{"id":10331,"date":"2010-04-26T12:02:31","date_gmt":"2010-04-26T17:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10331"},"modified":"2010-04-26T12:13:48","modified_gmt":"2010-04-26T17:13:48","slug":"the-price-of-greatness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=10331","title":{"rendered":"The Price Of Greatness"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing some digging – and I’ve found what really<\/em> happened at a number of key moments of American history…<\/p>\n

July 4, 1776<\/strong>: [Scene: Independence Hall, Philadelphia<\/em>].\u00a0<\/p>\n

JEFFERSON:\u00a0 “OK, here it is.\u00a0 When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to fully fund entitlement programs which have connected them with another, and to assume among the budgets of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Government and of Government’s God\/Goddess entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of The Budget requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation and the costs, amortized over 30 years, of said separation, as adjusted for inflation, with due diligence paid toward the opportunity costs arising from said separation.<\/em><\/p>\n

MADISON:\u00a0 “Good – but we need more on bonding.\u00a0 Could we go back to the bit on bonding?”<\/p>\n

August, 1864<\/strong>: [Scene: The War Department, Washington DC<\/em>].\u00a0<\/p>\n

GENERAL HALLECK:\u00a0 “President Lincoln, General Grant is a drunk”.<\/p>\n

PRESIDENT LINCOLN: “Then perhaps all of our generals should have a bottle of whatever he’s drinking.\u00a0 (Turns to secretary) We’ll call the program “The Cheap Blend Surge”; we can fund it through an excise tax on player pianos!”<\/p>\n

GENERAL HALLECK: “Capitol idea, sir!”<\/p>\n

December 25, 1944<\/strong>: [Scene: a basement, Bastogne, Belgium.\u00a0 General MacAuliffe, commander of the US 101st Airborne division, which has been surrounded by seven German divisions for nearly a week, is approached by a German emissary under a white flag<\/em>].\u00a0<\/p>\n

GERMAN:\u00a0 “General, vot iss your ansah to ze offer of zurrendah?”<\/p>\n

MACAULIFFE:\u00a0 “Nuts”.<\/p>\n

GERMAN: “Pardon me?”<\/p>\n

MACAULIFFE: “Nuts – I cant’ find my slide rule.\u00a0 I’ll have to take the idea under advisement, but honestly, I’m not sure that we have the budget to support 12,000 POWs.\u00a0 Can we schedule a meeting on this?”<\/p>\n

August 28, 1963<\/strong>: [Scene: The steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC<\/em>].\u00a0<\/p>\n

MARTIN LUTHER KING:\u00a0 “I have a dream that one day this nation will\u00a0be able to fund a program that will pay community leaders to organize us to rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are entitled to an equal share of this nation’s budget!.'”<\/p>\n

June 12, 1987<\/strong>: [Scene: The Brandenburg Gate<\/em>].\u00a0<\/p>\n

RONALD REAGAN:\u00a0 “If you want peace, General Secretary Gorbachev, increase the funding for East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process!\u00a0\u00a0 Secretary Gorbachev, open<\/em> the books on East Berlin’s transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation process!\u00a0\u00a0 Mister Gorbachev, tear down <\/em>the barriers to fully funding the timely completion of the transit redevelopment environmental impact mitigation documentation as part of the pre-design environmental impact and mitigation process preparatory to getting approval from the affected district soil, water and easement committees!” [1]<\/p>\n

April 26, 2010<\/strong>:\u00a0 [Scene:\u00a0a house in the Midway of Saint Paul (whose bathroom is the pride of the entire neighborhood<\/em>]<\/p>\n

FLASH:\u00a0 “The state can’t go through 4 more years of the same policies that have gutted they very budget items that made Minnesota great.”<\/p>\n

Immigrant pioneers struggling through blizzards to eke a living out of the sandy soil.\u00a0 241 Svens and Oles fixing bayonets and charging at 2,000 Bubbas and Billy Joes, saving the Union in the process.\u00a0 Doughty miners doing daily war with the rock beneath our feet for generations.\u00a0 Ingenious inventors working in obscurity to invent the modern flour mill, the gyrostabilized bombsight, the supercomputer,\u00a0 the pacemaker, the amalgamation of R’nB and rock’nroll, the greatest medical center in the world…<\/p>\n

…whew.\u00a0 Good thing all of that was in the budget!<\/p>\n

Thank you, State of Minnesota, for budgeting for life itself!<\/p>\n

NOTE TO THOSE WHO ONLY LAUGH AT COMEDIC MATERIAL DULY VETTED BY JON STEWART:\u00a0 No, none of the speeches above ever happened – except Flash’s.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Again – it’s satire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been doing some digging – and I’ve found what really happened at a number of key moments of American history… July 4, 1776: [Scene: Independence Hall, Philadelphia].\u00a0 JEFFERSON:\u00a0 “OK, here it is.\u00a0 When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to fully fund entitlement programs which have connected them […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,2,69],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-democrats","category-minnesota-politics","category-socialism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10331"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10337,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10331\/revisions\/10337"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}