I don’t recall many schoolteachers leading hymms to George Bush when he shifted the ground under Saddam Hussein and changed his world. Something tells me no one in the educational establishment would be leading musical worship sessions for the equally historic President Sarah Palin or President Condoleeza Rice, either.

The guy is everywhere, all the time. He’s been stalking the American voter all summer, muttering the ever-changing details and phony rationale for his health-care takeover plan. Mercifully, he stopped just short of filling our inboxes with spam emails, or dropping pop-up spyware onto our computers. I have a recurring nightmare that the Microsoft Office Assistant will rap on my monitor to get my attention, and start talking about the urgent need for health-care reform.

The omnipresence of our political leadership will only grow worse over time, if we don’t begin scaling back the super-State. Everything in life has become politicized, and politics have become highly centralized. The President, and the majority leadership in Congress, have an increasing amount of influence over every aspect of your daily life – not in a remote theoretical sense, but literally. If the government takes over health care, your body will become property of the State, which will have a vested interest in controlling your diet, exercise, and everything else that might affect your consumption of tightly-rationed medical resources. The cap-and-trade bill puts the federal government in charge of your kitchen appliances and light bulbs. These latest extensions of federal power come after decades of more gradual increases.

Once the functions of government move beyond essential expenses, such as national defense and border security, the rationale behind every additional tax dollar is based on the greater wisdom of the political class. You cannot be trusted to support the arts, care for the indigent, respect the environment, or do any of the other things Washington spends your tax money on. Soon, you will not be trusted to manage your own health care – in fact, under the Max Baucus health-care plan, you would be jailed for failing to purchase government-approved health insurance. If all of this money is taken from you because you can’t be trusted to spend it wisely, it follows that the people spending it must possess supreme wisdom. Likewise, the displaced private owners of a nationalized industry must be inferior to the politicians who now control it. No rationale for Big Government can escape these conclusions.