George W. Bush has declared Washington, D.C., a federal disaster area...
One reason why nobody's ever done that before is because a presidential inauguration is not... an "emergency." It's penciled in well in advance...
The proposition that a new federal administration is itself a federal emergency is almost too perfect an emblem of American government in the 21st century...
So a "federal emergency" is no longer a nuclear strike on Cleveland or even a Category Three hurricane, but now a snowfall in New England and an inaugural ball at the Mayflower Hotel. As Mister Incredible shrewdly observes to his kid in "The Incredibles," when everybody's special, nobody is. Likewise, when everything's an emergency, nothing is: We live in a permanent state of routine emergency...
If you'd suggested in the Seventies a new federal agency to cope with municipal snow removal in Connecticut, you'd have been laughed out the room. But, with government, mission creep isn't a bug but the defining feature...
The most basic of conservative principles is that if you reward bad behavior you get more of it. We now have a government offering trillion-dollar rewards for bad behavior to the financial system, to the housing market, to the auto unions and to individual voters. And the heirs to those Connecticut town meetings that Tocqueville regarded as the best form of government ever devised by man now underbudget their snow-removal costs, secure in the knowledge that the Feds will pick up the tab...
But, alas, Washington is one of those disaster relief cases, where they get the relief, and the rest of us get the disaster...
SteynOnline - THE UNITED STATES OF EMERGENCY
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