The Town is Burning, All Right

To those who read nuance in things people say, President Obama's recent use of a metaphor to sell his gigantic spending bill was a telling one. While he was on his recent Bipartisan Support of My Trillion Dollar "Stimulus" Promotion Tour, he uttered the passionate statement, "When the town is burning, everybody needs to grab a hose!"

Well, as a practical sort of fellow, I would have thought to use a different word. I would have said, "...everyone needs to grab a bucket." There is an important distinction between a hose and a bucket. Use of the word, "hose," presupposes that there is an unlimited supply of water at the other end of any hose you grab. But, to carry the metaphor further, there isn't always an unlimited supply of water, when there is a fire; or real money, when there is a financial crisis. From literal experience, I can tell you, that assumption is a naive one. If you grab a bucket, you can see just how much water you can dip into, to put out the fire. If you grab a hose and expect unlimited water to be supplied to the nozzle, you can be severely disillusioned. I am afraid President Obama is going learn this lesson the hard way -- an even harder way than I did. And in the process, we are all going to get burned -- or hosed.