Relying on Oklahoma's elected officials to address a failing state's needs, is akin to joining the thoroughbred racing circuit with a stable of dead horses.

Oklahoma's best hope for the future is to put out help wanted ads:

• Looking for a few good "Soap Men."
• Needs experience in recognizing dead horses.
• Preferably a long haul truck driver to haul, far away, our dead horses and a capitol full of bull manure.

Note: In the early days of Oklahoma, when a large animal, mostly horses, died of natural causes the owner would call a "Soap Man" who would haul the dead horse off, render the fat for making lye soap and send the hooves, bones, etc. to a glue factory.

The following little "dead horse syndrome" ditty reads like Oklahoma public officials' solutions to problems.

The dead horse syndrome:

There is wisdom passed down through generations of living the life of hard knocks and being accountable for mistakes, and says when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

The typical Oklahoma official response?

• Buying a stronger whip.
• Changing riders.
• Threatening the horse with termination.
• Appointing a committee to study the horse.
• Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses.
• Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included.
• Appointing an intervention team to reanimate the dead horse.
• Creating a training session to increase the riders load share.
• Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired.
• Change the form so that it reads: "This horse is not dead."
• Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse.
• Harness several dead horses together for increased speed.
• Donate the dead horse to a recognized charity, thereby deducting its full original cost.
• Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance.
• Do a time management study to see if the lighter riders would improve productivity.
• Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses run faster.
• Declare that a dead horse has lower overhead and therefore performs better.
• Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses.
• Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses.
• Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.