Saturday, May 02, 2009

No Crisis Is Wasted

No Crisis Is Wasted

In America, the chief of staff of the president famously said,
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste," Rahm Emanuel, Mr. Obama's new chief of staff, told a Wall Street Journal conference of top corporate chief executives this week. He elaborated: "This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
But this is by no means an exclusively American construct. In Egypt today, there are plans afoot to slaughter all the pigs in the country, citing the swine flu scare as a rationale. The World Health Organization and others claim that this is nonsense, as the vector for this flu is human to human and there has been no evidence that Egyptian swine even have any version of this flu. But governments everywhere will use any excuse they can get to make difficult decisions easier, and to use a trumped up "crisis" to enact unfavored legislation. As Egyptian health ministry spokesman Abdelrahman Shahine said,
"We're at stage five, the matter is now human not animal. The authorities took advantage of the situation to resolve the question of disorderly pig rearing in Egypt,"
The Coptic Christians are the ones officially rearing the swine, because muslim Egyptians are forbidden by Islamic law from eating pork. Do not doubt that this forbidden fruit is also eaten by apostate and irreligious moslems in Egypt as well, so now is a perfect time to destroy an indigenous industry. If they can kill all quarter million swine in Egypt, it is unlikely that these farmers will be able to reconstitute their herds anytime soon. Another victory for Pharaoh Mubarak, mirroring victories already chalked up by Obama. There will be more of this to come, to be sure. Only today democrats have said that they sense opportunity afoot in the area of Gay marriage. People are not as concerned with maintaining the moral health of civilized society while their 401ks are in the dumps. Most Americans may be against it, 55% to 38%, but democrats are for it, but this is about power, nothing more. And so it goes.

Things may look a bit bleak these days for zero base thinkers, but things have a way of working themselves out. So I will leave you with a snippet from David Harsanyi's column from yesterday.
As the left continues to lecture conservatives about their political future -- because, after all, Dems have been fully in charge for more than 100 days now -- let's recount a couple of facts: The Iraq war was supported by more than 60 percent of Americans. Polls showed wide-ranging support for the Patriot Act. Jimmy Carter was once president.

What's beloved today may be reviled tomorrow. Americans are a fickle bunch.