Posted by
Defend America on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 7:51:17 PM
Driving While Distracted
Ray LaHood, government guy, targets our cell phones.
February 22, 2010,
Vol. 15, No. 22
If you want to know why it may soon be illegal for you to use your
cell phone when you drive your car, you have to remember that Ray
LaHood, the secretary of transportation, is a government guy. It’s all
he knows.
As a young man LaHood taught for six years in a private school, but
since then it’s been government all the way—a few years as a planner
for the state planning commission, a term in the Illinois legislature,
nearly 20 years as a congressional aide, and 14 years in the big time,
as a Republican congressman, piping federal grants into a derelict
district in central Illinois. Though he’s driven many automobiles and
ridden in countless airplanes, he has no particular expertise in the
nation’s transportation systems, and some kibitzers wondered aloud why
President Obama appointed him secretary. But the kibitzers miss the
point: As a government guy LaHood doesn’t need any expertise beyond
being a government guy.
This is where you and your cell phone come in. Over the last several
months LaHood has mobilized his vast and lavishly funded ($70 billion)
department behind a high-minded goal: “to put an end to distracted
driving.” Those are his words—not curtail, not discourage, not even reduce by 50 percent. No: Put an end to.
In its ambition and method, LaHood’s initiative is a kind of textbook
example of how government guys create work for themselves, manage to
keep themselves busy, and put the rest of us on our guard.
The government guy’s first step, always, is to raid the language of
epidemiology and declare a problem—any problem, from anorexia to
obesity—an “epidemic.” And so: “Distracted driving is a serious,
life-threatening epidemic,” LaHood said at one of his big events last
month. (By definition, of course, epidemics are serious and
life-threatening, but since distracted driving isn’t really an
epidemic, the adjectives are needed to juice it up.)
http://weeklystandard.com/articles/driving-while-distracted