After the school shootings in Santee, California, the usual demand for gun control was muted. By now, everyone knows that that demand is just another opportunistic attempt to use human tragedy to push the liberal agenda. Though, of course, no respectable conservative ever puts that in plain English.

So liberals have used the latest school shootings to push another part of their agenda.

Liberals want more money spent on social programs and social experts. Those "experts," after all, are their people, and the more students that are exposed to such programs, the more liberalism can advance.

Naturally, no respectable conservative is going to point this out. When the liberal "experts" recommend something, they agree.

So the only recommendation everybody agreed on was that we need to institute lots of school "anti-violence programs." Practically no one mentioned that just such a program -- a BIG one -- already was in force at Sanatana High in Santee, California long before the shooting took place.

The fact that a program doesn't WORK means nothing.

The Santee "anti-violence" program spent $132,000 last year. It would be hard to imagine a more blatant proof that something didn't work.

But the media and public response made two things clear: 1) absolutely nobody is surprised that it didn't work and 2) it never occurs to anybody that such a program will actually work.

In one interview I saw, one of the experts was demanding that more money be spent on people like him. He tried to explain why their anti-violence exercise at Sanatana didn't work. He said it was because 1) there were guns around and 2) we have not yet learned to enforce the difference between free speech and hate speech.

Point 2) is what everybody says who wants to limit freedom of speech. See March 17, 2001, Whitaker Online: HARMLESS FREEDOM IS AN OXYMORON.

So let's go back to the real explanation of why it failed: Nothing liberals recommend ever WORKS.

But if we all know it won't work, how do they sell it?

Liberals have won by convincing us that all we need is to DO SOMETHING, even though that something is not supposed to do any good. If it costs us money and freedom, that shows we are trying, and that's enough.

But this "do something" logic is more than just ineffective. While a tragedy like this is used to push the liberal agenda, it has another effect.

When we just "do something," knowing it won't work, we ask for more deaths. We will only find out what is effective when we ABANDON THINGS THAT DON"T WORK.

In the meantime, liberals benefit, respectable conservatives make them happy, and children die.

Senator Pete Dominici is Chairman of the Senate Budget Committee. He is complaining that one of the major roadblocks to the Republican tax cut is the fact that his committee has the same number of Republicans and Democrats. He can't get the support of a single Democrat, and that allows them to block action.

Commenting on the pardon hearings, Senator Spectre said he was largely crippled by his inability to issue subpoenas. This is because he needs a majority of his committee to vote for a subpoena, and half the committee members are now Democrats. Trent Lott set it up that way.

Lott calls it "power sharing" with the Democrats, which is just what the liberal media asked for.

To back their "power sharing" demand, the media claimed that "the Senate has not been this evenly divided in one hundred and thirty years." Lott is a respectable conservative, which means he has no memory, so he went right along with this.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, this exact same thing happened in 1953. The Senate was split 48-48, and Vice President Nixon voted with the majority Republicans. Back then Republicans did what the Democrats would have done in the same situation. Each committee had one more Republican on it than Democrats, because Republicans were the majority party in the Senate.

If you cannot get a majority in a committee, that fact can be used to delay and kill a lot of legislation. So whether Lott's new precedent is just wimpishness or ignorance or both, it will be very costly for at least the next two years.

But the fact remains that Republicans have the majority, since the vice president is a Republican. Believe me, if the Senate were split fifty-fifty and the Democrats had the vice presidency, the media wouldn't be pushing "power sharing." And no Democrat would fall for it if they did.