WITHIN MINUTES after the Oklahoma disaster, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse indecently blamed Republicans and, to my ear, conservative southerners.
When cyclones tear up Oklahoma and hurricanes swamp Alabama and wildfires scorch Texas, you come to us, the rest of the country, for billions of dollars to recover. And the damage that your polluters and deniers are doing doesn't just hit Oklahoma and Alabama and Texas. It hits Rhode Island with floods and storms. It hits Oregon with acidified seas. It hits Montana with dying forests.
With equally unseemly dispatch -- and for the same goal -- the Houston Chronicle also rushed to capitalize on the human suffering. That goal: to defend and promote . . .
. . . the Leviathan state, toward which too many, in Mr. Whitehouse's and the Chronicle's view, are insufficiently submissive.
[The tornado] is a reminder . . . of the binding ties of community. Whether it's Oklahoma City Thunder basketball star Kevin Durant offering $1 million for tornado relief through his family foundation or the Moore elementary-shool teacher who lay her body atop as many children as she could, we do what we can to help.
Here's another expression of community: government. Talk-show bloviators can sneer and critics can find ready targets, but government is a key tool available to us to accomplish what we can't accomplish for ourselves. It's an expression of our collective will, a mechanism to marshal our collective strength.
Whether it's a tornado in Oklahoma or a hurricane along the Gulf Coast, a natural disaster is a dramatic reminder that government at all levels -- citizens acting in concert -- deserves our attention, maintenance and support. Disdain is not enough.
(Editorial, "Our hearts go out to the tornado victims," houstonchronicle.com, May 22, 2013)
What the editors huffed and puffed and blew down here, however, is a straw house -- imagined conservative opposition to all government.
Those of us who favor limited government cannot by definition be declared anti-government. We favor the national government of enumerated powers established by the United States Constitution, with all powers not delegated to the national government reserved for state governments and the people.
That's government. We're for it.
We also naturally support the claims of states, local governments, and -- most importantly, citizens -- against the actual and potential excesses of the national government. Abuses like being targeted by the Internal Revenue Service for our political views. Like having reporters' telephone records in the unclean hands of America's lawless attorney general. Like having political transparency and accountability for the inexplicable passivity that gripped our nation's political and military leaders as barbarians in Libya killed a U.S. ambassador.
Blather about "collective will" and "collective strength" is European-style rhetoric. It rings false to the American ear. This vocabulary is recycled from Jean Jacques Rousseau, intellectual progenitor of most of the bad ideas at the heart of modern Wilsonian progressivism.
People who talk this way would empower the instrumentalities of the state to tax, spend, and regulate the rest of us to the limits of our capacity to bear, then beyond.
To take but one example, our national government is spending America into bankruptcy. Call it the "collective will" run amok. America prints and borrows money promiscuously. This moral and fiscal indiscipline matters, and it matters more, frankly, than the Oklahoma tornado.
But it matters not to the Chronicle, which -- eager not to let this excellent crisis go to waste -- demeans critics of big government as "talk-show bloviators" who "sneer" and critics eager to "find ready targets."
"Disdain is not enough," the editors declare.
Who said it was?
The Chronicle fights an imagined foe with unworthy arguments.
The real issue is not whether government but how much? For the Chronicle, the answer is always the same: more, more, more.
Against those who see that issue differently, the newspaper self-righteously bloviates and sneers, and shows naught but disdain.
* * *
As for Senator Coburn's opposition to the Hurricane Sandy bill, it was, as he said, a "slush fund." Read his statement yourself and explain where he is wrong.
The legitimate spending for hurricane relief in the Sandy bill was almost buried under the tons of pork shoveled in by Democrats.
The unserious Houston Chronicle presumably thinks that was fine and dandy. Mr. Coburn, a serious man, takes the other side of the question. He's right. Good for him.
* * *
Also flattened by the tornado: Columnist Kyrie O'Connor's sense of decency.
She looked at the wreckage and condemned everyone within the ambit of the pronoun we, presumably including you, me, and all the grieving mommies and daddies in Oklahoma.
The deaths of school children demonstrate, she avers, that "we really don't care about kids."
Does this newspaper even have editors anymore?
Heck, forget editors. Does it even have human beings?
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