Rand Paul's Potty Mouth

In a recent congressional hearing where incandescent light bulbs were being discussed, Rand Paul went a tirade about his toilets.

“Frankly, my toilets don’t work in my house, and I blame you and people like you who want to tell me what I can install in my house,” Paul said. He added, “I find it insulting.”

Instead of blaming the company that built his defective toilet, Paul is blaming the government. We have low flow toilets in our house, and have had them for ten years, and they work just fine. Now, I suppose it's possible that Paul is so full of it that he needs an extra-high capacity toilet, but he could adapt his flushing technique to accommodate his great . . . needs.

Why do we have low-flow toilets? To save water, obviously. Why should we save water? If you live in LA, or Phoenix, or Las Vegas or pretty much anywhere in the southwest, or you live in Atlanta, where they recently suffered from a years-long drought, you know how wretched it is to not have enough water.

Big, thirsty toilets are just about the worst possible use for clean, fresh water: does it really make sense to waste 3.5 gallons of water to wash away a few ounces of urine? (Low-flow toilets use 1.6 gallons or less.) The average person flushes 5 times per day. With 300 million Americans, that comes out to 5.25 billion gallons a day. Using low-flow toilets reduces that to 2.4 billion gallons.

Water-wasting toilets require local governments to build extra large sewer systems and sewage treatment plants. They require development of larger water supplies, more municipal water towers for storage, and on and on. Wasting things costs money, and wasting common resources costs everybody money. Higher demand for a commodity raises its price, especially when it's in short supply -- that's Econ 101. Why should I pay more for water just so Rand Paul can waste it?

We use water for things other than toilets and showers and watering the lawn: industry needs a lot of water for fabricating ICs, generating power, making aluminum, etc. In California alone, low-flow toilets can save more than 100 billion gallons of water a year: water that farmers could use to feed the city folks who are literally pissing away the water farmers need.

Government regulations such as these save money and save lives. Those pesky government regulations for seat belts, air bags, crumple zones in cars, and so on, have saved thousands of lives. Those annoying regulations that require lead-free gas, catalytic converters, mercury capture in coal-plant emissions have saved millions of lives since they were enacted. They have lifted many of the ugly gray-brown clouds of filth that used to mar every city's skyline.

And who was that vile bureaucrat who signed the low-flush toilet act into law in 1992? Well, it was that commie pinko tree-hugging George H. W. Bush. The enviro-fascist who enacted the light-bulb law that Paul and Michele Bachmann were bitching about? George W. Bush (the Energy Independence and Security Act, enacted in 2007).

It used to be that Republicans were actual conservatives, wanting to conserve the past, our natural resources and our heritage. Now they seem to only be interested in conserving the right to be wastrels, and corporate profits that require ever-increasing rates of consumption to keep the stock market mavens and corporate take-over artists happy.

Why is it that every conservative these days has to trot out their petty grievances about every possible inconvenience in life and blame it on the government? Grow up, Rand Paul. You're embarrassing your kids with all this toilet talk.