It’s about time to resume the “War on Poverty” that we started in the 1960’s. And when I say “we,” I mean soft-hearted liberals who needed a slogan for re-election. But this time, we do the War on Poverty right. I’m talking big guns.

After all, we can’t eliminate poverty, any more than we can eliminate terror. That’s been my objection to the president’s War on Terror all along. And before you go thinking I’ve gone all NPR on you guys, that doesn’t mean we should give up. Let’s just refocus the War on Terror. Make it the War on Terrorists, which is what it already is. Wipe them all out from the face of the earth—if you’re not wit’ us, you’re a’gin us. And that’s what we got to do with the War on Poverty: Wipe out the impoverished.

It doesn’t have to be a hateful war, but we’ve got to get rid of them all the same. They’re just going to drag us all down with them. And even if they don’t, they’ll still make our lives hell—asking for money, especially around the holidays, starring in documentaries that clog our independent theaters, and just generally hanging around and making us feel bad. We can’t let them run our lives anymore. Wipe out the impoverished.

We can get it started it easy enough—since they don’t have houses, we can find most of them out in the open, where they’re easy to get at. Eventually, though, we’ll have to take it to the next level. Hunt them down in the housing projects, in the trailer parks, even in the mountains, where they’re bunched up together 25-to-100 per house. Sure, my soft side wants to give them all a free ride, but it’s by being pushovers we’ve been overrun with poverty all this time.

The best part is, we don’t need a new army to do it. Put the police to work doing what they were originally created for anyway—to keep the poor out of our hair. But give them their teeth back, no more of this back-alley beating crap and telling people to “move along.” We start the War on Poverty, I mean really start it, and the police can finally do what they were meant to do. Round ‘em up and march ‘em into the nearest large body of water. Or if that’s too unsanitary, maybe launch them into space. Give them a chance to colonize a planet full of moochers and layabouts.

We’ll need to set firm criteria so we don’t have everybody out in the streets getting shot by people riding polo ponies and everything. Set a bottomline income bracket above which everyone gets to live, and then root out the nickel-and-dimeless. I used to think a metal detector of some sort would help find whose got money and who doesn’t, but anybody walking around with pocket change is probably below the minimum income bracket, or just scraping together enough to stay above it.

People say I’m full of hate to suggest such a thing. I tell them to shut up before I choke them to death. Because I’m not full of hate. I just think everybody needs to pull their own weight, or pull whatever weight they’re told to pull. The world needs workers and the world needs bosses. What they don’t need is people who refuse to be either. I send my money to the government each week, and it’s always more than I like, so they can keep the roads in good shape for me to drive on and to keep the kids from turning out retarded. Judging by the noise on the radio and the TV, I’m not sure that last part is working out. But I know I don’t send my money to the government so we can support freeloaders, the infirm, or those who can’t swing a hammer or a shovel or whatever for 8-12 hours a day. Or write a column, of course—angry columnists provide the most valuable service of all.