Vin Suprynowicz

There’s a back-handed compliment buried in there.

If you’re a “think tank” dumping yet another new study on a jaded press and public, ranking cities from “best” to “worst” on some topic or other (and thus not-so-secretly lobbying for more government spending on your pet projects), there’s one sure way to make headlines. Highlight the high (or, usually, extremely low) ranking of the one town Americans never tire of hearing about …

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The common wisdom seems to be that four-term incumbent U.S. Sen. Harry Reid snatched a fifth term from Republican challenger Sharron Angle last month thanks to a better “ground game” that turned out a higher percentage of Democratic voters than the comparatively amateur Angle operation in Clark County (Las Vegas.)

But did he?

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When the Obama administration took over financially ailing General Motors instead of allowing the bankruptcy courts to reallocate the bloated firm’s assets to sharper entrepreneurs, more than one wag dubbed the resulting state-socialist enterprise “Government Motors.”

Since then, GM has geared up production of pricey “hybrids” that supposedly cause less pollution — until one considers battery manufacture and disposal.

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As we were saying last week, most political decisions are based on “narratives” — histories of how we got here, reduced to easy-to-grasp stories a few sentences in length.

The problem is, if we get the “narrative” wrong, bad outcomes grow far more likely, since we’ll be working to “solve” the wrong problem, or even applying larger doses of the “medicine” that got us here in the first place.

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Since few of us can actually wade through and comprehend a federal budget (or even a 2,000-page “health care law,” as written), most political decisions are based on “narratives” — histories of how we got here, reduced to a few easy-to-remember sentences.

The problem is, if we get the “narrative” wrong, bad outcomes grow far more likely, since we’ll be working to “solve” the wrong problem, or even applying larger doses of the “medicine” that got us here in the first place.

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Bruce Babbitt, former governor of Arizona, says it won’t be easy to tap wind and solar energy sources in the West while at the same time preserving wildlife, native cultural sites and landscape views across millions of acres.

The key, he told the Review-Journal last weekend, is for the Bureau of Land Management to adopt “better policies” to ensure those treasures are preserved when it comes time to develop solar, wind and geothermal power on public lands.

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The Health Nazis have tried for years to discourage cigarette smoking — at the same time they greedily seize cigarette tax revenues to plug their budget gaps, of course — by placing more and more onerous warning labels on packages, forcing smokers to huddle outside in the snow, slashing magazine revenues by barring colorful ads that once showed happy young people or cartoon characters puffing coffin nails — even barring truthful, factual ads reporting some products are less harmful, for that matter — in their endless campaign to discourage the unhealthy habit.

And I do mean endless.

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Barack Obama, who regularly attended a Muslim school and Muslim religious services with his mother’s Indonesian husband when he lived in that country as a youngster, told Indonesians in their own language last week as he re-visited that country with his thousands of courtiers — his $200-million-a-day royal entourage — that “Indonesia will always be a part of me.”

OK. We do not expect our presidents, visiting foreign countries, mainly to complain about the plumbing. Wouldn’t be very diplomatic. But the president also used the occasion to say the construction of new apartment buildings by Israelis in their own capital, Jerusalem, could be an obstacle to Mideast peace. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton echoed that Jewish building in East Jerusalem is not constructive, while announcing a further $150 million U.S. taxpayer gift to the Palestinian Arabs who have lived on Israel’s borders, arming for war, since they were kicked out of Jordan for trying to overthrow that country’s government a generation ago.

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Skeptics of the United Nations have long warned that subsidizing an outfit that holds any Third World potentate preening on an upturned bucket stands as a moral equal to the president of the United States could lead to trouble.

Supporters scoffed at the notion that — humored long enough — dashiki-clad kleptrocrats from nations where opponents routinely “disappear” could eventually sit in judgment of jurisprudence and “civil rights” in the United States.

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And so another election has come and gone. Nearly every concerned voter can be expected to emerge from the tumult in a state of adrenaline depletion: exuberance mixed with a few lingering doubts (still too early for REAL “buyer’s remorse”) over the victory of a favored candidate, puzzlement if not something closer to bereavement over the triumph of some crooked, mobbed-up potentate over a well-meaning soul.

And thus we are successfully diverted, again, from thinking about the really important stuff on which we got to cast no meaningful ballot, again.

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