Colorado is such a delightful place. Where else do you need to worry about snowstorms in August and forest fires in January? In an effort to put those worries behind me, I called my favorite inside source in Washington, D.C.: Ananias Ziegler, a retired lieutenant colonel who serves as media relations director for the Committee That Really Runs America.
After the usual pleasantries, he got down to business. “I suppose you’re calling about those secret wiretaps,” he said.
“That’s a good place to start. I don’t know why I should be paying my own government to snoop on me,” I began.
“Wait a minute. You don’t know for sure that the National Security Agency is monitoring your communications. In fact, you’ll probably never know. So you don’t have anything real to complain about. This is just the usual liberal whining about civil liberties and the Fourth Amendment and all that other knee-jerk stuff. Trust me, we’ll get to the bottom of this, find out who leaked that top-secret information to you seditious jackals in the media, and punish them appropriately – maybe in one of those secret prisons that we don’t have in eastern Europe. And besides, it’s a perfectly legitimate use of the president’s war-time powers.”
“What war-time powers?” I asked. “The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to declare war, and the last time that happened was on June 5, 1942, with declarations against Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania. If we’re not at war then how can he have war-time powers?”
Ziegler sighed, as if I were a child with a learning disability. “There you go again with technicalities like Article I of the Constitution. You ought to read a little further, like into Article II, and you’ll see that the president is your commander in chief.”
“No, he isn’t,” I parried. “And he’s not yours, either. The Constitution says he ‘shall be the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.’ That means soldiers and sailors on active duty. I haven’t been on active duty since 1972. What about you?”
Ziegler conceded that he had left the service years ago, but “we like to trot out that ‘commander in chief’ stuff because it fools a lot of citizens into thinking they’re under some obligation to take orders from the president. You’d be surprised by the poor state of civics education in this country.”
No, I wouldn’t be surprised, so I asked about education. “I just read that 15 states have sued the federal government because the cost of new testing under the No Child Left Behind Act is at least as much as the new funding budgeted for the act.”
Ziegler chuckled. “What better way to make it appear that we’re in favor of improving education when we’re really in favor of a docile population? Or, as your hero H.L. Mencken put it more than 80 years ago, ‘the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages.’ That makes the committee’s vital work so much easier.”
I had to concede his point, so I changed the subject, and asked, “What’s the official spin on the Jack Abramoff scandal?”
“Jack who?” Then Ziegler laughed. “We’ll put it out that it’s a bipartisan mess. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll blame it all on a sad fact of human nature.”
“That no one is perfect?” I asked.
“More than that. A lot of these guys ran for Congress really believing in a smaller, less-intrusive government and all that. But if we had a small federal government, it wouldn’t be worth lobbying, and our senators and representatives wouldn’t be nearly as important. So after they get here, no matter what they might have believed earlier, they want a big, intrusive government so they can dole out the pork while lobbyists make sure they have ample campaign funds to keep them in power. It’s kind of sad, when you think about it.”
“So that will be the official spin?” I asked in conclusion.
“Indeed. Think of them not as greedy, power-hungry hypocrites, but as victims.”
Ed Quillen of Salida is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
