The Last Word -- Beavers and Cherry Trees

When I opened my email from The Patriot Post this morning after not being on line yesterday, this gem jumped out at me and describes Washington DC and the people who run it to a tea.

The Last Word
"Ah, springtime has arrived in Washington, D.C. The National Cherry Blossom Festival is under way. The cherry trees, 3,700 of them given to America by the Japanese in 1912, are in full bloom. It reminds me why Americans are so wary of Washington. In the spring of 1999, you see, some culprits had been chopping down cherry trees. The National Park Service, in a state of high alert for days, finally identified the tree fellers: three beavers, who decided to construct a dam in the Tidal Basin. In a normal city, this situation would have been dealt with swiftly. The beavers would have been trapped, transported to another location and released. ... But Washington is no normal city. ... The hullabaloo went on for some time before the Park Service finally hired a professional trapper. The trapper caught the beavers and they were carted off. You'd think that would have been the end of it. But not in Washington. Activists, suspicious of what the Park Service really did with the beavers -- were they relocated to Guantanamo Bay? -- demanded their location be divulged. That prompted the Park Service to issue a statement. It said that, due to the publicity surrounding the case, the beavers were moved to a 'safe house,' which, apparently, is some kind of beaver witness protection program. The beaver incident illustrates how convoluted and confusing things can get in Washington -- simple ideas and solutions that work everywhere else are twisted and contorted and made unrecognizable there. That's why the fellows who founded this country had the right idea when they sought to keep most of the decision-making out of Washington -- keep it among the people and within the states. But the birds running the government right now don't see it that way. They have Washington butting into every aspect of our lives, health care being the most recent. Alas, springtime has arrived in Washington. The sun is shining, the birds are chirping and the cherry trees are in full bloom. And all I can do is worry about what that nutty town is going to meddle with next." --columnist Tom Purcell

Source: Read this on the Web at Patriot Post