Libertarianism Rears Its Ugly Head

I had a wonderful post in the works, about a woman called Buffy Trenton-St. Clair who had been pestering her Potomac, MD neighbors to join the “End Road Work” campaign she’d been seeing all those signs for. In the story, Mrs. Trenton-St. Clair draws up a petition for her new-found cause, and on this petition she has listed some of the reasons Road Work should be banned, not the least of which is that the roughened pavement that inevitably precedes such work causes the DVD player in her SUV to skip, which in turn causes the kids to whine, which in turn give her road rage and that’s why she held up the G-D 7-Eleven. So you can see why I stopped.

Plus, as it turns out, there was something even weirder going on: People inappropriately putting drugs in food. You think I jest. You are wrong.

In Marianna, FL, a woman attempted to bring pot to an inmate at Sunland Pathways via a pint of pistachio ice cream. In Los Luna, NM, Burger King employees apparently took to sprinkling pot on some burgers served to, honest, a couple of cops. And, in Santa Fe, NM a woman tried to smuggle heroin in to a friend in the Rio Arriba County lockup by hiding a hypodermic full of the stuff in a burrito.

Ignore for the moment that two of these stories involve inmates; that’s not the point. The point is that everyone knows, for instance, that you don’t put pot in ice cream (it ruins the texture): You put pot in brownies, for heaven’s sake; it’s also common knowledge that heroin does not go well with burritos, which go much better with Peyote. I got no real problem with the pot on the burgers, except for the obvious problems inherent in serving that combo to the police.

Which brings me, finally, to the point. Under my administration, my friend Myrna will be in charge of Federal Drug Policy—which will be, in essence, “Wherefore, as long as the United States Gummint, hereinafter referred to as Billy and the Boingers, receives a positively usurious tax, the sale of drugs, including, but not by a long shot limited to, marijuana, cocaine, mescaline, psilocybin, Peyote and heroin will be allowed—and in some locales* actively encouraged—by law.” Myrna has long experience in these matters and I trust her implicitly. She has also designed an absolutely wonderful plan for Casual Sex Fridays which, like my dug policy, will help pay down the seventy-gazillion-trillion-dollar National Debt, so I owe her. Anyway, part of our drug policy will be to educate people more realistically about the hazards of intoxicants, thus avoiding a serious faux pas (from the French meaning “Shit. Did anybody see that?”) like putting pot on a cop’s burger if he hasn’t asked for it. It’s rude. Perhaps we should train, as part of a Federal full-employment program, drug sommeliers…. Just a thought.

Plus, condiments cost money; how do these people think we got the seventy-gazillion-trillion-dollar National Debt in the first place? I’ll tell you how: It all started back in the Reagan Administration when the Department of Interior (headed by James “Wilderness-Schmilderness” Watt) decided that ketchup was a vegetable and started distributing packets of the stuff like they were Defense Department “contingency” funds, thereby allowing schools to claim they were meeting Federal Nutritional Requirements. Astoundingly, this plan backfired when the money saved by the school districts was squandered by giving a half-cent per year raise to every teacher in the country, who pooled the money and sent Miss Salisbury, my fifth-grade teacher and, as near as we could tell, Satan’s favorite daughter, to Washington, D.C. to beat Watt to death with a yardstick, but unfortunately Nancy Reagan got to him first.

In my administration, that could never happen. We will have—wait for it—FLYING CARS. If Miss Salisbury had had a flying car, she could have gotten to DC in plenty of time to beat Mr. Watt into bacon mist way before Mrs. Reagan could have broken free of her meeting with Halston--and would have no doubt enjoyed her retirement more.

You see how it’s all connected? We let people do what they damn well want to their own bodies, and pretty soon the stupidity is being beaten out the entrenched Washington establishment.

Incidentally, I plan to allow road work. You know, to keep those roads to DC open.

*We’re thinking, just by way of example, Benson, Arizona, a town so remote that not even AOL goes there.

Platform Soul. Well, Almost. (Part One point Five)

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention this, lest my claim to loathe all politicians currently in the biz become suspect. Apparently Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, like Senator George Allen, is incapable of following a few simple rules. Reid apparently owned some land, which he then sold to a company in which he had an interest. In other words, the land was still his, sort of, but in an entirely different (read: more potentially profitable) way. Three years after he sold the land, it was again sold, this time more traditionally, to a developer and Harry Reid, that bastion of Democratic morality, made a good chunk o’ cash.

At issue here is the fact that Reid never disclosed the initial sale of the land to the company, even though the Senate rules specifically require that he do so. Reid’s defense is that it was only a “technical” change of ownership. (Which ranks right up there with Allen’s for the dumbest excuse ever concocted for not having the slightest idea of what the word “ethics” even means.)

I said it—or at least implied it—about Sen. George Allen, and I will say it about Harry Reid: You guys are the reason I plan to replace Congress with 535 Shih-Tzus. You are the people I have to put up with, out there on the roads, who are either too freaking stupid to use your turn signals, too arrogant, or too busy making illegal financial deals on your cell phone to bother.

It is intriguing to note the timing of the Reid story, so soon after the Allen story. If I were one of the many weak-minded Democrats I would be crying “dirty partisan pool!” which of course seems to have become something of a Republican battle cry lately. We have a bunch of whiny ill-mannered little brats, there in Congress, is all I’m saying.

This is the kind of behavior that makes a body wonder just how much the Public Interest is thought about, there in the hallowed halls of Congress, as opposed the mutual fund kind of interest. If Ms. Betty Cruikshank of East Bumtickle, MN writes to her Congressperson about a problem, is that Congressperson more likely to: (A) Look into and if possible address Ms Cruikshank’s concerns or (B) Have an aide send her campaign propaganda? (Hint: This is a rhetorical question. The real answer is (C) He will send thugs to shake her down for a donation and then claim he knew nothing about the thugs.)

So: Shih-Tzus. Plus I’m gonna have 'em neutered and spayed.