You are here
Home ›And then I wrote...
by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus
... that I wouldn’t be surprised if I received a call today asking for support of a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, or a pollster asking my opinion. After all, the latest election was yesterday.
After being pestered for weeks by robot calls and polltakers, I decided to vote early. Someone suggested that was a way to stop the calls. I didn’t see how that was going to work, and it did not. I still received calls.
That decreased my belief in the polls. I answered the same questions in three separate calls, for example. There were real people making those calls. I know because twice I informed the “voice” that I had already voted, and the voice said it didn’t matter in one case, and in another case she would “make a note of that” and went right on. One of the poll takers represented an outfit in Virginia.
I realized that in answering the questions, I had revealed how I had voted in those races it covered. So my secret ballot wasn’t secret anymore. But I don’t mind. I’d have been happy to say why I voted the way I did, if they had asked.
My general feeling at this point is there is too much politics and too many politicians. Oddly enough, I am reading a book right now about the Internal Revenue Service. “The Pale King” is actually a collection of notes and stand-alone, previously published stories about a book, assembled by a third person after the 2008 death of author David Foster Wallace, and it was published in 2011 by Little, Brown and Company. So although it is about the IRS bureaucracy, it just barely predates Lois Lerner and her cronies of the current scandal. But the IRS, I sense, will not come out well as I finish the book.
I cite it only because one sentence, taken from an appellate court opinion, pretty much sums up my feeling about big government, suggesting that government bureaucracy is “the only known parasite larger than the organism on which it subsists.” In other words, government sucks us all dry.
But life isn’t fair, is it?
In the latest attempt by someone to reach the White House by climbing a fence, it was noted proudly that two dogs controlled by the Secret Service had foiled the attempt, holding the culprit until help arrived, but being slightly injured in the fight. The dogs had their names published and mug shots printed and they were highly praised.
About that same time, I read where two jail escapees from Muscatine County in Iowa were re-captured in nearby Illinois after they were held at bay in a wooded area by two coyotes.
In the “roast” words of the late comedian George Goebel, the coyotes “never got a banquet.”
Why not? They share a family Latin name, canis familiaris for the dogs, canis latrans for coyotes.
So, where is the ACLU? Where are the reverends Jackson and Sharpton? Where is Eric Holder?
It doesn’t seem fair!