

Again, more at the link. Bold print is my emphasis.

Both articles are highly recommended reading. The question is, what are we - you and I - going to do about them? I can only suggest we need to be hounding our elected representatives, making sure that they address these issues early and often. If they don't, we need to kick them out at the earliest opportunity and elect more responsible - and responsive - representatives.

Peter