The Monster-Bill Factory at Work

Ron Paul says that the bill to create a Department of Homeland Security is a monster that came out of the DC Monster-Bill Factory at blinding speed. It's that Bill-Factory I'd like to consider briefly.

Here's some of what Paul said as posted November 15 on LRC:

Fiscally conservative members of Congress were even told that the bill would be budget neutral! Yet, when the House of Representatives initially considered creating a Department of Homeland Security, the legislative vehicle almost overnight grew from 32 pages to 282 pages – and the cost had ballooned to at least $3 billion. Now we are prepared to vote on a nearly 500-page bill that increases federal expenditures and raises troubling civil liberties questions. Adding insult to injury, this bill was put together late last night and introduced only this morning. Worst of all, the text of the bill has not been made readily available to most members, meaning this Congress is prepared to create a massive new federal agency without even knowing the details. This is a dangerous and irresponsible practice.

My question is how is the miracle of production achieved that puts together nearly 500 pages (484 exactly, Paul says later) overnight.

Answer: it is not done, not even with zippy computers and an army of high-speed flacks typing faster than a man can talk.

I am reminded of a visit to a New York City typographer's shop years ago, when computerized so-called cold type was just getting going. In those days, long before PCs, the copy was typed on clunky electric keyboards and a machine produced punched paper tape that would then be fed into the actual type-composing unit. The whole thing depended on getting low-pay typists to go at dazzling speeds. The queen of that shop was a tiny young black woman who could input (I think they said) at well over 100 words a minute. I asked how come. Answer: she had total concentration, great dexterity, and absolute incuriosity about the material she was copying. She went from a on the page to a on the keyboard in a nanosecond or less. No intervening mentation. Maybe they have a lot of these young ladies in DC.

But then somebody has to compose the copy, that is, think it and write it. And something tells me that was not done overnight. No, while I can say with certainty that Ron Paul is telling us God's truth that the monster bill appeared out of nowhere in no time at all, it was not so produced. The thing was planned with great cunning; the copy was long in preparation (actually we've been hearing about this great new department since shortly after 9-11). It was only the last step – the high speed wrap-up and assembly – that was done "overnight," for the obvious purpose of minimizing the possibility of study and debate by the congresspersons, who can only get in trouble by trying to understand what they are doing. These worthies are expected to "get the general idea," not bother with fussy details, pay attention to what their betters are telling them to do, and get with the program.

The program, that is, as dictated by the Amurrican peeple in the recent great election, which huge numbers of Amurrican peeple carefully stayed away from so as not to be thought complicit in the doings of the feddle gummint.

I applaud Congressman Paul for complaining about this and for sticking with so clearly corrupt and stupid an institution as our Congress, in an effort to try to inject a little true patriotism and intelligence into their daily longueurs.

Paul hints that the dice they are playing with in Congress are loaded. The game is rigged. Well, but of course. The questions as always are who is doing the rigging and for what purpose.

The Net is alive with conspiracy theories, many of which look more and more reasonable the less and less reasonable are our national affairs and policies. I just finished a book written in 1969 that makes as a major point that, of course, FDR was not a traitor, so people accusing him of being one had to be crazy, right? No, wrong, because it has now been established by reasonable people – at least at the level of citizens who have read carefully enough into the case, that by any reasonable standards FDR was indeed a traitor, because he knowingly and willfully put American servicemen and their weaponry into jeopardy – and indeed thousands were killed – when he failed to warn them of an attack he knew was coming, precisely because he had "engineered" it.

FDR's treasonous deed occurred more than 50 years ago. If there are any honest historians left fifty years from now, what will they be saying about the present mess?

With the last fifty years to review for lessons, it has to be obvious to the people in charge, whoever they are, that the recording of events needs to be under much more rigid (Orwellian) control than government managed following WWII, so that the truth of our time does not get out. Thus the Department of Homeland Security. But it is equally obvious to me and I suppose many others that no such effort can ever succeed. It is anti-natural and anti-human, and so condemned to fail. Not that it won't cause much unpleasantness in the meantime. That you can count on, because it seems to be almost the chief business of government in our time. We live in a time of unpleasant government and ugly art and weak-kneed religion and spineless politics. But you don't have to let it all get you, which it is threatening to do to me as I write this. Where, I ask myself, is my sense of humor? It has apparently got up and git, as the old song had it.

A friend who just emailed me uses this salutation: "Whistle while you trudge." Trudge it is, but one can whistle. Or as Samuel Johnson put it a couple of hundred years ago (and remember, you have to make allowances for shifts in the language): "The needy traveler, serene and gay, walks the wild heath and sings his toil away."

Or, as the Master said, "In the world, ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world" (John 16:33).

November 16, 2002