Writing a
weekly column is stressful. By midweek, I am
fidgeting with the blank pages, hoping something
will hit me and jar loose a topic. Tuesday afternoon
an idea came out of nowhere and smacked me so hard I
have a black eye and dang near busted my
three-dollar reading glasses. On the bright side, it
is a relief to finally have a subject.
I drove to a boarding stable to examine a horse with
a laceration. Daun, the owner, showed me the
bleeding wound on Bob’s left front knee. Sometime
during the night, Bob stuck his front feet through a
corral panel and he was missing hide above both
fetlocks along with the cut on his knee. Bob was a
relatively quiet 17-year-old warm blood gelding, but
I slipped a little tranquilizer into his jugular
vein to make the wound cleaning easier on all of us.
Bob’s head dropped immediately and I wondered if he
could be one of those who are overly sensitive to
Rompun. His lower lip was nearly touching the ground
when I clipped the hair from the three wounds and
then lavaged them with the garden hose. He never
flinched. I probed the knee wound to be certain the
injury did not enter the joint. His left fetlock
injury did not quite penetrate the full thickness of
the skin, so I stepped to his right side to probe
the depth of the wound on the other fetlock.
More asleep than awake, Bob looked like he could
fall over at any second. I bent over, barely touched
his right fetlock when BOOM, he fired out his right
leg like he was stomping a snake. His right knee
flew up, crushed my glasses into my eye, sent my hat
flying and rocked me back on my heels. Daun gasped
the customary, “Are you alright?” Amazingly, none of
the profanity which was ricocheting around in my
skull found its way out of my mouth. I picked up my
glasses and hat before walking over to look at my
face in the rear view mirror of my pickup. If I was
missing my cheekbone or eye brow, I wanted to find
them before they were stomped in the mud. Amazingly,
my facial features appeared to be reasonably close
to where I had last seen them, so with blood
streaming from my eye socket, I returned to work.
Bob immediately fell back asleep and never twitched
as I finished bandaging the wounds. Usually, I am
good at reading animal behavior, but not this time.
Had Bob been pacing, kicking, or striking in the
beginning, I would have approached things
differently. It is foolish to recognize imminent
danger, but blindly charge forward as if nothing is
amiss; our exact situation this election. Here is my
point.
For a clear picture where America is headed let’s
take a look back. State Senator Barak Obama was
elected to the US Senate in 2004 with progressives
seizing control of Congress in 2006. In spite of
record federal revenues from 2006 through the first
half of 2008, their wealth redistribution spree to
green companies like Solyndra doubled our national
debt from $8 trillion in 2006 to $16 trillion today.
(A figure President Obama could not recite recently
on the Dave Letterman show.)
Advancing the man-caused climate change myth during
the presidential campaign of 2008, Senator Obama
promised to regulate coal-fired electricity
generating plants into bankruptcy. Facing record
unemployment, 46 million Americans on food stamps
and the largest tax increase in US history set for
2013, costly EPA regulations on coal-gen facilities
have been handed down. In business since 1968,
Yellowstone County’s Corette Coal Generating
facility announced the shuttering of its plant
rather than spending $38 million complying with
these new EPA directives. With similar companies
closing doors shrinking the demand for coal, 1200
jobs in the Appalachian mines recently went up in
smoke. Before long, these unemployed workers will be
on their knees begging for crumbs from the
government masters; the perfect storm for ruling
class progressives.
The horse knee to my eye may have rattled a few
screws, but since our Treasure State is so rich in
coal reserves I still know it is foolish to follow
President Obama’s campaign slogan “Forward.” Our
republic will not survive more of the same. Unless
you have been knocked senseless by hope and change,
you know we must remove progressives from every
elected office.
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