BurtPrelutsky.com

NOT NEWT!

2012-01-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Recently, I received word from a friend named Jack who let me know in no uncertain terms why he was backing Newt Gingrich and turning his back on Mitt Romney. Mainly, he seemed to like Newt because of his rousing attacks on the media and Obama. When it came to Romney, he used such demeaning terms as “non-patriotic mute,” “phony” and that old reliable, “RINO.”

The truth is, if he was the only person I know who felt that way, I wouldn’t be terribly concerned. But I have received similar messages from a couple of other friends. And like Jack, these are people dedicated to the conviction that the only way to save America from four more years of Obama’s expansion of the federal government, war on capitalism, gutting of the military and putting his stamp on the Supreme Court for decades to come, is by electing a Republican president in November.

RINO

Although I initially regarded our views as honest differences of opinion that didn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things, I had to reverse gears after the primary voters in South Carolina gave 40% of their votes to Gingrich. I then realized that there was actually a chance that Newt would carry the GOP flag in the general election.

It was with that grave concern in mind that I responded:

“Dear Jack: I get it that you don’t like Romney’s calm and rational demeanor. To me, it seems presidential. It is what I want in a commander-in-chief. You apparently want a president, or at least a candidate, who gets angry and nasty.

“But please tell me why you think that Newt’s insulting the moderators at every debate, garnering easy applause from the folks in the audience, and then being sweet to the media in the spin room afterwards doesn’t strike you as hypocritical and self-serving. Talk about phonies!

Mitt Romney

“Why do you ignore the fact that he was censured by House Republicans when he was Speaker for a financial shenanigan involving campaign funds, while keeping in mind they let him slide over the corrupt book deal he cut with media mogul Rupert Murdoch?

“Why, as a good conservative, don’t you hold it against him that he helped Nancy Pelosi promote the Al Gore-enriching global warming hoax?

“Why doesn’t it stick in your craw that he took $1.6 million of our tax dollars from the corrupt Freddie Mac?

“Even if you don’t seem bothered by Newt’s scuzzy personal history, why aren’t you at least a tad concerned that it will turn off a majority of independent voters, the very people who decide presidential elections?

“Why aren’t you angry that your guy referred to Paul Ryan’s brilliant economic plan as “right-wing social-engineering,” and that, motivated solely by personal pique and jealousy, blasted Mitt Romney for profiting from free market capitalism?

“Not only will the GOP stand a good chance of losing the presidency if Gingrich garners the nomination, but any number of Republican candidates for Congress are quaking in their boots, frightened that he could take them down with him, enabling vile Harry Reid to maintain control of the Senate.

“Frankly, I do not understand why any Republican who understands the very real danger that Obama represents to America and the free world would want to risk running Gingrich in November.

“The irony is that you and Obama are rooting for the very same guy. Sincerely, Burt”

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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VEGETABLES, VAMPIRES & RON PAUL

2012-01-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Political prognosticators are a lot like Iowa and New Hampshire in that it’s only every four years that people pay them any attention. Something you can always count on is that at some point they’ll stop gazing into crystal balls and reading tea leaves long enough to remind us that the taller presidential candidate tends to win elections and that the candidate with the longer name has an even better track record. Occasionally, such notable exceptions as Richard Nixon and George W. Bush break the rules, but it’s pretty rare.

While studying up on the subject, I discovered that Barack Obama isn’t 6’4”, as I had assumed, but only 6’1”. That led me to wonder if one of the prerequisites to being invited to join his administration was to be short so that he can always appear to tower over advisors and cabinet members. I mean, 6-1 is certainly above average, but nobody that height would invariably be the tallest person in a group, unless the Small People of America was holding its annual convention.

Ron Paul

Just for the record, Mitt Romney is 6’2, while Newt Gingrich is 6 feet even, although his weight makes him appear shorter. Both have longer last names than Obama; make of that what you will.

Speaking of the GOP contenders reminds me that if Timothy McVeigh hadn’t existed, Ron Paul would have had to invent him. I mean, has there ever been an occasion when sane people have been discussing the existential danger of Islamic extremists when Rep. Paul hasn’t felt it necessary to climb aboard his portable soap box and remind us all that native-born terrorist McVeigh was not a Muslim? Apparently at some time in the distant past, someone told the congressman that he had come up with an excellent reason not to take the fight to Al Qaeda, the Taliban and the Iranian mullahs, but someone should tell Mr. Paul that it’s not quite the argument clincher he seems to think it is.

Thanks to the GOP debates, people once again are talking about illegal aliens. One of the sillier things they’re saying is that we should inaugurate a guest workers program. With millions of unemployed Americans, do we really need to import workers? Of course, like everybody else, I have always heard about those jobs that Americans won’t do. I just don’t know what jobs they are. Would those be in hospitals, hotels, restaurants and the construction industry? Funny, but I seem to recall Americans doing that sort of thing.

Or perhaps they’re referring to jobs involved with agriculture. If so, I’m confused. It seems to me that with 12 to 15 million illegal aliens already here, we’d have sufficient numbers to pick the damn crops. Heck, if farmers paid a decent wage -- and with all that expensive machinery and expensive acreage, you’d think they could somehow manage to swing it -- I suspect they’d have to beat off able-bodied workers with a stick.

If it truly is impossible to grow lettuce, pay people a reasonable salary to harvest it, and still turn a profit, maybe we could simply start up the slave trade again. At least those folks wouldn’t expect welfare, in-state tuition and the right to vote. Or, if all else fails, we could simply get the “L” out of BLTs.

Finally, to show the depths to which America has fallen, radio talk show host Michael Medved recently disclosed that the two most popular names for newborns these days are Jacob and Isabella. I happen to think that both names are rather nice. The only problem is that the reason for their popularity is that they happen to be the names of the two main characters in the “Twilight” movie series devoted to vampires.

I suppose we should all be grateful that an earlier generation had more sense than that or today a lot of us running around would be named Vampira or Dracula.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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THE DIVIDED STATES OF AMERICA

2012-01-21T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

A few years ago, the folks on Martha’s Vineyard, a favorite Massachusetts island getaway for New England liberals, were under siege by a wild turkey named Tom. Unlike most turkeys who can be scared off by waving your hands or shouting at them, Tom enjoyed nothing better than attacking people. Shouting and waving merely egged him on. Compounding the problem, Tom led a flock of like-minded birds. If you think of the Hells Angels, but with wattles and feathers, you’ve got the picture.

Tom would even terrorize people in cars, daring them to come out and face him man to turkey. If they chose to wait him out, he’d peck the paint off their doors.

One day, the folks who rented cribs and cradles to vacationing tourists couldn’t make a delivery because Tom was chasing them around their truck, trying to draw blood with one of his spurs. In a panic, they dumped the stuff in the front yard and drove off. When the cops were called, Tom attacked them. Four bullets later, Tom was dead.

Naturally, Martha’s Vineyard being a community of liberals, it was the cops who came in for tons of grief. These are, after all, the same folks who get their shorts in a knot when American soldiers shoot jihadists, so you can imagine their outrage over a turkey being whacked.

I am recalling this event not merely to amuse you at the expense of liberal chickens, although that would normally be motive enough. This time, I am leading up to a reason why I think it’s time we divided America. I mean, can you imagine a town in Oklahoma, Montana or Alaska, being held hostage by psychotic poultry? That bird would only have had to look cross-eyed at a Texan and his next appearance would have been on a dinner platter with a side of cranberries.

It only makes sense to divide the United States along political lines. I’m not saying it would be easy, but it’s pretty obvious that the nation is growing increasingly polarized with roughly half the population favoring a huge federal government that oversees everything from smoking to nutrition, while the other half believes that the federal government has gone from being a necessary evil with the emphasis on necessary to one that is increasingly evil.

As I see it, the entire Pacific coast, along with the Northeast, favors Obama and the Democrats. Unfortunately, those two areas are separated by about 2,500 miles. Therefore, I would suggest connecting those two parts of the country with, say, a 30 mile corridor south of the Canadian border that would run through parts of Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. That America would include California, Washington, Oregon, New York, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey. We conservatives would give up Hawaii in exchange for Alaska. You can see where that would make for an odd-looking country, but no odder than the congressional districts that have been gerrymandered by the Democrats here in California.

I’m not being capricious about dividing a nation that has already cost 600,000 American lives lost during the war that was waged to preserve the Union. I simply see no other way to resolve the differences when half the population regards abortion as murder and the other half feels that young girls are entitled to state-funded abortions without parental consent. The same separation exists between those who favor same-sex marriages and those who don’t; those in favor of capital punishment and those who oppose it; those who respect the Second Amendment and those who’d like to abolish it; those who favor class and race warfare and those who believe their America is above such things; those who regard compulsory union membership as a good thing and those who don’t; those who defend public schools but send their own kids to private schools and those who believe in vouchers and home-schooling; those who oppose drilling for oil and digging for coal, and those who realize that alternative sources of energy might be sufficient for a house, but not for an industrial nation; and those who think that the rights of insects trump the rights of human beings and those of us who are sane.

If you believe that the bigger the federal government grows, the better it is, you will be right at home in the new America. If you not only believe that illegal aliens and jihadists are entitled to the same rights as a citizen, but believe that the government should intrude in every aspect of your life, including those that it is precluded from by the U.S. Constitution, you might even consider running for public office.

Just to avoid any possible confusion as to boundaries, we’d build a very high wall at both our southern and northern border.

There would be no hard feelings between our two nations, but knowing how opposed liberals are to military action and how unwilling they are to fund the Pentagon, they should not expect us squander our blood or treasure racing to save them if they are ever invaded by Canada or, for that matter, by a flock of really angry turkeys.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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WAS IDI AMIN SMARTER THAN MARTHA STEWART?

2012-01-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

As I have stated in other articles, I hate the over-use of the word “alleged.” I understand that those in the media are compelled to use it, for fear of lawsuits, when referring to people who have been indicted but not convicted, lest the jury neglects to find the person guilty. But when it is readily apparent to one and all, except for the 12 goofballs in the jury box, that, say, O.J. Simpson or Casey Anthony is guilty as sin, couldn’t the TV reporter at least wink or giggle when using the word? It would be a way of letting us know that they know that it isn’t the defendant’s guilt that should be called into question, but, rather, the sanity and commonsense of the jurors.

I suppose that carried to its extreme, Obama’s biographer will one day write that he was allegedly born in Hawaii, allegedly received good grades in college and was allegedly heterosexual, even though no woman, in spite of the fame and fortune awaiting her, has ever come forward to say that she dated him prior to his marrying Michelle when he was 31.

Speaking of people who should, by all rights, be going to jail, perhaps to share a cell with Bernie Madoff, there was Jon Corzine, the former governor and senator from New Jersey, being questioned by a congressional committee about $1.2 billion of MF Global customers’ money that’s gone missing. Mr. Corzine, who had already told a reporter that he had no intention of using any of his fortune to pay back bilked investors, sat at a table, insisting that even though he had been the head of the company, he had no idea where the money had gone. That part was all too predictable. What threw me is that this Jersey sleaze ball, this friend and confidant of Obama and Biden, got to perch behind a little sign identifying him as The Honorable Jon S. Corzine.

Now, first of all, I suspect the various politicians on the committee already knew his name. After all, they were the ones who had subpoenaed him. But how is that none of them commented on the fact that referring to this jackass as honorable was as laughable as putting a top hat on a pig. Wouldn’t you think that the sign might at least have read The Allegedly Honorable Jon S. Corzine?

Finally, what is it with some people that compel them to take entirely unnecessary risks? I’m not just referring to those who climb mountains, bungee-jump or, worse yet, run for president when they must know that their worst, most embarrassing, secrets will inevitably be splashed all over the media, scarring their wives and children?

The folks I actually have in mind are those people who are given ample opportunity to avoid scandal, jail and even death, but decide to roll the dice and take their chances. For instance, when the prosecutors offered the fabulously wealthy Martha Stewart the opportunity to avoid jail time if she’d merely admit she’d saved herself some dough by taking advantage of insider information, why did she insist on going to trial? For one thing, it’s not as if she couldn’t have afforded to take the stock loss by ignoring the information she received in the phone call from a friend. For another, I’m sure her defense lawyers wound up costing her more than the $150,000 or so she’d saved by selling off earlier than the other, outside-the-loop, stockholders.

For that matter, why didn’t Saddam Hussein, Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi, all get out while the getting was good, and spend their golden years enjoying freedom and their ill-gotten gains?

If I were any of them, the worst part about ending up dead or in an Egyptian cage, would have been the realization that I was even dumber than a psychotic gorilla like Idi Amin, who wisely scampered off to Saudi Arabia, and, as a result, got to spend his last 24 years living the life of Riley.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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WITH CONSERVATIVES LIKE THESE…

2012-01-16T00:01:00.001-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Santorum, Gingrich and Perry, all condemned Mitt Romney’s Bain Financial for putting people out of work. If anyone should be sidelined, it’s Santorum, Gingrich and Perry.

For one thing, as every conservative who isn’t running behind in the primaries knows, venture capitalists put their money where their mouths are. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as the old adage goes. When it comes to picking winners, Bain has a far better record than the Obama administration. After all, Bain was gambling on turning around the fortunes of companies that were close to death or assisting in the birth of companies that would otherwise have been aborted. Obama, on the other hand, handed out billions of our tax dollars for no other reason than that company owners had contributed heavily to his presidential campaigns.

Mitt Romney

As Romney has admitted, there were times when Bain had no choice but to shut down companies and let the employees go, but in every case those employees kept drawing salaries for a far longer time than they would have done without Bain’s infusion of cash. Clearly, those factory workers confused themselves with public sector union members. Those are the folks, let us never forget, who keep getting hired and having their salaries and pensions increased in spite of a failing economy. That’s the difference between Washington, D.C. and the real world.

Another irony of the campaigns that Santorum, Perry and Gingrich, are running is that each of them promises to shut down entire departments of the federal government if they’re elected president. Just how will they manage to keep that promise without handing out thousands of pink slips? While it’s true that the intended victims are nothing more than Washington bureaucrats, they are still more or less human beings with children to feed and mortgages to pay.

Newt Gingrich

Some people defend Gingrich’s attacks on Romney, insisting that Romney has it coming because of the ads that Romney’s supporters ran in Iowa attacking Mr. Gingrich. The obvious difference is that while Romney’s attacks could certainly be described as vicious, they also happened to be true. In fact, they could easily have been even more hurtful.

For instance, Gingrich was a serial adulterer. And while he has insisted he is a changed man and that he regrets his sins, the same holds true for every other rascal who has ever been found out. On one occasion, he even explained his adultery by stating “Partially, I was driven by how passionate I felt about this country that I worked far too hard and things happened in my life that were not appropriate.” It’s not every day, thank God, that America is basically cast as The Other Woman. Even Bill Clinton, who couldn’t quite define sex, but certainly knew it when he saw it, didn’t rationalize his boorish behavior as excessive patriotism.

Not only did Gingrich dump his first wife and their two kids, but, adding injury to insult, he refused to pay alimony or child support, thus forcing the local Baptist church to pass the hat. He eventually repaid the debt in full, though, by converting to Catholicism.

It’s true that Gingrich was the first Speaker who was ever censured and fined by his congressional colleagues. And although it was for financial shenanigans, it did not, for some reason, involve the multi-million dollar book deal he had cut with Rupert Murdoch. The deal, it so happens, had far less to do with Gingrich’s writing ability than with the fact that mogul giant Murdoch had a vested interest in befriending, otherwise known as bribing, the Speaker, who at the time chaired the committee that oversaw the granting of radio and TV licenses.

Lest we ever forget, Gingrich volunteered to sit on that dumb couch with Nancy Pelosi, and help her perpetuate Al Gore’s hoax of global warming. He has since said that agreeing to make that TV spot was the single dumbest thing he ever did. But I think he was just being modest.

Gingrich pocketed $1.6 million of our tax dollars, thanks to the generosity of Freddie Mac, for allegedly giving them advice he claims they ignored for five years. I wonder if that gig is still available. It’s a job I was born to have. After all, I’m constantly giving people advice they ignore.

Gingrich derided Paul Ryan’s fiscal plan as “right-wing social engineering” and then, for good measure, insisted that when Romney said he would enjoy firing his health insurance provider if they failed to satisfy his needs, he really meant that he took pleasure in firing people who worked for him.

Now, in desperation, after finishing near the bottom in Iowa and New Hampshire, Gingrich attacks Romney for profiting from being a free market capitalist.

The good news for Newt is that once he finally drops out of the GOP race, he can sign on with David Axelrod and start getting paid to help re-elect Barack Obama.

In conclusion, a free piece of advice for Callista: Be on the alert if Newt claims he’s working late at the office. By now, I think we all know how patriotic this guy can get.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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SOLVING THE DEFICIT

2012-01-14T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

I know that Barack Obama puts a great deal of stock in people like Timothy Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Harry Reid and Barney Frank, but they’re the folks who helped get us into this financial mess. As usual, it takes an ordinary American such as myself who relies on logic and common sense, not a bunch of pie charts and Keynesian theories, to get this economy moving in the right direction.

Bill Gates

I realize that Obama is counting on class warfare to win re-election, but I’m here to tell him that most Americans won’t fall for it. They know that Bush started that jalopy down the hill, but it was Obama who kept pushing it over the cliff or into the ditch or wherever the hell it wound up. As a result, a child of six can see that placing a two or three percent surtax on rich people is just more of the same.

After studying the problem, I am here to report that, as usual, Obama’s thinking is small and entirely inside the box. I, on the other hand, have discovered that the solution is well within our grasp. I suspect that the reason that Obama didn’t arrive at the obvious answer is that for all his grousing about millionaires and billionaires, in his heart he realizes that most of his friends, not to mention he himself, are members of those two elitist groups. I mean, who else do you think can afford to plunk down $35,000 to attend one of his fund raisers? When your nearest and dearest include the likes of Jeffrey Immelt, Jon Corzine, the folks at Goldman Sachs and George Soros, you don’t want to act too rashly.

I, as you’ve probably guessed, suffer from no such inhibitions. If you are serious about getting the deficit under control, you can’t nibble a little here, a little there, especially not if you wish to keep spending tax dollars like a fleet of drunken sailors, otherwise known as Democrats.

After conducting a little research, I discovered that there are over 400 billionaires in America. Thirty-one of them are worth more than ten billion dollars, 11 of them worth more than 20 billion. Bill Gates tops the list at $59 billion, followed by Warren Buffet at $39 billion. I’m sure it’s just the cynic in me, but when those two pals get together for lunch, I can’t help wondering which of them pretends to have left his wallet in his other jacket.

George Soros

Most of the people in the billionaires club are fairly anonymous, having come by their fortunes through mining, hedge funds, hotels, the media, banks, construction, computers, sports teams, casinos, supermarkets and real estate. A few of the better known include Meg Whitman, H. Ross Perot, Jerry Jones, Steven Spielberg, Donald Trump, Stephen Bechtel, Ralph Lauren, Michael Milken, Oprah Winfrey, Sam Zell, Steve Wynn, Charles Schwab, George Lucas, Ted Turner, Barry Diller, Mark Zuckerberg, George Kaiser, Michael Bloomberg, David Geffen, three people named Ziff, four people named Hearst, seven people named Pritzker, T. Boone Pickens and a whole bunch of heirs to Walmart and the Mars candy company.

These 400-odd people are worth over 10 trillion dollars. The way I figure it, all we need to do is confiscate all their money and we are nearly 70% of the way to eliminating the national deficit. Frankly, I’m a wee bit surprised that with all the advisors and czars who make up this administration, it took an outsider to come up with this brainstorm. Of course it’s just possible that Valerie Jarrett or Van Jones suggested it, but once Obama saw so many of his friends and supporters on the list, he had no option but to nip it in the bud.

It’s one thing, after all, to whine constantly about generic millionaires and billionaires not paying their fair share, and quite another when you have to break the news to old chums like Oprah, Bloomberg, Diller, Geffen, Spielberg, Kaiser and Soros, that their future won’t be quite as rosy as they had anticipated, and will likely consist of panhandling, food stamps and homeless shelters.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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STILL THE LAND OF THE FREE?

2012-01-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

There seem to be two kinds of Americans. There are those who wish this nation could once again be what it used to be, a beacon for those who cherished freedom and liberty. Then there are those who look at America and wish it could be more like Cuba, of all places. Or if not Cuba, perhaps Spain or Mexico or Venezuela, with maybe just a smidgen of Iran or Egypt or the West Bank tossed in, and a dash of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In short, they prefer a swamp to a melting pot.

I can’t pretend to understand those on the Left. I don’t know why they think the way they do. Once I was being interviewed on a radio show and the host asked me if I was proud to be an American. I shocked him, and even myself a little, when I said I wasn’t. I told him that I was proud of my various grandparents, proud that they had the gumption to make their way across a continent and an ocean to get here. But what did I have to be proud of? I was simply handed a gift. I was just lucky. I won the big lottery. I got to be born an American. What I can’t fathom is why all those liberals, progressives and run-of-the-mill Democrats, don’t seem to share my sense of gratitude, harboring only resentment.

RINO = Republican In Name Only

I also have no idea why they continue to ballyhoo Barack Obama. He’s a hypocrite, a liar and he’s supremely arrogant. If he were only your neighbor, he’d be so obnoxious, you’d consider moving. But here he is the commander-in-chief, and these louts carry on as if the sun shines out of his backside.

His view of America is a place where the dumbest, the laziest and the least grateful, are entitled to everything that the smartest, most decent, hardest-working individuals have. Redistribution of wealth has a nice, uplifting tone to it, but when you cut through the slag, it comes down to taking by force what taxpaying, law-abiding people have and handing it over to those who want it.

It strikes me as pretty obvious that when you pander to those whose most over-riding emotion is envy, you destroy a nation. It is Obama’s game plan now, just as it was in 2008 . Unlike any other president, Obama hopes to conquer by dividing blacks and whites, rich and poor, union members and the rest of us. It’s atypical in America, but it is business as usual in every communist country that has ever existed.

If Obama were to be re-elected, it would be the death knell for this country. Not because of any specific thing he would accomplish over the next four years, although he would very likely have the opportunity to re-create the Supreme Court in his own distorted image, but because of what his re-election would say about us.

Were he to win in November, it would prove that less than 250 years after the creation of this republic by such giants as Washington, Madison, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson, the majority of Americans are prepared to hand the country over to moral and intellectual pygmies. It would mean that most Americans now subscribe to a life consisting of cradle-to-grave government-provided entitlements, even though anyone who has paid the slightest attention to what is happening in Greece knows the inevitable result of such insane policies.

Speaking of so-called entitlements, it is high time that pensions be re-examined. If I had my way, salaries would be raised across the board and pensions would disappear. Although nobody holds cops, firemen and members of the military -- particularly those who have risked life and limb in combat -- in higher esteem than I do, it simply makes no sense that these men and women should be able to put in their 20 years and then, starting as young as 38 or 39, begin collecting monthly checks for the next 40 or 50 years. Even alimony doesn’t last that long!

Finally, I’d like to address those Republicans who get on my case whenever I say something nice about a candidate they don’t regard as a hard core conservative. Invariably, the candidate and I get slimed as RINOs. No matter how often I contend that while I would prefer a conservative, most Republicans clearly don’t. That is why it’s people like Dole, McCain and the Bushes, who keep winning GOP primaries.

When I insist that, imperfect as they were, the Republican candidates over the past two decades were better than Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama, were or would have been, they remain unconvinced. What they like to say is that the only difference between a RINO and a liberal is that a RINO will destroy America at a slower rate.

Although I don’t happen to agree with them, what I say in rebuttal is that even if they’re right, that is a hell of a big difference. After all, we all know that nobody lives forever, but would they prefer to die sooner or later? Or would they, like dumb mules, stubbornly stick to their guns and insist it really doesn’t matter?

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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ELECTION YEAR BLUES

2012-01-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Ican certainly understand why Gingrich is so angry with Mitt Romney. It’s because of all the negative ads that Romney ran in Iowa. You know, the ones that told the truth about Gingrich’s having been censured by Congress for financial shenanigans when he was the Speaker of the House; that he had fully supported mandated health care; that he had joined Nancy Pelosi and Al Gore in promoting the fraud known as global warming; and that he had been paid 1.6 million of our tax dollars by Freddie Mac.

Frankly, I think that nobody was more surprised than Newt when he found himself riding high in the polls back in December. After all, this was the same guy who went off to the Greek islands with Mrs. Gingrich at the start of the primary season, leading his entire election team to quit, after having decided that he obviously wasn’t a serious candidate. It also helps explain why he didn’t bother getting his name on the Virginia ballot. All along, I figured that he had thrown his hat in the ring for the very same reason that Pat Buchanan used to throw his. It’s called branding, the human equivalent of the way that Coca Cola, GE and Disney promote themselves. By keeping his name in front of the public, it helps Newt sell books, videos and make certain that his big, fat lecture fees remain big and fat.

As for Ron Paul’s groupies, they’re always insisting that his detractors don’t really understand the subtle nuances of Paul’s foreign policy, and that, in any case, his domestic policies are utterly sublime. The problems are two-fold: one, the major reasons that young nincompoops champion his domestic platform is because it pretty much consists of legalizing drugs and making certain that the military draft is never reinstated; and, two, his foreign policy would, to an even greater extent than Obama’s, gut the U.S. military and encourage the likes of Russia, China and the Islamists, to start licking their chops.

When Ron Paul’s fans insist that voters overlook a few of his nuttier notions in order to appreciate his overall message, I’m reminded of those screwballs who want people to ignore Louis Farrakhan’s racism and anti-Semitism because, after all, he encourages his followers to dress neatly, bathe regularly and marry the mothers of their children.

I suppose that while we’re at it, we should never forget that Mussolini made the Italian trains run on time and that “Hanoi Jane” Fonda was good to her elderly father.

I read that about half the members of Congress are millionaires, and that their median worth is $913,000. And that’s excluding their home equity. Those are pretty impressive numbers when you realize that they’ve somehow managed to accumulate all that wealth in spite of having to maintain two separate residences on an annual salary of about $170,000. Isn’t it a shame that they’re never able to employ those same talents when it comes to solving America’s financial woes?

Some of my readers get irked by my insistence that liberals are not only stupider than conservatives, but far nastier. The latest example was the way that Alan Colmes went after Rick Santorum. In case you missed the news, it seems that when Rick and his wife lost their baby boy, Gabriel, two hours after he was born prematurely, they decided to take him home so that the rest of the family could acknowledge their brother’s existence.

But, according to Colmes, the Santorums took Gabriel home so that his siblings could “play with him” for a few hours. Only someone as morally rancid as Colmes, an Obama shill who regularly insists liberals are the most compassionate of people, would try to scuttle Santorum’s candidacy by insinuating that he was some sort of monster who encouraged his kids to perhaps toss their brother around like a Frisbee.

However you may feel about what the parents did, and whether or not you would have done the same thing in their tragic circumstances, I think we can all agree that Colmes, in his snide comments, proved that his inner self is even more vile than the smirking skull he presents to the world.

It also bears noting that while Colmes sheds crocodile tears over the plight of little Gabriel, in keeping with liberal hypocrisy he insists the government continue funding Planned Parenthood’s efforts to abort 350,000 babies a year.

Finally, according to the Mayan Calendar, the world is supposed to come to an apocalyptic end on December 21st. I am of two minds about the prediction. On the one hand, I’d hate to think that I might never see another Christmas or another birthday. On the other hand, if, by some awful turn of events or through some political skullduggery, Obama actually gets himself re-elected on November 6th, the end couldn’t come soon enough for me.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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DINGBATS IN THE NEWS

2012-01-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

After dismissing the importance of the Bilderberg Group, the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, in a recent article, I knew I would hear from those people who check under their beds every night to make certain that Henry Kissinger isn’t lurking under the box springs. I only wish I could predict Kentucky Derby winners with equal success.

The angriest of the conspiracy nuts insisted that I was intentionally ignoring solid evidence of the threat these people posed, suggesting that I just might be a closet Bilderberger. In response, I wrote to tell him that, like Groucho Marx, I refuse to join any group whose standards were so low that they’d accept me as a member. Besides, I try to never come between a man and his paranoia. But does anyone in his right mind seriously believe we are any closer to a one-world government today than we were a hundred years ago? Heck, we’re not even close to a one-nation America these days. One might as well contend that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy, are planning a coup d’état.

Something else I keep hearing, at least from Ron Paul’s groupies, is that America should not be the policeman of the world. Oh, really? Perhaps we should leave it to the likes of France. Or maybe the Netherlands? Costa Rica? Or would we all be better off if we just let China, Russia and the Islamic nutcakes, fight it out for global supremacy? And when the dust settles, I suppose we can just line up on our knees to kiss the heinie of the winner.

It is such an infantile suggestion that it explains why Dr. Paul draws most of his followers from high schools and colleges. You know, the same bunch of youthful ninnies who applaud Obama for keeping them on their parents’ health insurance policies until they’re middle-aged, who turned our streets into latrines as members of the Occupy Wall Street movement and who think George Washington and Samuel Adams are the wide receivers on the Oakland Raiders.

Speaking of Ron Paul, I had been aware of the fact that no important piece of legislation carried his name, even though he’s parked his backside in the House for the past 23 years. But until I heard it on Fox, I was unaware that during that time, he had proposed 620 pieces of legislation and only had one bill passed. And that one dealt with the sale of a Galveston landmark to a Texas historical society. Just think about it. The man has been in Congress for nearly a quarter of a century, collecting roughly $3.5 million in salary, and all he has accomplished is to facilitate the sale of a building he, himself, didn’t own. I’d say that he’s the Republican answer to Dennis Kucinich, except that Kucinich doesn’t keep embarrassing the Democrats by running for president.

Still, I hasten to add that where presidential elections are concerned, it’s rarely, if ever, a contest between a great candidate and a terrible one. But, quite often, it’s a choice between someone who is just mediocre and a Democrat, who really is terrible. Having said that, anyone who fails to acknowledge the huge difference between the two is either a mere dunce or completely deranged.

When I first heard that Nancy Pelosi spent her Christmas vacation in a Hawaiian resort that ran her $10,000-a-night, I was flabbergasted. But, then, I reminded myself that the woman is worth nearly $40 million. Besides, it’s her own dough she was spending. That’s quite different from the Obamas spending over $4 million of our tax dollars to catch the rays 7,000 miles from the White House.

I suppose if you’re a liberal jackass, you don’t see that as an example of gross insensitivity during an economic crisis, but merely as the spirit-lifting equivalent of Churchill’s flashing the V-sign while touring London’s bombed-out buildings during the worst of the Nazi blitz.

But, on the other hand, imagine how they would have reacted if it had been George and Laura enjoying those expensive sunsets, and not Barack and Michelle.

For my part, I can hardly wait for November 6 to roll around, so I can bid them one final heartfelt aloha.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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I AM NOT, THANK GOD, GEORGE SOROS

2012-01-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

It would appear that the DNC has me confused with George Soros. I don’t know why this would be. For one thing, he was born in Hungary and I was born in Chicago, so we sound nothing alike. For another thing, he has a full head of hair and I only have a cute little fringe around my ears. He’s a billionaire and I am only just getting by. And, finally, I am sane and he’s as crazy as a proverbial bedbug.

He’s not Burt!

But obviously something has gone haywire at Ground Zero of the loony Left. During the past week or so, Frank Lautenberg, Jason Rosenbaum, Dick Durbin and Ted Kennedy’s dipstick son, Patrick, have all sent me messages, urging me to donate money to help them defeat the GOP.

If I failed to kick in, the following are just a few of the dire scenarios they warned me would more than likely take place: The Republicans would dismantle ObamaCare; prevent the re-election of such party stalwarts as Elizabeth Warren and Tim Kaine; take control of the U.S. Senate; and, egad, prevent the Democrats from excising the 2nd Amendment from the Constitution!

As amusing as I found the notion that I would donate even a farthing to the Party of Obama, Pelosi and Reid, the frightening thing is that there are millions of Americans, people who actually get to vote, work in the media and teach in our schools, who receive the same requests and immediately sit down and write a check.

What is going through their minds? Who are these blockheads who, even in this miserable economy, are willing to spend their hard-earned dollars to help the current administration shove ObamaCare down our throats and disarm law-abiding citizens?

Perhaps the topper is that these people are so desperate that they even stooped to using Patrick Kennedy as one of their shills. Even though you would have to be a member of the Kennedy clan in order to state “My father and uncles fought to build a society that takes care of the least among us,” how pathetic that the Party would utilize a schmuck who has been addicted to cocaine, booze and prescription drugs, for most of his adult life; would have been in jail several times for drunk driving and assault if the Kennedy money and influence hadn’t been at his beck and call; and even been asked to refrain from taking Holy Communion by his bishop because of his pro-abortion stance as a congressman. This lump has also been known to brag that he’s never worked a day in his life. I guess in that family the fruit doesn’t fall too far from the tree.

By this time, even with Patrick Kennedy gone, you can’t really expect much from Congress. But even I was flabbergasted by the inability of the Super Committee to cut a pathetic trillion and a half dollars in spending. But unlike the dimwits who blamed the six Republicans on the Committee for the impasse, I blame Obama and his stooges in the House and Senate. It was the Democrats, after all, who insisted that no cuts would be made without the Republicans agreeing to raise taxes. I must confess that every time I heard that demand, I would rush to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. Had I heard right? Surely, my aging ears must have been playing tricks. Or, perhaps, as usual, I had dozed off while listening to Sen. Patty Murray prattle away, doing her inimitable impression of ditzy Barbara Boxer.

On the other hand, I never heard a Republican Committee member say what I kept thinking: If our mission is to cut federal spending, why would we simultaneously consider raising taxes? Isn’t that contradictory? How is that any different from someone on the second floor announcing that he’s going downstairs to answer the phone, but instead ascending to the attic?

Finally, there are millions of people in this country who agree with Obama and the rabble who constitute the Occupy Wall Street movement. They resent rich people. In Obama’s case, he only resents rich people who don’t kick in to his re-election war chest. But even he, who is a multi-millionaire, believes that other wealthy people should hand over their money to the poor. And not in the form of charity, which has always been the American way, but through taxation and federal redistribution.

There are several reasons why this should be abhorrent to everyone. For one thing, an awful lot of poor people are leeches. They don’t work even when jobs are readily available. And when they’re given money, food stamps and housing, they aren’t even grateful. They regard it as their due.

For another thing, the weaponry used in class warfare is envy, which, along with its Siamese twin, self-pity, are the two most loathsome human emotions. Those who have less than others are told that the only reason for the imbalance is that they’ve been cheated. It has nothing to do with their sloth, ignorance and lack of initiative, everything to do with a system that allows the rich to steal what is rightfully theirs.

The folks behind the perpetration of the big lie are politicians, journalists, academics and those in the movie and TV business who invariably portray the poor as noble creatures. The truth is, there is nothing noble about poverty, especially not in America, where, thanks to limitless opportunities to improve one’s lot, it is probably more difficult to remain poor for more than a single generation than it is to become wealthy.

Thomas Edison once observed in pre-inflationary times: “From his neck down, a man is worth a couple of dollars a day; from his neck up, he is worth anything his brain can produce.”

And while we can’t all invent the electric light bulb, it behooves every one of us to get off our backsides and quit cursing the darkness.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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THE SAD STATE OF THE UNION

2011-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

[Burt and Yvonne and the editor wish each reader a happy and prosperous New Year.]

by BurtPrelutsky

Recently, a reader wrote to ask me why anyone would spend a million dollars to become a member of Congress, a job that pays less than $200,000 a year. I explained that there were several reasons. One, they seek fame. Celebrity is a major goal for a large number of people, and not just kids who are dying to switch places with rock stars and fashion models

Two, they want to oversee fiefdoms that would have been the envy of English royals. You often see the likes of Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner striding down congressional corridors, dozens of attendants in their wake. They don’t have anywhere in particular to rush off to, they just enjoy leading parades. Too bad they can’t twirl a baton.

Three, the cost doesn’t really concern them because they’re usually spending other people’s money when they run for office. Come to think of it, that’s really all they do once they get elected. Four, thanks to insider trading, grateful lobbyists and big fat pensions, they will leave office -- if they ever do -- far wealthier than when they arrived.

Finally, five, they just want to do good. Whenever possible, I like to end with a joke.

If I had my way, being a congressman would be a part-time job, and it would be conducted using modern technology, conference calls and the like. The main reason they convene in Washington, D.C., is for the convenience of lobbyists. Think of it as one-stop shopping.

In his recent book, After America, Mark Steyn observed that America has been busy exporting its unskilled jobs while, at the same time, through encouraging invasion by illegal aliens, importing unskilled workers. As a result, America is being bled to death providing schooling, health care, food stamps and prisons, for millions of non-citizens. And those who balk at providing the uninvited with all these goodies are labeled racists. Then, to compound the problem, we have a Republican candidate for president talk about amnesty for those who have been here for 25 years. Or it might be 20 years, or maybe only five years. Or perhaps it will be a week and a half by the time President Gingrich gets around to dictating a piece of legislation.

Between the influx of illiterates and our sub-standard public schools, it seems that the collective IQ of America is declining at an alarming rate, perhaps as much as a point a year. Still, when I first heard that half of high school seniors couldn’t identify George Washington, I was shocked. Then, after a moment or two, I was shocked that I’d been shocked. After all, one merely had to see the teachers in Wisconsin using phony medical excuses in order to play hooky from the classroom and riot over their pensions to understand why I and others hold the teachers unions in such contempt. If you recall, the hypocrites in Madison even had the gall to carry signs suggesting they were doing it for the kids. I suppose if drug dealers belonged to a union, they could carry those same placards.

Speaking of hypocrites, I see that Obama, who’s planning to campaign against a do-nothing Congress, intends to take a 17-day vacation in Hawaii!

Back in 2008, when Obama said he’d never, in 20 years of church attendance, ever heard Rev. Jeremiah Wright say anything offensive, we naturally assumed he was lying. After all, by that time we had seen the obscene videos of Wright’s ranting against America, against the white race and against the Jews in Israel.

But, after Obama’s first three years in the White House, I think we may have leapt to the wrong conclusion. I suspect now that he wasn’t lying. After all, when a person is in complete agreement with a psychotic racist like Rev. Wright, there’s no reason he’d find those demonic sermons the least bit offensive. Wright, I’m afraid, was merely giving voice to what Obama, in his heart, already believed.

It works the same way when liberals listen to left-wing bilge spewed by the likes of Bill Maher, Joy Behar, Rachel Maddow, Alan Colmes and Ed Schultz.

On the other hand, if these lunkheads weren’t gainfully employed in the media, they would probably be dues-paying members of some teachers union, devoting their time to turning your kids into George Soros’ brand of hand puppets.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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WHOS AFRAID OF THE BIG BAD BILDERBERG

2011-12-29T10:07:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

It seems that whenever I point out that a true conservative is not ever likely to win the presidency in a country that is only slightly right of the middle, I can count on hearing from people who regard RINOs as worse than Obama, worse than Pelosi, Reid and Waxman, and even worse than jihadists.

They are sure to let me know that Ron Paul is the only true patriot in the running. When I point out that in 2008 when he was well-financed and only had to worry about McCain and Romney, Rep. Paul couldn’t win a single Republican primary. How in the world did anyone think that he would ever win a presidential election when, for reasons I don’t really understand, they permit Democrats to vote?

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas)

When these folks aren’t busy lambasting any Republican who isn’t Ron Paul, they’re running around screaming about the Bilderberg Group, the Tri-Lateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, conspiring to create a one-world government. The members of those groups are wealthy and influential, but, if that is really their endgame, they might as well form a bowling league.

I mean, this conspiracy theory has been kicking around since the days of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Now, nearly a century later, does anyone in his right mind actually believe that a billion Muslims, a billion Christians, a billion Chinese, and a billion Russians, North Koreans, English, French, Germans, Poles and Americans, are about to come together for a chorus of Kumbaya? Heck, you can’t even get the wackos hanging out in the U.N. to agree on what to have for lunch.

Instead of worrying myself sick about conspiracies that have allegedly been hatching for 100 years, I choose to concentrate on the creep who has his shoes on the desk in the Oval Office. I realize that it is easy for liberals to discount my anger with Obama. After all, I’m a rightwing partisan. What I don’t get is why liberals don’t get angrier with him.

I mean, here’s a guy who is constantly telling Congress and most Americans that we’re not doing enough, but no president has ever taken as many vacations or played as many rounds of golf in three years as Obama. And as if that’s not enough to make him the playboy-in-chief, between February and December of this year, he spoke at 69 campaign fund-raising events. For the mathematically challenged, that’s roughly seven times a month he’s taken off to bad-mouth Republicans, millions of whom have to help pay for his jet fuel, his campaign buses and his security detail.

Frankly, I’m surprised that Air Force One can actually get airborne, what with having to fly this guy’s ego around. After doing everything but giving Benjamin Netanyahu a wedgie when he came over for a visit, Obama had the chutzpah to say, “I try not to pat myself too much on the back, but this administration has done more in terms of the security of the state of Israel than any previous administration. And that’s not just our opinion, that’s the opinion of the Israeli government.”

Well, I hope Obama didn’t damage his rotator cuff patting his own back, but if suggesting that Israel stop building houses in Jerusalem and pull back to 1967 borders is his idea of befriending Israel, I’d hate to think how he treats his enemies.

It isn’t only Obama who exhibits signs of being disengaged from reality. Consider, if you will, how deeply concerned those on the Left claim to be with the environment. Even at the risk of costing 20,000 Americans good-paying jobs laying an oil pipeline from Canada to Texas, they insist the project be scrapped because of the potential for harming Mother Earth. On the other hand, the environment was the very least of their concerns when they congregated for Obama’s inauguration and left the capital looking like a city dump and when hundreds of union thugs trashed Madison, Wisconsin, in order to show their displeasure with Governor Walker for attempting to bring fiscal sanity to the state.

More recently, we all got to witness the liberal approach to ecology at the Occupy Wall Street events. Even if you overlook the crime, the violence and the harm they did to local commerce, it’s hard to ignore the fact that when the L.A. cops finally sent the various anarchists, socialists, anti-Semites and whiny babies home, the mutts left 30 tons of garbage and debris in their wake. That’s 60,000 pounds, which, coincidentally, is just about the combined weight of the Democrats in the House and Senate, plus what Barney Frank had for lunch today.

In conclusion, I will frankly admit that I had no use for Bill Clinton, but at least he tried to pretend he felt our pain. That’s in stark contrast to Chairman Obama, who recently had the gall to say, “I always tell Malia and Sasha, ‘Look, you guys, I don’t worry about you.’ They’re on a path that is going to be successful, even if the country as a whole is not successful.”

I can’t tell you how relieved I was to hear that. I can live with 9% unemployment, a $15 trillion deficit and a nuclear Iran, but worrying about his daughters was keeping me up nights.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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POLITICAL INCORRECTNESS 2012

2011-12-29T00:05:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Apparently the Obama family holiday in the islands will run us taxpayers $4,113,038, and that’s not counting Sno-cones, leis, surf board rentals and assorted Hawaiian souvenirs. Still, it’s hard to begrudge the man his vacation. After all, for months now, it’s been one damn fund-raiser after another, broken up only by a daily round of golf and an hourly excoriation of Republican congressmen. A schedule like that can take it out of anyone.

I probably shouldn’t be making fun of Obama. After all, I have it on good authority -- the U.S. attorney general, no less -- that the only reason anyone would criticize either of them is because of their race. Frankly, I have to admit I hadn’t thought of it that way. I honestly thought that people criticized Eric Holder because, among other things, his Department of Justice had green-lighted Operation Fast and Furious, which resulted in the murder of an American border agent, and because he had refused to indict the Black Panthers for voter intimidation. I was also naïve enough to believe that most Americans were opposed to Obama because of ObamaCare, the trillion dollar stimulus and because he admitted that he wasn’t entitled to a second term if he failed to turn around the economy during his first term.

On the other hand, at the risk of being labeled a racist, I must confess that I personally don’t like Obama. For one thing, I can’t stomach his arrogance. During his “60 Minutes” interview with Steve Kroft, he bragged that in modern times no president, except for FDR, LBJ and Lincoln, had accomplished more than he during their first two years in office!

Quite a stretch to refer to Lincoln’s administration as modern times, but no more of a stretch than to boast about a record that includes ObamaCare, caving in to Russian demands by selling out Poland and Czechoslovakia, and a trillion dollar stimulus whose major achievement was to help lower America’s credit rating for the first time in history.

Compared to this egomaniac, even Donald Trump manages to look humble.

I also don’t like Obama’s attacking Republicans in the House and Senate, claiming they won’t compromise, when we all know that when he says compromise, what he really means is capitulation.

For instance, he told us that the moratorium on payroll taxes had to be extended or the typical middle class family would be hit with $1,000 more in 2012 taxes. But, for mysterious reasons, Chairman Obama only wanted it extended for two months. When the Republicans said a two-month moratorium would only result in pro-rated savings of $167, and suggested the bill should cover the entire year, thus saving the folks the other $833, Obama insisted they were being unreasonable.

In case you missed it, during a recent congressional hearing, Rep. Dan Lungren spent nearly five minutes trying to get Obama’s Assistant Defense Secretary for Homeland Defense, Paul Stockton, to simply acknowledge that we are at war with violent Islamic extremists. At the very least, he tried, but failed, to get Stockton to admit that violent Islamic extremists are at war with us. He couldn’t even get him to confirm that an official with the Defense Department said, shortly after Major Hasan massacred 14 people at Fort Hood, “Losing our program of diversity would be an even greater tragedy than what took place.”

But whether or not Stockton acknowledged it, that is how the wishy-washy boneheads in this administration and in this commander-in-chief’s military establishment deal with national security concerns. Even though Major Nidal Malik Hasan had “Soldier of Allah” on his business cards and Yemen-based terrorist Anwar al-Awlaki on speed dial, no one in the Army dared suggest the major belonged either in the brig or an insane asylum. I’m sure political correctness is also the reason that Bradley Manning, a mere private, but an acknowledged homosexual, got away with removing tons of top security documents from government files.

After all, if you’re a Muslim or gay, nobody can even dare challenge you, lest he see his own career go down in flames. Such is the tyranny of diversity, multiculturalism and political correctness, in America today.

Hell, a gay Muslim could probably stroll into the White House and toss a stink bomb into Lincoln’s bedroom without anyone’s daring to question his presence.

Finally, in North Korea, when Kim Jong-Il recently kicked the bucket, a great many of his countrymen took strong exception to his young son, Kim Jong-Un, taking his place. But even they were ultimately won over by the slogan “Anyone but Obama.”

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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NOTIONS

2011-12-26T00:05:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky
Occasionally, a reader will take me to task for covering several topics in a single piece. I assume such people somehow regard themselves as my boss. Although I generally try to be polite about it, I feel obligated to set them straight. In short, I write these articles in order to let off steam. I generally try to leaven them with humor, but that’s just the way I am.

Inasmuch as most of my fellow commentators are quite happy to devote entire articles to a single issue, I generally just steer the malcontents to the competition. For my part, I have a rather short attention span, so I like to hop around, lest I bore myself.

Rep. Barney Frank (D)

The truth is that I get just as angry as every other conservative when I see the leftwing riffraff occupying the marble halls in Washington, our college classrooms, the editorial boardrooms of the MSM and the streets of America. I just try to maintain a sense of humor about these various creeps in order to keep my head from exploding.

I also find it helps me to maintain my emotional equilibrium by keeping in mind that when a glass is half empty, it’s also half full.

Moving on, I was delighted when I heard Barney Frank announce his decision to retire from the House. Short of Obama’s announcing his own retirement, I could hardly have been happier. But I had to laugh when Mr. Frank said that the best thing about stepping down is that he would no longer feel compelled to be nice to people he didn’t like. He didn’t specify whom he was referring to. We already know that he treats Republicans and his Tea Party constituents like dirt, so could he possibly have been referring to Pelosi, Reid, Obama or even just heterosexuals in general?

The notion of Barney Frank, one of the vilest individuals in Congress, even suggesting that there’s another, even nastier, version waiting in the wings brings to mind the image of Hitler’s announcing, “Okay, Poland, no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

Although I’d never vote for a Libertarian, I must confess that I agree with them when it comes to illegal drugs. I honestly don’t think you or I have any business telling people what they can smoke, ingest or shoot into their veins. But that is not the same as saying they have a right to be hired. I wouldn’t employ a drug addict and I don’t think anyone else should be compelled to do so.

Dennis Prager

In addition, I object to those who commit crimes or cause accidents while under the influence avoiding punishment by insisting that they are the innocent victims of their addiction. Nobody, after all, put a gun to their head and turned them into a coke, meth or heroin, addict. So, do the crime, do the time…and don’t whine. You wanted to be cool? Fine, go be cool in the cooler.

Recently, Dennis Prager devoted an hour of his daily radio show to deconstructing Oregon’s Governor John Kitzhaber’s pathetic case against capital punishment. Although I agreed entirely with Prager’s logic, I felt that he fell down in one instance. That was when an opponent of capital punishment called in to argue that the biggest danger with capital punishment is that an innocent person might be executed. [Read Prager’s article on this subject in the National Review. -ed.]

As an example, he presented a case in which two guys go off to commit a burglary, but one of them decides to rape and murder a woman in the house. The caller argued that the one burglar was innocent of those more serious crimes, but might very well suffer the same fate as his partner. For some inexplicable reason, Prager didn’t point out that if someone is killed during the commission of a felony, everyone involved is held to be as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger. But, moreover, if you stand by while your fellow burglar rapes and kills a human being, on what planet would anyone regard you as an innocent bystander?

Some people despise liberals because of their politics. Some people despise them because of their arrogance. Others despise them because of their double-standards and hypocrisy. I happen to believe that all the reasons are equally valid. Take the head of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. If you’ve ever seen her, you know that when she was younger, her grandmother would try to find dates for her by telling the other mothers and grandmothers in her circle, “My Debbie’s not much to look at, but she has a wonderful personality.”

But Debbie, whose personality isn’t really all that wonderful, excoriated all the Republicans who are seeking their party’s presidential nomination, saying, “If it were up to them, we’d all be driving foreign cars. They’d have the U.S. auto industry go down the tubes.”

I wager that none of you are surprised to hear that Debbie drives an Infiniti FX35, a Japanese luxury car.

Lest anyone think that I only pick on Democrats, I heard Newt Gingrich say that because he made $60,000-a-speech, he didn’t really need to lobby in order to make money. Instead, he claims, he only lobbied on behalf of issues he really cared about.

Well, inasmuch as Newt was regularly sending mailers to my wife, seeking donations, for at least a year or two before deciding to throw his hat in the ring, I have to assume that taking his wife on cruises to the Greek islands and keeping her bedecked in jewelry were a couple of those issues he really cared about.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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PINNING THE TAIL ON THE DONKEYS

2011-12-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

There are so many bad things one can say about those on the Left, one hardly knows where to begin. But one of their most annoying traits is that they absolutely refuse to acknowledge that they’ve ever been wrong even when actual events, as opposed to the fiction so often spun by liberal professors and historians, confirms it time and again.

Whitaker Chambers

For instance, when I was a youngster, Time magazine editor Whittaker Chambers testified that Alger Hiss, the fair-haired boy of FDR’s and Truman’s State Department, was not only a member of the Communist Party, but an agent of the Soviet Union. The way that the Left erupted, you might have thought that Chambers was a latter-day Pontius Pilate and that Hiss was Jesus. Even when the Soviet Union released the Venona Papers years later, proving that Hiss had indeed been one of their agents -- in other words, a traitor, one of Stalin’s useful idiots -- the Left refused to acknowledge their collective naïveté.

Along the same lines, one never heard the likes of NY Times foreign correspondent Walter Duranty, playwright Lillian Hellman or film director Abe Polansky, ever acknowledge that they’d been dangerously mistaken in paying homage to Joe Stalin. And when did you ever hear of Hollywood’s lefties beg anyone’s pardon for tithing the Soviet Union or acknowledging that long before any of them had been blacklisted, they had engaged in blacklisting conservative screenwriters such as Morrie Ryskind?

Alger Hiss

Did any of those on the Left ever denounce their younger selves for insisting during the Cold War that the United States should have unilaterally disarmed itself of nuclear bombs, thus setting, as they fatuously claimed, a good example for the Russians?

Did any of those louts ever declare a mea culpa for demanding that Ronald Reagan be impeached if, for nothing else, referring to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire” and then regurgitating their moral outrage all over again when George W. Bush declared that Iran, North Korea and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, constituted an “axis of evil”?

Apparently nothing ticks off a leftist more than calling a spade a garden utensil.

Anyone with a frontal lobe recognizes that the economic chaos in Europe is the direct result of socialist nanny states promising to provide their citizens with all their material needs in exchange for over-inflating the size of government. And yet lunkheads like Obama, Pelosi, Waxman and Reid, refuse to recognize the predictable results of these idiotic policies even when confronted with the inevitable riots every night on the evening news.

One definition of insanity is constantly repeating the same action in the cockeyed belief that the results will eventually be different. In the case of Leftists, if you point out that socialism doesn’t work any better in Wisconsin or Ohio than it did in the Soviet Union or does in Greece, they argue that it simply has never been done correctly. In the wake of such bloody failures as China, Nazi Germany, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela and North Korea, only a certifiable lunatic would even consider defending socialism on such shaky ground. However, when it comes to unequivocal devotion to failed attempts at social engineering, those on the Left could give collies and cocker spaniels lessons in blind loyalty.

If I haven’t yet convinced you that those who inhabit the ranks of the Left are dangerously self-righteous and unbelievably stupid, consider that they not only elected Barney Frank to Congress, but then kept doing it 15 more times. Consider, too, that they hold the unholy likes of Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore and Michael Bloomberg, in high regard.

Finally, never forget that one of the intellectual heroines of the Left, Susan Sontag, once declared, “The white race is the cancer of human history,” and, as usual, she was being deadly serious; and that Barack Obama, after once acknowledging that America was the greatest nation on the face of the earth -- no doubt with his fingers crossed behind his back -- went on to announce that, as president, he intended to radically transform it!

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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LIBERALS, LIKE FISH, ARE ALL WET

2011-12-24T00:01:00.001-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

One of the many things that make liberals so obnoxious is their hypocrisy. For instance, when campaigning against Christmas symbols, they make a mantra of “separation of church and state,” although those words never appear in the Constitution. They appeared in a letter that Thomas Jefferson addressed to the members of the Danbury, Connecticut, Baptist Association. While insisting that a person’s religious beliefs were a personal matter, he did not expand upon the Constitution’s very specific wording, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Nothing there that prohibits communities from doing whatever they want to do in the way of celebrating Christmas or any other religious holiday. It’s only Congress that is limited. The Founders had a legitimate distrust of the federal government and they didn’t want to risk the establishment of something akin to the Church of England. But they weren’t quaking in their boots over decorated fir trees standing in the town square or people wishing one another a Merry Christmas.

When it serves their purpose, liberals like to quote Jefferson and pretend that he is one with them. However, pretending that Jefferson, the man who filled his Declaration of Independence with references to the Creator and inalienable rights, those rights that can only be granted by God, was an atheist is the sort of self-serving rubbish that liberals make a practice of promoting.

It’s no surprise that Rhode Island’s Governor Lincoln Chafee recently decreed that Christmas trees be referred to as holiday trees. He is, after all, a liberal, although he labels himself an Independent, and therefore, takes his marching orders from the loons at the ACLU.

On the other hand, liberals take strong exception to the Second Amendment, which gives law-abiding citizens the right to bear arms, and they would gladly have it nullified, even though its importance is patently obvious; otherwise, the Founding Fathers wouldn’t have placed it right after the First Amendment, the one guaranteeing freedom of religion, free speech, a free press and the right to peaceably assemble. It’s obvious that the Founders believed that without the Second Amendment, the First risked being merely words scribbled on parchment.

Liberals assume they hold the high moral ground, taking it upon themselves to determine who is a decent American and who is a racist, even though it’s been their policies that have kept so many of those in black communities poor, ill-educated, fatherless, drug-riddled, violent, and as dependent as little babies on the federal government.

For good measure, it’s been the liberal media that has raised such miserable reprobates as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton to prominence, anointing them black leaders and providing them with megaphones.

Liberals elected Barack Obama, a man with no particular experience, a foggy past and a circle of friends and mentors who, in a more honest society, would mostly be in jail. They accuse anyone who opposes his socialistic policies of racism, but turn a blind eye and deaf ear to their party leader, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, when she attacks military veteran and fellow member of congress, Allen West. They are also deaf and blind when half a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus return from Cuba, singing the praises of Fidel Castro, while the Caucus simultaneously slimes millions of decent, law-abiding, tax-paying Americans who have found their voice in the Tea Party movement.

Liberals attacked George Bush for signing the Patriot Act, but have no problem when Obama prolongs it. They called Bush a dictator, but they have no problem with Obama’s giving the NLRB and EPA legislative powers, provided they continue their pro-union, anti-business, agendas.

Although liberals had a conniption fit every time President Bush took off for Crawford, Texas, they have no problem with Obama’s spending more time playing golf and raising campaign funds than trying to curb spending and doing something about our $15 trillion deficit.

Although leftists were always trying to find an excuse to impeach Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, they don’t find it even slightly annoying that 16 of the 20 green energy companies that have received federal loans, Solyandra among them, are owned by major bundlers for Obama.

If Obama didn’t spend so many of his waking hours attacking millionaires and billionaires, it wouldn’t be nearly so egregious that he spends so much time trying to get his hands on their money. Wouldn’t it be nice if once in a while, he would forgo one of his $35,000-a-plate fund raisers and, instead, ask that they voluntarily donate the dough to the IRS? After all, he maintains that seven out of 10 millionaires that he knows would like to see their taxes raised. Isn’t it high time he called their bluff? Perhaps he could start with his pals, Jeffrey Immelt and Warren Buffet.

The world of liberalism, I’ve concluded, is full of bubbles. There’s one bubble filled with liberal arts professors, another filled with mainstream journalists, a third for defense attorneys, a fourth for actors, screenwriters and directors, and so on. These bubbles serve as self-contained universes. It’s not that these vacuum-packed elitists are unaware that other people exist, but they regard them as a sub-species, only fit to buy their newspapers, watch their TV shows, purchase their CDs and pony up their kids’ college tuition. They refer to these suckers contemptuously as the folks they fly over. But even at ground level, liberals feel that they tower, morally and intellectually, over these inferior specimens.

My friend, Bernie Goldberg, who spent nearly 30 years in the trenches at CBS studying liberals in their own environment, came to the conclusion, as he wrote recently, that liberals regard themselves as moderates for the same reason that fish are unaware they’re wet. They simply have no other frame of reference.

Related: The Christmas Grinch Revisited

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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THE 1960s LIVE AGAIN

2011-12-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

I have long insisted that the decline of America began roughly 50 years ago. That was the decade that saw the liberals take a hacksaw to the black family, as LBJ and thousands of social workers did everything they could to drive black husbands and fathers out of the household. It also saw the advent of the Free Speech movement that started out in Berkeley and culminated in Kent State.

Snapshots of the decade would include the Yippies rioting in the streets of Chicago, the Black Panthers murdering people in Oakland, suburban couples engaged in wife-swapping, and parents all over the country looking to swap places with their children, while extolling the hedonistic life style summed up by the odious phrase ”sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll”.

Had it all ended with January 1, 1970, it would have been bad enough. Unfortunately, far too many of the young folks grew up to become the judges, professors, journalists and politicians, who are still causing immeasurable mischief. For good measure, their ignorant grandchildren helped elect Barack Obama in 2008 and will try to get him re-elected in 2012.

One of the most quoted lines from the 60s was uttered by lifelong political activist Jack Weinberg, who along with Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden, helped make it such an execrable period: “Don’t trust anyone over 30.” Thanks to those guys and their latter-day equivalents in the Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s fair to suggest that a wiser course of action is to trust nobody under 30 unless they happen to be wearing an Army, Navy or Marine, uniform.

The pain of inflation, the sort brought about by the Federal Reserve running the printing presses 24/7 ever since Obama came along; was brought home to me after watching a couple of old movies recently. Both of which were scripted by Peter Stone. In the 1963 release, “Charade,” four crooks devote nearly 20 years to trying to get their hands on $250,000. Even if you forget about the dough they had to spend tracking their prize all over Europe, you can’t help thinking that if they’d just opened up a garage or a coffee shop, the guys would have made a lot more money. Then, in the 1965 movie, “Mirage,” Gregory Peck goes into an upscale bar in Manhattan and orders a Scotch. “That’ll be 90 cents,” the bartender reminds him when he shows signs of leaving without paying.

This being the holiday season, I found myself thinking about a few of those we annually celebrate. Thanksgiving is an oddity because we wind up eating a lot of stuff that we apparently have absolutely no interest in the other 364 days of the year.

For some stupid reason, we went from honoring our two greatest presidents on two separate days to celebrating President’s Day, a generic term that suggests that along with Washington and Lincoln, we’re also tipping our hat to the likes of Wilson, Carter, Clinton and Obama.

But perhaps the oddest of all is Labor Day, when we pretend to honor hard work by taking the day off to listen to long-winded speeches by the likes of Richard Trumka, Jimmy Hoffa, Jr., and Barack Obama, quite possibly the three laziest men in America.

Speaking of Obama, I realize that back in 2008 he was called The One. Now that we know him so much better, I’m having a hard time deciding on a more appropriate moniker. A few that I’ve considered are Nanny Barack, the Preacher, the Great Pretender, the Scolder-in-Chief and Chairman Obama.

But, here’s hoping that after January, 2013, we’ll be able to simply refer to him as the Dearly Departed.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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CAPTAIN CHANDLER AND ME

2011-12-22T00:03:00.000-08:00

At this time of year, it seems fitting to share this classic article Burt wrote many years ago. Don’t forget to scroll down and read the bonus article which follows. You’ll find many more autobiographical articles in About Burt. Enjoy! -ed.

by BurtPrelutsky

Recently, I received an e-mail from a young associate pastor in Maryland. He introduced himself as an avid fan of “M*A*S*H.” He said that one of his favorite episodes had been one I wrote, Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler? and that he was considering using the show as an inspiration for an upcoming sermon. He wanted to know how I had come up with the idea. He also wanted to know how my own faith and understanding of God or Christ had informed my writing.

I must confess that I am not usually given to thinking of my writing in such grandiose terms, and it shocked me to find a man of the cloth doing so. It took some thinking on my part, especially as the writing took place over 30 years ago. At the time, my TV writing career was at a standstill. Because my agents were a man and wife team who were well-meaning, but highly ineffective, it appeared that things weren’t likely to change for the better any time soon.

Fortunately, I was still a print journalist, writing a weekly humor column for the L.A. Times. Because I would occasionally mention having gone to Fairfax High School, I was invited to host an event celebrating the 50th anniversary of the school’s founding. As part of the event, someone representing each of the five decades would reminisce about their years of internment. Larry Gelbart, writer-producer of M*A*S*H, spoke about the 1940s. I did double duty, hosting and talking about life at Fairfax in the 50s.

One day, some months later, I got a call from my female agent. She wanted me to know that they’d taken in a third partner. The new guy would specialize in sit-com writers. She suggested I come down and meet him. I did, and regretted it almost immediately. The guy was totally obnoxious. It seemed he wanted to be a producer more than he wanted to be an agent. He proposed that I should write up his ideas. I pointed out he didn’t seem too crazy about the way I wrote up my own. He said that was true, but this time he would be around to help. I told him that I would think about it, but in the meantime I had a family to support.

He asked me what shows appealed to me. I mentioned Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore and M*A*S*H. He looked at me as if I were insane. “You’re only talking about the hottest shows on the air.” I told him I was fully aware of that fact, but those were the ones I wanted to write for, and, besides, I was merely answering his question. I told him that, inasmuch as I had to earn a living, I would gladly write for any shows that would have me. He told me that at least now I was being realistic.

When I got home, my wife told me I had a phone call from Larry Gelbart. I called him back. He started out by thanking me for having mentioned him in a column I had written that past Sunday in which I argued that for a quarter of a century the best comedy in America wasn’t in books or movies or on Broadway, but, rather, on TV. I then mentioned ten of the anonymous talents who were most responsible for writing Sgt. Bilko, The Sid Caesar Show, Mr. Peepers, The Honeymooners and M*A*S*H. Gelbart was one of the ten.

Larry Gelbart

He went on to say that when he and his wife had attended the Fairfax event months earlier, they had assumed they’d be bored to tears, but that I had been very funny, and that he felt remiss for not having dropped me a note.

I thanked him for the kind words and was ready to hang up when he said, “By the way, I hear on the grapevine that you sometimes write for TV. If you ever get a notion for a M*A*S*H episode, please send it along.”

Some of you will wonder why I hadn’t broached the possibility of my writing a M*A*S*H script. It’s not as if it didn’t occur to me, but I would have considered it impolite. I mean, Gelbart was calling to pay me a compliment and to thank me for mentioning him in my column. Taking advantage of his courtesy to ask him for a job simply struck me as rude.

In any case, as soon as we hung up, I called my new agent and told him he was now my ex-agent -- that M*A*S*H apparently wasn’t as locked up as he’d insisted it was half an hour earlier.

For a few seconds, I felt just great. Then it hit me that I was not only unemployed, but now I didn’t even have an agent. Talk about your Pyrrhic victories!

In a panic, I sat down in a chair with a steno notebook and my pen and hoped (prayed?) that a terrific idea would magically appear on the page. The idea that arrived within minutes was that a wounded soldier would arrive at the M*A*S*H unit without dogtags, claiming to be Jesus Christ. I took another twenty minutes or so to fill in the details pitting good Dr. Freedman and evil Col. Flagg in a battle for the man’s body and soul. I even came up with a title, Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?

I typed it up and mailed it to Gelbart at 20th Century-Fox. A day or two later, he called to say that he and his producing partner, Gene Reynolds, loved the idea.

The final script got nominated for a Humanitas Prize, and led to my writing seven more M*A*S*H episodes, and totally resuscitated my TV career.

At the time and to this day, although I am a non-observant Jew, I felt the idea was divinely inspired. How could I not? After all, when I sat down with pad and paper, I had no reason to suspect that Jesus Christ was going to wind up in a sitcom episode.

Although there is no way to really explain how the creative process works, typically a notion buzzes around in a writer’s head until the opportunity to use it comes along. But that was certainly not the case here.

With Captain Chandler, there was no notion, no buzzing, just a timely Christmas miracle.

Related: Larry Gelbart: An Appreciation

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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READING POLITICAL TEA LEAVES

2011-12-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers, Burt would like you to enjoy an extra bonus article as a combination Chanukah and Christmas present. Don’t forget to read the other article, Captain Chandler & Me, which precedes this one. - ed.

by BurtPrelutsky

When I see all the infighting taking place in the ranks of the GOP, I find myself hoping that by the time we finally get through the primaries and nominate a candidate, hard feelings will have subsided and we’ll all be able to support the last person standing. After all, the most important consideration isn’t whether it’s Gingrich, Romney or Perry, who carries the banner next November, but that Barack Obama be sent packing, and that Harry Reid joins Nancy Pelosi in the ranks of the terminally irrelevant.

Ann Coulter

Although I, personally, would prefer to see Bachmann or Santorum heading the ticket, with Marco Rubio holding down the second slot, the writing on the wall doesn’t look good for either of them. Some people suggest that the main problem for Bachmann is that she’s a member of the House, and members of the House rarely get elected president. Frankly, I think her anemic poll numbers have more to do with the memory of the unfortunate pissing contest she engaged in with Tim Pawlenty. As for Santorum, it simply doesn’t look good on your resume that in your last senatorial election, a flaming liberal like Bob Casey, Jr., crushed you by a 59% - 41% margin.

What I don’t understand is why Ann Coulter, who seems to feel that she is a human litmus test, possessing the mysterious power to tell who is and who isn’t a true conservative, recently informed the world that Bachmann and Romney are the only two true conservatives in the running. It’s fine to suggest that in a general election, Gov. Romney is far likelier to attract moderates than Speaker Gingrich, which, along with his general demeanor and character, is my main reason for supporting Romney. But what would possess Ms. Coulter to insist that Romney is more conservative than either of the Ricks, Perry or Santorum?

Santa a socialist?

My concern for Ms. Coulter’s mental condition began when she declared her devotion to Chris Christie. Like every other Republican, I’ve very much enjoyed watching Gov. Christie go mano-a-mano with the public sector unions, but, by no stretch, is he a true conservative. If he were, New Jersey’s voters would not have elected him.

I don’t want to be accused of gossip-mongering, but I’m wondering if Christie and Coulter have been sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. I mean, first she pushes him to enter the race, looking, for all the world, like a stereotypical stage mother. Then, when he finally convinces her that he has no intention of tossing his hat in the ring by endorsing Romney, suddenly there’s cheerleader Coulter assuring us that Romney is the second coming of Ronald Reagan.

As in past holiday seasons, I was reminded all over again that Santa Claus is a socialist. As socialists go, he’s a nice one. At least he doesn’t try to push his health care program down our throats or spend us into insolvency or accuse people who work ten times harder than he does that they’re lazy. But what else would you call a guy who doesn’t require anything of the people who receive his bounty? He doesn’t ask that they do chores or put away their toys or make their beds. He only requires that they be nice, a rather vague term that could mean they don’t rob or pillage or maim.

When you get right down to it, the only difference between Santa and a typical Democrat is that he bestows gifts without demanding that the little tots troop out and vote for him in the next election.

Finally, Time magazine decided that their Person of the Year is The Protester. Although the unwashed anarchists, communists, socialists, and assorted riffraff, who comprised the Occupy Wall Street movement, are mentioned, Time also includes those who, in 2011, have demonstrated in Syria, Egypt, Libya and Russia.

Every year, the Time editors have to explain that they’re not voting for the greatest person necessarily, but the person or persons who did the most to change the world for better or worse. That explains, to a degree, why the likes of Hitler, Stalin, the Ayatollah Khomeini, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin and Jimmy Carter, have all graced the magazine’s cover. But it doesn’t come close to explaining why Wallis Simpson was their cover girl in 1936 or why, this year, they decided that Kim Kardashian and Casey Anthony achieved runner-up status and were included as people who mattered.

It’s strictly out of sincere conviction that I protest Time’s decision, and definitely not because I am trying to weasel my way into a bit of tawdry glory.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
Get your personally autographed copy of Liberals: America’s Termites or Portraits of Success for just $19.95, postpaid. Get both for just $39.90.

CRITIQUING THE SIOUX CITY DEBATE

2011-12-19T00:01:00.001-08:00

As a combined Chanukah and Christmas present, Santa Burt has some bonus articles for you this week. When you finish this one, please scroll down to read the article which follows this one. -ed.

by BurtPrelutsky

In a way, it’s rather admirable that Ron Paul sticks to his guns when everyone knows that his ostrich-like response to a nuclear Iran positively guarantees that he will not be the presidential nominee in 2012. Although I’ve always thought that Rep. Paul has a startling physical resemblance to the myopic cartoon creation, Mr. Magoo, the real life person he invariably brings to mind is none other than Neville Chamberlin. All the man needs is the furled umbrella.

On the other hand, I’d be churlish if I didn’t commend Paul for providing me with my only laugh during the Sioux City GOP debate. That was when he let us know that none other than James Clapper, Obama’s head of National Intelligence, agreed with his assessment of Iran. That would be like my denying that the Holocaust had taken place because no less an authority than Muammar Ahmadinejad said it hadn’t.

The fact is, until Dr. Paul mentioned him, I had assumed Clapper was long gone from the administration. After all, this is the same James Clapper who, in 2010, had been unaware late in the day that a dozen Islamic terrorists had been arrested that very morning in Great Britain. He’s the same fellow who insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood was a secular group that had eschewed violence.

In March, 2011, this very same intelligence maven predicted that “Over the long run, Gaddafi will prevail.” Either he was all wet, as usual, or he considered seven months “the long run,” inasmuch as Gaddafi was dead as a doornail as of October 20th.

At the same congressional hearing, in March, he was asked why he’d neglected to list Iran and North Korea among the nuclear powers that might pose a threat to the United States. We’re all still waiting for his answer. That is, all of us who aren’t Ron Paul.

One has to assume that in a President Paul administration, Mr. Clapper would continue to be the head of National Intelligence, although combining Clapper and intelligence in the same sentence is my idea of an oxymoron.

Speaking of the Sioux City debate, I, unlike some others, did not think Newt Gingrich came out smelling like a rose.

For one thing, while arguing for his loony notion of forcing federal judges to defend themselves before the louts in Congress, he said that he would be taking on the judiciary in the spirit of Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln and FDR. Well, lest anyone leap to the conclusion that I’m on the side of activist judges, let me make it clear that would never be my intention. But anything that a conservative president can do, a liberal president can do. So I’d suggest to Speaker Gingrich that he keep the political showboating to an absolute minimum.

But, more to the point, when he started to explain in what way his cockeyed idea was in the spirit of those four presidents, he said that Jefferson, when asked if the Supreme Court was supreme, replied, “That’s absurd.” He said that Lincoln had challenged the Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott decision with his Emancipation Proclamation. While it’s nice to know that Gingrich still opposes slavery, I would have been far more interested in his defense of FDR.

You see, Roosevelt’s major judiciary battle arose when the conservative Supreme Court ruled several portions of his New Deal unconstitutional. FDR decided that nine old guys in black robes should not have the authority to dismantle any portion of his socialistic agenda. He therefore decided to pack the Court by appointing up to six new justices for every sitting justice over the age of 70 years, six months. Even a public enamored of Roosevelt opposed this clumsy ploy to expand the power of the executive branch.

But, then, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that historian Gingrich has stated that the greatest president of the 20th century was FDR, not Ronald Reagan.

Finally, after listening to Newt trying to explain why the $1.6 million he received from Freddie Mac was perfectly acceptable, I have come to two conclusions. The first is that it provides us with yet another excellent reason to rid ourselves of Freddie and Fannie once and for all.

The second reason is equally damning of Speaker Gingrich. If, as he keeps insisting, the services he provided Freddie were the equivalent of dusting the shelves and cleaning out the wastepaper baskets -- and not influence peddling in the corrupt halls of Congress -- the schmuck is positively shameless.

I mean, how dare Newt charge $30,000-a-month -- money coming out of the pockets of the American taxpayer -- for advice that, by his own admission, was ignored for five long years!

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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WHY ISN’T THERE MORE ANTI-SEMITISM IN AMERICA?

2011-12-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Recently, I had an exchange with my friend Alan Caruba, a fellow Jew who had written a piece in which he pointed out that in hard economic times anti-Semites have a greater tendency to crawl out from under their favorite rocks.

After acknowledging that he was right, I went on to state that as an American Jew, I was frankly surprised that there wasn’t more hatred of Jews than there is. And for once, I was being totally serious. If I weren’t Jewish, I could see how I, as a conservative, could be very antagonistic towards Jews. I mean, not being a total barbarian, I would try to be fair; I would attempt to balance things off by listing all of the Jewish contributions to medicine and science, literature and music, Hollywood and Broadway. I would think how much more unpleasant modern life would be without the efforts of Jonas Salk, George Gershwin, Albert Einstein, Richard Rodgers, Saul Bellow, J.D. Salinger, Jerome Kern, Billy Wilder, Carl Sagan and Milton Friedman. And that’s just the tiny tip of a huge iceberg.

But the fact remains that Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky and Saul Alinsky, also form a small portion of a fairly large toxic dump. It’s also true that the reason that people equate Jews with shady financial practices isn’t entirely due to the libelous charges planted in The Protocols of Zion, but to high-profile scoundrels named George Soros, Bernie Madoff, Michael Milken, Joshua Gould and Bernie Cornfeld. It doesn’t help that Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs could just as easily be the names of two kosher delis.

Speaking of which, why is it that it’s only beloved Jews who ever got around to changing their names? Why was it always the likes of Danny Kaye (nee David Kaminsky), Jack Benny (Benjamin Kubelsky), Mel Brooks (Mel Kaminsky), Woody Allen (Allen Konigsberg), George Burns (Nathan Birnbaum), Kirk Douglas (Issur Danielovitch), John Garfield (Jacob Julius Garfinkle), Eddie G. Robinson (Emanuel Goldenberg), Tony Curtis (Bernie Schwartz), Shelley Winters (Shirley Schrift), Lauren Bacall (Betty Joan Perske), Judy Holliday (Judith Tuvim) and Irving Berlin (Israel Isidore Baline), and never such national disasters as Henry Waxman, Michael Bloomberg, Barney Frank, Charles Schumer and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz?

Speaking of which, as a conservative, it pains me to have to acknowledge that while there are 31 members in the House and another 13 in the Senate who are Jewish, only one, Eric Cantor, is a Republican. When you realize that Jews represent less than three percent of the American population, the fact that they represent 13% of the Senate and nearly nine percent of the House, you get some idea of what a difference these people would make if only they used their power for good!

Fortunately, in spite of 80% of American Jews being so besotted with the Left that they would vote for Daffy Duck so long as he was running as a Democrat, we are not entirely insane and, with fewer and fewer exceptions, such as Jon Stewart (formerly Jonathan Leibowitz), we no longer feel we have to change our names in order to advance our careers. As a result, Bernard Goldberg, Charles Krauthammer, Dennis Prager, Mark Levin, Michael Medved, Ben Shapiro, Harry Stein, Lionel Chetwynd and Ronald Radosh, make no secret of the fact that they are both Jewish and conservative. I must confess I thought I’d be able to include Mark Steyn, but I checked and found out that he was baptized as a Catholic and confirmed as an Anglican, which probably explains the funny spelling.

Why isn’t there more anti-Semitism in America? After all, we Jews tend to be extremely out of step with the majority of Americans, who tend to be slightly right of center. Moreover, even aside from all those leftwing politicians who carry Barack Obama’s water, no matter if the issue is the stimulus, pandering to public sector unions or ObamaCare, we include in our ranks such prominent leftwing loudmouths as Ed Asner, Barbra Streisand and Sean Penn.

The answer is surprisingly simple. It appears that America’s Christians, by and large, are decent, logical and patriotic. As a result, they not only subscribe to the words found in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but the other, older ones, inscribed in their Bible. And it probably doesn’t hurt that their savior happened to be Jewish.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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AH, SWEET MYSTERIES OF LIFE

2011-12-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

There are a number of questions I keep waiting to have answered, and I am getting doggone impatient. For instance, is Barack Obama’s mother-in-law still living in the White House? If she’s living there rent-free and dining on our dime, why do we never see her? They sure made a big deal about it when they moved her in, allegedly to help look after the grandkids, but then she fell off the face of the earth. Sort of like Bo, the invisible dog.

Next, I want to know how much money Jeffrey Immelt is being paid to be Obama’s job czar. During WWII, a great many wealthy men went to Washington to serve their country and were known as dollar-a-year men because that is what they were getting paid. So, what’s Immelt’s salary? The fact is, if he, the man who runs GE, the outfit that paid no corporate taxes last year, the man who sent major divisions of his company over to China, is getting as much as a dollar-a-year, he is definitely being overpaid.

Rick Perry

I’d also like to know why Bill O’Reilly divides everyone into one of two groups, patriots or pinheads. The opposite of a patriot, after all, is a traitor, whereas the opposite of a pinhead is someone who isn’t a liberal.

I was taken aback when so many people got on Mitt Romney’s case for offering to bet Rick Perry $10,000. For one thing, Romney knew he was betting a sure thing. For another, he knew that Perry wouldn’t take the bet, so he might as well have offered to wager a million dollars. But the blowback seemed to come from people who resented the fact that Romney could even afford to make such a sizable bet. Well, I think by this time, we all know that the man is a multi-millionaire. As Republicans, we are not supposed to resent wealthy people for no other reason than that they happen to be richer than we are. We leave that to the mutts in the Occupy Wall Street movement and to such wealthy hypocrites as Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Warren Buffet, George Soros and Matt Damon.

Mitt Romney

It’s one thing when Newt Gingrich, the man who subscribes to global warming, who thinks FDR -- not Ronald Reagan -- was the greatest president of the 20th century and who made his money the old-fashioned way, as a Washington insider lobbying for any outfit that met his price, to attack Romney for being a successful capitalist, but quite another when it’s done by conservatives.

In a related matter, I recall years ago watching an episode of the “Bob Newhart Show” in which the Hartleys (Newhart and Suzanne Pleshette) agreed not to exchange Christmas gifts one year. But as so often happens in the world of sit coms, the missus double-crossed her hubby by buying him a present. The gift turned out to be a $1,200 wristwatch. Watching at home, I still recall how shocked I was. As a rule, characters in TV sit coms were supposed to make it easy for the audience to identify with them. But here was a female lead in the mid-1970s spending a small fortune for a watch, and nobody I spoke to afterwards had even given it a second thought.

Now, 35 years later, a great many people seem to have been knocked off their pins because one rich guy unsuccessfully challenged another rich guy to make a bet. America is definitely getting older, but we don’t seem to be maturing.

Another silly controversy seems to be brewing over Tim Tebow’s Christian beliefs. A great many people are taking him to task because he credits Christ with whatever success he and his team have, and that he occasionally kneels on the field to give God a quick thank-you. It seems that some football fans can’t stand it when a quarterback kneels down for any reason other than to run out the clock.

Well, just as no atheists are said to reside in fox holes, I assume that everyone on a football field, whether or not he kneels and bows his head, is praying not to have his knees shattered or have his brains jarred loose.

What I don’t get is why people are picking on young Mr. Tebow. After all, nobody makes a big deal of the fact that just about every time a Latin baseball player hits a home run, he points heavenward as he crosses home plate, as if thanking God for making sure that the pitcher, no doubt a non-believer, threw him a gopher ball.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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NEWSREELS

2011-12-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

When I was a kid, next to the cartoon, one of my favorite things at the movies was the weekly newsreel. In fact, unless the cartoon starred Tom and Jerry, I often enjoyed the newsreel more.

For those too young to remember, in the days before TV, these 10-minute films generally included some politician, usually FDR or Harry Truman, giving a speech or tossing out the first ball at an All Star Game; celebrities showing up for a movie premiere; bathing beauties water-skiing in Florida; highlights from an Army-Navy football game; an exhibition of trick bowling or pool shooting by Andy Varipapa or Willie Hoppe, respectively; and, on their birthday, an update on the status of the Dionne Quintuplets of Canada. At its conclusion, we would all be urged to buy War Bonds or, once WWII ended, to contribute to the March of Dimes in order to stamp out infantile paralysis.

Something else I recall from those long-ago movie-going days is how often movies had priests in feature roles. Just a short list of the major stars who took their turn wearing a turnaround collar were Bing Crosby, Gregory Peck, Spencer Tracy, Barry Fitzgerald, Montgomery Clift and Pat O’Brien. Some wag once observed that in those days, Jewish movie moguls told American Protestants how to be better Catholics.

Because my parents started taking me to the movies when I was just three or four, it was inevitable that I would sometimes draw the wrong messages from the newsreels. On one occasion which has become family legend, although I don’t recall it, my folks looked outside our Pine Grove Avenue apartment in Chicago and saw me doing the goosestep on the sidewalk. One or both of them ran out and grabbed me before the neighbors saw me and decided that we weren’t really Jewish, but were actually members of the Nazi Bund. I guess while watching newsreels, I had decided that it was a very amusing way to walk.

It’s hard to imagine now, when, between TV and the Internet, we get our news 24/7, that there was a time when newspapers, Time, Life, and such producers of newsreels as Hearst Metrotone, Pathe News and Fox Movietone , were all we had. In a way, I miss those times. These days, the bad news bombards us so relentlessly, there’s barely time to catch our breath.

For instance, when the rapes, murders, anti-Semitic posters and drug use, at the Occupy Wall Street events were called to the attention of Rep. Maxine Waters, she said, “That’s life and it happens.” She felt that even mentioning such matters “is a distraction from the mission of calling attention to the unfairness of the system.” I’m trying to recall if she ever said similar things about the Tea Party movement, which has a similar mission, but one they manage to conduct without the rapes, murders, drugs and anti-Semitism.

Young Burt’s favorite cartoon

Sometimes, when tragic events such as the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, even religious people must find themselves wondering if God fell asleep at the switch. But then along comes the Keystone XL oil pipeline, and all doubts vanish. I mean, who else but God could have created such a dilemma for Obama? And what could be better than seeing Obama caught between a rock (wealthy environmental zealots) and a hard place (blue collar unions)? By kicking the oil pipeline all the way into 2013, Mr. Pass-My-Jobs-Bill-or-Else sends the message that 20,000 good-paying jobs and American energy concerns aren’t nearly as important as keeping his big money Hollywood contributors happy.

It’s not just Obama, Waters and their Washington cronies, who are in line for distemper shots. Consider PETA. Where do these people come from? I mean, nobody likes animals more than I do. But when the head of the group was a guest on Dennis Prager’s radio show, she seriously insisted that even cockroaches have rights. When Prager asked her how she felt about abortions, she said that PETA doesn’t have a position on the unborn. So, as Mr. Prager concluded, according to PETA, a cockroach has more rights than a human fetus. And these people aren’t embarrassed to be seen in public.

When Jon Corzine was running for re-election as the governor of New Jersey, Obama went there countless times to campaign for him, and Joe Biden referred to Corzine as his favorite financial expert. After Chris Christie defeated him, Corzine went on to be the CEO of MF Global, which not only went bankrupt nearly as quickly as Solyndra, but managed to misplace $1.2 billion of its investors’ money before going out of business. Makes you wonder what the “MF” stood for. And how do you manage to lose track of over a billion dollars? I mean, sometimes I forget where I put my car keys, but I’m pretty sure that even I could keep track of that large a pile of money.

Finally, am I the only person who appears to notice a strange pattern forming in our nation’s capital? It appears that nobody involved with this administration will read anything but a menu. Several Democrats who voted for the trillion dollar Stimulus admitted they hadn’t read the bill. Eric Holder confessed, after filing a federal lawsuit against Arizona’s immigration bill, that he hadn’t bothered to read the 13-page document. More recently, the Attorney General claimed he hadn’t read any of several memos his underlings had sent him regarding “Fast & Furious.”

Energy Chief Steven Chu, while defending the half billion dollars given to Solyndra, claimed he hadn’t read any of the memos his underlings had sent him, warning him that Solyndra’s chance of success weren’t half as good as that snowball that somehow found itself in Hell.

The most egregious example, though, is Barack Obama, who, rumor has it, once started reading the Constitution, but quit as soon as he saw that it didn’t deal with the redistribution of wealth.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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THE CHRISTMAS GRINCH REVISITED

2011-12-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Nothing that I have ever written has provoked as huge a response as a piece I wrote some years ago called “The Jewish Grinch That Stole Christmas.”

In the article, which brought me roughly ten times as much e-mail as I’m accustomed to receiving, I suggested that my fellow secular Jews (aka atheists and agnostics) were at the forefront in waging war on the values and traditions of Christian Americans.

Predictably enough, the response from gentiles was uniformly positive. The feedback from Jews was somewhat less favorable, roughly split between those who admired my courage while questioning the legitimacy of my birth and those who accused me of being a turncoat. What I found most telling was that those who damned me didn’t, as a rule, refute what I had written; they were merely angry that a Jew had written the piece. They accused me of lending aid and comfort to bigots.

Because I make it a rule to write back to anyone who writes me, and because I assume that those who took the time and trouble to write were representative of many more who didn’t, I’d like to share some of my responses.

The term that nearly every Jew used in condemning me was “a self-hating anti-Semite.” A few accused me of not really being a Jew. That didn’t mean they thought I was a Catholic or a Baptist flying under false colors; no, they meant that my sole claim to being Jewish was that my ancestors were Jewish. The fact is they’re right.

As I have written on other occasions, I am not a religious man. I do not keep kosher. I do not help make up the morning minyan at the local synagogue. I do not even attend High Holiday services. So what? I’m Jewish because I say I’m Jewish. And because, quite frankly, with my face, who would believe me if I bothered to deny it? Furthermore, most Jews in America are not orthodox and can not read Hebrew or even speak Yiddish. For the most part, American Jews are circumcised, have a bar mitzvah, attend a reformed or conservative temple once or twice a year, frequent delis and Chinese restaurants, and vote the straight Democratic ticket.

Also, I say I’m Jewish because I don’t wish to offend the memory of my parents by denying their religion and the religion of their parents.

Finally, I say I’m Jewish because Hitler would have said I was Jewish, and then sent me off to Auschwitz, if I hadn’t been fortunate enough to have been born in America.

That was my whole point. I was lucky to have been born to a Jewish family in a Christian nation. It was, in the main, Christian soldiers who liberated the Nazi death camps. Even if I’m not as Jewish as some of my critics would like, I still believe it behooves us to be openly grateful to our Christian neighbors -- not because we fear future pogroms -- but because it’s the decent thing to do.

One of the very few points for which I was specifically taken to task was for referring to America as a Christian nation. To those people, I pointed out that I wasn’t claiming this nation is a theocracy, but Christians of one denomination or another compose nearly 90% of America’s population. That is 10% higher than the percentage of Jews in Israel, but I am willing to wager that none of my critics would deny that Israel is a Jewish state.

As one of my respondents put it, “An anti-Semite used to be someone who hated Jews, but it’s become someone whom Jews hate.” The problem with that truism is that Jews, in the great majority, don’t hate gentiles. Sometimes it just seems that way. In fact, most of us are well aware that Israel has no more devoted allies in the world than America’s most devout Christians. What’s more, the reason that atheists and agnostics are able to wage their anti-religious crusade is because they can safely do so, and the only reason they can is because millions of Christians fought and died to protect this freedom. Unfortunately, as happens, for instance, when freedom of speech leads to obscenity and pornography, this precious freedom has been corrupted and turned into a license to bully Christians.

Sadly, as is so often the case with black Americans, those who are high-profile and get most of the media attention are the knee-jerk radicals and the anything-for-a-buck rabble-rousers.

When my critics accused me of promoting anti-Semitism, I pleaded not guilty. I asked them if they thought that gentiles were so stupid that, until I wrote my piece, they didn’t recognize that there is a secular jihad underway in this country to remove Christ from Christmas, which, by the way, happens to be a national holiday, unlike Chanukah, Kwanzaa and my birthday.

Finally, the problem is that if Christians complain that a minority is trying to bully the majority, they stand condemned as bigots. If I, a Jew, suggest that Christians should be free to celebrate one of their holier holidays in any fashion they like, and not have to feel guilty about it, I’m accused of being a self-hating anti-Semite. In short, nobody is allowed to be critical of Jews. Well, it so happens that while we Jews may be the Chosen People, that doesn’t make us the perfect people. And, believe me, I’m not just talking about my relatives.

Many of us, Jews and Christians alike, have been annoyed with American Muslims because they seem to spend an inordinate amount of time whining about racial profiling, instead of condemning the world-wide butchery committed by jihadists in the name of their religion. Well, to me, the silence of American Jews when it comes to Christian-bashing has been equally deafening.

Frankly, I’m relieved that Lincoln Chafee, the oafish governor of Rhode Island, a proponent of same-sex marriage, who recently declared that Rhode Island Christmas trees would be called holiday trees, is an Episcopalian. It’s bad enough that we Jews are stuck with the likes of Henry Waxman, Barbara Boxer, Bernie Sanders, Brad Sherman and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz.

What truly astonishes me is the patience and good grace with which Christians have dealt with this attack on so many things they hold sacred.

It is, I think, a tribute to their religion.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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THE CASE FOR LOGIC

2011-12-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

The only thing in shorter supply in America than jobs, shovel-ready or otherwise, is logic. And with most liberal arts professors taking their lead from Saul Alinksy and Noam Chomsky, not Socrates, it doesn’t appear that college students will start thinking for themselves anytime soon.

For instance, how is it that every other group in America has to go through the rigmarole of obtaining a city permit if it wants to conduct a two-hour parade down Main Street, and that municipalities can’t even put up Christmas trees in the public square, but the bozos in the Occupy Wall Street movement are free to turn entire neighborhoods into toxic dumps? And how is it that until a few women are raped or a few guys are murdered, America’s mayors and city councils all adopt a live-and-let-live policy to accommodate these creeps?

I say if a Christmas crèche can’t exist on public property, there’s no legitimate excuse for letting a thousand unwashed goons set up their tents and turn the city sidewalks into their personal latrine.

❝I like all of the top-tier GOP presidential candidates.❞

I’m not surprised that the Democrats are united in their opposition to photo IDs. It stands to reason that they’d oppose anything that served to guarantee that only American citizens could cast ballots. But I am surprised that it’s not just liberals who oppose a tamper-proof national ID number. Whenever it’s suggested, even conservatives get nervous. For reasons I can’t fathom, they seem to feel as if their individuality were being threatened. Inasmuch as we’re all carting around numbers by the bushel load, I don’t see why anyone but Islamic terrorists, biker gangs and deadbeat dads, would object to just one more.

While on the subject, I would also campaign for English as our official language, putting an end to foreign-language ballots, and regular drug-testing for all welfare recipients. And, yes, that would definitely include politicians.

Herman Cain

Unlike most people, I like all of the top-tier GOP presidential candidates. Unfortunately, there are also some things I don’t like about them. Although Herman Cain appears to be sliding in the polls, I hope the reason has nothing to do with those unsubstantiated sexual harassment rumors. So far as I’m concerned, once Gloria Allred appears on the scene, all claims to objective testimony fly out the window. She is to the legal system, what Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa are to major league baseball, what Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi are to Congress, and what Jerry Sandusky and Mike McQueary are to the state of Pennsylvania.

Although Mr. Cain seems like a nice guy, there’s no getting around the fact that he handled the accusations badly, that he shows a very slim grasp of foreign affairs and that he had a Rick Perry-sized brain freeze when asked a simple question regarding Libya.

However, I was already questioning his 9-9-9 tax plan. Unlike others who opposed it because they didn’t like that third “9,” a national sales tax, because they feared that giving Congress yet another tax stream is a lot like giving a book of matches to a child. The fact remains that Congress can never be trusted not to raise taxes, but that’s the case no matter what plan is in place.

My biggest objection was that Cain suddenly revised it to 9-0-9 in order to let poor people off the hook and provide for development zones in the inner city. One, I want everyone to pay income taxes. There is something terribly immoral about people who pay nothing on April 15th being allowed to vote for politicians who get to raise the levy on the rest of us. In short, if you have no skin in the game, you’re not entitled to have a say in how the game turns out.

Furthermore, I want the entire country to be a development zone, not just a few urban areas designated by pandering politicians. If a city needs to be rejuvenated, leave it to the city and the state. If the job is too big for them, as with Detroit, for instance, take a page out of Nero’s playbook and burn it down and start over.
Recently, a reader sent me an email. He said that he was surprised that I seemed to be such an optimistic person. He based his conclusion on the fact that I was certain Obama would lose next year’s election, and that I was rather sanguine about the various GOP contenders.

I pointed out that all the evidence I have at hand suggests Obama has no chance of winning, no matter how much money he spends. Also, I happen to be an odd combination of cynic and optimist. Perhaps that simply means that my expectations of the human race, being not particularly high, are often easily met.

As for the various candidates, I would settle for any of them, including Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, over Obama. I even find something worthy in both of them. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that Rep. Paul seems to believe that a nuclear Iran would like us if only we left the Middle East -- and even though Iran also insists that Israel leave with us -- I might even endorse his candidacy.

As for Rick Santorum, he is the one contender with whom I sympathize. He is obviously aching, just dying, to be the president, and he clearly can’t grasp why he doesn’t top the polls when he is the guy who, as he incessantly reminds us, is, first and foremost, for family, the flag and apple pie. Every time I see him on stage at one of these debates, his desire is so naked that I’m almost too embarrassed to look. It’s such a sad case of unrequited lust, I wind up feeling like a voyeur.

©2011 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by email
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