I saw a story linked on Instapundit, but it really belonged on The Onion.
Apparently, our tax dollars are being used to fund grief counseling for congressional staffers who will lose their jobs in January because of the elections. Can you think of a better example than this of how Washington is screwed up?
This isn’t just a symbol of fiscal excess (though it definitely belongs in that category). It’s also a sign of the wuss-ification (not a technical term, but you know what I mean) of American society. Are we really so pathetically fragile that we need professional hand-holders for something like this? It’s not like people who work on Capitol Hill don’t know ahead of time about elections.
Besides, there’s a what-goes-around-comes-around element to this story. I’m not trying to be callous. Unemployment can be a terrible thing, particularly for people who have kids. But these congressional staffers spent their days figuring out ways to impose costs on the rest of us. They schemed to reduce our freedoms and take our money. These are people who pushed policies that resulted in job losses for millions of people in the productive sector of the economy.
Asking me to feel sorry for these people is like asking me to have pity on burglars who dislike door locks, alarm systems, and armed homeowners.
Here’s an excerpt from the Politico story.
A staffer for a congressional Democrat who came up short on Tuesday reports that a team of about five people stopped by their offices this morning to talk about payroll, benefits, writing a résumé, and so forth, with staffers who are now job hunting. But one of the staffers was described as a “counselor” to help with the emotional aspect of the loss — and a section in the packet each staffer was given dealt with the stages of grief (for instance, Stage One being anger, and so on). “It was like it was about death,” the staffer said. “It was bizarre.”
