BHO

FDR. JFK. LBJ. BHO.

It's what the DEMs do. Make it simple for us. Take intractable problems and pare them down to a few initials. That way a big Deal is made New, and oh so governable. What else after all is humanity itself but a hank of DNA just waiting to be manipulated?

We might however remain slightly skeptical when the tide of Sen Obama's rotund oration flows over us, carrying with it the warm, salty and slightly musky conviction that none have ever loved as we ourselves love now. What else are we to make of his troth?

"Because if we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth.”

Jeffrey Lord lays it out for us, how it's all been done before. Forget about the New Deal. LBJ's Great Society saved us in the Sixties from all the trials of humanity. That's why there is no poverty or pollution. You remain unconvinced. Huff. All right then. A partial list.

• College Facilities
• Clean Air
• Vocational Training
• Indian Vocational Training
• Manpower Training
• Federal Airport Aid
• Farm Program
• Pesticide Controls
• International Development Association
• Urban Mass Transit
• Water Resources Research
• Federal Highway
• Civil Service Pay Raise
• War on Poverty
• Truth-in-Securities
• Medicine Bow National Forest
• Ozark Scenic Riverway
• Administrative Conference
• Food Stamps
• Housing Act
• Nurse Training
• Revenues for Recreation
• Library Services
• Federal Employee Health Benefits
• Wilderness Areas

That's a partial list, for around winter of '63/'64. What's that you say? Not enough? You want more and yet even more government programs that will cast away forever the very shadow of human unhappiness? Why, that is so easy! Consider the host of plagues and woes that were banished in 1965 through the gentle ministrations of the following infallible palliatives:

• Medicare
• Aid to Education
• Higher Education
• Four Year Farm Program
• Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Housing Act
• Social Security Increase
• Fair Immigration Law
• Older Americans
• Heart, Cancer, Stroke Program
• Drug Controls
• Mental Health Facilities
• Health Professions
• Medical Libraries
• Vocational Rehabilitation
• Anti-Poverty Program
• Arts and Humanities Foundation
• Aid to Appalachia
• Water Pollution Control
• High Speed Transit
• Community Health services
• Water Resources Council
• Water Desalting
• Juvenile Delinquency Control
• Retirement for Public Servants

LBJ's later years may have been slightly cluttered with international concerns, but the home front was not entirely neglected:

• Child Nutrition
• Rent Supplements
• Clean Rivers
• Child Safety
• Narcotics Rehabilitation
• Water Research
• Water for Peace
• Air Pollution Control
• Education Act
• Deaf-Blind Center
• Safe Streets
• Wholesome Poultry
• School Breakfasts
• Aircraft Noise Abatement
• Better Housing
• Oil Revenues for Recreation
• Juvenile Delinquency Protection
• Guaranteed Student Loans
• Gun Controls
• Aid-to-Handicapped Children
• Hazardous Radiation Protection
• Dangerous Drugs Control

I'm amazed that we even need government anymore, what with how perfect the world was made, 40 years ago. What's left to do? I don't see anything in these lists about AIDS or entirely cost- and consequence-free abortion services -- but it was a darker time then.

So that's it then. All we need to do is get our heads out of the sand and understand that the Dawning of the New Age is at hand, and do the only sensible thing possible.

This fall, we must all vote for the Messiah.



This morning as I lay abed, as yet unsleeping, a thought came to me. Obama gives bad speeches. Aside from his hypnotic intonations themselves, he uses one and only one of the tools available to the writer and orator. He uses a sort of structural repetition. He has no great images, no stirring metaphors. His prose is lackluster. His selection of vocabulary is obvious. Yet the virtue of simplicity is lost amid the verbiage. There is no dramatic build, no mounting up of image and emotion -- he just cracks open the rhetorical thesaurus and says the same thing again with a few different words. And this is supposed to be eloquence.

He's like the adolescent who learned to use sarcasm three months before everyone else. Man, he seemed so smart and funny. But it hardly seems enough to hang a presidency on. Isn't there some other messiah we could vote for?


J