Election 2000

Election 2000

Oct. 28, 2000

STRAIGHT TALK
By Muriel Sluyter

Greetings, Gentle Reader,

This year, I am going to vote NO on everything except Amendment 25 and Referenda B and D. Some of the proposals address genuine problems, but I don’t like these particular answers. The framers need to do a better job before they get my vote.

When President Reagan appointed Dr. Bill Bennett as his Secretary of Education, the intellectuals had fits by the score. Bennett was not their cup of tea, and they burned up the editorial pages with their scathing denunciations.

At the next cabinet meeting, Reagan read one editorial after another. Facetiously, Bennett says the people around him began moving their chairs away, as though he had been designated ground-zero for an explosion of presidential wrath. Reagan finished reading and said, "That’s what Bennett is doing; what’s wrong with the rest of you?"

Reagan had been denounced as a dumb actor during his run for the presidency. Fortunately for the American people, he was anything but dumb (nor was he sly and devious). But most of all, he was neither a progressive (see liberal) nor an intellectual, who inspired his detractors to embarrassingly great heights of literary silliness.

We don’t need an intellectual. Jimmy Carter was an intellectual of sorts. He presided over the disarmament of America, an explosion of devastating inflation, unbelievably high interest rates, and the hostage-taking of our people by Iranian hoods.

Woodrow Wilson was an intellectual. He gave us the income tax, which gave us the predatory agency that enforces it, the IRS. He gave us the Federal Reserve banking system, which was supposed to steady our economy, keeping it from going into inflation or depression. Ironically, it was in full power well before the Great Depression.

Wilson was a visionary, and he did a tremendous amount of good. But as is common with such, he didn’t realize that, with the income tax, he was introducing an innocuous-appearing tiger kitten that would grow up into the vicious predator called the IRS.

FDR was both an intellectual and a visionary. He, too, did a great deal of good, but he gave us the War Powers Act, which allow a president to bypass Congress and run the country by himself, if he is sufficiently arrogant and unprincipled enough to do so.

Since we now have an arrogant and unprincipled president, we are being inundated by land-grabs by the federal government. The President can do these things if he chooses; all he does is sign an executive order or a Presidential Decision Directive (which can be kept secret).

Now, we are being bombarded with the message that Gore is a real brain, while Bush is too dumb to come in out of the rain, much less walk and chew gum at the same time. True or false? Well, Bush did his postgraduate work at a Harvard business school, and he graduated. Let’s just say that Gore didn’t do quite that well and let it go at that.

Many of Gore’s supporters insist that his propensity for lying is of less importance than his much-vaunted intelligence. Some media people say his lying seems to be psychological, therefore, since he isn’t capable of restraining himself, let’s just not hold it against him. That is ridiculous. We’ve already had eight years of one man who couldn’t control himself.

Bush’s record in Texas is good; the people like him. He says he is a good manager; that he appoints men who are smarter than he is in the fields of their expertise, then he doesn’t try to take credit for their successes.

That is a novel approach. I could learn to like it.