Somewhere on a virtual bookshelf on the Library of Congress’ website sits a beautifully illustrated book, crafted with the purpose of raising up virtuous young men and women. Its title is “The Aesop For Children.”
Many RedState readers will be familiar with Aesop and his short (sometimes funny) morality stories, written in Greece sometime circa 620 BCE and 564 BCE. (Well, that’s a guesstimate from the source: take a gander yourself, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.)
Earlier on Sunday evening, my colleague Nick Arama wrote a piece about Joe Biden and the Democrats’ attempts to pull a fast one on the American people, whether on the Sunday shows or through slyly worded social media posts. They are claiming that not only does their boondoggle of an infrastructure plan contain spending items that the majority of Americans of every stripe and creed say they agree with, but that it will end up costing zero dollars.
After reading Nick’s piece and mulling over what the Dems are about to do to themselves in the coming hours and days, I remembered a tale my parents taught my sister and I to read many years ago, while we were growing up in former House Speaker John Boehner’s district. In the book pictured above, the story is called “The Dog And His Reflection.” And it goes like this:
A Dog, to whom the butcher had thrown a bone, was hurrying home with his prize as fast as he could go. As he crossed a narrow footbridge, he happened to look down and saw himself reflected in the quiet water as if in a mirror. But the greedy Dog thought he saw a real Dog carrying a bone much bigger than his own.
If he had stopped to think he would have known better. But instead of thinking, he dropped his bone and sprang at the Dog in the river, only to find himself swimming for dear life to reach the shore. At last he managed to scramble out, and as he stood sadly thinking about the good bone he had lost, he realized what a stupid Dog he had been.
As Aesop points out, the moral of the tale is, “It is very foolish to be greedy.”
Now, as Monday morning draws near, in the spirit of Christian goodwill, we have to hope that Mr. Biden and the Democrats in the lower House might do some self-reflection of their own, at this point. Maybe they can gain some instruction in morality and a way forward toward reason from the fable above written for kids. Because, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves when they come up empty.