John Hayward / Doctor Zero Podcasts

It has long been my practice to write a horror story on Halloween, and share it with my friends. I posted last year’s effort at Hot Air, along with an essay about horror entitled The Very Witching Time of Night. I thought I would share this year’s story as well. Happy Halloween!

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The 111th Congress began by dropping a trillion dollars in debt on the American taxpayer. The money disappeared in a wild spending spree, buying $2 million jobs in Los Angeles, and evaporating into nonexistent zip codes. Billions of dollars remain clogged in the filthy pipes of government, producing nothing but more debt through accumulated interest payments. Much of the “stimulus” money was used to pump lard into government payrolls, creating useless jobs that vanished as soon as the taxpayer subsidies ran dry. The President recently admitted that the stated reason for appropriating this vast sum of money, the creation of “shovel-ready jobs,” was an outright lie.

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You know what America really needs? More stimulus spending! We’ve got double-digit unemployment and a moribund economy after President Obama’s first trillion-dollar stimulus bill. Obviously we need more.

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In a radio interview for Latino audiences, President Obama laid bare the ugly reality of statist government:

“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.”

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The central idea behind every form of collectivism is the belief that the State is better able to address most social problems than free-willed individuals. The government is morally and intellectually superior to its citizens. It can be trusted to act in their best interests, while greedy private corporations will only try to take advantage of them.

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It’s almost Halloween, which means it’s time to harvest the fall crop of horror movies. The most memorable scary movies are those which echo the fears of the moment. The Exorcist arrived at a time of tension between science and spirituality, pitting a very modern single mom and her daughter against an ancient terror. Halloween unleashed a faceless, unstoppable evil into the backyards and living rooms of a comfortable suburb. Jaws reminded audiences that overcrowded beaches full of overfed tourists are but the top layer of some very deep waters. The Blair Witch Project used creepy little twig dolls to teach a high-tech, know-it-all generation that old-growth forests still exist, and you can still get lost forever in their shadowy embrace.

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Everyone has their pet theories about National Public Radio’s stunning decision to fire Juan Williams, and most of those theories are probably correct. Williams is reliably liberal in most of his views, but he’s too friendly with conservatives, and his presence smears a bit too much liberal credibility on the dry right-wing toast of Fox News. It’s a pledge week for NPR, and the high-profile sacking of the tainted Williams will inspire the insulated left-wing audience to push a few more bucks through the feeding slots in their hermetically sealed isolation bubbles.

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In the first decade of the new millennium, a great crisis of confidence shook the United States of America. This crisis has cultural and international dimensions. The election of a supposedly “post-racial” black President was meant to achieve a level of racial harmony the public had wearily concluded it could not reach on its own.

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Comedian and fake news host Jon Stewart has announced a “Rally to Restore Sanity” on October 30 in Washington, D.C. Nervous at being almost completely eclipsed by Glenn Beck, Stewart decided to stage a rally that would be presented as a satire of Beck’s immense “Restoring Honor” rally in August. Of course, Stewart wants to drop his detachable clown nose at his convenience, to make “dead serious” points, as Time magazine puts it . . .

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Back in September, we were astonished by the spectacle of John Kerry lurching before the cameras to call the voters stupid and ignorant. He dismissed the rising tide of resistance to the Democrat agenda by saying, “We have an electorate that doesn’t always pay that much attention to what’s going on so people are influenced by a simple slogan rather than the facts or the truth or what’s happening.” Many observers scratched their heads and wondered what the creepy senator from Massachusetts could possibly be thinking. I said at the time this was not just another instance of Kerry deciding to chow down on a foot sandwich in front of reporters. It was the final narrative produced by the Democrats to limit the damage from the Republican tsunami headed their way in November.

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