Guest Editorial
‘They would’ve took my baby’ and other evidence of decay
By Craig Cantoni | April 14, 2010
“They would’ve took my baby if it wasn’t for this program,” lamented the single mom. “And I wouldn’t have went to college,” she went on to mangle grammar.
She was referring to a program for drug addicts that would be cut under budget cuts in my home state of Arizona. On a per-capita basis, the state has the second-worst budget deficit in the nation, due to the housing collapse and to a Republican majority in the state legislature that didn’t have the courage and conviction to restrain the spending of the former Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, who was rewarded for wrecking the state economy by being promoted by Barack Obama to head Homeland Security.
The addict and her mangled lamentations were spotlighted on local TV news. I use “news” loosely, because there was nothing newsworthy about a single-parent-bites-taxpayers story. There also wasn’t anything out of the ordinary about the media spin on the story. The spin was to the left, of course. Portrayed as a victim, the mom was not asked about the whereabouts of the father of her child, because in the media’s spin, pregnancies are by immaculate conception and no one’s fault.
Nor were any taxpayers asked how they felt about their taxes going to the woman. After all, it would be silly to interview beasts of burden. That’d be like interviewing the mules that take tourists to the bottom of the Grand Canyon. “So, mule, how do you feel about carrying these fat-ass tourists?” Answer: “Hee-haw!”
Equally unsurprising, the woman’s mangled grammar didn’t raise any questions with the crackerjack reporter about whether she had really “went” to college. No doubt, the reporter had also went to college and had got the same quality education. That would make him clueless about the fact that there is an inverse relationship between good grammar and government money going to colleges. The more money, the worse the grammar – and the higher the tuition. In fact, college tuition increased 274.7 percent in the United States between 1990 and 2009. Only cigarette prices increased more (351.5 percent), due to increased tobacco taxes.
Here are some other tidbits recently gleaned from the mainstream media:
• Barack Obama is going to increase funding to colleges and take over the student loan program from private lenders. Look for every American to have went to college in a couple of decades and to be steeped in the same statist gruel as the president and his predecessor, who was another Ivy League graduate.
• The president is also going to stop holding K-12 schools accountable for teaching reading and math. But he is going to hold them accountable for graduating students who are “college-ready.” A loud, collective guffaw wasn’t heard in the nation when he said that. Taxpayers were too busy hee-hawing as they carried fat-asses on their shoulders.
• A muckety-muck from the federal Department of Health and Human Services announced that top executives in private industry will now be held responsible for fraud and misdeeds committed by lower-level employees, even if the executives hadn’t condoned the actions or knew about them. No crackerjack reporter asked him if the same standard would be applied to government muckety-mucks.
• Since December 2007, over 20,000 federal jobs have been added in metro Washington, DC. During the same period, the District lost 100,000 private-sector jobs. The HHS muckety-muck is undoubtedly delighted about this. Hee-haw!
• A shameful retired school principal showed no shame when he was quoted by the Wall Street Journal about selling his condo at a loss in a short sale and sticking the bank (actually, taxpayers) with the loss. Undoubtedly on a government pension, the retired principal and his wife have a monthly income of $6,000. They also have $38,000 in credit-card debt. Thanks to Barack Obama, greedy spendthrifts like this will get subsidized healthcare at the expense of frugal taxpayers who have lived below their means. Mules might wonder if the former principal taught students that such redistribution was social justice. They’ll never know, because, to repeat myself, the mainstream media cares more about mule riders than mules.
To be fair, such decay isn’t restricted to America. Consider:
• Rick Steves, the darling of the Prius-driving PBS crowd, continues to tour European countries on his PBS travel show and to gush about European mass transit, museums, and hordes of smartly-dressed young people sitting in cafes and strolling along streets where cars are banned. He continues to ignore the graffiti, the shabby housing, the high unemployment rates, the low birthrates of non-Muslims, the high birthrates and welfare dependency of Muslims, the greed of public-sector unions, and the other results of a bloated social-welfare state, a state that is carried on the backs of European mules, an endangered species. Hey, Rick, what do you think about Greece being bankrupt and about Italy, Spain, and Portugal being close behind? I can’t remember you saying anything about the unsustainable spending when you visited these countries and gushed about their tourist attractions and Bohemian lifestyle.
• Europeans are pissed off at Germany. Why? Because Germany has high productivity, sound fiscal policies, and a thriving export economy. In other words, it has the opposite of what most other European countries have. So instead of being ashamed and pissed off at themselves, non-Germans are pissed off at Germans. Hmm, this sounds like the United States, where fat asses who ride on hard-working, productive mules are pissed off at the mules.
Well, that’s enough braying by me for now.