DC sucks, says geezer Andrew Ferguson, senior editor at the Weekly Standard, so much of a geezer, in fact, that he even has a white moustache to prove it. Ferguson holds forth on Reason TV with “Kennedy,”* seated on the lawn of his “beautiful McMansion” (Kennedy’s term), rapping about how the DC economy is largely “parasitic” (largely true) and about how DC folks, well, they aren’t like ordinary Americans like you and me. They don’t even own cars! They have this weird thing, called Zipcar, that lets them drive cars without having to sully themselves with ownership! They’re that un-American!
Naturally, I live in DC and I am a Zipcar dude, along with 700,000 others in the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom, located in hundreds of cities and college campuses. Fergie, if he didn’t spend so much time sucking on his ‘stache, might even think to consider Zipcar as yet another triumph of modern capitalism, finding and satisfying a market, rather than an affected gesture of a dandified, sissified, effete elite. And Fergie, if he really wanted to cut down on the size of government, might encourage his buddies over at the WS to support reducing our grotesquely outsized defense budget instead of, you know, increasing it, as they keep demanding. War is the health of the state, Fergie! Did you ever hear that? If you and your friends wouldn’t keep thinking up new wars for the U.S. to fight, maybe DC wouldn’t be so big!
Afterwords
The “War on Terror,” for which the Weekly Standard is easily the most passionate cheerleader, virtually guarantees an ever-expanding federal budget, and the more money DC spends, the more people will make their careers here trying to influence the decisions on how that money is to be spent. Furthermore, the Standard has shown virtually no interest in shrinking government, other than a few anti-poverty programs identified exclusively with the Democratic Party (and, usually, black people, whom conservatives continue to love to hate), for fear of offending potential allies.
Fergie’s McMansion is financed in part by his book Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College, which allowed Ferguson to make money off getting his son into the totally non-elitist University of Virginia. Top That!
*Kennedy, a libertarian LA DJ, dispenses with her first name for professional purposes.
