Bring 'em on...

There's another lie going around, about how the Bush Administration is responsible for the recent coal miner deaths.

Newsbusters has the facts; a general downturn in deaths since 1995. (With an uptick in the last Clinton years, which I'm sure the media found perfectly acceptable.) And compare 2005's 22 American deaths with China's 2,600!

But what bothers me more then the political gotcha games, is the picture I've seen presented recently of miners as poor ignorant fools driven to unacceptable work by greedy capitalism. This is a despicable canard; our miners are well-paid, and are proud to follow a difficult and dangerous craft that is vital to our country. This is exactly the same dirty lie leftists use to dishonor and denigrate our military.

And more bothersome than that, is the sub-text that being a coal miner (or lineman, lumberjack, carpenter, fireman) is to be less important, less significant, less worthy of consideration than being, say, journalists, professors, or clergy. Just the opposite is true. If we tossed out all our journalists, all our professors, and all the fake-Christian lefty-trendoid Jesus-was-a-socialist churchmen, the country would not only be the better for getting rid of rotten ideas, but also better because those people would quickly be replaced by better ones from out of the vast reserves of talent and energy to be found among ordinary Americans.

And more bothersome yet is the subtext that the most important goal of life is safety and security. I won't explain why this is a pernicious thought---if you don't get it already, you probably never will.