…of President Obama’s first two and a half weeks in office is that they have provided many opportunities for humor. Today someone actually called our radio show to complain that what the Democrats are doing seriously threatens our country, and we shouldn’t be laughing at them. True, perhaps, but humorlessness is a bad quality in a talk radio show (just ask the folks at Air America, if it still exists).
No one is better at finding the humor amid the wreckage of sound public policy than Mark Steyn; his latest is a masterpiece of the genre. You need to read it all, but I can’t resist these two excerpts. First, the latent connection between two stories in the news:
Appearing on The Rush Limbaugh Show last week, I got a little muddled over two adjoining newspaper clippings–one on the stimulus, the other on those octuplets in California–and for a brief moment the two stories converged. Everyone’s hammering that mom–she’s divorced, unemployed, living in a small house with parents who have a million bucks’ worth of debt, and she’s already got six kids. So she has in vitro fertilization to have eight more. But isn’t that exactly what the Feds have done? Last fall, they gave birth to an $850 billion bailout they couldn’t afford and didn’t have enough time to keep an eye on, and now four months later they’re going to do it all over again, but this time they want trillionuplets. Barney and Nancy represent the in vitro fertilization of the federal budget.
And Mark has words of sympathy for high-ranking Democrats who don’t want to pay their taxes:
The bloated non-stimulus and the under-taxed nominees are part of the same story. I’m with Tom Daschle: I understand why he had no desire to toss another six-figure sum into the great sucking maw of the federal treasury. Who knows better than a senator who’s voted for every tax increase to cross his desk that all this dough is entirely wasted? Tom and Tim Geithner and Charlie Rangel and all the rest are right: They can do more good with the money than the United States government can. I only wish they followed the logic of their behavior and recognized that what works for them would also work for every other citizen.
Mark notes that we’re past the point where anyone still thinks Barack Obama can walk on water, but “he should at least be able to paddle in it.” Obama better start paddling pretty soon, because his canoe is heading for a waterfall.
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