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DELVING INTO FOREIGN AFFAIRS

2013-06-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

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by Burt Prelutsky

With so many disasters befalling us domestically, it’s easy to take our eye off all the bloody nonsense taking place outside our borders. And of course let it be understood that when I speak of borders, I’m referring to a concept, nothing more than a notion, and not to anything that actually exists in the real world.

For instance, a Nazi flag has been seen flying over a mosque near the Palestinian village of Beit Omar, on the outskirts of Hebron. But that won’t stop the Jew-haters, both those inside and outside of the rat-infested U.N., from siding with the barbaric Arabs and Muslims against Israel.

That reminds me that the next president who sends the U.S. military anywhere in the world to defend one Islamic sect from another should be impeached on the spot. I am revolted by the number of young Americans who have bled and died in order to protect Muslims. I say if Allah is as great and powerful as these ignoramuses keep insisting, let Allah protect them.

I know that wimps and weasels will say we shouldn’t tar all Muslims with the same brush, arguing for tolerance and multiculturalism. To which, with all respect, I say, phooey. What exactly is it these lunkheads think is being preached in their mosques? The brotherhood of man? The equality of women? A live-and-let-live attitude towards Christians and Jews? To get a proper feel for their level of tolerance and good will, you need only check out the havoc the Ayatollah Khomeini and the mullahs have wreaked in Iran. They’re not exactly the sort of clerics you’d invite over for Sunday dinner. Give these people their head and they’ll chop off yours.

Here in the States, we have race hustlers like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright, all passing themselves off as clergymen. But at least they’re in the minority. And while they should be despised for promoting and justifying victimhood and racial hatred, at least they are not encouraging people like Nidal Hasan and the Tsarnaev brothers to maim and murder innocent Americans.

While on the subject of foreign vermin, why on earth do Americans continue to venture into Mexico? First, there was the ex-Marine who was tossed in one of those cesspools they try to pass off as a jail, and now we have Yanira Maldonado, the 42-year-old mother of seven, being railroaded on a trumped-up drug smuggling charge. I realize she was down there in order to attend a funeral, but I would have advised her, as I advise every other law-abiding American, to just send flowers.

Obama keeps insisting we need to spend more money on our infrastructure. In the meanwhile, the Gang of Eight insists we have to provide illegal aliens with a pathway to citizenship. It’s my contention that they already have citizenship. It just happens to be Mexican.

If they want to get me on board, I suggest they finally get cracking on building that 1,500 mile long fence. That’s the sort of infrastructure we really need, and it’s what the Democrats promised Reagan we would get if he signed the amnesty bill. Well, it’s been 27 years. I figure if anyone, including Marco Rubio, needs to wait another two or three years for us to get that fence built before we start talking about pathways, so be it.

My own suggestion is that we build it with the 350 million tax dollars we annually contribute to Mexico’s economy for no apparent reason.

China wages cyber war on U.S. businesses and our military, costing us $300 billion a year and two million jobs. They are thus guilty of both copyright theft and espionage, and, as always, Obama talks tough and does absolutely nothing to back up his words. So perhaps all the conspiracy theorists are wrong. Maybe he’s not a Muslim, after all. It could be he’s Chinese.

Finally, speaking of he who should be impeached, he recently said, referring to the war on terror: “This war, like all wars, must end.” While it would be nice to be hearing these words coming from jihadists waving a large white flag, coming from the President of the United States it’s just chilling.

Still, one can’t fault Obama when it comes to comedy. I mean, how many guys in his position could say with a straight face that we should cease drone strikes on American citizens; prevent the IRS from targeting conservatives; and shield reporters from government snooping; as if he’s just another schnook on the street, someone like me, who’s merely offering an opinion and has no real say in any of these matters?

Alas, if only we didn’t have to wait another three and a half years for that to finally be the case.

©2013 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? BurtPrelutsky@aol.com.

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MONEY, MONEY, MONEY & OTHER MATTERS

2013-06-14T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Money has no morality, but that doesn’t mean it should be dispensed by those who share that failing. That is particularly the case when it’s the people’s money, our tax dollars, which are being dispensed.

For instance, since going on a murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Muslim jihadist Major Nidal Hasan has collected $278,000 in salary from the Army. Meanwhile, because his crime was designated “workplace violence,” his surviving victims have been denied various benefits, including Purple Hearts, which would have increased their disability pensions.

More recently, Lois Lerner, the IRS bureaucrat who took the 5th during her congressional hearing, although she insisted she did nothing wrong and told no lies, was placed on administrative leave, a euphemism for a paid vacation.

But compared to what we dole out to other nations, most of whom openly despise us, that’s chump change. We give $316 million annually to Mexico. Ostensibly, it’s to help them wage war on drugs. And we can all see how well that’s going. If it were up to me, I’d make them build a wall on their northern border before giving them another peso.

As for the latest attempt at what congressional schnooks like to call comprehensive immigration reform, why should we want to create a pathway to citizenship for what they insist are 11 million illegal aliens, and what I’m betting is at least twice that many? They snuck in. If someone sneaks into your house, does he get to stay there just because he’s managed to hide out in your cellar or your attic?

I realize that a certain segment of the population known as nitwits will accuse me of being a racist. But first they have to explain how it is racist to resent the Mexicanization of America, but not racist to promote such a policy at the expense of those patiently waiting their turn in Europe, Asia and Africa.

In somewhat related news, in Patterson, New Jersey, the Palestinian flag was raised over city hall after Mayor Jeffery Jones proclaimed May 19th as Palestinian American Day. I’m waiting for Gov. Christie to weigh in on this, but I’m not prepared to wait too long.

Along similar lines, I’m wondering what right we have to force-feed the jihadists at Gitmo. If they wish to starve themselves, how is it our business to interfere? For all I know, it could be an integral part of their glorious religion, along with suicide-bombs, honor killings and clitorectomies.

I would also be interested in discovering why we, who are about 17 trillion dollars in debt, insist on coming up with $531 million for Tanzania; $580 million for Ethiopia; $625 million for both Nigeria and Kenya; $676 million for Jordan; $1.5 billion for Egypt; $1.7 billion for Iraq; $2.1 billion for Pakistan; and $2.3 billion for Afghanistan.

I’d also like to know just exactly when did we adopt Africa and the Middle East. Where was I when the announcement went out? If only I’d known, I’d have sent a card and a couple of baby blankets.

The nation that receives the most money from us is Israel. But at least that’s three billion dollars going to an ally, a democracy with whom we share values, traditions and, perhaps most important of all, sworn enemies.

Assuming my ears weren’t playing tricks on me, Obama recently declared that, for all intents and purposes, the war on terrorism was over. Inasmuch as jihadists were still killing people in London, Boston, Iraq and Afghanistan, the last time I looked, I guess he was acknowledging that, under his leadership, they won and we lost. For a minute or so, I was really depressed. But then I realized the schmuck never tells the truth, and I was greatly relieved.

While on the subject of money, I would like to know why there should be corporate taxes. It’s not just that ours happen to be the highest in the world, which explains why major entities like Apple and G.E. don’t bring their foreign profits back to the U.S. to be used for expansion and dividends; it’s that corporate taxes serve as a tremendous drag on an economy that’s lacked traction for years now.

It’s one thing to tax the earnings of corporate executives and their employees and shareholders, but what purpose is served through taxing a corporation as if it were an individual?

Another tax that should be eliminated is the death or, for those who have a superstitious reluctance to say that word, estate tax. The money that is left by the deceased has already been taxed when he earned it and again when he got a return on his investments. For the tax collector to swoop in like a vulture just because the person has died smacks of grave robbing.

Finally, under the heading of it’s not what you know, but who you’re related to that counts in Washington: ABC reporter Claire Shipman is married to Press Secretary Jay Carney; CNN President Virginia Mosely is married to Hillary Clinton’s former Deputy Secretary Tom Nides; CBS President David Rhodes is the brother of Ben Rhodes, a top Obama advisor and the fellow who helped edit the Benghazi talking points; and ABC President Ben Sherwood is the brother of Obama’s special advisor Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall.

I swear there’s more inbreeding among these left-wing elitists than you’ll find in the backwoods of Tennessee. It’s a wonder their kids don’t all have 12 toes and suffer from hemophilia.

BATTLING PYGMIES

2013-06-12T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Sometimes, I must confess, I almost feel like a bully when I ridicule so-called progressives. The old expression “Like shooting fish in a barrel” comes to mind. But, then, I merely have to remind myself that these fish happen to control the White House, the Senate, the Department of Justice and the IRS, and I don’t feel so bad.

Besides, how can one not ridicule Obama when he insists that federally-funded pre-school programs will lead to good-paying jobs down the line? Oh, really? As pre-school teachers, perhaps? In the meantime, as an inevitable consequence of this brainstorm, all privately-owned pre-schools will be put out of business.

He also promotes a 94-cent tax on a pack of cigarettes. What a boon that is for all those poor people he claims to be so concerned about. Almost as great as $4.20-a-gallon gas here in California.

Obama is so far out of step in his efforts to model our economy on that of Greece and the other socialist welfare states in Europe that even China has noticed the error of his ways. In a major policy shift, its new prime minister, Li Keqiang, is seeking to have private businesses and market forces play a larger role in shaping its economy. It’s his hope that the change will unleash the creative energies of the nation.

I keep praying that the Koch brothers will succeed in their efforts to buy up several major newspapers, including our local rag. Every time I pick it up, I recall that Mark Twain once observed that if you don’t read a newspaper, you’ll be uninformed, whereas if you do, you’ll be misinformed. Out here, it’s not lies, damn lies and statistics, but lies, damn lies and the L.A. Times.

In case you missed it, when Susan Muranishi retires in a couple of years, she will be collecting $423,664-a-year for life. If you’ve never heard of her, don’t berate yourself. She’s nobody famous and she didn’t just win grand prize in the Publisher’s Clearinghouse drawing. She’s merely an Alameda County administrator. Is it any wonder California is going bankrupt?

Speaking of wealthy women, I just discovered that the wealthiest woman in show business is not Oprah Winfrey. Instead, it’s Julia-Louis Dreyfus. It’s nothing personal, but I regard this as further proof that life isn’t fair. Here’s a woman who regards the million dollars-an-episode she wound up making on “Seinfeld” as chump change. It seems her grandfather was a French billionaire.

At the risk of sounding like a leftist, I say it should be one or the other. In a just world, some impoverished actress would have gotten the role of Elaine Benes.

For some mysterious reason, I keep getting email from the DNC inviting me to contribute to the party of fools, liars and cheats. Most recently, I was urged to pitch in as little as $3 for the opportunity to be entered in a drawing. The grand prize was the opportunity to meet Michelle Obama and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, whom some wag has tagged Fauxcohantas, at some event in Boston. Frankly, I would rather spend an hour with the two Evas, Braun and Peron.

Finally, in the spirit of bi-partisanship, I have been giving some thought to how Obama can best extricate himself from the quicksand in which he now finds himself being engulfed. Benghazi was bad enough, but now he finds himself hip-deep in the scandals involving the IRS and spying on journalists.

He should take a leaf from Bill Clinton’s playbook. When Willie the Hound Dog found himself in trouble because he had perjured himself before a grand jury, he pretended it was really about Monica Lewinsky and sex. The media, which as usual, is only too happy to carry water for liberals, took its cue and put the spotlight on Ken Starr, portraying him as a prude who could be easily confused with Cotton Mather.

So my suggestion to Obama is that he let himself be caught having carnal relations with a male intern. For one thing, it would animate his base of gays and those simpletons who regard homosexuality as not merely an alternate life style, but as a superior one.

For another, it would confirm the suspicions of those on the Right who have seen him try to throw a baseball.

IMPLAUSIBLE DENIABILITY

2013-06-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Generally, when it comes to White House scandals such as Watergate and Iran-Contra, the relevant questions are what the president knew and when he knew it. However, when it comes to Obama and Benghazi; the monitoring of the AP reporters; the targeting of Fox’s James Rosen; and the IRS’s intimidation of conservative groups; the questions appear to be what did Obama not know and when did he not know it?

Again, most presidents want to at least appear to be on top of things; Obama wants us to believe he’s merely a bystander just waiting for Jay Carney, dressed up as a cop, to come along and say, “Let’s just move along. Nothing to see here.”

Whenever an administration is caught, as it were, with its hand in the cookie jar, the chief executive wants to have plausible deniability. That’s why he doesn’t make it a habit to write a memo that reads: “Dear IRS: I’m in the middle of a re-election campaign. Please do everything in your power to shut down the ability of conservative groups to raise money…at least until November 7th. Much appreciated. Regards from Michelle and the kids. See you at the Easter egg hunt. Sincerely, President Barack H. Obama.”

Instead, what these guys do is have a trusted lieutenant like Valerie Jarrett or David Axelrod let it be known in the appropriate circles that the boss would like to see certain things take place, and then, with the cooperation of stooges like Attorney General Eric Holder or IRS attack dogs Doug Shulman and Lois Lerner, those things just miraculously happen. And not even the FBI can find an Obama fingerprint anywhere, not that they’re likely to look too hard.

When I finally got a peek at some of those emails regarding Benghazi released by the White House, so much was redacted -- a $10 word meaning blacked out -- that I was reminded of those 18 minutes of tape recording that went missing during the Watergate investigation. It does seem as though all those comparisons of Obama to Lincoln and FDR were a bit wide of the mark. Clearly, it was Richard Nixon who was this schmuck’s role model.

Speaking of schmucks, a Fox poll asked people which of the recent scandals concerned them the most. IRS topped the list with 32%; followed by Benghazi with 27%; the monitoring of AP reporters scored 21%; and 10% went for none of the above, claiming that all of them were of grave concern. I might have preferred to see a higher score for Benghazi, which saw four Americans slaughtered and an eight-month full court cover-up by Obama, Clinton and Carney, but that’s an honest difference of opinion. However, the truly shocking number was 8%. That represented the percentage of Americans who were not the least bit concerned about any of these matters. And I will remind you that these ignoramuses are allowed, even encouraged, to go out and vote every Election Day.

Chris Matthews, who says almost as many stupid things as Joe Biden, and for added comedy effect says them with a lisp, recently labeled Obama “The Perfect American.” Apparently he based his conclusion in large part on his belief that Obama has never broken a law, which strikes me personally as a very low standard for perfection. But in addition, Matthews has apparently chosen to ignore the fact that Obama boasted in his autobiography that he regularly used illegal drugs as a young man.

In the meantime, we know Obama lied about what happened in Benghazi for no other reason than to be able to campaign as the super hero who killed bin Laden with his bare hands and went on to personally decimate Al Qaeda. One can only conclude that Matthews is as easy a grader as Obama, who, as I recall, gave himself a B+ near the end of his first term.

Back in the 1940s, President Harry Truman had a little sign on his desk in the Oval Office that stated: The Buck Stops Here.

If Barack Obama had a sign on his desk, it would read: The Buck Stops Here… Just Long Enough to Catch Its Breath.

BP BONUS: SANITY TAKES A HOLIDAY - TRANSLATING OBAMASPEAK

2013-06-07T00:30:00.000-07:00

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by Burt Prelutsky

We have all come to expect split-decisions from the Supreme Court, but we don’t expect the four on the losing side to consist of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and…Antonin Scalia! But there he was lurking with the three left-wing harpies when it came to the recent decision involving DNA.

In case you missed it, Alonzo Jay King had been arrested for assault. As part of the booking process, the cops took a swab of his cheek. The DNA test resulted in his being connected to a rape in Maryland for which he was subsequently tried and found guilty.

According to Scalia and the ACLU, the police had no right to swab his cheek because it invaded his right to privacy. That is exactly the sort of muddleheaded thinking that we have come to expect from liberals. Fortunately, the majority of the justices quite rightly decided that taking the smear was no more invasive than taking his fingerprints.

I can’t imagine what Justice Scalia has been smoking, but I have heard that he and Mrs. Ginsburg are extremely friendly, so one might leap to the assumption that the old gal has used her female wiles to cloud his judgment. One will have to wait and see if his derangement is temporary or terminal.

Speaking of females, if abortion is a women’s health issue, as Obama and his chums over at Planned Parenthood keep insisting, why isn’t carrying a concealed weapon a public health issue? After all, abortion leads to the taking of innocent lives, whereas a weapon in the right hands leads to the defense of innocent lives.

What liberals seem unable to grasp is that making schools, churches, movie theaters and malls, gun-free zones guarantees that only criminals and lunatics will be armed in those venues.

Another bit of liberal malarkey has it that blacks are always in need of federal assistance because of slavery. What they choose to ignore is that slavery ended 150 years ago, and that 50 years have elapsed since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act. How is it that Jews, Italians, the Irish and Chinese, all came to America, most speaking a foreign language, and faced discrimination when it came to housing, education and employment, but managed to overcome bigotry and succeed within a generation? And, more recently, how is it that Americans of Japanese ancestry were tossed into concentration camps during WWII, but quickly recovered from the insult and injury of losing not only their freedom, but their homes, farms and businesses?

While on the subject of minorities, I have never understood why Native Americans, as they apparently choose to be called, objected to having college and professional sports teams named the Indians, the Braves and the Chiefs. Considering the life style so many have chosen for themselves by remaining wards of the state on reservations, would they really prefer to have the teams called the Sots, the Idlers and the Ne’er-do-wells?

Speaking of sots, idlers and ne’er-do-wells, it seems that the IRS spent $50 million on conferences during the past few years, the costs including $1,500-a-night hotel rooms and $60,000 videos parodying “Star Trek” and “Gilligan’s Island,” and still had enough left over for $92 million in employee bonuses between 2009 and 2013.

As proof that the White House had nothing to do with the IRS kerfuffle, Obama henchman David Axelrod claimed it was simply too stupid a scandal to be laid at the feet of Obama or any of his advisors. Oh, really? After recalling such brainstorms as Cash for Clunkers, the Unaffordable Health Care Act and Solyandra, I at least had to acknowledge that Axelrod delivers much funnier one-liners than Jon Stewart, David Letterman or Bill Maher.

What even Axelrod didn’t try to laugh away was the fact that although Hillary Clinton had only visited the White House 43 times in four years and Leon Panetta, 20 times, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman had been in and out 157 times. When you realize that, between fund-raisers, vacations and golf outings, Obama only visited 78 times, you have to wonder if Shulman and Michelle have been carrying on an affair.

In case you ever doubted that college campuses are every bit as left-wing as MSNBC, a survey showed that only four Republicans were invited to be commencement speakers at the top 100 universities.

And while the likes of Charles Krauthammer, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Clarence Thomas, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Rush Limbaugh, Thomas Sowell, Bernie Goldberg, Kelly Ayotte, Dennis Prager, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Ann Coulter and Steve Hayes, were probably relieved that they didn’t have to shlep out to some college, don a silly robe and stand in the sun, delivering one of those boring speeches sprinkled with words like “future,” “dedication,” “youth,” “hope” and “dreams,” I’m sure they would have appreciated being asked.

Speaking of being asked, apparently the price extracted by Bill Clinton in return for his lauding Barack Obama, whom he apparently despises, at the Democratic National Convention last year was that Obama would return the favor by endorsing Hillary in 2016. But the way that Obama’s popularity is plummeting in the wake of all these scandals, Clinton must be kicking himself. And when his foot gets tired, I’m sure Hillary will be only too happy to take over.

TRANSLATING OBAMASPEAK

I have never been good with foreign languages, so it’s little wonder that I have had so much trouble figuring out what Barack Obama is talking about. Still, it didn’t take me too long to realize that “fees” and “revenues” are what the rest of us call taxes.

I’m ashamed to admit that the first time I heard him say, “I can’t comment because there’s an ongoing investigation,” I assumed he couldn’t comment because there was an ongoing investigation. By the second time, it dawned on me that what he was really saying was “There’s no way I’m going to talk about (Operation Fast & Furious) (voter intimidation by the New Black Panthers) (the monitoring of the AP) (the national security leaks to the NY Times that made me look like I knew what I was doing when it came to foreign affairs) (Syria) (Benghazi) (the targeting of conservatives by the IRS) while an ongoing investigation is taking place.”

And if you asked when any of those investigations was likely to be concluded, the honest answer, which you’d never get, is sometime after January 20, 2017.

Does Obama actually think anyone believes him when he says that he had no idea that Internal Revenue was targeting right-wing groups and individuals? In order to swallow that, we would also have to believe he’d have been equally in the dark if the IRS had been targeting liberals for the past two or three years.

He’s not alone when it comes to speaking in code. For instance, when you ask Hillary Clinton why it makes no difference who killed Ambassador Stevens and his three colleagues in Benghazi, the honest answer would be that neither she nor Chelsea was one of the four victims, so it was no big deal.

And when Bill O’Reilly tells guests on The Factor “You’re dodging my question,” it really means they’re not agreeing with his latest pontification.

A reader sent me a question he wished somebody would ask Obama: “Why is it that Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood get free F-16s, but law-abiding Americans can’t be trusted with hunting rifles?” On behalf of Obama, let me assure you that there is an ongoing investigation.

Another reader pointed out that if you cross the North Korean border illegally, you’ll be sentenced to 12 years hard labor. If you sneak across the Afghan border, you’ll be shot. If, on the other hand, you enter the U.S. illegally, you get a job, food stamps, a driver’s license, a place to live, health care and an education. Some would suggest that proves we are better than North Korea and Afghanistan. Others would suggest that what we are is a nation of suckers and screwballs.

On a somewhat related matter, although I love the game of baseball, I despise the World Baseball Classic, which is not to be confused with the World Series. For one thing, the competition begins when the winter baseball season south of the border concludes. Thus, Latin players are ready to go at a time, early March, when our own players are supposed to be getting into shape with their teams at spring training camps.

But worse than that basic unfairness is that players being paid millions to play for the Yankees, Cardinals, Red Sox and Mariners, are expected to play for their native countries. Even those who have resettled with their families in the U.S. are encouraged to compete under a foreign flag against their native-born teammates.

I know I shouldn’t be too surprised. Major League Baseball, an organization so corrupt that it knowingly turned a blind eye to players juiced up on steroids erasing the records of Ruth, Maris and Aaron, just so they could sell a few more tickets, cares about the Game about as much as Obama cares about America.

Radio talk show host Dennis Prager has pointed out that when it comes to religion, there are three self-identified groups: Believers, Agnostics and Atheists, and of the three only the Agnostics are hypocrites. As Prager argues, if a person really can’t decide whether or not God exists, doesn’t it behoove him to attend a church or synagogue every other week? Instead, Agnostics behave exactly like Atheists, who at least have the courage of their convictions.

But I would suggest that Liberals, including the Atheists in their ranks, have their own religion. It’s called Big Government. They don’t question it. Instead, like Muslims, they prostrate themselves to it.

Their faith is so great that it doesn’t even occur to them that at some point, Satan, otherwise known as a Republican, will inevitably gain control of it, and whatever powers have been granted or gobbled up by the executive branch will be in the hands of their archenemies.

But, then, nobody ever said that the followers of Liberalism were smart. Well, at least not with a straight face.

WHY I CAN'T BE GOD

2013-06-05T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

I have come to the realization that I am not cut out to be God. I mention that because there was actually a time when I thought I could handle the job. I’m not just bragging. I just figured that if I’d been in charge, I would have prevented the Holocaust, I would have given Stalin and Mao heart attacks in their 20s, I would have done away with cancer and Alzheimer’s, I would kept the temperature in the low 70s year round here in the San Fernando Valley and I’d have steered Juan Williams into a different line of work .

But I have come to the conclusion that I lack the prerequisite of patience. I can’t tell you how many times if I had the power, I would have scrubbed the human race and started over from scratch. I’d probably have let dogs and elephants run things. Clearly, leaving people in charge is a big mistake. Especially when you look around the world and you see people like Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin, the Castro brothers, Bashar al-Assad, Asif Ali Zardari, Hamid Karzai, Xi Jinping, Mohamed Morsi, Mahmoud Abbas, Robert Mugabe, the mullahs of Iran and Barack Obama, running things.

Some would say that Obama doesn’t belong on a list with all those tyrants, but, fortunately, I don’t have to live with those guys. I don’t have to listen to their self-serving blather day after day. None of them is in a position to leave our Constitution in tatters, our nation in ruins. Therefore, if I could replace any one of them with a sane and decent man, it would be Obama.

Quite often, I find myself wishing that Obama had stayed in Illinois and settled for being the governor. I’m sure he wouldn’t have handled that job any better than he’s handled the presidency, but at least there’s a history of those guys winding up in the poky. In fairly recent history, four of those mugs -- Otto Kerner, Dan Walker, George Ryan and Rod Blagojevich -- went from the governor’s mansion to the penitentiary.

Speaking of Obama, there’s a delicious irony in the fact that the industries that he has championed in word and with our tax dollars -- namely, electric cars and solar panels -- have failed miserably. However, the one he has waged a campaign against -- gun manufacturing -- has flourished to such an extent that in 2011, alone, the sale of guns and ammo resulted in federal excise taxes of $4.59 billion!

If Obama weren’t such a left-wing zealot, he’d have supported the latter enterprise and ignored those silly green companies, and today he might be receiving plaudits instead of having his economic prowess ridiculed.

Speaking of money, Huma Abedin, while serving as an advisor to Mrs. Clinton at the State Department and pulling down $135,000-a-year, was also acting as a well-paid consultant to private firms. I’m not sure what her official duties were at the State Department, but I’m sure that Mrs. Clinton and Ms. Abedin, who’s Mrs. Anthony Weiner in real life, shared many a laugh over the fact that neither of their ludicrous husbands could keep his pants zipped up for more than five minutes at a time.

Did I mention that Kirsten Powers, aka Ms. Smug, used to date Mr. Weiner? Oh , what a tangled web they weave in the cesspool that serves as our nation’s capital.

As if we didn’t already know it, a new study concludes that strong men tend to be conservatives. If you’ve attended movies during the past 50 years, you probably know that John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Jimmy Stewart, Chuck Norris, Bruce Willis and Clint Eastwood, were and are straight shooters off screen, as well as on. Whereas anyone who has ever seen young twerps swooning over the likes of Bruce Springsteen or seen the testosterone-deprived fans lighting candles and swaying at Bono’s concerts could have saved them the price of the study.

In case you missed the news, O.J. Simpson has asked for a new trial, contending his former lawyer, Yale Galanter, had done a lousy job of defending him during his trial for armed robbery.

Well, clearly any schmuck who’s been found guilty is convinced that the problem isn’t that he committed the crime, but that his mouthpiece blew it.

What I want to know is why the legal system allows a felon to have a hearing based, not on new evidence, but merely because he wound up in the cooler. It seems to me that if you hire someone who has gone to law school and passed the bar to defend you, unless you can prove he took a bribe to throw your case, you shouldn’t get a mulligan.

Finally, we’ve all recently witnessed the farce in Washington in which three of the most powerful individuals in the nation -- Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Hillary Clinton -- all insisted that nobody ever gave them the slightest hint what was going on in Benghazi, at the IRS or the offices of the Associated Press.

Frankly, I’d be prepared to accept that they had switched jobs with some janitor named Tyrone, leaving it up to him to make all the tough decisions, except that I don’t really believe the three of them, individually or together, are competent to unclog sinks, wash windows or change light bulbs.

In the meantime, we are stuck with a president so divisive that while his opponents regard him as dangerous, even his defenders find him disengaged. Republicans view him as a menace to America and the world, while a great many Democrats consider him passive and as a man who leads from behind.

For my part, I say God help us. Please.

IMPEACH THE S.O.B.!

2013-06-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

For a long time, as much as I wanted to see Obama gone, I opposed the notion of Congress attempting to impeach him. I figured that with the Senate in the hands of Harry Reid, nothing would come of it. What’s more, when it was attempted with Clinton, he came out at the other end more popular than ever, a martyr in the eyes of the Left.

But I no longer care about the end result. I want Obama to go through the process because he has it coming. In totalitarian states, after all, the people have no other recourse except to take to the streets and spill blood. But we have available the process of impeachment, and Obama should be forced to defend his contemptible lies and actions.

If for no other reason than his unbearable arrogance, the schmuck should have to pay a penalty. For instance, when a White House reporter asked him to justify spying on the Associated Press, Obama said, “I’ve still got 60,000-plus troops in Afghanistan and I still have a bunch of intelligence officers around the world.” No, sir, the United States has 60,000-plus troops in Afghanistan and a bunch of intelligence officers around the world.

It was all too reminiscent of his speech after the execution of bin Laden, when his use of the personal pronoun would have led you to believe he had personally rappelled into the Pakistani courtyard and stormed the villa, guns blazing, and that he’d had the Navy Seals along just for company.

His defense of spying on reporters was that he was checking out leaks into national security matters. Eric Holder, his right hand stooge, even boasted that this administration had set a record for prosecuting leakers. The point neither of them mentioned was that the only leaks they pursued were those that made them look bad. Apparently the leaks to the NY Times in 2012 intended to enhance Obama’s pre-election image as a master of foreign diplomacy went no further than Dianne Feinstein’s fatuous vow to ferret out the guilty parties.

Some of the things this administration does are so dumb that you might imagine they’re auditioning for a sit com on ABC. For instance, in the midst of the IRS scandal, a scandal so pernicious that even some Democrats are calling it scandalous, we discover that the woman, Sarah Hall Ingram, who was heading up the division that targeted conservative groups and individuals for the sort of hell that only the IRS can dole out is -- a drumroll, please -- the very person Obama has selected to make sure that ObamaCare is enforced, with drawing-and-quartering optional.

To be fair, we have been assured that Ms. Ingram is a “superb civil servant.” Unfortunately, the person who gave her that ringing endorsement is the former acting head of Internal Revenue, Steven Miller, who, when last seen, was lying through his teeth to a congressional committee.

Miller is the fellow whom Obama fired with much fanfare, about two weeks before he was already scheduled to resign. The question I would like answered is whether Miller will continue to receive his federal pension even when he winds up in a federal prison for perjury and obstruction of justice.

I know I am coming across as something of a scold, and I should probably temper my remarks because I have been provided with so many laughs by these assorted goofballs, I am clearly in their debt. For instance, I actually heard a spokesperson for the IRS say that the targeting of conservative groups prior to the 2012 election had nothing to do with politics. I haven’t heard anything that funny since “The Princess Bride.” Mainly, it reminds me of the scene when the comic villain Vizzini (Wallace Shawn) kept responding to one unpleasant fact after another by sputtering “Inconceivable!” Eventually, his reluctant henchman , Inigo Montoya (Mandy Patinkin), has had enough and says, “I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”

In a sane world, wouldn’t someone who denied the targeting by the IRS had anything to do with politics be compelled, by force if necessary, to suggest an alternative explanation? Coincidence, perhaps? Sun spots? Or maybe just one of those crazy things.

Only in the world of fiction would I expect to encounter a president, an attorney general and a former secretary of state, so eager to claim that on all of these major issues, one involving the massacre of four Americans, including an ambassador, they were simply out of the loop.

I would suggest that Obama, Holder and Mrs. Clinton, could easily fill in for the three monkeys who hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil, except that I would no doubt be tarred as a racist and a misogynist.

Oh, what the heck! I think I’ll go ahead and do it anyway.

The Winner of the May book drawing is Tom Pedersen of Loretto, MN. A copy of "Liberals: America's Termites" is on its way to the lucky fellow.

CHANNELING SHERLOCK HOLMES

2013-05-31T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Arthur Conan Doyle's greatest creation, the pre-eminent logician and crime solver, Sherlock Holmes was wont to compare the human brain to an attic. It was his belief that the finite space was best employed as a storage bin for those items that would be of use in his work. Thus, at any given time, he might not know the name of the Prime Minister, but he would be able to identify over 150 different types of tobacco.

I’m sure there are those who would argue that the human brain has infinite capacity, but even they would have to acknowledge that life would be a lot easier if, when searching for someone’s name, they didn’t have to rummage through a brain that was cluttered with a lot of names they’d casually tossed into their cranial attics, where they lie and collect dust; the verbal equivalent of torn lampshades, rusted ice skates and Hula Hoops.

The following is my attempt at spring cleaning. So, for openers, let me say that I believe attempted murder should carry the same penalty as first-degree murder. Otherwise, you’re simply rewarding incompetence.

It will come as a surprise to most people that the Pledge of Allegiance was authored by a socialist minister named Francis Bellamy, a cousin of Edward Bellamy, author of “Looking Backward,” a futuristic novel which depicted a socialistic America as Utopia.

When Francis penned the Pledge in 1882, he hoped it would promote public education while denigrating private and parochial schools, which couldn’t be relied on to promote the authority of the federal government.

In the beginning, students were instructed to recite the Pledge with their arms outstretched, palms up, similar to the way Romans had once been required to hail Caesar. The custom was dropped in the 1940s when people realized how similar it was to Germans heiling Hitler.

What Bellamy initially wrote was: “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” With an eye to the French, he considered including “equality” and “fraternity,” but decided against it, realizing that the state superintendents of education on his committee were opposed to equality for women and blacks.

One of the things that I despise the most about the Pro-Choice groups is the way that Obama, the harpies in NOW and the creepy crew at Planned Parenthood, try to pass off abortions as a women’s health issue. To me, that’s as far-fetched as describing Nazi concentration camps as a German transportation issue.

I am always hearing liberals insist that anything they object to -- be it Guantanamo, drone strikes on Islamic terrorists, U.S. presence in the Middle East, military tribunals or our alliance with Israel -- are all recruiting tools for Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood. Why is it that I never hear them say that the attack on the USS Cole, the taking of hostages by Iran, the attack on our Marine base in Lebanon, 9/11, the safe haven for Osama bin Laden in Pakistan and the Boston massacre, should all be recruiting tools for the good guys?

I’d love to have someone interview Jay Carney’s mother and ask her how she feels about all the sacrifices, all the skimping and saving, required to enable the family to send her son to an Ivy League school, just so he could grow up and lie for a living.

Speaking of he for whom Carney tells whoppers on a daily basis, in his commencement speech at Ohio State, Obama warned the graduating class not to listen to those who tell them the tyrant is just around the corner.

For once, he was right. The tyrant wasn’t lurking in the wings. He was standing at the podium.

Speaking of tyrants, let us all keep in mind that it’s this very same Tea Party-hating IRS that Obama has authorized to oversee and enforce ObamaCare.

While I know that the media and some Democrats have backed the IRS into a corner, Obama, as usual, has tossed a body -- in this case the temporary head of the organization who was already two weeks away from being replaced -- under the usual bus. So far as Obama is concerned, he’s done all that needed to be done. Now everyone is expected to move along. “Nothing to see here, folks.”

But anyone who believes that the IRS has been buried has never seen one of those horror movies in which zombies crawl out of their graves and start clumping around the neighborhood, looking for human brains, which they crave the way some people hanker after those nice little energy bars.

Although we all realize it’s only a temporary setback, I confess I’m delighted to see those bratty tax collectors for once being scolded and sent to bed without their supper.

For as I’m always saying to Dr. Watson, it’s elementary that even a slightly tarnished silver lining is better than no silver lining at all.

DELEGATING THE BLAME

2013-05-29T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Until the current administration came along, never in American history had so many people claimed to be taking responsibility without taking even the least little bit. Some leaders take pride in knowing how to delegate responsibility. Obama and his crew only know how to delegate blame.

It’s been a while, but surely you recall that when we heard about the Justice Department funneling guns to Mexican drug cartels, Attorney General Eric Holder swore he had no idea who green-lighted Operation Fast & Furious, but he was darn certain it wasn’t him.

When someone in the White House leaked national security secrets intended to make the president look competent in foreign affairs to the NY Times, everyone with an active brain cell was certain the leaker was Barack Obama, but Obama had a hunch it was some tourist from Nebraska who just happened to be passing through the White House before tours were curtailed because of that doggone sequester.

Hillary Clinton said she was taking responsibility for what occurred in Benghazi. That is to say she was responsible for everything, except for denying Ambassador Stevens the additional security he begged for; for removing the little bit of security he had; and for lying about the massacre having been triggered by a YouTube video nobody ever saw. Aside from all that, Mrs. Clinton wanted us to know that about three cents of the buck stopped with her and 97-cents stopped with some underlings she had never even met.

In the case of Obama, after he, David Axelrod and other members of his campaign team got done revising CIA reports about the Benghazi massacre, and handing them off to Susan Rice so she could repeat his lies on five Sunday news shows, Obama gallantly sprang to her defense. When people demanded to know where she got off trying to peddle stale baloney, Obama, pretending to be the stand-up guy he isn’t, told the media that if they had a bone to pick with anyone, they should pick it with him. And as soon as they did, he turned around and told Ambassador Rice that she could forget about becoming Secretary of State.

Jeremiah Wright could have warned her that Obama may throw a baseball like a little girl, but he’s Olympic-class when it comes to tossing people under the bus.

Inasmuch as it made about as much sense for the ambassador to the U.N. to have gone on those various news shows as Lady Gaga, one can only assume that someone decided that Rice was a better liar than Clinton, or at least more expendable. And, frankly, after seeing Clinton’s phony over-the-top performance before the Senate committee, I have to agree. You’d have thought that after all those years spent listening to Bill tell one whopper after another, she’d be better at it.

That brings us to the kerfuffle at the IRS. Typically, as soon as it came out that the tax collectors had been making life extra miserable for conservative groups, the blame was placed on underlings in the Cincinnati office. Like Captain Renault in “Casablanca,” who was shocked to learn that gambling took place in the backroom at Rick’s, Obama claimed he had no idea that those upstarts were creating havoc for his political opponents. It’s even possible he didn’t. Between golf and fund-raising and accusing Republicans of being Satan’s spawn, he can’t know every last thing that people are doing on his behalf.

I’m sure that’s also holds true for Mafia dons. I’m told that they don’t always have to give specific orders; they merely need to have it understood that they’d appreciate having certain things done. And in those places where corruption reigns, whether it’s denying a Tea Party group tax-exempt status or putting an icepick in the ear of a crosstown rival, they’re done.

The upside of all this is that even the members of the major media seem to be getting tired of being played like suckers by this administration. These people don’t mind lying on behalf of a left-wing president. In fact, they accept that it’s part of their job description, not to mention their main purpose in life. But they resent it like hell when they’re the target of a president’s lies and the objects of his obvious contempt.

It may have taken well over four years, but even the folks from the NY Times, the Washington Post and the major TV networks, seem to have finally had enough. In the past, Obama could have gotten away stonewalling the press about an event that saw four American patriots murdered by jihadists, claiming, as is his wont, that he couldn’t possibly comment during an ongoing investigation.

But that was then and this is now. This time, after months of lying about what he knew and when he knew it, when the truth finally started seeping out, thanks to State Department whistleblowers, and Obama tried to dismiss it as old news, the members of the White House press corps were no longer nodding along like a roomful of dashboard dollies.

And those little wet drops on Jay Carney’s brow weren’t sweat. That was blood.

THE IRS HITS THE CENTURY MARK

2013-05-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

It is just possible that 1913 was one of the worst years in American history. Not only did Woodrow Wilson, a role model for Obama, become president, but the 16th Amendment was passed, giving Congress the right to levy income taxes on us. And as anyone who has been paying attention lately realizes, when you place that much power in the hands of federal bureaucrats, you’re just asking for trouble.

It was recently disclosed that our own tax collectors are every bit as evil as those that plagued Robin Hood. But as you may have noticed, these days there’s never a master archer around when you really need one.

It seems that starting as early as 2011, the IRS was already targeting groups that did not view Obama as the Second Coming. They made things easy for themselves by determining that if the name of the group included “Tea Party,” “Constitution,” “Bill of Rights” or “Patriot,” it was not entitled to have the same tax-exempt status as, say, such sacred entities as Media Matters or the ACLU.

What’s more, the groups were expected to identify their donors, which normally would be illegal, but this, after all, is Barack Obama’s America, a nation in which harsher words are used to describe law-abiding, gun-owning, Christian conservatives than blood-thirsty jihadists.

The good news of late is that even such dedicated leftists as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and former congressman, Dennis Kucinich, have taken to attacking the current administration over Benghazi and its misuse of the IRS.

What’s more, by the time the various congressional committees get to the bottom of Benghazi, I suspect I will stand a better chance of garnering the 2016 Democratic nomination than Hillary Clinton. Considering her decision to remove security forces from the consulate in spite of Ambassador Stevens’ begging for reinforcements; her telling the ambassador’s grief-stricken mother that her son’s death was due to some silly video; and her delivering that disgusting line “What difference, at this point, does it really matter” when referring to the identity of the Libyan killers; I would say it’s time to stick a fork in her. That’s because, one, her presidential aspirations are D.O.A. and, two, because she’s long deserved to have a fork stuck in her.

I understand that it’s not always possible for conservatives to rid themselves of the liberals in their lives. In a few instances, even I have not entirely managed to carry it off. After all, it’s not easy to cast off college friends, and even harder to dump loony relatives. But I would suggest as a test, try asking those you know what they think of Obama after the Benghazi cover-up and the news about the IRS. Both, after all, are somewhat reminiscent of life under Richard Nixon. I’m sure most of us recall how outraged liberals were over Watergate and about his infamous enemies list.

If you ask the liberals in your life these two questions and they insist that Obama had no involvement in either matter or that neither of those events is worthy of their interest, and you don’t call them on it in the exact same way they would if George Bush were the responsible party, you are, at best, an enabler and, at worst, a moral coward.

I despise Obama, and while I regard him as a vile symptom, even I have to acknowledge that he’s not entirely the cause of our national malaise. I mean, he didn’t hand Dr. Kermit Gosnell the scissors with which he cut the spines of those babies. On the other hand, a spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood did say that the decision to cut or not to cut should be solely in the hands of the woman and her friendly abortionist, and Obama did find time to give a shout-out at the recent Planned Parenthood convention. But that was only fitting because as an Illinois state senator, he had already cast votes in favor of murdering the tiny survivors of botched abortions.

While I’m in attack mode, I’ll go on record that when it comes to criminal defense attorneys, they remind me less of actual human beings than they do of those slobbering long-fanged creatures one comes across in sci-fi horror movies. As if what Ariel Castro, the Tsarnaev brothers, Jodi Arias and Kermit Gosnell, did wasn’t appalling enough, we have an endless daisy chain of lawyers who are only too anxious to defend these monsters.

One assumes the motivation is publicity, although these creeps with their law degrees will inevitably contend that we are a nation of laws and that even those who are obviously guilty deserve the best defense that money can buy. But it seems to me that the Law, aka Justice, is really intended to protect the innocent, not to enable the guilty to escape their just deserts. What, after all, is so great about this Law they keep yammering about?

The Law, which these shysters pretend to hold sacred, permits a million legal abortions to take place every year. The Law permits convicted serial killers to survive for decades after they’ve slaughtered their victims, thanks to an appeal system so perverted that most of those on Death Row will never be executed. The Law also permits politicians to pass legislation, including ObamaCare, that affects the rest of us in terrible ways, but never them or their families.

The Law goes so far as to permit, one might even say encourage, Supreme Court justices to ignore the Constitution with impunity, and base their decisions on their own political disposition, having nothing to do with the Founders’ obvious intentions.

Thus I say, in the immortal words of Charles Dickens’ Mr. Bumble, “The law is an ass,” and, more often than not, so are its practitioners.

COPING MECHANISMS

2013-05-22T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

I will frankly admit I find it increasingly difficult to share the same planet as leftists. That’s because I believe they are all insane. They say such things as “We all belong to the state” or “It takes a village to raise a child” with a straight face. One might say that a North Korean belongs to the state, but an American?

To tell the truth, the only way I have found to cope with liberals is by ridiculing them every chance I get.

Does anyone but an idiot believe that folks like Jefferson, Washington and Franklin, went to all that trouble to create a nation that was basically the same as the English monarchy?

Just how is it that it takes a village to raise a child, but any female, even one as young as 12 or 13, is entitled to have it murdered by someone like Kermit Gosnell before the village gets their hands on it?

Lest anyone ever forget, Barack Obama, while in the Illinois legislature, not only voted in favor of late term abortions, but voted in favor of killing any tots who, miraculously, managed to survive the butchery. Furthermore, unlike same-sex marriages, transparency in government and the Patriot Act, Obama has not evolved even the slightest little bit when it comes to this particular issue.

Speaking of he who should go back to community-organizing, I immediately thought of Obama when I heard about the letter sent to a casting agency by the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The CBC was looking for someone to host an afternoon TV show. But they didn’t want just anyone to apply. In order to qualify, the person had to be good with kids, love physical comedy and enjoy hanging out with puppets all day. The job was open to people of any gender, so long as they weren’t white. I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if they had sent the job offer directly to the White House.

For one thing, we know Obama likes spending time with his daughters, especially when the taxpayer is picking up the tab. Next, anyone who saw him sink only two of the 22 shots he took on Easter Sunday knows he is Buster Keaton’s equal when it comes to physical comedy. And, finally, after spending four years pulling the strings of Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Charley Rangel, Henry Waxman and Jay Carney, he has already put in more time with puppets than Burr Tillstrom, Jim Henson and Mr. Rogers, put together.

An odd fact I recently came across is that if you’re treated for COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) at the Bayonne Hospital Center in New Jersey, the cost is $99,490. However, just 30 miles away, at the Lincoln Medical Center in the Bronx, it will run you $7,094. I can’t possibly explain the discrepancy or recommend one hospital over the other but that doesn’t mean I’m not suspicious of Bayonne.

For one thing, the price is far too reminiscent of those rip-off artists that go out of their way to keep the price of their product or service below $100 by offering it for $99.99 or under $1000 by deducting a penny from the cost. But unless I find that Bayonne has a success rate 14 times higher than Lincoln or that they encourage smoking in the Bronx facility, I’d give Bayonne a very wide berth.

In case you missed the news, Kathy Boudin, a dedicated radical/convicted cop killer, went straight from the penitentiary to a professorship at Columbia. She is merely following in the tawdry footsteps of other unrepentant nogootniks like Angela Davis and William Ayers. If anyone is seriously wondering why academia is held in such low regard these days, it’s because so many universities will roll out the red carpet for murderous loons, while at the same time slamming their ivy-covered doors in the face of conservative scholars.

What makes Democrats so despicable isn’t simply that they’re wrong on just about every issue, but that they will lie and provide cover for their fellow liars. All you had to do was tune in to the Benghazi hearings to realize how, even in the wake of our ambassador and his three gallant colleagues being slaughtered by the barbarians in Libya, people like Rep. Elijah Cummings will put partisan politics ahead of ferreting out the truth. And for good measure, they will then attribute partisan motives to those seeking the facts.

In the run-up to the election, in order to bolster the big lie about having decimated Al Qaeda, Obama, Biden, Clinton and Susan Rice, pretended that the Benghazi massacre was the result of an impromptu demonstration brought on by a silly video.

One would think that however one felt about Obama’s re-election prospects, an honest person would have to take the word of the Libyan president when he immediately announced that the attack was premeditated and carried out by Muslim terrorists.

One would also think that a cover-up involving four dead Americans would trigger at least as big a reaction from the media as Watergate, which involved an office break-in, for God’s sake, but no spilling of innocent blood. But, then, of course, one can’t really expect a Democrat such as Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin or Patrick Leahy, to follow the example of Barry Goldwater and tell the president in no uncertain terms to do the honorable thing and vacate the premises.

One of the more mind-boggling things about Americans is the ridiculously high esteem in which so many of them hold Hillary Clinton, a woman who owes her fame not to any actual achievement, but to the fact that 37 years ago she displayed her own lack of judgment by marrying a serial adulterer

But to me, the nadir of her public life took place last January. I only wish I had been sitting in Sen. Ron Johnson’s chair when she berated him for daring to question her over the tragic events that took place on 9/11 in Benghazi.

After her hammy outburst, I would have said, “Somehow I can’t quite believe that if Ambassador to Libya Chelsea Clinton had been murdered by jihadists four months ago, her mother would sit there today and say, ‘What difference, at this point, does it make who did it?’”

THE LEFT: GUILTY OF UNREQUITED STUPIDITY

2013-05-20T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

It goes against my grain to generalize about large groups of people, but when it comes to liberals and Muslims, I find it increasingly difficult to resist the urge.

For instance, House Democrats, led by the thoroughly obnoxious Rep. Barbara Lee, have proposed a resolution calling on Congress to acknowledge that global warming could drive poor women to depend on “transactional sex” for their economic survival. Their reasoning, for want of a better word, is that global warming would lead to drought, and drought would inevitably lead to prostitution as food became scarce and more expensive.

What Ms. Lee neglects to explain is why prostitution is so widespread outside the confines of the already drought-riddled Third World, and has for millennia been referred to as the world’s oldest profession. When informed of the proposed legislation, Bill Clinton was overheard saying, “Remind me, what’s wrong with prostitution?”

Speaking of people named Clinton, as anyone familiar with my work knows, I hold his wife in even greater contempt than I hold her husband. This is especially true ever since her vile performance testifying before Congress on the subject of the Benghazi massacre. One can only imagine the hell she would raise if her own daughter, Chelsea, had been murdered, and a few months later, some loathsome Washington harridan had dared to say: “What difference, at this late date, does it really make who did it?”

Sometimes I attempt to imagine what life must be like inside the mind of a leftist. I’m guessing it’s filled with spider webs, squeaky doors and the faint echo of Obama’s countless lies. Sometimes, as in the case of people like O.J. Simpson, Robert Blake and Casey Anthony, it seems to me that our nation’s jury pools are filled exclusively with liberal morons who are devoid of commonsense and the ability to handle even a single idea, let alone juggle two simultaneously.

Is it possible that between “Perry Mason” and “CSI,” members of juries have no concept of what constitutes a reasonable doubt? Do they equate circumstantial evidence with perjury? Do they even know what circumstantial evidence is, and will anything short of the defendant rising in the courtroom and confessing his crime convince them?

But juries are merely one of the problems with our legal system. Between the endless and absurd appeals that have become standard practice, particularly in capital cases, the recipient of a death sentence is far more likely to die of old age than by lethal injection.

That reminds me of a friend, now deceased, who had worked for several years inside California’s Soledad Penitentiary. He had nothing but contempt for the inmates with whom he was forced to deal on a daily basis. He didn’t regard them as unfortunate victims of a cruel or neglectful society, but as vermin from whom society needed to be protected. The kicker is that he wasn’t a prison guard; he was the prison chaplain!

One of my readers has let me know that he got ripped off by an air conditioner repairman, and that neither the local police chief nor the state licensing board will do anything about it. I told him that it’s a sad day when service providers can get away with behaving like politicians. After all, repairmen are expected to have professional and ethical standards, whereas when it comes to politicians, lying and cheating are included in the job description.

One of my chief complaints with political correctness is that blacks, Muslims, illegal aliens, homosexuals and the transgender crowd, are not only encouraged to take offense with anything that doesn’t advance their various agendas, but are applauded for their alleged sensitivity. Being thin-skinned is bad enough without anyone trying to make a virtue of it. Sensitivity should be a word reserved for those who are concerned about the feelings of others, not for those ballyhooing their own under-developed defense systems, otherwise known as maturity.

Finally, a word to the current commander-in-chief and those who will succeed him: Not since 1945, has the United States engaged in a war with the intention of destroying the enemy. As we should have learned through our half-assed experiences in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, playing for a tie is a great way to squander treasure and gallant American lives.

If the president and the Pentagon are going to continue fretting about collateral damage, nation-building and the risk of offending the tawdry religion of our sworn enemies, they really should step aside and leave it up to the folks who have a serious interest in protecting this nation. I refer to the patriotic members of the NRA and and the feisty Daughters of the American Revolution.

OUT OF MIND EXPERIENCES

2013-05-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

We have all heard of out of body experiences in which people claim to be hovering in the air gazing down on themselves. But I think that it’s far more commonplace for left-wingers to take leave of their brains than their bodies. I mean, how can people with even half a brain possibly condone the things they do?

Take same-sex marriages, for instance. How such lunacy has come to be taken seriously as a civil right by so many on the Left makes you wonder if there is any goofy idea that these pinheads won’t promote, any silly slogan they won’t parrot. Every time I come across one of these farcical “marriages” on TV, I am reminded of those stomach-turning “beauty” contests involving five-year-olds decked out in lipstick, rouge, tiaras and evening gowns; grotesque parodies of normal life.

Or consider that this administration is encouraging Mexican consulates to tell illegal aliens to demand food stamps from the U.S. government. I’m reminded of a friend who wrote me to say that henceforth his unlicensed guns won’t be illegal; they will merely be undocumented.

Speaking of guns, Thomas Jefferson wisely observed that “Those who beat their guns into plowshares will soon be plowing for those who don’t.”

Having now had several months to rue the last presidential election, I have decided there’s no big secret why 51% of the voters went for Obama. It’s because more and more Americans are childish, if not downright infantile. In a divorce, will the kids favor the disciplinarian who demands they complete their schoolwork and do their chores or the one who bribes them with toys and other goodies? Americans should grow up, but it may already be too late to expect such an unlikely miracle.

As someone else pointed out, in the U.S., a 13-year-old girl is already an adult who can be trusted to buy the day-after pill off the shelf, but 26-year-olds are still children who must be covered by their parents’ medical insurance policies.
I know there are some people who hold Kirsten Powers in higher regard than her fellow left-wing propagandists because, on very rare occasion, she will acknowledge that Obama doesn’t walk on water. I, on the other hand, find her usual expression so relentlessly smug, I have to assume she’s come to regard herself as being the prettiest woman in any venue in which she happens to appear. Unfortunately, the venue in which she appears most frequently is Fox News, where the likes of Dana Perino, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Megyn Kelly, hang out. So my advice to Ms. Powers is that she wipe that smirk off her puss.

Not since O.J. Simpson’s murder trial have so many shysters lined up to defend a criminal as have offered to help Dzhokhar Tsarnaev out of his legal difficulties. Under our system, lawyers are free to defend whomever they wish. But I would remind people that they have the right to shun and despise whomever they wish.

Frankly, I’m sure if there had been any law school grads around in ancient times, some latent ambulance chaser would have been only too happy to defend Cain. Of course in the case of the Tsarnaev brothers, there is no Abel. Instead, we have the disgrace of Cain and Cain.

Finally, in 1999, Al Gore augmented his salary as vice-president by selling cows off the family farm for $6,000. Back then, he had a net worth of $1.7 million. Today, 14 years later, he’s worth an estimated $200 million, thanks to the success of his global warming hoax.

To me, that simply proves that in America today there’s a heck of a lot less money to be made selling actual livestock than in peddling bullshit.

COOLIDGE & CUCKOOS

2013-05-15T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

I always knew I liked Calvin Coolidge, but I thought perhaps it was merely because he was a quiet man who, unlike most of our presidents, wasn’t infatuated with the sound of his own voice. I also liked the fact that he was apparently devoid of that thing called charisma, which is generally what politicians have in place of character.

But, thanks to economist/historian Amity Shlaes, who proved in her book, “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression,” that although FDR didn’t create the Depression, he did a great deal to prolong the agony until World War II finally brought it to an end, Coolidge emerges as a heroic figure.

She points out that even though Ronald Reagan was a tax cutter, reducing the top marginal rate from 70% to 28%, the federal budget increased by close to 40% during his administration. As I have often observed, Republicans are only anxious to decrease spending when the Democrats are in power.

But you could never say that about Coolidge, a man who said shortly after assuming office upon Warren Harding’s death: “We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic of undeveloped people, or of a decadent generation.”

He also said such sensible things as “Collecting more taxes than is absolutely necessary is legalized robbery,” “I should like to be known as a former President who minded his own business” and “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”

Speaking of bad bills, when I wrote about the 20,000 pages of administrative rules for ObamaCare, my friend Art Hershey sent an email alerting me to the fact that the Social Security Act, or Economic Security Act as it was called in 1935, was just 63 pages long. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, which dealt with minimum wages and overtime pay, ran 64 pages. And the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a scant 10 pages.

Nancy Pelosi wasn’t just whistling “Dixie” when she announced that Congress would have to enact the Patient Affordable Health Care Act of 2010 (aka ObamaCare) before anyone would know what was in it. Three years later, we are still finding out about all the vile snips and snails and puppy dog tails that are concealed within its 2,700 pages.

It’s very possible that you might have missed the news, as I had, that GE Capital made the following announcement in 2008: “As a responsible lender, we regularly review our lending policies and products to meet changing conditions and requirements. We have adopted a policy to cease providing consumer financing programs for merchants whose primary business is the sale of firearms.”

One of my readers, who shared this with me, sent GE a message that read, “As a responsible consumer, I regularly review my buying practices to meet changing conditions and requirements. I have decided to cease purchasing GE products. Any firm that tries to manipulate the free marketplace for political reasons doesn’t merit my support and trade.”

The next time you go shopping for light bulbs, you might keep this exchange in mind.

Finally, I must confess I have often longed to be invited to join a think tank. Imagine how delightful it must be to sit and think, and be paid to do it. I’ve gone through life sitting and thinking, but nobody has ever paid me to do so. In fact, on those few occasions when I’ve actually worked in an office, if my boss passed by, asked me what I was doing, and I had told him I was thinking, I would have been canned on the spot. But at a think tank, the same answer would probably garner me a raise.

As the old sage said, beware of what you pray for. As often happens, there are exceptions to the rule. In this case, the exception would be Ron Paul’s Institute for Peace and Prosperity. Among the nutballs the former goofy congressman has gathered around him are John Laughland, Eric Margolis, Butler Shaffer, Lew Rockwell, Dennis Kucinich and Andrew Napolitano. With the possible exception of the last two, these are hardly household names. But each, in his own way, would have been right at home at Lewis Carroll’s famous tea party along with the White Rabbit and the Mad Hatter.

Among this collection of kooks are to be found people who defend Serbian war criminal Slobodan Milosevic; moved to try George W. Bush for war crimes; support Hamas; opposed America’s intervention in World War II; and edited Rep. Paul’s racist and anti-Semitic newsletter. You remember -- the newsletter bearing his name that Ron Paul insisted he barely ever looked at during the 20 years it was published, reminding some of us of Obama’s absurd contention that he snoozed through 20 years of Jeremiah Wright’s vile sermons.

Less a think tank, I’d suggest, than a stink tank.

For those of you who merely know Judge Napolitano from his rather arrogant pronouncements on the law for Fox News, it turns out that he is one of those loony conspiracy theorists known as 9/11 truthers. In other words, he doesn’t think that Muslim jihadists were behind the attacks that killed 3,000 Americans. Instead, he believes it was an inside job by the George Bush administration.

Maybe it’s just me, but I have never trusted anyone whose hairline starts half an inch above his eyebrows. It suggests to me that the brain was surgically removed and the head was then stitched back together.

SPREADING THE BLAME AROUND

2013-05-13T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

I generally regard the Israelis as sensible and self-sufficient, but now I hear that they put a major construction job up for bids and, lo and behold, a Chinese firm got the contract. Frankly, I wouldn’t trust the Chinese to build me a bird house, let alone a railroad from Eilat to the Mediterranean. What? There are no Israeli construction companies? What if Iran had submitted a lower bid than the Chinese? Would Ahmadinejad be the foreman on the job? At this point, I only hope that the construction company is the one we know as Chang, Lee, Wu and Rosenberg.

Speaking of that part of the world, the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald insists it’s U.S. intervention in the Middle East that motivates screwballs like the blood-thirsty Tsarnaev brothers. In the meantime, former TV anchorman and all-around pinhead Tom Brokaw lays the blame on our drone attacks. What neither of these chuckleheads bothers to explain is why the Muslim jihadists have blown up civilians in Bali, Japan, Brazil and India, among other places that have left no footprints on their precious sand. People like Mr. Greenwald and Mr. Brokaw would be labeled useful idiots if anyone could ever come up with a use for them.

Although it’s much more fun to mock Bob Beckel, who spends hours a day on Fox looking as if he’s about to fall off the wagon at any moment, truth demands that I give him a shout-out for proposing a sensible idea. He suggests that until we find out where the thousands of people who came here on student visas and never attended a single class are hiding out, so we can round them up and boot them out, we shut down all immigration from China and the Muslim nations. And I say if we fail to collar all the ne’er-do-wells, what’s the big deal if their countrymen can’t ever come to America? They can always go to Israel and help them build that damn railroad.

Speaking of glorious days, wouldn’t it be great if instead of worrying about law-abiding citizens being able to protect themselves with guns, and providing citizenship to people who don’t have it coming, Congress would devote its time and energy to passing a federal law denying voting privileges to anyone who can’t provide a valid photo ID? The notion that such a requirement would deny suffrage to millions of people who are either elderly or members of some racial minority is so preposterous that only a liberal would have the chutzpah to make the charge with a straight face.

But it figures that a country that’s been so frivolous when it comes to protecting its sovereignty by guarding its borders would be equally cavalier when it comes to preserving the sanctity of the polling booth. I would actually have more respect for the Democrats if they just came out and admitted they wanted illegal aliens to have every possible opportunity to elect their candidates. That would go down so much better than all their lies and false pieties, especially when everyone, including the illegal aliens and fraudulent voters, know the truth.

Although by now we’ve all seen the commercials urging us to sign up for food stamps, what you might not know is that the federal government is paying people to go out and recruit older Americans to sign up for the program. Florida is proving to be a happy hunting ground for these recruiters.

Even though most of those signing up in recent years are living comfortably on their investments, pensions and Social Security, idling away the golden years soaking up the sun, playing golf and taking macramé classes, they’re being told that they’ve earned all this largesse, and, essentially, that they’re suckers if they don’t let their fellow taxpayers put food on their table.

And, so, much like Faust, they trade their souls for something they don’t really need and, worse yet, don’t deserve.

I only hope that the next time those old retired folks cluck their tongues over welfare cheats, they realize they’re talking about themselves.

VENTING

2013-05-10T00:30:00.001-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

A while back, it occurred to me that while the glamour magazines are constantly telling American women that 60 is the new 50, and 50 is the new 40, and 40 is the new 30, in Hollywood, 60 is the new 30, and 50 is the new 15. For instance, if you consider the movie roles they play, you might get the idea that most leading men are in their teens or early 20s. So it may come as a shock to you that Matt Damon is 42, Will Ferrell is 45, Adam Sandler is 46, Ben Stiller is 47, David Spade is 48 and Jim Carrey is a ripe old 51.

Even more surprising to me is that in spite of his boyish ways and his collegiate haircut, Jay Carney is 48. But I guess it takes time and experience to learn how to lie on Obama’s behalf with such ease and, apparently, without the slightest bit of embarrassment.

But, then, he has learned from the master. Imagine the amount of gall it must take to furlough air traffic controllers, causing massive delays at airports all around the country, blaming it on the Sequester, while at the same time throw lavish galas at the White House, blow a million bucks on a round of golf with Tiger Woods, and God knows how many of our tax dollars jetting down to Texas for a fund-raiser! And of course Air Force One is never forced to idle on the tarmac for a couple of grueling hours simply because air traffic controllers have been sent home as a cheap political ploy.

In the wake of the Boston bombings, I have noticed that the media is up to its old tricks. Just as they persisted in posting photos of 11-year-old Trayvon Martin for months after the 6’2,” 17-year-old menace was shot in self-defense by George Zimmerman, I keep seeing photos of bushy-haired, baby-faced, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev looking like he’s at his first Communion. Instead of a pressure cooker bomb, he’s holding a single red carnation. Funny, but I don’t seem to recall seeing pictures of Charles Manson or Timothy McVeigh at the age of 10, frolicking with their puppies.

Even in the wake of the Boston massacre, I keep hearing liberals complaining that cameras in public places are an invasion of privacy. Just how loony are left-wingers, you ask? Let’s just say that if their stupidity could be transformed into electrical power, we’d have a power grid in America that would free us of our dependency on oil, coal, sun and wind. Anyone who believes that once he steps outside his front door, the Constitution provides him with the expectation of privacy is clearly non compos mentis, and should not be trusted to venture outdoors.

Thanks to the media’s infatuation with abortions, the trial of late term abortionist Kermit Gosnell has pretty much flown under the public’s radar. The fact that he made a practice of snipping the spines of babies who managed to survive his butchery would normally make him lip-smacking grist for TV, but aside from Fox News, the media is giving his trial a wide berth. God forbid they do anything that might make abortions unpalatable to the American public.

For a long time, I generally limited my remarks about abortions to honestly admitting that I couldn’t imagine how in this day and age, with all the birth control pills and devices, and the decades of sex education classes in our schools, anyone could still be dumb enough to become accidentally pregnant. But after 51% of the country decided to re-elect Obama last November, I realized that there is no limit to human stupidity.

Therefore, ridicule is plainly not enough. So, instead, I will say that unless a three-man panel of gynecologists whose names have been drawn out of a hat has determined that an abortion is necessary to save the life of the mother, abortions should be banned.

What’s more, any man who impregnates a woman to whom he isn’t married will be arrested and serve time in jail. And, furthermore, any doctor who performs abortions, in clear violation of his Hippocratic Oath “to first do no harm,” will both lose his medical license and be charged with murder.

I am well aware that the Supreme Court made abortions legal in its Roe v. Wade decision. I am also aware that slavery was once legal and women’s suffrage wasn’t. Anyone who puts his faith in the Supreme Court is guilty of naiveté in the first degree. These are merely men and women who owe their positions and authority to the whims of politicians. They were not appointed by God, after all, but merely by the likes of people named Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama.

Excusing what is immoral on the grounds that it is legal is dangerous. After all, under Nazi law, the butchery performed by Dr. Josef Mengele on concentration camp prisoners in the abattoir he called a laboratory was perfectly legal.

What astonishes me is that liberals shed more tears for the murder of late term Kansas abortionist George Tiller than they ever did for the thousands of babies he destroyed. And what disturbs me even more are the millions of people who parrot the nonsense that embryos belong solely to the women carrying them, and that an abortion is no different from a woman’s having a mole removed.

Abortion enthusiast Paris Harris of MSNBC recently insisted that children belong to society, not their parents. If I follow that correctly, one second before birth, the child belongs exclusively to some woman who has the perfect right to kill it, while a second later it belongs to all of us.

I have long contended that it’s impossible to dig up a Democrat who makes any sense at all unless, of course, you literally dug one up. So, does anyone happen to know where Harry Truman is buried?

ALLAH NOT SO AKBAR!

2013-05-08T00:30:00.001-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

In the aftermath of the Boston bombings, we hear that the FBI was informed by Russia that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was a Muslim radical, but even after he spent six months in Chechen, the FBI decided he wasn’t worth a second look. As a result, the FBI has come in for a great deal of criticism. I’m not saying it’s not warranted, but I suspect there’s a lot of blame to spread around. And, at the risk of sounding like Obama, some of it can be laid at the feet of George W. Bush.

It wasn’t long after 9/11 that we started hearing Bush and Condoleezza Rice parroting the line that Islam was a religion of peace. I don’t recall any president reminding us that Christianity, Judaism or Buddhism, was a peaceful religion. Well, considering that in the name of Islam, 3,000 Americans had just been killed, and that in the subsequent years innocent people have been killed and maimed in countries ranging from Russia to the Philippines, Spain to India, all in the name of Allah, it’s obvious that Bush and Rice were lying.

The truth is that we are in a state of war, but when the police commissioner of New York City gets tarred for trying to conduct undercover surveillance in mosques and when Major Nidal Hasan is allowed to continue serving in the military even after it’s known that he is communicating with terrorists in the Middle East and doing everything but taping pin-up photos of Osama bin Laden on the walls of his barracks at Fort Hood, it’s clear that anyone who dares to say “Islamic” and “terrorist” in the same sentence is running the risk of committing professional suicide.

That, I believe, is why the FBI didn’t haul Tamerlan Tsarnaev into its Boston field office and grill him like a Labor Day wienie.

Now I hear a lot of people assuring us that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother, will be found guilty and executed. I’m convinced he’ll be found guilty, but I suspect that I stand a far better chance of being executed for not separating my trash. The reason for my skepticism is that John Walker Lindh, the American jihadist who killed an American soldier in Iraq, got off with a prison sentence, as did Lee Boyd Malvo, half of the D.C. sniper team that killed 10 people and critically wounded three others a decade ago, all in the name of Allah.

Tsarnaev won’t be executed because, like the other two vicious creeps, he’s young. Lindh was 21 when he went on trial, Malvo was 17 and Tsarnaev is 19. For reasons I can’t fathom, there is a reluctance to execute women or young men, no matter how clearly they have it coming.

That brings us to those three mealy-mouthed liars, Barack Obama, John Brennan and Jay Carney. Obama has determined that whether it’s in Iraq, Afghanistan or the moon, we are not engaged in a war on Islamic terrorism; instead, it’s designated an overseas contingency operation. I’m sure Ambassador Stevens and his three colleagues would be relieved to know that it wasn’t really Islamic zealots who massacred them in Benghazi, but merely some guys, in the immortal words of Hillary Clinton, who might have been out for a walk and decided to kill Americans.

The new CIA chief, John Brennan, announced, “We don’t describe the enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam.” No wonder I keep hearing from people asking me if it’s true that Brennan is a Muslim convert.

As for Jay Carney, who not only earned a B.A. in Russian and Eastern European Studies from Yale, but a Ph.D in bullshitting, when asked why it was that young Mr. Tsarnaev was read his Miranda rights so soon after his arrest, replied that if he had been designated an enemy combatant, it would have required subverting the Constitution by trying him in a military tribunal. The problem is that an enemy combatant can be tried in a civilian court; the upside of the designation is that it would have allowed law enforcement agencies up to 30 days to mine him for information before he had the opportunity to lawyer up. Apparently Mr. Carney never heard, even during his years at Yale, that the Constitution is not supposed to be a suicide pact.

Finally, there were two great ironies that resulted from the Boston bombings. The first of these was that the bumper sticker on the Mercedes that the Tsarnaev brothers carjacked read “Coexist,” the letters formed from the symbols of the world’s seven major religions. If the Tsarnaevs had seen that bit of blasphemy, I wonder if they would have let the driver survive, even if he wasn’t an American.

The other irony is that the hospital where both of them wound up, and where Dzhokhar’s life was saved, was Boston’s Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, whose president and CEO is a Jew named Kevin Tabb.

I realize it’s precious little consolation to the three people who were killed and the 200 who were maimed at the Boston massacre, but I’d like to think that somewhere in the universe the God of Abraham is giving Allah one big horselaugh.

A FEW GLAD TIDINGS

2013-05-06T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

I don’t mind admitting I was relieved that the Boston bombers were Muslims. While I regret the murders and mutilations committed by the Chechen brothers, I admit I was worried that the mayhem had been perpetrated by native-born Americans. That’s because I am so sick and tired of the politically correct crowd countering legitimate attacks on radical Islam by playing the moral equivalence game every chance they get.

You can bet that if they had been Americans, the liberal pinheads would have immediately identified them as conservative ideologues who were card-carrying members of the Sarah Palin Fan Club. Then they would have quickly dragged Timothy McVeigh and the Tea Party into the mix. The way some people insist on providing cover for Muslim jihadists, you would think that Islam was a major religion in America, when in reality there are only about two million followers of Allah in the entire country.

For a while, I figured that Obama, in spite of his all-out crusade against the Second Amendment, would at most get his universal background check. But, in spite of pulling those Newtown parents out of his back pocket every 20 minutes, he couldn’t even muster enough votes for that. It’s beginning to look as if his lame duck status has already been recognized even by his fellow Democrats.

When it appeared that he would have to settle for the background checks, even after going full-bore after guns and bullets, I was picturing him running a series of victory laps, pretending he had landed a knockout punch on law-abiding gun owners. It would have been like a guy vowing to climb Mount Everest, going up five feet and coming back down. When asked about his failure to reach the summit, Obama would have said, “I said I would climb it. I never said how high.”

But as things turned out, he couldn’t even claim he’d set foot on Everest. The best he could do was mail Michelle a postcard from Nepal: “Having a wonderful time. Not climbing any mountains for the foreseeable future. Love to the kids.”

Another piece of good news comes our way from Brevard Community College, where the administration fired Prof. Sharon Sweet for last year forcing her students to sign the following: “I pledge to vote for President Obama and Democrats up and down the ticket.”

Aside from the fact that a college actually had the courage to fire a professor, the biggest surprise is that she’s a professor of mathematics. I would have bet on political science, black studies, Hispanic studies or lesbian studies. Those tend to be the departments where the pinheads congregate, whereas math, science and engineering, tend to attract intelligent professors, along with those students whose life plans generally include moving out of their parents’ basements.

One of the things included in the immigration reform bill proposed by the Gang of Eight that caught my attention was the part where it mentioned that proof of the border being secure would be when Homeland Security managed to stop 90% of those people attempting to sneak in.

One, I know how to count those we manage to round up, but how on earth do you count those who elude capture? And, two, if you manage to do everything necessary to prevent illegal aliens from sneaking in, how and why would those ten-percenters continue to get through? How much lower can expectations go?

Wouldn’t it be like the warden of Sing Sing addressing a convention of his fellow wardens, and saying, “Fellas, we’re all doing a hell of a job. Only one out of every 10 prisoners is breaking out of jail! Drinks for everyone!”

A Burt Prelutsky EXTRA: A POX ON POLITICIANS

2013-05-04T00:00:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Until I read Amity Shlaes ‘s tribute to Calvin Coolidge, I had assumed that Ronald Reagan was the last true fiscal conservative we’ve had in the White House. Well, it seems I only missed by 60 years. I was aware that Reagan had lowered the marginal tax rate from 70% to 28%, but I hadn’t been aware that federal spending increased by 40% during his eight years in office. In other words, both parties want to increase the number of dollars flowing into Washington. Where they differ is in which way they believe the larger amount will accrue, be it from raising or lowering tax rates. Alas, neither side regards reduced spending as a virtue.

I believe this country is in deep doo-doo. But I believe that Obama is the result of the national malaise, and not entirely the cause, as some would insist. After all, with reporters working as enablers of all things left-wing, with professors indoctrinating students with communist swill, and with the majority of Americans casting votes for any swine who promises them freebies, I am not convinced that things would be a lot better with someone else in the Oval Office.

I can’t bring myself to say that Mitt Romney wouldn’t have made any difference, although probably not as much as he or I would like. But I believe we can assume that he would not have lied about the Benghazi massacre, would not have threatened the survivors to keep their yaps shut and would have made a sincere effort to capture or kill those responsible for murdering Ambassador Stevens and his three colleagues by this late date. I also can’t picture Romney using lies about the Sequester to punish Americans with cancelled White House tours and furloughed air traffic controllers.

But I’m only guessing because 51% of the voters let us know that four years of record unemployment, a nuclear Iran, a berserk North Korea, soaring inflation and diminished American influence around the world, don’t really matter when it comes to choosing between an honorable man who has succeeded in every aspect of his life and one who has surrounded himself with lowlifes and succeeded at nothing except winning a few elections. But he has a winning smile, which in a sane universe would land him a toothpaste commercial, not the presidency.

Obama spoke about dire consequences if Assad used chemical weapons, and when the weapons were used, he began threatening to take the matter to the U.N. Apparently, it doesn’t matter even a little bit to Obama if his idle threats mean that America loses its credibility not only with our enemies, but our allies. At least he didn’t tell Assad to just wait until his father comes home.

It’s probably just a rumor, but I heard that Obama is waiting for O.J. Simpson to be released from jail, so they can join forces to track down the people responsible for the Benghazi massacre and the murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman.

Someone sent me a photo of Obama and Kim Jong-un. The caption read: “He eats the finest foods, drinks the finest wines, and lives like royalty while his people suffer from his oppressive policies. The other guy is the communist dictator of North Korea.”

Getting back to the survivors of the Benghazi massacre, I hear that there are three men who are anxious to tell what they know to Congress, but they first want to be granted immunity, lest they be fired for engaging in whistleblowing. Now if I’ve got that right, these employees of the State Department and the CIA are, at least theoretically, willing to sacrifice their lives for America, but not their jobs? Is this what is now passing for patriotism?

It’s not just our presidents who keep telling us that we shouldn’t tar all Muslims with the same brush. I also keep hearing commentators remind us that it’s only radicalized jihadists who want us dead. I beg to differ. These days, as I see it, a radical Muslim, if by radical we mean the exception to the rule, is one who doesn’t crave sharia law, one of a tiny minority whose heart didn’t swell on 9/11, and who didn’t feel a surge of tribal pride when they got word that two of their guys spilled all that blood in Boston.

Finally, when I heard that Jason Collins, the backup center on the Washington Wizards, came out of the closet, and immediately received a phone call from Obama, I assumed it was to invite him to the White House for a little one-on-one. And maybe even some basketball.

THE WORLD'S GONE MAD TODAY

2013-05-03T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

My title comes from a Cole Porter lyric for “Anything Goes.” If anything, it’s even more relevant today than when he wrote it 79 years ago.

For instance? For instance, we dither around while tinhorns in Iran and North Korea threaten to nuke us. I say that when you’re in an alley fight with thugs, you toss out the Marquis of Queensbury rules and do whatever needs to be done to cripple your opponent. What you don’t do is ask him time and again what you have to give him so that he’ll leave you alone, while in the meantime he has all the time in the world to get his ducks, not to mention nuclear missiles, in a row.

For instance, I heard that Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee, is refusing to push for repeal of the ObamaCare tax on medical devices. It seems that he’s afraid that if the House sends such a bill to the Senate, Harry Reid will pull something tricky. I agree that it’s always in America’s best interests to distrust Sen. Reid, but that is hardly a good reason not to force him to deal with a bill that would go a long way to help various businesses stay solvent and keep thousands of workers gainfully employed.

If Camp is this easy to bluff, every poker player in Washington, D.C., must be eager to have this pigeon sitting at his table, just waiting to be plucked.

People used to joke that the Democrats have taxed just about everything but the air we breathe. In Maryland, the left-wing legislature is getting close with the new rain tax that will cost homeowners anywhere between $50 and $200 annually. The bill states that if you own a roof or a driveway, which are identified as impervious surfaces, you will be held responsible for your share of the tainted water that runs off into Chesapeake Bay. Hey, don’t look at me, you folks elected these humbugs.

The latest word from Europe is that Greece, seeking a way out of its fiscal malaise, wants Germany to pay reparations for World War II. So, first, these left-wing idiots go hat-in-hand, begging the krauts to send them money because they have lived the Karl Marx dream with its inevitable unhappy ending; and now the ingrates turn around and demand reparations. Usually there’s an “or else” that goes with demands. But aside from threatening to hold their collective breath until Germany comes across, I can’t imagine what the Greeks have in mind.

My favorite novelist these days is Donna Leon, an American who has lived in Venice, Italy, for several years and has written 22 books featuring a police commissioner named Guido Brunetti. In “The Girl of His Dreams,” Brunetti’s wife at one point is expressing her contempt for the sort of pious platitudes for which certain Italian newspapers are noted, but acknowledges that “they’re the sort of thing people like to hear.”

When a friend asks her why, she says, “Because they don’t have to do anything. All they have to do is feel the right things, and that makes them believe they deserve credit for having done something. It’s all so terribly American.”

“Why American?” her friend asks.

“Because they think it’s enough to feel things: they’ve come to believe it’s more important than doing things, or it’s the same thing, or at any rate, deserves just as much credit as actually doing something. What is it that poseur of a president of theirs was always saying, ‘I feel your pain’? As if that made any difference to anything. God, it’s enough to choke a pig.

“All you’ve got to do is have the proper feelings,” Mrs. Brunetti went on, “the fashionable sentiments, and make a business about how delicate your sensibility is. And then you don’t have to do anything. All you do is stand there with your precious sentiments hanging out while the world falls over itself applauding you for them and giving you credit for having the same feelings that any sentient being would have.”

Except that I would have substituted “liberal” or “celebrity” for “American,” I think Ms. Leon has brilliantly summed up what we saw at the Democratic convention last year and what we see and hear at every single gathering of left-wingers, be they on the floor of the Senate, on a late night TV talk show or at an Occupy Wall Street demonstration.

These self-anointed saints are always feeling someone’s pain, usually while on their way to collect yet another humanitarian award while driving their Hummer over some poor schmuck’s foot.

THE CRAZIES

2013-05-01T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

A serial killer has been on trial in Philadelphia for several weeks and yet the TV networks that love to devote every waking hour to covering a murder trial if it involves the likes of Casey Anthony or Jodi Arias, have totally ignored it. I’m referring to the trial of a ghoul named Kermit Gosnell, who made a practice of murdering babies born alive after he botched late-term abortions.

Obviously, the reason that all the TV networks other than Fox have gone out of their way to bury this story is because anything that varies from the left-wing narrative that there’s no difference between a woman having an abortion and having a mole removed is seen as providing Pro-Lifers with ammunition.

Several of Gosnell’s unlicensed assistants have testified that they’ve seen these babies breathing and have heard Gosnell, who would have been right at home performing experiments for the Nazis, joke that some of them were big enough to walk to the bus stop. He would deliver the coup de grace by cutting their tiny spines.

The problem is that even if he’s found guilty and sentenced to death, he will live another few decades while his lawyers appeal his conviction. And even after the appeals run out, the state will make every effort to ensure that his execution is pain-free. The truth is justice would only be served if a day after he’s found guilty he would be done away with by having his own spine severed.

It’s worth mentioning that Obama, when he served in the Illinois legislature, voted against making it a crime to kill babies who survived abortions. Not to be outdone, California’s own loony senator, Barbara Boxer, once insisted that “A baby’s life doesn’t begin until it’s brought home from the hospital.” I haven’t yet found a theological basis for that, but it does remind me of the Jewish joke -- and, no, I’m not referring to Mrs. Boxer -- that a Jewish boy is still a baby until he graduates from medical school.

If you spend any time at all studying American liberals, you will be convinced that “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” with its spooky pod people from outer space, is a documentary.

In all the skirmishing over weapons, the one conclusion I have come to is that if this administration were really serious about doing something to decrease violence in America, they would forget about trying to shoot holes in the Second Amendment. Instead, they would make it easier for states to institutionalize psychotics. I’m not a psychiatrist, but I don’t think you would have needed to have a Ph.D to recognize that the guys who committed mass murder in Tucson, Aurora, Fort Hood and Newtown, weren’t playing with a full deck.

I mean, have you looked at their photos? They might as well have been walking around with a sign around their necks that read: “I am certifiably insane, and if you don’t get me into a padded cell immediately, you will live to regret it.”

The other thing a nation that was actually serious about gun violence would do is send the National Guard into every major urban area and clear out the gangbangers. Anyone who thinks that Kabul, Kunduz and Kandahar, present a greater danger to Americans than Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit, has simply not been paying attention.

In much the same way, our nation twiddles its thumbs while nutballs in Iran and North Korea threaten to nuke us and our allies. In the meantime, while our enemies gear up, we’re stuck with a president who likes to hear his own voice almost as much as Kim Jung Un. Obama speaks loudly and carries a very small stick.

Our foreign policy mirrors the way we deal with violent lunatics domestically. Just as we waited until Jared Loughner, James Holmes, Nidal Hasan and Adam Lanza, went off on their killing sprees, leaving 58 dead people in their wake because we lacked the spine to be proactive, we dawdle while the loons in Tehran and Pyongyang promise to destroy us. Some folks don’t think they’re capable of carrying out their threats. Maybe they are and maybe they’re not. But why take chances?

It seems to me that the sensible thing to do if a nation vows to nuke America is to do unto them before they do unto us. Otherwise, what’s the point of having all those very expensive bombs at our disposal? Where is it written that the bad guys get to hit us first? I know that the same louts who wanted us to disarm unilaterally during the Cold War want us to convert our nuclear arsenal into plowshares, but we used similar bombs 68 years ago and it worked like a charm.

I hate to sound like a worrywart, but it seems to me that time is of the essence. I’m concerned that if we wait too long, Obama will simply be snookered into making one more disarmament treaty with Vladimir Putin, and we’ll wind up at the mercy of the Canadians.

Law and Disorder

2013-04-29T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Instead of all the needless nattering about guns and bullets, there is a public safety issue that the states and the federal government could actually do something about. I refer to prisons. Why aren’t we building more and bigger ones?

Maybe it’s just me, but that seems a lot more sensible than releasing felons because some pinheaded bureaucrat decides we should be overly concerned about the discomfort of robbers, rapists and murderers. I mean, these are the most vicious of the vicious, and we’re treating them like guests at a hotel.

I even know how we could start funding construction of new prisons. I suggest we simply stop providing prisoners with gymnasiums, TV sets and sex change operations. They did not, after all, go on a TV game show and win 10-20 years at a Marriott.

Another way to help cover the cost is to sell naming rights to corporate sponsors, just the way they do with stadiums and arenas. All by themselves, rap music record companies could easily re-christen the likes of Leavenworth, Attica, Soledad, Folsom and Sing-Sing. And, what’s more, the new monikers would be far more fitting once you realize that among the major labels are Asylum, Bad Boys, Gangsta Advisory, Captivity, Psychopathic, Low Life and Konvict Muzik.

Also, unlike sporting venues, where the payoff to the corporation ebbs and flows with the fortunes of the teams, the nice thing about having your company’s name attached to a penitentiary is that people will always be grateful to be reminded that those walls are keeping them safe from the human vermin inside.

Getting back to guns for a moment, Harry Reid admitted that Dianne Feinstein, even with 55 Democrats in the Senate, wouldn’t be able to muster even 40 votes in support of her bill to eviscerate the Second Amendment. But rather than force those 15 or 20 Democrats to cast votes in opposition to Obama or face the ire of the NRA in 2014 and beyond, McConnell and his Republican colleagues threatened a filibuster if the bill was brought to the floor. The question that comes to mind is just how stupid are they?

Is it possible that because Rand Paul got so much attention for filibustering John Brennan’s appointment to head up the CIA, Republican lunkheads have decided that they will now filibuster against everything except a pay raise?

Speaking of Obama, I found it amusing that he recently got in hot water for complimenting California’s Attorney General Kamala Harris on her looks. Now if he’d gotten an earful from Michelle, I might have understood it. But, instead, he caught hell from a coven of feminists who treated the poor schnook as if he’d referred to Mrs. Harris as a broad, a dame or a skirt. According to these harridans, by commenting on her looks, Obama was turning the clock back by several decades. You would have thought he was campaigning to reverse the 19th Amendment, denying women the right to vote.

I would have loved to have listened in on his apology to the woman. What could he say? “Hi, Kamala, it’s Barack. I just wanted to call and assure you that I didn’t mean it when I said you were good-looking.”

Because it always annoys me when I hear people refer to a federal judge who delivers a stupid ruling without naming the schmuck, as if the ruling came down from the Mount, I always try to track him down. In the case of the decision to make Plan B, the so-called day-after contraceptive pill, available without a prescription and without age restrictions, the dunderhead was Federal District Court Judge Edward Korman. It was he who decided that girls as young as 11 or 12 should be able to go into a drug store and buy a comic book, a candy bar and contraception off the shelf. No big surprise. After all, that’s the sort of nonsense that federal judges do on a regular basis. What I was surprised to discover was that Korman was first appointed by Ronald Reagan.

But I suppose I shouldn’t have been too surprised. After all, when guys like Clinton and Obama appoint justices to the Supreme Court, it’s always someone like Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan and Sotomayor. Good old-fashioned left-wing ideologues. But when it’s time for the likes of Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush, to handle it, it’s just as likely -- make that more likely -- to be a Brennan, Burger, Blackmun, Kennedy, O’Connor and Souter, as it is to be a Scalia or Thomas.

So, whereas the Democrats vet their judicial appointments to within an inch of their lives, knowing that the Court will be their lasting legacy, the Republicans seem content to pick their names out of a cap. And a dunce cap, at that.

SO MUCH BS, SO LITTLE TIME

2013-04-26T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

Over 30 states have voted against recognizing same-sex marriages, and of the few states where it’s legal, most have had it mandated by judicial bullies, not through the election process. But in spite of all that, gays and other leftists insist that within a few years, homosexual marriages will be legal in all 50 states. They base that conclusion on the polls that show that young people favor the silly notion.

What these seers ignore is that as people mature, get married, have children, as often as not, they discard the faddish beliefs they held in their twenties. After all, many of today’s parents experimented with drugs, booze and sex, in their own youth. That doesn’t mean they approve of their own sons and daughters doing the same. Not even if they’re named Clinton, Bush or Obama.

Speaking of which, Sen. Rand Paul, a devout libertarian who wishes to see drug use de-criminalized, pointed out, in making his case, that the past two presidents -- and he could have said three -- could have been arrested on drug charges in their twenties. He was trying to make the point that our drug laws are too draconian, and that these men might have had their political aspirations snuffed out if they had had drug arrests on their record. But that’s not how I look at it. Instead, my reaction was that the country might have been spared these past couple of decades if only the DEA had been doing its job.

Al Sharpton, who should have wound up in the clink after choreographing the Tawana Brawley hoax, claims that the opposition to Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control crusade is the result of -- hold on to your hats! -- anti-Semitism! Well, I guess if anyone knows about that sort of thing, Sharpton is the go-to guy. After all, he’s the minister who once said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin on their yarmulkes and come over to my house.” He’s also the schmuck who led the Crown Heights rioters who chanted “Kill the Jews” and actually killed one, Yankel Rosenbaum, a student visiting New York from Australia.

I don’t think anyone has yet explained what Joe Biden was doing that was so important that it was worth spending over a million dollars to put him up for two nights in London and Paris. Has nobody in this administration ever heard of teleconferencing? Although I can’t imagine Biden doing or saying anything that could be worth the price of a phone call, but canceling White House tours at the same time that Obama’s mascot is running up humongous hotel bills is as arrogant a display as anything ever attributed to Marie Antoinette.

At Florida Atlantic University, Professor Deandre Poole, while conducting an Intercultural Communications class, ordered the students to write “Jesus Christ” on a piece of paper, and then place it on the floor and step on it. When some people got wind of this outrage, they complained to the FAU administrators. Typically, they responded with the sort of high-sounding claptrap for which these pinheads are famous: “Faculty and students at academic institutions pursue knowledge and engage in open discourse. While at times, the topics discussed may be sensitive, a university environment is a venue for such dialogue and debate.”

Unfortunately, it is also a venue in which the one student who objected to this blasphemous and juvenile exercise, a Mormon named Ryan Rotela, was suspended.

I doubt if it comes as a surprise to anyone that Professor Poole moonlights as Vice-Chairman of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party.

One thing we do know is that Poole would never have dared tell his students to write “Allah” or “Mohammad” or even “Martin Luther King” on that piece of paper. And we can only hazard a guess that the honchos at Florida Atlantic might have reacted differently if the professor had been a white man instead of a black one.

As you’ve probably heard by now, another thousand or so pages of new regulations were recently added to the 20,000 or so pages of regulations regarding ObamaCare. Frankly, even I am amazed at the way we’ve allowed government bureaucrats -- people who don’t actually know how to do anything -- regulate how the rest of us do everything.

Because Romney had an even worse writing staff than most TV sit coms, just about the only thing he said during the entire campaign that anyone remembers was his dismissive line about 47% of the population having been bought off by the Obama administration. My only objection to his statement was that I thought his statistic was slightly off, and so it proved to be. As borne out on Election Day, the actual number was 51%.

In the aftermath of the Sequester, more and more of the goofy programs being financed with our tax dollars are coming to light. Most recently, it was discovered that $360,000 is earmarked for a fund to study the reproductive organs of ducks.

I don’t know if they give names to these various boondoggles. But if they do, this one is crying out to be christened “We’ve been ducked!”

THROWING DOWN THE GAUNTLET

2013-04-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

by Burt Prelutsky

As you may have noticed, liberals are ever on the alert when it comes to what they love to label “the religious right.” But they never have a problem with those on the left mixing religion and politics. So far as they’re concerned, when Jesse Jackson runs for president, he’s merely exercising his rights as an American. However, when Pat Robertson ran, he was out to turn the U.S. into a theocracy.

When Catholic bishops speak out against wholesale abortions, they’re crossing the line. But when Obama sits in a pew for 20 years while Jeremiah Wright condemns white people or when Rev. Luis Leon of St. John’s Episcopal devotes an Easter sermon to labeling conservatives racists, Obama and his supporters are as happy as pigs in slop.

A friend of mine suggested a slogan Obama should have employed last year instead of his generic “Forward.” He thought it would have been more honest if the radical transformer had used “I’ve Got What it Takes to Take What You’ve Got.” And by reading between the lines, which is all the reading some people do, young women, Hispanics, blacks and public sector union members, knew that once he took it, he would split the proceeds with them. What, after all, is redistribution of wealth but taking what some people have worked to earn and using it to bribe those who want it in exchange for their votes?

H.L. Mencken, the cynical sage of Baltimore, wrote, nearly a century ago, “As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

Some people, even some conservatives will take umbrage at calling Obama a moron. Like trained parrots, they will say, “I may not agree with his policies, but he is an Ivy League graduate, after all.” In rebuttal, I will say, he is merely the over-weaned product of affirmative action. Not only have generations of morons graduated from Harvard, Yale and Princeton, but generations of the mentally challenged have taught there and continue to teach there.

A recent poll of America’s college law faculty shows that nearly 30% of the law professors made political contributions last year. Over 76% of them only contributed to Democrats, while 12.8% contributed only to Republicans. That says all you need to know about diversity on college campuses.

Getting back to Obama, I must confess I found myself chuckling when I saw him sink just two of the 22 shots he took at the Easter festivities. It wasn’t just a rare pleasure to see him fail at something he likes to boast about, but it provided a perfect insight to his mentality. As he shot one brick after another, you would have thought you were looking at the same shot over and over again. That’s because he stubbornly refused to change the arc on his shots. Even though one shot after another bounced off the rim, he kept shooting it the exact same way. Rarely have I seen such a perfect illustration of that old definition of insanity: Doing the exact same thing again and again in the deluded belief that you will get different results.

So it should be no surprise that his solution to our financial malaise is to raise taxes and pass more regulations on business. After all, it hasn’t worked before, so it figures Mr. 2-for- 22 is firmly convinced it will work this time.

But Obama isn’t alone in his delusions. After all, he was re-elected after the worst first term any president, including Jimmy Carter, has ever overseen.

When I think of the nation that was bequeathed to us by the Founding Fathers, I could sit down and weep. We Americans are like the ne’er-do-well scions of great men who are left large fortunes, only to fritter them away on electronic toys, drugs, booze and pornography. And simply because we haven’t squandered away every last nickel, and because we say nice, but generally untrue, things about illegal aliens, sodomites and people so ignorant and lazy that if the government didn’t coerce the rest of us to support them with our taxes, could only survive by stealing, we hold ourselves in ridiculously high esteem.

Some will take fierce objection to that last paragraph, which suits me just fine. I only hope it won’t be used to tar all conservatives as heartless, homophobic racists. The worst I can say about most conservatives, at least those in public office, is that they’ve become so accustomed to mincing their words, they fail to notice that eventually it’s the truth that gets minced.

For my part, I will quote George Orwell, who observed that “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

It took a revolution, after all, to create this nation. It will take nothing less to save it.