There's bad in a general sense, and then there is the kind of bad that is unique to this particular time

I haven't written about either the GSA confab in Las Vegas or the Secret Service prostitute-hiring scandal in Cartegena, Colombia yet.

Here at LITD, we reserve for first-tier consideration those developments that illustrate clearly the consequences to society of tilting leftward. The fact of the matter is that either of these incidents, while they are indeed harmful to the MEC regime (which is, admittedly, always a good thing), do not get to the essence of what makes leftist policy so harmful. Yes, they both - certainly, the GSA scandal - illustrate how the government gravy train can fill a public servant's head with notions of power and moral immunity. Really, though, that just illustrates how government bloat has gotten out of hand in our time. Let's be honest; either of these situations could have happened in a Republican administration. They would have been less likely to occur, I would sumbit, but it wouldn't have been impossible.

I guess another way of putting it is that we definitely do need to protect the president, and, given the sprawl of present-day government, we probably do need an agency that provides logistical and support infrastructure to the rest of the federal leviathan. But we don't need stimulus spending, green-energy subsidization, federally subsidized before-and-after-school meals or day care, and the rest of the unconsitutional intrusions about which LITD opines daily.

It is true that we need less of even the things we may need some of, and that's what went wrong in Cartagena and Las Vegas.