Can We Stop Obama By Destroying Our Interstates?

Dangerous times call for bold ideas, which is why I was so excited after reading my colleague George Will's insightful column on Tuesday about how the socialist Eisenhower government forced Americans to become drivers of automobiles because of the Interstate Highway System.

"That explains a lot," I told my secret friend who reads all the various columnists and blogs to me over the telephone.

Now, Barack Obama and his liberal Republican Transportation Secretary are trying to "improve" or "update" things we all know certainly do not need updating. If roads and trains and other such modes of transport needed "updating" all the time, why, they may as well be computers.

From improving gas mileage in cars to trying to provide health care for children, it seems there's no end to the communist designs Barack Obama and his increasingly Republican administration have for our country. And it all goes back not only to Roosevelt's "New Deal" to help people supposedly inconvenienced by the Great Depression, but also to the sinister Interstate Highway system pushed by "RINO" Dwight Eisenhower, who apparently never met a big government spending program he didn't love.

Interviewing Republican Ray LaHood, the new secretary of transportation, over a fine lunch somewhere around Washington, George Will was able to effortlessly extract a shocking admission from this Republican:

Government "promoted driving" by building the Interstate Highway System - "you talk about changing behavior."

Incredible. So, according to Will and LaHood, the Eisenhower administration colluded to force us to drive these terrible cars, on interstates. People used to happily get around on private-sector donkeys and steamboats. And then ... oh, that explains quite a lot.

While I remember the 1960s very well, as it was the "greatest generation" in which we fought important civil rights battles while enjoying the soundtrack of our era, The Beatles, I do not know what happened in the 1950s. Of course, I can look at Wikipedia as easily as some of you reading this today, if you know how to use simple parts of the Internet. But I cannot say, "Oh yes they, the government, forced me or whatever people to get in 1950s cars and go, go, go, for the Beat Generation."

Our quandary is this:

More and more, the timeline is raising the question of why, if the interstate system was to prevent public transportation, it seemed to happen mainly during the period when the Eisenhower crowd was looking for what was essentially political information to justify the building of interstates.

So if we, as a teabagging movement, were to destroy each and every government-built big-government interstate system, could we not perhaps return to the old, good America of the 18th Century, before roads and concrete? If we could no longer drive in a car on a paved highway between, say, Phoenix and Tuscon, wouldn't the Private Sector quickly build thousands of new hand-carved toll trails over the hardscrabble boulders and cactus-strewn valleys?

We are a strong country. We can remake this nation in the image of its founders. We can once again become a vast wilderness of scattered settlements connected by dangerous footpaths. Let's leave socialism where it belongs, in Canada.

Ken Layne is the editor of Wonkette, a transportation policy think tank in Washington D.C.