Big Government: "All Jacket, No Bombers"

FEMA can't even provide food water and shelter to hurricane Sandy victims...

Small government conservatives do not hate government. We hate bloated, wasteful, oppressive government. No government at all would mean anarchy, and no conservative I know wants that.

We want a small, efficient government that works.

But, as Mark Steyn points out, so much government now is expensive window-dressing.  The president looked good in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy:

He had himself photographed in the White House Situation Room, nodding thoughtfully to bureaucrats[...] and Tweeted it to his 3.2 million followers. He appeared in New Jersey wearing a bomber jacket rather than a suit to demonstrate that when the going gets tough the tough get out a monogrammed Air Force One bomber jacket.

So you can have Big Government bigger (or, anyway, more expensive) than any government's ever been, and the lights still go out in 17 states – because your president spent 6 trillion bucks, and all the country got was a lousy Air Force One bomber jacket for him to wear while posing for a Twitpic answering the phone with his concerned expression.

He notes that the hurricane only struck a few counties on the eastern seaboard, but it's winds wreaked havoc with an antiquated electric grid across a swath of states:

Everyone else had slightly windier-than-usual wind – and yet they were out of power for days. In a county entirely untouched by Sandy, my office manager had no electricity for a week. Not because of an "emergency" but because of a decrepit and vulnerable above-the-ground electrical distribution system that ought to be a national embarrassment to any developed society.

Imagine if Obama's 2009 stimulus had been spent burying every electric pole on the Eastern Seaboard. Instead, just that one Obama bill spent a little shy of a trillion dollars, and no one can point to a single thing it built.

Steyn goes after New York Nanny Michael Bloomberg as well...

This is a man who spends his days micromanaging the amount of soda New Yorkers are allowed to have in their beverage containers rather than, say, the amount of ocean New Yorkers are allowed to have in their subway system.

Imagine if this preening buffoon had expended as much executive energy on flood protection for the electrical grid and transit system as he does on approved quantities of carbonated beverages.

Finally, Steyn asks, what good is all that military power?

When something goes screwy at a ramshackle consulate halfway round the globe, very few governments have the technological capacity to watch it unfold in real time. Even fewer have deployable military assets only a couple of hours away. What is the point of unmanned drones, of military bases around the planet, of elite Special Forces trained to the peak of perfection if the president and the vast bloated federal bureaucracy cannot rouse themselves to action?

Shouldn't we demand accountability from our government?

All quotes from Biggest Government Can't Keep the Lights On