First Aid

The First Ladies are costing us a fortune:

Well, in my reading and conversing, I came across a person...who is intimately familiar with the workings of USAID, the federal government agency responsible for giving our money to foreigners. Why does an agency like USAID just keep going, I asked this person (who, by the way, is a lifelong Republican), after decades of futility?

"It's the wives," he replied.

"Say again?"

"The wives. U.S. presidents don't care about aid. George W. Bush was actually quite hostile to it when he first came in. Of course, Iraq skewed the whole thing; but so far as these other places are concerned [the President had just returned from an Africa trip, showering aid from country to country in his progress across the continent], they mainly do it for the wives. There's nothing Laura likes better than being photographed holding some African AIDS baby. Cindy McCain is worse. It's the damn wives that help keep it going.

Since Cindy McCain and Laura Bush are both filthy rich, I cordially invite them to toss their own money at the rest of the world's problems and keep their perfectly manicured nails out of my pockets, because I have neither the desire nor the capacity to help anyone outside of my family and immediate friends. I am perfectly capable of deciding when, where and to whom my charity dollars flow; I certainly don't need the government deciding it for me. That said, I must admit that throwing 80-pound bags of rice from a hovering helicopter at Bangladeshi natives was great fun. Like Whack-a-mole, only squishier.

Aidbiz is, after all, one of those enterprises which delivers very little, perhaps nothing at all, to its supposed beneficiaries, but offers masses of well-paid and prestigious positions to liberal-arts graduates, failed lawyers, aspiring politicians, and other members of the lumpen-intelligentsia who could never get a real job doing anything useful. In that respect it is very much like... Community Organizing.

Heh. Funny, but frighteningly close to the truth.