"Hold
the dark holiday in your palms,
Bite it, swallow it, and survive,
Come out the far black tunnel of El Dia de Muerte
And be glad, oh so glad you are ... alive!"
From
"The Halloween Tree" by Ray Bradbury
In my
backyard, my Halloween tree, a double maple, glows like fire at peak
color. The snarling pumpkin on the front-porch rail and the Greek evil
eye hanging in the window, protect my home from evil spirits on the
night they roam the earth, searching for souls.
Yes, I am
safe inside; but I see the dark things huddled in my front yard beneath
the evergreen trees.
There's the
Vampire Letstax, whom I interviewed in October 1994 during the state
graduated income tax campaign. His admission on tape that he needed the
"grad tax" in order to suck lots more Massachusetts taxpayer blood,
helped us defeat that ballot question; but he is back now with a liberal
group that calls itself "One." It will take them four years to get their
grad-tax proposal on the ballot again, so in the meantime they will
settle for an income tax rate increase if they can get the bloodsuckers
on Beacon Hill to help them prick your neck.
Standing
with Letstax is a rather pleasant-looking Devil; they are using some
taxpayer blood to toast this year's sales-tax hike and making plans for
a gas-tax increase soon. There's another vampire with them: Ah yes,
Count Barackula, his cape wrapped around his BarackulaCare proposal.
I shudder.
During a recent news conference, Count Barackula attacked the Medicare
Preferred programs, making it clear he wanted to kill them. And just
last week, I got a notice in the mail from Tufts informing me that my
Medicare Preferred plan will no longer be offered after Dec. 31; I and
thousands of other Massachusetts seniors must find another Medicare
supplement plan before the end of the year.
Will
Barackula kill them all, and eventually force seniors and younger folks
together into "the public option"?
There they
are, in my front yard: Nancy Belagosi and a Hairy creature, waiting to
control our health-care system. They feed not on blood, but on power.
Beware them!
Speaking of
drunk on power, there's Barney Frankenstein, the monster that helped
bring down the national economy with his support for Fanny Mae and
Freddie Mac and his resistance to mortgage reforms until it was too
late. For some reason that achievement made him a major player in
government bailouts intended to address the mess that he helped create,
adding even more to the national debt. Now as chairman of the House
Financial Services Committee, he is raising huge amounts of money from
those who, understandably, fear him, which he will funnel into
congressional campaigns to elect other monsters next year.
There must
be a Republican out there in the yard somewhere. Ah, yes, Dick Lon
Cheney, annoying Count Barackula with demands to quickly take the
country farther down yet another long dark tunnel of war. He refers to
"taking time to make wise decisions" as dithering, because what is the
military-industrial complex without young bodies to sacrifice on the
altar of futile nation-building?
Oh no, and
there go the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate: Martha Croakley,
Michael Capghoulano, and two others I get mixed up, though one is a rich
liberal and one is a community activist.
Croakley was
one of the district attorneys who persecuted the innocent Amirault
family in a rerun of the Salem witchcraft rials that was the Malden
day-care scare. Anyone who can't tell the difference between good people
and evil ones shouldn't be hanging out in the U.S. Senate. I'll be
voting in the Democratic primary, but I wouldn't vote for her if she was
the last politician on earth.
Capghoulano
is an old friend, honest and real; I worked with him when he was chief
of staff to the House Taxation Committee in the '80s. Unfortunately, he
was a supporter of the grad tax and now supports single-payer health
care; I might trust him on Afghanistan though. In the end, I'll be
voting for Scott Brown in the general election because he's not a
blood-sucking liberal.
What's that
in the shadows behind the lilac bush? It looks like a pig, but must be
the H1N1 virus.
We were
told, almost hysterically, by the government that we must get vaccinated
against it, must vaccinate our kids, ASAP! Now we learn that there's not
enough vaccine anyhow, so maybe we can wait and learn more about the
virus before we panic.
None of the
scary creatures in my yard seem to know what to do with the little
swine; but most of them think they and the government can run the entire
health system.
These are
the vampires, monsters and hairy creatures who want to be in charge of
our health care. If that's what lies at the end of the tunnel, we really
might not survive.