Washington, Our No-Spine Zone

by George F. Smith

Suppose one day you meet with a security specialist to safeguard your business. They're called "For Everyone's Defense"--FED. Fed tells you what bad things could happen and how they'll protect you from them. You say okay and sign up.

Your contract provides you with two well-trained and armed agents, who stay mostly out of sight but within easy reach. You also get a detective you never see but who scouts the area looking for threats.

Time passes and everything's peaceful. Then your bill goes up. "What gives?" you ask. They tell you they're doing more than security work, they're into helping others and need additional money to pay for it. You start to object, but feel a twinge of guilt and go along with it.

Your monthly bill continues to rise. And one of the armed agents is missing.

"He's not missing, he's protecting you from a different location," Fed assures you.

"Where?" you ask.

"Overseas."

You grumble, but gosh, they've taken the trouble to include a full-color brochure with your bill in which Charlie Brown and gang explain all the many ways they're helping people, including aliens.

Next time you talk to them it's by pay phone across from the smoldering ruins of your once-prosperous business, as rescue workers dig through rubble searching for your employees.

"This is no time to be pointing fingers!" they sneer. "Our detective's chasing down a lead but he needs help. We'll need more money."

"You're fired," you tell them.

"We're also going to run random checks on your bank account, audit your tax returns, fuse an ID chip to your brain, confiscate your luggage--"

You hang up, steady yourself, then put the phone to your ear to call another security firm. You're still connected.

"--savage your stock portfolio--"

You slam the phone down. This can't be happening. You wait a long minute and pick it up again. Now there's a chorus on the other end, singing--a cappella, loud, and off-key:

". . . From the mountains, to the prairies . . . ."

You drop the phone and run screaming down the street.

And in the real world, many Americans are singing to keep from screaming.

"Trust us," the government said. "We'll find the ones responsible for these egregious acts and bring them to justice, along with the states who sponsor them."

Most of us couldn't wait.

So we watched our strategy unfold. Licking the boots of the likes of Iran and Sudan? Iran, which hosts the biggest terrorist conventions in the world, and Sudan, known for exterminating Christians and fostering slave trade?

"The president has surrounded himself with the wisest foreign policy advisers available," David Limbaugh explained, in an attempt to comfort the doubting.

"Trust us," our government told us. "Get on planes again," they urged.

Flight attendants still don't feel safe. You might want to practice your spinning mule kick before taking off, just in case, since none of the flight crew will be legally armed. Either that or wait for a government fighter jet to blow you out of the sky.

"Go back to your normal lives," we were told.

And the government, heeding its own words, has done just that. Predictably, they're spending money like they had it, throwing billions at every problem above the fold. They've fattened themselves and shackled us for their total failure to protect the homeland from aggression.

The Feds discovered that 15 of the 19 suicide bombers of Sept. 11 were carrying legal visas issued from our consulates and embassies in Saudi Arabia, who hand them out like Halloween candy. Our guys will get around to fixing this, just wait, as soon as the House of Saud lets them. Meanwhile, determined visa-carrying terrorists can still use the Saudi express to come over here legally.

The permanent solution to unwanted visitors, the government suggests, is a national ID card. Right. And no permanent police state can exist without one, either. Of course, that's paranoid reasoning--this is America, we'll never have a police state. Treating terrorists and soccer moms alike is simply good sense. No terrorist could possibly circumvent an ID card scheme.

If anyone should carry an ID card it should be our elected officials--and Larry Ellison.

"Trust us," they tell us, as we see President Bush pay respects to anti-American Islamic leaders here in the U.S.

"Trust us." When anthrax first hit Florida it was only an "isolated incident," according to Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson.

Stay calm, nothing to worry about.

Then we saw them running like rats when the powder shows up in D.C.

Pols who lead by polls, who cold-shoulder friends and glad hand the enemy, who discourage criticism and curtail our liberty, surrender their right to be trusted. Instead of Cipro, they should look into getting a spine.

January 31, 2002

-- Anonymous, January 31, 2002