Irony Alert: I'm Going To Say Government Is Stupid And Inefficient And Conservatives Will Disagree With Me

I am in the process of gathering the documents necessary to renew my driver licence.  I'm so old I can remember when the documents were called driver's licences.

The fact that I am alive is insufficient for the state of South Dakota to believe I was born, so I had to obtain a copy of my birth certificate. In fairness, the state of South Dakota wants to be sure I am a legal resident who is not a terrorist. Apparently I might have been not have been the former but a member of a group who supports the latter the previous times the state issued me a license.

In order to get a copy of my birth certificate, I had to provide a copy of--and I'll bet no can guess what's going to come next--my driver license. So, to a get a driver license, I need a copy of a birth certificate. To obtain a driver license, I need a copy of a birth certificate. I believe that's called a catch-22 or a cluster . . . .

One more time--the old driver license isn't good enough to show a state bureaucrat that I am a legal resident, but it is enough evidence for another state bureaucrat to give me a birth certificate. Of course logic is not a necessary tool in the war on terror. Waging war on an emotion is an illogic all its own.

I guess it's a good thing that no one's worried I'm going to try to vote. I can't imagine the paperwork they'll devise for that

Quotation Of The Day: Television Is Better Than Politicians Edition

From this Sam Wilkerson post:

I think that people assume that there are pro-government (Democrat) and anti-government (Republican) people occupying the world. I think that’s unfortunate. Seems like there are an awful lot of people who want competent government. Whether or not such a thing is possible might be beside the point; its what those people want, especially when the Wild Wild West is out there beyond the government’s existence. David Simon’s shows have repeatedly made this point. Whether it was Homicide‘s occasionally callous detectives or The Wire‘s innocent bystanders or Treme‘s “city-planning,” it seems clear that people victimized by their government aren’t necessarily against it conceptually so much as they’re against it in reality. There aren’t many politicians capable of making that point in such a way as to get elected.