A Waste of Time and Resources redux

If I had to speculate I would guess that the priorities of a federal prosecutor who took office only six days before September 11th would be oriented toward something slightly more important than say people selling glass bongs to each other over the Internet. But alas United States attorney from Western PA, Mary Beth Buchanan, thinks not. In fact she also seems to have made it her specialty to bring obscenity indictments against porn producers, novelists, and bloggers. As a result of this millions of dollars have been wasted in a quest which has accomplished nothing more than to saddle Tommy Chong with a hefty fine.

This is after all the Bush administration and when a person believes, as many of them do, that their prudish local pastor has a pipeline to god we might expect such opinions to permeate their professional life. It would be another tolerably risible misadventure in moralizing if not for the glaring contravention of good sense that at about the same time Gonzalez was firing eight competent and sane prosecutors, Ms. Buchanan was being promoted.

The fact that Ms. Buchanan wants to bring society's sensibilities into consonance with something like those of her Wednesday car pool to after-school soccer, does not surprise me but the fact that she has been allowed to spend 12 million dollars doing it and been promoted, should I think stand as quite a testament to the fact that religious conservatives have an affinity for government's ability to engineer society that even a Bolshevik could be proud of. And as such I will rename them Christian Bolsheviks (my own slight to Chris Hedge's misnamed book).

It is not hard to understand why the religious right has so destroyed the Republican Party if you ask yourself a few hypothetical questions. One I would start with might go something like this: If we must spend 12 million dollars of tax revenue on something would I rather it be used to take Tommy Chong's bong away or to subsidize health care? I doubt even Ron Paul would object to spending it on health care given this choice.