Useless "Leaders"

By Alan Caruba

In a democracy you have to try to elect leaders who will not lie to you. Unfortunately, that eliminates most of the members of Congress and a succession of recent Presidents. I find it nothing less than astonishing that “everyone knows” that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are accomplished liars, but that she is actually running to be the next president.

If you can just stand back a moment from that total absurdity, knowing that millions of dollars are being sent to her and that voters have actually chosen her over her opponent, and that her chief qualification for the job is that she is the wife of a former president, you can begin to grasp that too many Americans are horribly removed from reality, common sense or anything that passes for serious judgment.

The other absurdity, of course, is a young, Black Senator who hasn’t even made it through half of his first six-year term in office running for the highest office in the land. It’s fascinating to watch all the “Obamamania” fade away as people discover what a raving Leftist he is. All that blather about change may dazzle younger voters, but they don’t show up at the polls in the numbers older ones do. By the time the Republicans get through slicing and dicing this lad, he’s going to wish he’d stayed in Chicago.

It is no surprise to see Bush’s popularity numbers plunge lower and lower these days. He has been such an incredible disappointment to Republicans and everyone else that historians are already writing him off based on his performance in office.

He will leave a nation in desperate financial straits and I get the feeling he just doesn’t care. If he did, why would he have signed that bill mandating billions of gallons of ethanol, the effect of which has been food riots around the world and skyrocketing costs here at home? For the first four years of his time in office, he signed every spending bill that crossed his desk. Not one single veto. In nearly eight year’s time, he hasn’t been able to find one very tall Saudi in the mountains of Waziristan or anywhere else. We have satellites that can read a license plate in Red Square, but we can't find Osama bin Laden.

If the two Democrat candidates weren’t so pathetic, John McCain wouldn’t have a chance following an unpopular President into office during bad economic times, and with an unpopular war still in progress. That has never happened in the history of the presidency, but McCain has proven to be so dumb lucky that he might pull it off.

When you look around at the rest of the world, you see the same horrid collection of despots, dictators, and kleptomaniacs running nations as existed in former times. Then add in the farce of the United Nations and you have the latest loser, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who, on the first world Malaria Day said that what Africans need is 500 million bed nets. That’s right, bed nets!

This assumes that mosquitoes don’t bite Africans during the day and kill a million of them every year from Malaria. What Africa and the rest of the world needs is DDT. But the United States banned it some years back because of the usual stinking pile of environmental lies about it.

I’ll finish up this rant noting that, back when its use was permitted, the same DDT had virtually eliminated the problem of bed bugs in America. Can you name the number one pest problem in the nation today? Bed bugs!

Editor's Note: It has been suggested that DDT was not effective against bed bugs when it was used during the 1950s, but this is not true.

This is what Michael F. Potter, Extension Entomologist, University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, has written:

"Most householders of this generation have never seen a bed bug. Until recently, they also were a rarity among pest control professionals. Bed bug infestations were common in the United States before World War II. But with improvements in hygiene, and especially the widespread use of DDT during the 1940s and '50s, the bugs all but vanished."

I have worked closely with the pest management industry since the 1980s. My sources tell me that DDT was an effective pesticide against bed bugs.