Published: November 10, 2008 03:03 pm            

Cheese lines forming soon

“I will keep my freedom, my guns, and my money — you can keep the ‘Change’.”

Bumper sticker on Southern car





This presidential election is mercifully over. There is something inherently corrupt about two candidates raising a billion dollars to get a job that pays $390,000 a year. The process is too long and painful, and I think Hillary Clinton and John Edwards will start campaigning for the 2012 Iowa Caucus next week.

I suggest that we decide our leader by a duel. It would be short, sweet, decisive, and would greatly reduce any future bellyaching by the loser. It would also be uncorrupted by campaign money’s influence, favor a Southerner, and great for TV ratings. I would call it “Survivor: Washington.” What better way to determine who would indeed be the best Commander-In-Chief?

This election has made one alarming thing clear to me: we have evolved into two differing groups of people. There are those who are independent, self-reliant, hard working and who expect little, if anything, from the government; and then there is the burgeoning class of folks who believe that they should be taken care of by others, namely the government. It seems the government-dependent, welfare state contingent just won the right to rule the country, dealing an ominous setback to the productive members of society. I guess it began in 1999, when Congress made Fannie Mae a social program and the American dream of owning a home became a right. The “right” of health care is next; what could possibly go wrong with government involvement there?

Where you fall in this category depends entirely on your definition of two words: need and greed. “Greedy” is what 49 percent of the people are who want to keep more of the money that they earn; “need” is the excuse of the other 51 percent for taking more of that money.

I hope that the new nanny government stays at the state level and does not become some national government cheese program. If San Francisco or a state like California wants to coddle the slothful by encouraging dependent behavior, they will attract those types of citizens and foot the bill for them. Because if you give it, they will come. No group of people knows better where the government cheese lines form than the ruling mooching class.

There is one thing for sure: if those who spent their time deciphering the complexities of government’s largesse to exploit it had spent that energy looking for work, they would not need a handout. There was a story recently about a woman who has been living on FEMA support for three years after her apartment was damaged by Hurricane Katrina. And our government continues to pay her. If government gives it, it is not the truly needy who take it; sadly, it is the truly conniving.

To illustrate my point, heed the recent tale of an Atlanta woman who carefully analyzed state laws and opportunities and determined that she could legally dump her 12-year-old boy on the state of Nebraska to raise, thanks to the vague wording of its “Safe Haven” law. In fairness to her, the rich have been outsourcing the rigors of raising a boy for years; they just call it military or boarding school.

This woman got in her car and drove 1,400 miles to Nebraska to dump her troublesome kid at a hospital there, where, by law, they are prevented from turning her in or prosecuting her. Better yet for her, they have to raise the hellion. I am glad my mom did not know this, as I would be a corn-fed Nebraska Cornhusker now.

For the 49 percent of us who are self-sufficient, we call that shirking responsibility. The newly empowered, welfare state crowd of Obama’s Kool-Aid drinkers, however, will find a way to justify this. They will say this single mother was a dutiful, stay-at-home mom, and not just because of the court-ordered electronic ankle bracelet; she just could not find suitable work. By “suitable” work, I think she means any work.

She is not unlike that Louisiana woman still living on FEMA money (our tax dollars) since Katrina. According to this lady, she just cannot find work that “suits her schedule,” a schedule that I can only assume includes Oprah, soap operas, and daytime Obama rallies. It is tragic that our capitalistic and free society, long the envy of the world, is now heading down the road to socialism.

        

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