Pay attention, children. This is an allegory that draws a parallel between how the government does things, and how things should be done.
Way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and there were two world superpowers -- the U.S. and Russia (okay, technically, it was the USSR, but Russia and the USSR were used interchangeably - for the sake of convenience, we're going to use Russia here) -- there was this contest between us and them known as the Space Race.
That was back when America had pride in itself, had lofty objectives, and had the technological, economical, and spiritual resources to strive and achieve. In other words, pre-obama.
Anyway, back then when NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity.
To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, underwater, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300° C.
The Russians used a pencil...
