Harry of the Horse Poop

And no one in the media mentions he's a Mormon, yet it was never forgotten about with Romney. Curious. m/r

Git Along, L'il Harry :: SteynOnline

by Mark Steyn  Topical Take  March 27, 2015

The news that Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid will not contest the next election and has decided to ride that lonesome trail into the sunset of lobbying and consulting naturally reminded me of the great man's finest hour - his stirring defense of the federally subsidized cowboy poetry program. Here's what I had to say about it in my column of more or less exactly four years ago - March 2011 - oh, and do stay tuned for my own non-federally subsidized efforts at cowboy poetry right at the end:

How mean-spirited are House Republicans? So mean-spirited that they would end federally funded cowboy poetry! On Tuesday, Harry Reid, the Majority Leader, took to the Senate floor to thunder that this town ain't big enough for both him and the Mean-Spirited Kid (John Boehner).

"The mean-spirited bill, HR 1 ... eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts," said Senator Reid. "These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist." [Would these people be eliminated by Harry's Cowpoke Hit Posse?]

"Tens of thousands" would "not exist"? There can't be that many cowboy poets, can there? Oh, c'mon, don't be naïve. Where there are taxpayer-funded cowboy poets, there must surely be cowboy poetry festival administrators, and a Bureau of Cowboy Poetry Festival Licensing, and cowboy poetry festival administration grant-writers, and a Department of Cowboy Poetry Festival Administration Grant Application Processing, and Professors of Cowboy Poetry Festival Educational Workshop Management at dozens of American colleges credentialing thousands of cowboy poetry festival workshop co-coordinating majors every year. It all adds up. In Western railroad halts where the Last Chance Saloon shuttered in 1893, dusty one-horse towns are now glittering one-grant towns, where elderly hoochie-koochie dancers are being retrained to lead rewarding lives as inspectors from the Agency of Cowboy-Poetry Festival Handicapped-Access Compliance. Used to be a man could ride the range for days on end under lonesome skies with nuthin' on the horizon 'cept a withered mesquite and a clump of sagebrush, but now all you see are clouds of dust and all you hear's the mighty roar of thundering hooves as every gnarled ol' wrangler in the territory races for the last hitching post outside creative-writing class.

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