Hello, Barnmates

No one's quite sure who said it. It was either LBJ, or the Democratic Speaker of the House a decade before LBJ, Sam Rayburn. Either way, one of these powerful Democrats spoke the words that would result in the founding title of this blog: "Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a good carpenter to build one."

I took these very sincere words to heart. I am a jackass to the core. I do dumb shit all the time. And I can kick down a barn? Wow. I didn't know I had the right!

And this got me to thinking. If I had the right to kick down a barn, what other cool stuff can I do? So I opened up the rulebook and nosed around. You know what? There isn't even that much cool stuff that I have the right to do. And I looked around some more, and realized that 5591 American soldiers have died in the last six years to defend these cool things I don't have the right to do. And I also realized that these guys were defending my rights in countries that are a full ocean and a continent away. And they aren't even looking for the right bad guy!

I realized that Lyndon Johnson, despite sending more people even further away to fight for the same not-rights, and increasing taxes to defend the same not-rights in countries where our not-rights aren't at stake, was a pretty smart guy. And he said I could kick down a barn?

It was at this point that I realized he meant a metaphorical barn, because a president talking about kicking down a barn seemed silly.

So I thought something: I thought that maybe all these people dying to protect the not-rights of people and the rights of politicians to raise taxes to do stupid stuff like protect not-rights and send probes to Mars was the barn, and I could be the jackass. Obviously, that's a pretty big barn, so I don't doubt I'll be kicking for a while. But it's one of the few rights I haven't lost, and I might only have a few short years with it before this Indonesian guy running a country he hadn't even heard of until he was 10 takes them away.

So I'm going to kick my little jack-ass off. And I'm going to make sure everyone knows why this barn needs to come down.

And it's not going to make a rat's ass of a difference, but I'm going to do it anyway.

Tune in and watch me kick.