Calhouns Can(n)ons

Calhoun’s Cannons, The Bay News, Morro Bay CA, for March 14, 2007

And Your Problem Is?

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for thirty years while saying, “Really I was meant to be a ballet dancer.” By that time, pigs will be your style.
Quentin Crisp .

I don’t get it. Why the hand-wringing now over the deplorable conditions at Walter Reed hospital? The conditions at Walter Reed are simply the logical result of the President and the Republican-held congress’s privatization ideology at work: “Government isn’t the solution; Government is the problem.” (Many management functions at Walter Reed were outsourced to a company called IAP Worldwide Services. IAP is now being managed by two former executives with Kellogg, Brown & Root, which is a subsidiary of Halliburton, a name that should ring a bell.) So Walter Reed was brought to you by some of the same people who brought you the outsourced Iraq war, the outsourced, crony contract governmental response to Katrina and soon, The President’s Great Surge In Iraq that will ensure even more good men and women will be arriving at Walter Reed in need of more outsourced, privatized care. So, why is anyone getting upset? Clearly, pigs are this administration’s style.

Sure, the polls show that Bush & Co are not held in very high esteem right now, but the very people answering the polls are the very same people who elected these guys . . . not once, but repeatedly. Even more telling, when the voters had an opportunity in this last election to completely change the balance of Congress, they voted to maintain the status quo: Congress just barely changed hands, which means it isn’t veto-proof, it isn’t filibuster-proof and there isn’t a sufficient majority to make major needed changes or look into any administrative High Crimes and Misdemeanors more serious than lying about semen on a blue dress. Instead, the voters returned to power senators and congressmen from both parties who failed in their oversight duties because they put political self interest and partisan power politics above the national interest. Once again, the voters chose a government run by people who have contempt for and so can’t be bothered to actually run a government competently. Pigs are their style, too.

Which means that we’ve got an electorate that was satisfied enough with the way the country is going so they made sure it would pretty much remain business as usual down on K Street. Which means more ginned-up intel, a continuing crony-outsourced bungled War On The Cheap, budget slashes to the VA program, privatized overburdened facilities unprepared for returning injured soldiers, a national debt that threatens the republic itself, corporate war profiteering, Guns and Butter tax cuts, ignored domestic problems like universal health insurance, no jobs, crumbling infrastructure, and the threats from global warming all going begging while congress focuses on a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, all of which is exactly what the American people voted for repeatedly. So, what’s the problem?

At a conservative gathering, best-selling author and self-described “satirist” Ann Coulter used the offensive “F- word” epithet to imply that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards is gay. It was a two-fer-one jab; slam the Demos, slam the gays. In the room, some of the biggest movers and shakers within the conservative movement all roared with laughter. Later, when the comment became public, Republican presidential candidates fell all over themselves to put distance between themselves and Coulter. Why? Pigs have always been her style. She was and is the conservative’s darling Point Woman of Wedge Politics, a political tactic that American voters respond to like Pavlov’s dogs. So, why the for-public-consumption-only squeamishness now?


And so it goes. Chickens coming home to roost, skeletons falling out of closets (The Vice President’s chief of staff now a convicted felon; how long until a Presidential Pardon comes hustling down the Pike?), more lies, more hypocrisy, more incompetence, more treasury-looting by the crony kleptocracy, more ordinary lives damaged beyond measure while faux outrage chuffs across the media screens.

It’s all entertaining, but useless because the American people got exactly what they asked for, not once, but numerous times. Pigs are indeed now our style, so we’d better put on hip boots and grab a shovel. With the level of muck in our self-created, bankrupt barnyard, ballet slippers will be inappropriate footwear for a long, long time.