Cal-gone

It's my weekly penance to read the Cal Thomas column in the paper. Sort of like fasting, except with my brain instead of my belly. I'll admit that every once in a great while the moons of Saturn align with the moons of Pluto and I find myself in agreement with Mr. Thomas. His column about the War On Christmas, for example, was almost sane.

But that was like, a month ago, and the real Cal's off the medication and back in the saddle. We were only three sentences into this week's column when we hit this:

Given the threats posed by foreign and domestic terrorists, Democrats risk exposing Kaine as an inexperienced lightweight who is not in the president's league of knowledge and experience.

Good Lord Cal, did those pants come with the kneepads sewn in, or is that something you had the wife help you with? We moved on, to give Cal some privacy to regain his dignity. A paragraph later we have:

Virginia has a surplus of $1 billion dollars, but Democrats think they never have enough of our money and so, like unsatisfied vampires, they are constantly looking for new sources of blood.

I guess "creature of the night" is a step up from "al-queada loving terrorist" so we'll let that one slide. Discussion on Gov. Kaine's impending highway boondogle follows, culminating with:

If Kaine were as smart as his supporters say he is, he would steal from what Republicans used to do when they resembled Republicans. He would cut spending.

That'll slay the vampire! Just cut spending! I'm sure there's plenty of dollars to be squeezed out of Virginia's poor people that could stay with the people that the system gave them to in the first place. We then get some examples of government waste from the 2003 legislative session, when the previous Governor was in charge.

We continue with a portrait in courage:

Faced with budget problems, Sanford formed a commission in 2003 that identified wasteful spending. Adopting the commission's recommendations produced $225 million in immediate savings, with further annual savings of $300 million. Last year, he proposed a budget without a tax increase.

Hey, isn't that what Howard Dean managed to do in Vermont? Cal's about out of steam by this point, but he does manage one final swipe:

That virtually his first act as governor was to announce plans for another round of tax hikes with nothing said about spending reductions marks him as an old Democrat, not a new one.

And there we have it. We'd like new Democrats that run just slightly right of center and destroy the party, instead of old Democrats who got shit done for everyday Americans. Only with fewer hummers please. That's Cal's job.

Comments

[Dr. Mike Kear]

Preach on, dude. You're making sense.