Quote of the week
According to Roberta X, this was found “sealed in a tin below a midden-pile in the ruined USian city of Trento, dating uncertain”:
Most Esteemed Diary,
At Education today in the Sharing, before we ate our beans and rice, we celebrated the 25th anniversary of Dear Leader’s gift of a new puppy to his obedient daughters. The Group-Mother reminded us that it was an example of the importance of sharing (one puppy, two children) and obeying our Leaders, who are more dear to us than than parents and who are leading us to peace and prosperity. After we ate, we shared crayons and colored in pictures of puppies. I didn’t feel very hungry at all. We could drink all the water we wanted because it was special day. The Group-Mother started screaming strange things about poor starving ragged children and the National Service Helpers had to take her away. I don’t know who she was talking about. We got to go home early and Jimi said the Group-Mother was probably going to have to go to Education herself but he’s bad and doesn’t share very good. I think he was trying to be mean about my Daddy.
Before he had to go away to learn how to follow Dear Leader better, my Daddy told me about the puppies he had when he was a boy. I wish I had a puppy. Daddy said they were delicious roasted or boiled. Maybe when we all learn how to share properly, everybody will get puppies. At least once a year.
I’m getting the distinct impression that “Education” in that era is roughly comparable to “Rehabilitation” in Mike Judge’s Idiocracy.
Dan B »
7 November 2008 · 10:43 am
Do Republicans think this is going to happen because Obama is President? FDR was President how long? Never happened. The Democrats controlled Congress for 40 years from 1955-1995, and it didn’t happen. But with ‘W’ in just a few short years we got the jack-booted thugs, the 24/7 surveillance, and prisons without trial or escape.
If the choice is a bloated incompetent bureaucracy or the sudden disappearance of citizens because they “might be terrorists”, give me the bureaucracy and quickly. Bureaucrats can at least be bribed into doing the right thing, self-righteous jack-boots won’t change their “mind” for anything.
Tatyana »
7 November 2008 · 12:55 pm
Would you prefer “prisons with escape”, Dan B?
Strangely, in my professional experience (design of detention centers, among other things), the biggest proponents of security measures are inevitably liberals/lefties who vote Democrat. Fences, solid steel doors, metal ceilings, tamper-free ligh fixtures, masonry blocks instead of GWB, concealed hardware….all the while calling their charges “kids”.
Tam »
7 November 2008 · 1:24 pm
Not a fan of the ol’ history, are you, Dan?
Nisei much? Abe Lincoln suspending habeus corpus? Alien & Sedition acts?
If some people would change their “minds” about being historically illiterate, maybe we wouldn’t keep making the same dumb mistakes over and over and over…
Roberta X »
7 November 2008 · 1:54 pm
Which “jack-booted thugs” would those be? The ones in Janet Reno’s ATF? Who’s surveilling you? Why are escape-proof prisons bad and which citizens have been denied trial?
FDR managed to prolong the Great Depression and created vast new Federal agencies and greatly expanded Federal payroll. –Not that Presidents (and Congressthings) who came after didn’t keep up the same trend, mind you.
Over the forty years of Democrat-controlled Congress, the US went from bad to worse — from a safe nation, where kids bought .22 ammunition (and rifles!) at the corner hardware store to a dangerous country, where gun purchases required Federal approval from a limited group of Federally-licensed dealers and young adults shot one another with illegally-obtained firearms. Over those 40 years, unwed motherhood rates closely tracked Federal handouts, especially in the nation’s big cities, and a growing sense of entitlement undermined pride in achievement among the worst-off citizens. Democrat social programs kept having the opposite effect to what they claimed was intended and yet they kept piling them on, almost as though they wanted to turn the States into one big plantation.
There’s no telling what might have happened under Republicans in those years, or even (best of all) if we’d managed to achieve near gridlock in the Executive and Legislative branches and certainly the huge strides made in that time to eliminate racial barriers were a worthy achievement. But to claim one side is made up of saints and the other wholly villainous..? Nonsense. They’re politicians, perhaps a necessary evil but an evil nonetheless, which is why Federal powers are (at least in theory) limited. We expand them at our peril and the incoming Administration has promised to expand them greatly.
My little story is imaginary. For a real look at the well-fed prosperity socialism brings, have a look at North Korea or the old Soviet Union.
And by the bye, we’ve had a Democrat majority in Congress for the last two years — why didn’t they stop watching you 24/7, or at least put the watchers in less-oppressive boots? Darn ‘em. It’s almost like they don’t care how you feeeeeel.