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With President Panic shakily steering the country through his third wobbly week in office, and Mayor I Love Me up for a cinch re-election in Los Angeles in 22 days, only a curmudgeon would kvetch about the abysmal state of American governance.
When you have a President who pitched his moral compass overboard one night in college 28 years ago when he was heavenly high on drugs and a Mayor who needs a GPS to find City Hall, is it any wonder we are in fiscal trouble.
Each Democratic leader is desperately pushing his own secretive document that he says his constituents must embrace or risk a catastrophe.
In the old days of more adult politicians, you would take such a threat soberly.
But how can you swallow the callous words of these medicine men?
Take Mr. Obama: Like a cheerleader waving pom-poms as high as he can reach, the President is swinging the Senate Stimulus Bill around his mightily troubled head as if this largely unknown trillion-dollar-plus document bore the sacredness of the Declaration of Independence.
In Los Angeles, Mr. Villaraigosa’s analogue is Prop. B on the March 3 ballot, a wily green-based boondoggle that, I guarantee, is understood by less than one half of 1 percent of the electorate.
If Prop. B passes, it will be such a global bonanza for the shady leadership tier of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers that even the anti-religious unionists will thank God every day the rest of their lives.
Here is how former Los Angeles Times labor writer Bill Boyarsky, a reliable left-winger, describes Prop. B:
“The measure would authorize the department to install solar panels on commercial, industrial and other buildings and in parking lots. The power would flow into the Dept. of Water and Power system, where it would supplement power from fossil fuel plants and a nuclear facility. IBEW workers would install the panels and the many new employees needed for the installations would boost the union membership. The panels would generate 400 megawatts of power by 2014. A megawatt is a million watts. If that’s hard to visualize, think of a 100-watt light bulb and multiply.”
As a test, say it over in your own words.
I didn’t think you could.
Prop. B is the kind of abstract scam that a morally crooked politician such as Mayor I Love Me craves, exactly what he needs to deflect attention in his re-election campaign from his dreary warm-up term for the Governor’s office.
As with the Stimulus Bill, the vagueness of the concept, the utter absence of concrete information — such as its cost, its implementation and its effect — are not known by anyone who regularly inhabits this planet.
But, by golly, we must pass it. We must.
They Won the Liberal Lottery
Liberals only dream of having a Prop. B plopped into their generous laps because when touting its critical parameters and the necessity of passage, they can wander all over a rhetorical landscape. They hate specificity. Meanwhile, they can sound as if they are saving the world — for the third or fourth time this week.
Sit down and think hard. In the last two weeks, have you heard Mr. Obama offer one single vital insight, one piece of hard information, about the Stimulus Bill?
He has cried to the top of his quivering lungs how America will fall into an ocean of emotion, though, if the bill is not passed.
He is hitting his beloved constituents over the head with a baseball bat instead of conducting himself as an adult, as a leader, and explaining which portions are crucial and why.
His rhetoric is hit-and-run, which was so obvious during the campaign. He has not explained, just panicked.
I am confident he could not discuss the innards of the bill. He is the horn on the car, not, emphatically not, the daddy of the family, the head of household, the driver.
His immaturity, his complete lack of a compass, are as obvious as his rabbit-ears.
Pardon Me While I Gag
Back in Los Angeles, Prop. B looks like a good bet to pass because of brute force, absent any rational reasoning.
If you have watched Mr. Obama try to make a presentation without a script before him, then you know what Mr. Villaraigosa sounds like when he is pressed for specifics by serious reporters — both of them.
He stutters and evades, just as Mr. Obama does, when he cannot afford to be precise because that would blow the game.
You may remember that President Panic and Mayor I Love Me criticized the previous President for regularly employing scare tactics. Look at them now.
There are only two reporters in all of Los Angeles seeking to hold Mr. Villaraigosa accountable, one from the Los Angeles Daily News, one from the Times.
The Mayor, in response, sounds as if he still is lying to his wife about cheating on her when he sneaked into the bedroom.
But, as you know in this era of cartoon politics, if you mention possible benefits for the environment, that is all that is required for passage. The Gore clones start running around like mice on steroids. No matter how drunken crazy the scheme, we are supposed to fall to our knees and bellow, “All hail to the god of earth, wind and fire.”
Just as the global-warming movement is falling apart for the 75th time.
Mr. Boyarsky, even in retirement, remains such a journalistic turkey that he will vigorously back any liberal cause. Yeah, government.
Who cares what it costs? he says. We are saving the earth.
Here is the old boy’s reasoning:
“Despite all the questions, I think Prop. B is a good plan. Solar is perfect for sunny L.A. Green industry is the wave of the future. It’s smart to have our public power utility do the work instead of a variety of private contractors. It’s good that DWP union workers will do the installations. We need more union jobs, which strengthen the economy by expanding the middle class.”
To say it differently on Mr. Boyarsky’s behalf, I don’t know anything about it, but Prop. B has to be good because the team of big government and big union is unassailable.
