Mark Steyn is one of Canada’s greatest gifts to the United States, up there with Dan Akroyd, Eugene Levy, Leslie Nielsen, Mike Myers and Martin Short. He’s at his hilarious best when skewering an administration that could only have been imagined by the joyously satiric mind of Christopher Buckley. They’re proving to be an over-the-top assortment of what Clarice Feldman calls “over-credentialed idiots” now pummeling Washington and the world as Hurricane Katrina pummeled New Orleans.
The Obama adminstration’s unerring tin ear for its own patented brand of arrogant cluelessness never fails to provide Steyn with exquisite fodder. His latest on Energy Secretary Chu is right up there with his best. His take on our all-knowing Secretary of Energy, who’s more concerned with controlling how we spend our few remaining untaxed dollars than he is with well, energy, is here:
“I think we ought to be harder when minor functionaries of a failed leviathan reveal themselves to have a defective understanding of the role of government in free societies. Steven Chu, the Energy Secretary who came into office saying ‘we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe‘, has now offered up another soundbite for our times. On Friday, he defended the ban on Edison’s iconic incandescent in economic terms:
“‘ We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money.’
“So what? I waste my own money on all kinds of things. If I wanted Steven Chu to have a say in it, I’d get Parson Bloomberg to marry us at Gracie Mansion.
“More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people’s money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of ‘stimulus’ and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers’ bellies with. (In my weekend column, I touch on only the most lurid and outrageous of the government’s many smart investment decisions: its use of stimulus dollars to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry.)”
h/t: NRO’s Newsletter, Morning Jolt by Jim Geraghty
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