At this point you might be thinking "Huh, I wonder how much money the U.S. government saved by switching to more efficient and longer-lasting lightbulbs. That seems like a fiscally sound idea. That sounds like something Saint Ronald Reagan himself might do, in an attempt to shrink the bills of government, or like something George W. Bush himself would have proposed, had he ever become president, but of course he never did so shut up." That is a damn insightful comment on your part, and I congratulate you for making it. It is, however, not in keeping with the current direction of conservatism. The current direction of conservatism is to do the most dickish thing possible at all times, and claim that you are doing it because Nancy Pelosi wants you to do the opposite, and ignore the entire history of what you might have thought about fiscal penny-pinching or government waste mere moments beforehand.

The true conservative solution, therefore, would be to re-outfit all of the lamps in the Capitol to run on whale oil. It has the word oil in it, which makes it good, and it kills things, which makes it better. The conservative thing to do is to demand less energy efficiency, not more, because freedom demands being able to be as wasteful as all hell in accordance with that part of the Bible where Jesus talked about blessed-are-the-big-spending-assholes, which comes just after the part about rendering-to-Ceasar-as-little-as-damn-possible and just before the section on blessed-are-those-that-litter-for-fun.

I guarantee you Steve King would not give one incandescent shit about lightbulbs if, say, a Speaker Boehner had sent his East German Elite Janitorial Guard to change them out. But this is the nature of conservatism.



"I would screw them out and send the interns out to get me some of those good Edison lightbulbs," he said, the crowd cheering. "And those interns would come back sometimes empty-handed in tears, because they couldn't come up with a regular Edison light-bulb."

Really? Really? If I had interns that burst into tears because they could not find the proper kind of lightbulbs, I honestly would have to question the quality of my interns. Is his staff populated with four-year-olds? Is there some prescription drug dependency that needs to be looked into? I have to say, if Steve King has interns coming back in tears because they could not find Steve King the kind of lightbulbs Steve King demanded, then Steve King must be a horrible person to work for.

Also: I am sorry, but if you are sent on an errand to find incandescent lightbulbs and yet cannot find them, you quite possibly might be a moron. Even today, after the cruel regime of lightbulb-Gestapoism has done its devastating work across our great land, I can find incandescent lightbulbs in no less than a dozen stores in my tiny, suspiciously leftist-sympathizing town. I dare say that I could find incandescent lightbulbs in two of those stores while blindfolded, without help from onlookers or any kind of lightbulb-sniffing dog. Maybe this is a skill only available to the coastal elites (there are many, it turns out: I once stunned a visiting crowd from Tennessee by flattening a box before putting it in my recycling bin, thus magically making room for more recycling) but I have confidence it can be learned, with practice.



He said he finally decided it was "cruel and inhumane" to send the interns on that task, so he went to find "black-market" lightbulbs himself. He then was faced with a decision: buy a recyclable bag, which he at first said no to, or pay more.

He went to Wal-Mart, then? That would explain being charged for a bag. A crappy Wal-Mart bag, too, probably made in China from the extruded hopes and dreams of orphans. Congratulations to the congressman for solving the goddamn lightbulb problem his entire staff could not manage to solve for him; I may have to rescind my previous suspicion that he was one of the stupidest people in America. He at least has the coastal "can find my own goddamn lightbulbs" gene, so someone in his distant ancestry must at one point have slept with a liberal.

(Note, too, the even further-heightened tension of this most epic possible lightbulb-changing story. Here our hero bravely defies the East Germanic authorities in order to go buy his own lightbulbs, which he must purchase on the "black market." The black market, however, requires recyclable bags to carry out your lightbulbs in. What will his choice be? Will he make it out alive, or have to pay an extra ten cents for a non-recyclable bag?)



"Whenever I need to put a lightbulb in the lamp, I reach into this green bag and I screw it in there and I smile," he said. "A little bit of my liberty back, a little bit of my freedom back."

Ah! The dramatic ending. You can cut the sexual tension with a knife, as Steve King talks of screwing things in and smiling about it. All good conservative principles revolve in some fashion around screwing. Who should screw, who shouldn't screw, who should get screwed by which group, and so on. There is only one tool in that little toolbox, but it serves all purposes.

And thus a story about changing a lightbulb because you are too much of an enormous, intern-hectoring dick to tolerate your government-owned office saving a little money becomes a metaphor for freedom, and for liberty, and for how something that nobody gave even the slightest damn fuck about during the Bush years became communism when Nancy Pelosi did the exact same thing. I like to imagine here that the CPAC crowd then rose to their feet, a few hundred lily-white faces peeking out from atop tightly buttoned white dress shirts, and gave a thundering ovation to this heroic Conservative Tale of Adventure. And there, beaming, is Steve King, the Indiana Jones of conservative congressmen, 100 watts of liberty shining forth from a 5-watt man, a man able to negotiate a Wal-Mart, make decisions about which sort of bag to take home, and thwart the machinations of his oppressive and deadly janitorial staff.

For what? To cost the government a few more dollars a month just because he can. For liberty. For freedom.

