Apparently, it’s OK for Obama to fire the head of General Motors, but Bush can’t fire his own U.S. attorneys.

It is generally agreed that the Obama administration’s demand that Rick Wagoner resign as chairman of General Motors is the price of GM’s accepting government money.

To promote the sales of GM vehicles, Obama says the government will stand by your GM car warranty. And all the taxpayers will get a lube job. The new GM owner’s manual will come with a disclaimer: “Close enough for government work.”

Now that we’re all agreed that the government can make hiring and firing decisions based on infusions of taxpayer money, I can think of a lot more government beneficiaries who are badly in need of firing.

Just off the top of my head, how about Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and everybody at the Department of Education?

How about firing all the former Weathermen, like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Mark Rudd, whose university salaries are subsidized by the taxpayer?

Nearly every university in the country accepts government money. Is there any industry in America more in need of some “restructuring” than academia? What’s Berkeley’s “business plan” to stop turning out graduates who hate America?

And what is Obama’s justification for keeping Shirley M. Tilghman as president of Princeton University as long as Princeton employs prominent crackpot Peter Singer?

Singer, the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton’s Center for Human Values, believes parents should have the right to kill newborn babies with birth defects, such as Down syndrome and hemophilia, and says there is nothing morally wrong with parents conceiving children in order to harvest them for spare parts for an older child – or even for society to breed children on a massive scale for spare parts.

His views on these issues are so extreme I’m surprised Singer hasn’t been offered a position in the Obama cabinet yet. Perhaps he paid his taxes and was disqualified.

Singer compares the black liberation movement to the liberation of apes, saying we must “extend to other species the basic principle of equality that most of us recognize should be extended to all members of our own species.” (Imagine if Rush Limbaugh had said that and then go lie down for 20 minutes.)

The esteemed professor Singer also believes sex with animals is acceptable and has no objections to necrophilia – provided the deceased gave consent when still alive. We’re still waiting to hear his views on sex with dead animals. Especially me, as I have no plans for next weekend.

Doesn’t a “new vision” for Princeton – which benefits from massive taxpayer subsidies in the form of student loans and government grants – require firing the president of Princeton? That university is clearly teetering on the brink of moral bankruptcy.

When is the government going to get around to firing 99 percent of public school superintendents? They’re clearly turning out an inferior product – i.e., America’s public school graduates – as compared to some of the foreign models now available.

In New York City, spending on public schools increased by more than 300 percent between 1982 and 2001, coming in at $11,474 per pupil annually – compared to about $5,000 for private schools.

But in 2003, a New York court ruled that graduates of New York City’s public schools did not have the skills to be “capable of voting and serving on a jury.” (Worse, some kids coming out of New York high schools are so stupid they don’t even know how to get out of jury duty.)

If Obama can tell GM and Chrysler that their participation in NASCAR is an “unnecessary expenditure,” isn’t having public schools force students to follow Muslim rituals, recite Islamic prayers and plan “jihads” also an “unnecessary expenditure”? Are all those school condom purchases considered “necessary expenditures”?

Illegal aliens cost the American taxpayer more than $10 billion a year, net, in Medicaid, Medicare, food stamps, free school lunches, prison, school and court costs. And yet cities, counties and states across the nation are openly refusing to enforce federal immigration law against illegal aliens – all while accepting billions of dollars of stimulus money on top of a litany of other federal payouts.

Shouldn’t somebody be fired over this? Like maybe Geraldo Rivera?

How about hauling San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom before a congressional committee and firing him? In fact, just being named “Gavin Newsom” should be grounds for dismissal. San Francisco is getting $18 million of stimulus money – to say nothing of its residents who receive federal money in the form of Social Security payments, government grants, welfare payments, federal highway funds and on and on and on.

Doesn’t PBS take federal funds? Obama should really ask Big Bird to step down. While we’re at it, shouldn’t Tim Geithner be fired?

Now that the government owns everything, there’s no end to the dead wood that can be cleared out.

Except the problem is – as this very partial list demonstrates – most of the dead wood exists only because of the government in the first place. Capitalism has its own methods of clearing out dead wood, which the government keeps preventing by forcing the taxpayer to bail out capitalism’s losers.

COPYRIGHT 2009 ANN COULTER
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