Don't Just Stand There. Panic!

By Alan Caruba

I am rather tired of having to panic every other day courtesy of the U.S. government. It started with seeing the former Secretary of the Treasury sweating profusely while demanding the Congress give him a blank check for $700 billion to bail out some financial institutions that probably should have been allowed to fail.

Many were given gobs of taxpayer money to avoid bankruptcy. Others were merged with those that hadn’t been as profligate.

In October 1929, Variety, the show business newspaper, had a headline that said “Wall Street Lays an Egg.” What followed was some ten years of a Depression that would not go away because the government did everything possible to prolong it in the name of ending it.

The so-called “brain trust” around Franklin D. Roosevelt made every wrong decision available. The Supreme Court had to step in to limit some of the damage at one point. Constitution? What Constitution?

About the only thing we are being told is not a cause for panic is the “war on terror”, a phrase that is no longer allowed to be used in official Washington where, apparently, if you don’t call a duck a duck it is no longer a duck. Nonetheless, we are also told that Afghanistan is the “front line” of the war on you-know-what even though there are no “front lines” in insurgencies or guerrilla wars.

Aside from the economy and the former war on you-know-what we are being assured that there are still sufficient causes for panic. We were told that unless the Cap-and-Trade act was passed, the planet would be destroyed by global warming. Apparently this will happen well before any member of Congress actually reads the bill.

Al Gore has been telling us this for quite some time and recently the Secretary General of the United Nations said we only had four months to act before we were doomed. Americans have, however, concluded, based on empirical observations of cold temperatures, expanding glaciers, and other indicators, that the Earth is cooling. No need for panic after all.

Having failed to panic about global warming, the very same Congress told us that we had to “reform” Medicare or terrible consequences would occur. Some sacrifices will have to be made to save Medicare. These include sacrificing crippled veterans and most of the old people in America because they require too much care. After that, Medicare will be okay, unless you get ill, are over age 65, and actually need medical care. The bill has been renamed KennedyCare to avoid any connection to Barack Obama.

Perhaps the most genuine cause for panic involves the economists on the President’s staff who managed to miss the amount of the federal deficit by two trillion dollars the first time they made their calculation. After that, feel free to panic about a deficit that your great grandchildren will be working to pay off.

Another likely cause for panic is the growing list of “czars” being gathered around the President. They are in charge of all the big things in the nation as well as things such as the Great Lakes and something called Green Jobs.

Following an attack on the homeland which could easily be perpetrated by hired thugs, the President is likely to get on television, peer deeply into his TelePrompter, and announce that his “czars” are now in charge and Congress has been dismissed along with the members of the Supreme Court. Remember, it only took 19 real terrorists to attack the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

Lastly, the CDC is presently spending $16 million dollars to ensure that Americans panic over the H1N1 flu which will be arriving the same time as all previous flu seasons. We call them seasons because some form of flu arrives in the autumn. This one, however, is raising questions, not about its lethality, but about the shots that will be involuntarily administered to school children to prevent its spread. Word is circulating that the new vaccine is more lethal than the flu. Were I a parent I would not permit my child to be innoculated with the swine flu vaccine, but if an alternative exists. it's probably a good idea.

Simply said, if you have ever had the flu, your immune system has already built up antibodies against a new strain and the vast number of people who get the flu feel lousy for a week and then recover. There is at this writing, no indication of a massive die-off occurring.

If you get the impression I no longer trust anything the President says or that our government is doing, you’re right. That is why I am refusing to panic.

Instead, I will be attending tea parties and will try to make it to Washington, D.C. on September 12 to join a protest that I hope will cause the White House and Congress to panic.