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" Welcome back to our weekly survey of the state of Our National Dialogue which, as we know, is what Beethoven would have come up with, had he written Seven Bags of Shells. We are going to do something this week that we&amp;#039;ve never done before. This is in part because the Dancin&amp;#039; Master was pre-empted by an automobile race. (Peggy Noonan in a fire suit! Oooh! Ick!) But it also was prompted by a remarkable performance by Mary Fallin, the governor of Oklahoma, when she appeared with former Doge Of Venice beat reporter Bob Schieffer on CBS. Fallin was on my electric teevee to talk about her state&amp;#039;s efforts to recover from the devastating tornado that struck the city of Moore. I hadn&amp;#039;t seen Fallin since August 28, 2012, when she gave a remarkable speech to the Republican National Convention that explained that Oklahomans did build Oklahoma, dammit, with no help whatsoever, not even from that big government program called the U.S. Army. It was the most conspicuously ahistorical public address I ever heard. I thought it might be instructive, as Sister Marie dePaul used to say, to compare and contrast. &amp;quot;During the great the Land Run of 1889, thousands of families rushed to put a stake down on empty plots of land. They built tent cities overnight, they farmed the land and they worked hard. And in 1897, eight years after the Land Run, a handful of adventurous pioneers risked their own money - NOT, the federal government&amp;#039;s - to drill Oklahoma&amp;#039;s first oil well, the Nellie Johnstone. By doing so, these early-day pioneers changed the future and the fortune of Oklahoma forever, and today Oklahoma is one of the nation&amp;#039;s key energy producers and job creators. President Obama wants us to believe that Oklahomans owe that success to the federal government: to the Department of Energy, to the EPA, the IRS or maybe even to him. Mr. President, we know better ... as we say in Oklahoma, that dog won&amp;#039;t hunt.&amp;quot; (August 28, 2012) &amp;quot;Well, I&amp;#039;m going to tell him that we appreciate his visit first of all, but that we also need quick action as it relates to FEMA. And, so far FEMA has done a great job. They were here immediately on the spot. They have been throughout the different neighborhoods.&amp;quot;(May 26, 2013) Or: &amp;quot;We owe these remarkable successes to the imagination and ingenuity of people like my friend, Oklahoman Harold Hamm. The son of sharecroppers, and the youngest of 13 children, Harold grew up in the small town of Lexington, Oklahoma... Today, Harold Hamm is the Chairman and CEO of Oklahoma&amp;#039;s own Continental Resources, a top ten U.S. producer of petroleum liquids with nearly 700 employees operating in 10 states and valued at over $13 billion... Harold&amp;#039; success story is not one-of-a-kind; it is an American dream that has been realized by countless men and women since the founding of this country. He is just one of the many visionaries and innovators in the private sector that are the true drivers of economic growth and job creation. And that&amp;#039;s where President Obama just doesn&amp;#039;t get it. He&amp;#039;ll tell you that &amp;quot;If you&amp;#039;ve got a business &amp;#039;you didn&amp;#039;t build that. Somebody else made that happen.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; Well, Mr. President ... like who? The IRS? The EPA? Or the federal government? The president believes that government is responsible for our successes and that&amp;#039;s why his solution to everything is more government, bigger spending, more regulation, and more bureaucratic programs like ObamaCare.&amp;quot;(8/28/12). &amp;quot;I know I have heard of families that have already received money from FEMA because-- as-- as you know, in a disaster like this, lot of people lose their \u2014 their \u2014 their checkbooks. They lose their credit cards. They lose their driver&amp;#039;s license, their birth certificates, their insurance papers, they lose everything and they have no cash. And some of the banks were even hit, the ATM machines, so people need cash to get immediate needs. And the Red Cross, The Salvation Army takes care of those immediate-- needs, but then there comes a time, a-- a month from now or whenever it might be that people really start having to crank out the money to get their homes built and get the things they really need to replace things they lost.&amp;quot; (5/26/13). Or, perhaps, &amp;quot;Families feeling pinched not just by a bad economy, but by a President who promised hope and change and left many Americans with no hope and just change in their pockets. President Obama believes the power of a Big Government is the key to American success.&amp;quot;(8/28/13) &amp;quot;I personally have met with them many times, but, you know, there&amp;#039;s going to come a time where there&amp;#039;s going to be a tremendous amount of need once we begin the debris clearing which we already have, but really get it cleared off to where we need to start rebuilding these homes, rebuilding these businesses and we know at different times in the past, money hasn&amp;#039;t always come as quickly as it should, so I&amp;#039;m hoping that FEMA will be very prompt in getting the relief here.&amp;quot;(5/26/13). The speech last August was given during an entire night in which the idea of the government operating on behalf of a viable self-governing political commonwealth was treated as a clumsy fiction worthy only of crude ridicule. (A remarkable number of the We Did Build It stories began with a parent, or the speaker, explaining how they got started in the world by joining the Army.) It was the most meretricious evening of politics through which I ever sat. There wasn&amp;#039;t an ounce of truth to it. It substituted myth for history, comforting sentiment for obvious historical fact, posturing for government. It was a massive con, and it was the best illustration I ever saw of the fact that the modern Republican party is not in the least interest in running an effective national government. It wasn&amp;#039;t divide and conquer. It was divide and pillage. And it is completely immune to the consequences of what it does on the lives of actual people. For example, if Governor Fallin really wants to deserve the help she&amp;#039;s getting from all of us mooching bastids in the blue states, she might make a phone call to Senator Tom Coburn, who appeared later on the program to ride his personal hobby horse over all the rubble in Moore. She perhaps could tell him to shut his damn gob. Well, the way we calculate damage. One, under the law it&amp;#039;s only supposed to be when the local resources are overwhelmed. Oklahoma, I think, received over twenty-one different disaster declarations last year where, in fact, some of those we were overwhelmed, but the vast majority of them, we were not. So we&amp;#039;ve kind of translate \u2014 transferred the responsibility for storms and damage to the federal government instead of to the state government. Oklahoma has done a great job. You know we have a rainy day fund. We took money from that for this. We&amp;#039;ve had a great response both through private money is being donated and then just the public as a whole pitching in, but we&amp;#039;ve created kind of a predicate that you don&amp;#039;t have to be responsible for what goes on in your state and big storms like Sandy, or like this tornado, there&amp;#039;re certain things that we can&amp;#039;t do, that we need the federal government to do... The actual deficit is, of course, dropping. Whatever deficit in humanity Tom Coburn has is growing almost by the hour.I would have gone completely off the trolley, enraged and throwing small household objects, had Bob not provided some comic relief later in the show. Well, I&amp;#039;d start by \u2014 by reminding people that these are not second-term scandals, they&amp;#039;re actually first-term scandals where the information on them was delayed until after the election for variety of reasons. So I don&amp;#039;t know if that&amp;#039;s successful or not successful in that \u2014 in that political context. Clearly, they missed some classes in crisis management 101. This insight comes to you courtesy of Michael Gerson, who worked for President George W. Bush. He should have delivered it standing atop the I-10 overpass in New Orleans. I stopped laughing hysterically at the whole thing about 20 minutes ago "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a18615/the-solo-gobshites/>