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Pork could come with terrorists
(by Dave Lange - June 17, 2009)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Pork could come with terrorists
The telephone rang me out of a dreamless sleep in the dead of a misty spring night, and my hunch was right. "Hollow Larynx," the self-deluded authoritative source with connections to a high-ranking official in the Washington disestablishment, was on the other end of the line, somewhere not too far from the Pentagon and not too close to the Oval Office.
The recent vote against a $5.4 million bond issue to build a new 16,870-square-foot police station in Chagrin Falls could be a setback, he told me, but intelligence sources remain impressed with the progressive law-enforcement capabilities of the Chagrin Valley and Geauga County.
And $5 million or $10 million is chump change compared to the $80 million that the Barack Obama administration wants to spend just to close down the prison that's holding 240 terrorism suspects on the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. If the federal government is considering more than $300,000 per prisoner to get them out of Gitmo, Hollow Larynx confided, just imagine the amount of pork that could be collected by communities that are willing to lock them up in the United States.
Remember the famous words of one of our nation's former fearless leaders, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," he said, not to mention the words of a more recent fearful leader about terrorists just itching to break through those porous federal prison walls on the mainland.
While people around the country are scared witless about al Qaeda and the Taliban running around their neighborhoods and blowing up oil wells, Hollow Larynx reasoned, people in these parts can trust their local police to handle our cowardly enemies. Besides, they know that Northeast Ohio oil-and-gas-well drillers are perfectly capable of blowing up terrorists along with Bainbridge Township neighborhoods.
With the federal government tossing stimulus pork around like sausages at a pancake breakfast in Burton, with a president who would pay billions to smack the Gitmo monkey off his back and with a congressman who knows how to stimulate pork in his own back yard, Hollow Larynx said, Geauga County and the Chagrin Valley could get a piece of the action.
Since the federal prisons can't be trusted to hold those Guantanamo detainees, he said, the answer is to secretly spread them around in county and city jails. As we know, there has never been a jail break since the new Geauga County Jail was built a few years ago in Munson, he noted. And since they hired a new caterer at the Solon City Jail, the well-fed prisoners don't even want to leave.
For $50 million or $100 million a year, which is peanuts to the Obama administration, local jails could easily be expanded, according to Hollow Larynx, and a lot of good-paying jobs would be created for guards and interrogators.
In fact, they could throw a few cells in the new Chagrin Falls police station and build the whole thing with federal stimulus money, he said, thus they wouldn't have to stimulate reluctant voters. If Pepper Pike would agree to take on a dozen or so terrorists, they could build a gated police station to go with their gated neighborhood, he added.
Best of all for the phony moralists who complain about harsh interrogation methods, they could lock up some terrorists at the spacious Bainbridge jail, Hollow Larynx said. Since the well there got contaminated by a gas leak back in 2007, there's not enough water left for water boarding.
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