Unsurprisingly, The Wall Street Journal has a great editorial this morning on the sequester. A bit more surprising is that the good and fine editors at the Journal stumbled upon basically the same gag I used last week.
They begin their editorial:
’And when the Republicans opened the seventh seal of the sequester, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black and the stars fell unto the Earth; and our nation’s ability to forecast severe weather, such as drought events, hurricanes and tornados, was seriously undermined. Lo, and the children were not vaccinated, and all the beasts starved in the zoos, and the planes were grounded.“
Last week, my column began:
We are just days away from a cataclysm of biblical proportions. The cuts foretold in the Budget Control Act of 2011 are young as far as prophecies go, but apparently they are every bit as terrifying as rivers of blood and plagues of locusts. Any day now we can expect White House spokesman Jay Carney to take to the podium and read a prepared statement: “And when he opened the seventh seal, there was a small decrease in the rate of increase in federal spending.”
I like their version better, but they don’t have the length constraints of a normal column. Anyway, I don’t think anything nefarious is going on. These things happen. I once thought I invented a brilliant gag about Howard Dean looking like he was Bruce Banner in mid-transformation into the Hulk, only to be informed that Steyn had come up with the same riff months before me. As I believe Steyn said at the time, sometimes these things are simply in the water.