Good advice for the phonies

They don’t want government running things — except when there are devastating
hurricanes or oil spills, or terrorists on airplanes, or bank failures, and — as
Yul Brenner, the King, said, “Et cetera and et cetera.” Then the know-nothings
complain that the government is inept in doing things they didn’t want
government to do in the first place.

Sarah Palin realized how much easier it is to bellow from the sidelines than to
actually do something about the nation’s problems. She’ll never run for office
again, I predict — it’s too easy and lucrative to scream platitudes, and much
harder to roll up one’s sleeves, go to work solving problems and be accountable.

Candidate Rand Paul’s comment about the West Virginia mine catastrophe — “accidents
happen” — makes a good bumper sticker, but it is a revealingly thoughtless
comment for an erstwhile public official. As Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson aptly wrote, Paul and
other new politicians like him live “in Libertarian La-La Land, where a purist
philosophy leads people to believe in the purest nonsense.” It is no more than
the Alaskan bridge to nowhere.

Visit www.RonaldGoldfarb.com.