“How do you steal a 400-pound replica of the Statue of Liberty? That’s what a miniature golf course owner is asking Friday morning,” Des Moines’ KCCI Channel 8 reports. The Drudge Report has linked to this story, no doubt because it has metaphor written all over it:
Steve Klein discovered the theft at Puttmasters Miniature Golf Course at 2977 NW 66th Ave. near Saylorville on Thursday.
Klein told KCCI.com that it was a sad day when thieves stole the focal point of the golf course, an 8-foot-tall replica of the Statue of Liberty. The statue is made of copper-coated aluminum, is blue and green in color and weighs approximately 400 pounds.
It was valued at about $10,000.
The statue was located near a lake and marshy area, making access difficult.
There have been a series of copper thefts reported across Iowa as metal prices reach an all-time high.
In other news from the intersection of golf and American freedom, at the Tatler, Bryan Preston quotes from golfer Paul Azinger, including this zinger: “Facts: Potus has played more golf this month than I have: I have created more jobs this month than he has:”
Paul Azinger just earned the hero tag. Also, the heh, and obvious tags.
Pro golfer Paul Azinger thinks President Obama might be hitting the links a bit too hard.
The author, businessman and 12-time PGA Tour winner took to Twitter Thursday to zing the commander-in-chief over his frequent golf outings while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard.
“Facts: Potus has played more golf this month than I have: I have created more jobs this month than he has,” Azinger wrote.
Double eagle.
Which dovetails into something that Andrew Klavan recently noted as well, just to keep it in the PJM family:
Question: What’s the difference between a Federal Jobs Creation Program and Kim Kardashian’s wedding?
Answer: Kim Kardashian’s wedding creates jobs.
As Andrew added:
Miro Vrlik Photography LLC / Shutterstock.com.
It was at this point someone at the party said scornfully, “That wedding cost ten million dollars! That’s obscene in these hard times with so many people suffering!”
Is it obscene? Really? Unless Kim Kardashian is famous for robbing banks, I don’t see why. Assuming she made her money honestly, then every dollar she has was given to her freely by a public who thought she was worth it. She, in turn, freely decided it would be worth it to her to spend that freely given money on her wedding. And because there was no force in operation other than free human desire — the public’s desire to see Kim Kardashian do whatever it is she does for a living and Kim Kardashian’s desire to get married in high style — every single dime spent on that wedding helped create a job — if by a job, we mean a task someone does because someone else wants or needs it done.
Consider it. No money was taken at gunpoint during the making of this wedding. No power was exerted over others. No jumped-up prince of a middle man decided what should or shouldn’t be eaten or drunk or spent or by whom. No useless government department was formed, taking capital out of the economy. No time was wasted by officious bureaucrats who don’t have any reason to do their job efficiently or well. Not at all. Kim, God bless her, wanted — I don’t know what — flowers, let’s say, by the thousands, and so Flora the Florist set to work providing them in return for her daily bread. Kim wanted a cake the size of the Ritz, or whatever, and Charlie the Chef got to work on that. Even the annoying helicopters were freely paid for by someone who, I guess, wanted aerial photos of the nuptials. And the photographers earned their keep because people who want to see the pics will freely buy whatever magazine they’re in.
In truth, the economy was more stimulated in my little neighborhood this weekend than it has been anywhere in the country during the entire Obama administration.
And at least it was a wedding. They come only once or twice, OK, maybe five or six times in the average celebrity’s lifetime, so it’s worth splurging to make it an event. Compare that with the enormous taxpayer-funded motorcade dispatched for a typical Sunday drive around Martha’s Vineyard by an environmentalist president who hectors his voters about their fuel economy.
Bryan has a couple of theories as to why the president has gone out of his way to be known as First Duffer, but ironically, he was warned early in his administration that his addiction to golfing could backfire — including by Joe Queenan, in the otherwise disastrous Obama/Tiger Woods January 2010 Golf Digest cover story:
By all accounts, President Obama loves golf but it does not love him back. To date, he has not let the public see much of him in action on the course. Tiger would probably tell him to keep it that way. Tiger doesn’t appear on “Dancing With the Stars.” Tiger doesn’t sing in public. Tiger doesn’t appear on talk shows with Janeane Garofalo. Tiger never does anything that would make him look ridiculous. The President of the United States needs to do the same. After all, Jimmy Carter never recovered from that incident with the killer rabbit. Thomas Dewey’s loss to Harry Truman in the 1948 election might have been because Dewey was somehow cajoled by supporters into donning a pirate’s hat.
Obama seems to get all this. Most Americans do not want to see the president fail. They certainly don’t want to see him fall at golf. For the sake of all of us — lest our enemies use the president’s lack of links prowess against him — Obama should keep his game far, far away from the eyes of prying photographers. What we can’t see can’t hurt us. Much less him.
In the 1992 edition of Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, he credits Dwight Eisenhower as “the most successful of America’s twentieth-century presidents, and the decade when he ruled (1953–61) the most prosperous in American, and indeed world, history.” But as Johnson noted, Ike maintained a public appearance of appearing to exert himself very little (he too was invariably photographed on the golf course), but worked diligently behind the scenes, beginning his day at 7:30 am and working deep into the night, the original version of the famous SNL sketch of President Reagan cheerfully meeting with girl scouts one minute, and switching into Mission:Impossible mode with his staff, the moment the guests have left the Oval Office. Similarly, Reagan himself kept a sign on his desk that read, “There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don’t care who gets the credit.”
In contrast, if The World’s Biggest Celebrity gestures, and there isn’t a camera around to record it, did it actually happen?
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