McCain: Pay for your own damned statues

In an interview with NPR last Wednesday (as reported by the B'ham News here), Sen. John McCain reiterated what he said to his fellow Senators back in 2001 about Birmingham's Vulcan statue:

While the federal surplus is rapidly dwindling, why should federal dollars pay for a face-lift of a statue of a Roman god in Alabama? Not one more federal dollar should be spent on this kind of foolishness.

I ask my colleagues to extinguish this Roman god of fire and strike a victory for taxpayers ... and Metis, the goddess of prudence ... by throttling down our insatiable appetite for pork-barrel spending starting today.

As the News reminds us, McCain's effort to stop "this kind of foolishness" back then was rebuffed by his Senate colleagues, including Alabama's own Sen. Richard Shelby:

Led by Alabama's Sen. Richard Shelby, among others, the Senate easily voted to fund the Vulcan project.

Now, while the citizens of Birmingham may take some delight in seeing to it that Vulcan's naked posterior continues to moon the city of Homewood, I - like John McCain - don't see how that's any of the federal government's business. Unless, of course, they had intended to turn him around and point his ass towards Washington, in which case raising the necessary funds would not have been a problem to begin with.