southchild

Deferred Success is the title of Mark Steyn’s recent essay on redefining away the concept of “failure” and what the American icon of failure — the Democratic Party — has learned from this.

In typical Steyn fashion, “Deferred Success” is a gut-splitting commentary on recent, hard-to-believe utterances of desperation from the increasingly marginalized Democrats. On the recent DNC slam of Bush for being physically fit, Steyn quotes the DNC then responds. Here’s the exchange:

“While President Bush has made physical fitness a personal priority, his cuts to education funding have forced schools to roll back physical education classes and his administration’s efforts to undermine Title IX sports programs have threatened thousands of women’s college sports programs.”

Wow. I noticed my gal had put on a few pounds but I had no idea it was Bush’s fault. That sonofabitch chicken hawk. Just for the record, “his cuts to education funding” are cuts only in the sense that Hackett’s performance in the Ohio election was a tremendous victory: that’s to say, Bush’s “cuts to education funding” are in fact an increase of roughly 50 percent in federal education funding.

Some of us wish he had cut education funding. By any rational measure, a good third of public school expenditures are completely wasted. But instead it’s skyrocketed. And the idea that Bush is heartlessly pursuing an elite leisure activity denied to millions of American schoolchildren takes a bit of swallowing given that his preferred fitness activity is running. “Running” requires two things: you and ground. Short of buying every schoolkid some John Kerry thousand-dollar electric-yellow buttock-hugging lycra singlet, it’s hard to see what there is about “running” that requires increasing federal funding.

Perhaps America could have a Running Czar or a National Commission on Running that would report back on the need for a Cabinet-level Runner-General. Perhaps Title IX needs to be expanded to provide a federal sneaker subsidy: a woman’s right to shoes.

But I don’t think so. Sitting behind yet another Vermont granolamobile bearing the bumper sticker “Bush Scares Me,” I found myself thinking that perhaps the easiest way to reduce childhood obesity in American families might just to be to shout out, “Look! There’s big scary Bush! Run! Run for your lives! No, wait, there’s John Bolton, too! Better cut through the park before he puts his hands on his hips in an aggressive manner!” Indeed, when yesterday’s coming man John Edwards dusts off his “Two Americas” stump speech — the one with the heartwarming Dickensian vignette about the shivering girl whose parents can’t afford to buy her a winter coat ($9.99 brand new from Wal-Mart) — he might want to add a section about how an easy way for shivering coatless girls to keep warm is to run around the block a couple of times.

Don’t you wish you could write like that?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 9th, 2005 at 7:51 pm and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.