BurtPrelutsky.com

A TALE OF TWO DEBATES

2012-02-24T00:01:00.001-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Tonight, I watched the GOP Presidential debate from Mesa, Arizona. Last night, I attended a Congressional debate here in the San Fernando Valley. There was a world of difference between them. The biggest difference is that I got a big kick out of last night’s event, even though the candidate I’ll be voting for hasn’t got the slightest chance of winning. His name is Mark Reed, and he’s a bright, attractive, well-spoken fellow. In many parts of the country, even in many parts of California, he’d be a shoo-in. He suffers from only one drawback; Reed happens to be a Republican.

Last night, he had to enter the lion’s den. Not only did he have to contend with two U.S. congressmen, Howard Berman and Brad Sherman, but the event took place in a synagogue, so nearly everyone in the overflowing audience was a Jewish liberal. To be fair, nobody booed Mr. Reed, but that was mainly because the rabbi reminded everyone to be on their good behavior, and because the audience knew that Reed was essentially irrelevant.

What made the evening so entertaining for me is that one liberal was, for the first time in his political life, being forced to tell the truth about another liberal. It was sheer heaven listening to these guys insult each other. There was none of that phony “With all due respect to my distinguished colleague” blather. These guys wanted to bludgeon each other to death with their microphones.

The reason behind this mortal combat was that California’s congressional lines were redrawn after the last census and what had previously been safe liberal districts for Sherman and Berman had been turned into a single district that will be covered in blood before the primary vote in June determines which of them goes back to the House and which one goes back home.

Honesty compels me to confess that I have been friends with Howard since our days at UCLA. But as he knows, I will be voting for Mark Reed. At present, Brad Sherman is my congressman. If I had to choose between them, I would vote for Berman, not only because he’s an old chum, but because so far as it is possible for a liberal to be a man of principle, I believe he is one. For one thing, he backed the invasion of Iraq. Whether you agree with that decision or not, a great many Democrats opposed it for no other reason than to make political hay at George Bush’s expense.

For another thing, Brad Sherman joined the likes of Henry Waxman and Maxine Waters in voting to continue funding ACORN with taxpayer dollars. And that was even after we had all seen the videos of ACORN employees trying to help someone they believed was a pimp finance a proposed brothel to be filled with underage girls from Central America.

That brings us to tonight’s GOP debate. As usual, I found Ron Paul alternately amusing and alarming. One minute, you find yourself being charmed by his apparent good nature; the next minute, you’re asking yourself “Did he really say the world has nothing to fear from a nuclear Iran? Or did he mean that someone has invented a new, clear iron?”

Rick Santorum still strikes me as a guy born to be a college cheerleader, although it appears that this lengthy campaign has taken a toll on his hairline. It seems to be receding at the speed of light. I recall that during the 1961 baseball season, as he pursued Babe Ruth’s home run record, the pressure became so great on Roger Maris that his hair began falling out in clumps. I fear that if the primary race lasts into June, Santorum could wind up as bald as I am.

As usual, I was impressed with Mitt Romney. I know that some people resent his looks, his height, his hair and his money. By” some people,” I mean others besides myself. But just because someone looks and sounds presidential, I don’t really think that should be a liability for someone who deserves to be the President.

That brings us to Newt Gingrich. Although I have sat through all of the debates so far, which adds up to about 498 hours I’ll never get back, I finally focused like a laser on what Gingrich was actually saying, as opposed to the glib way he has of saying things.

I don’t know why after all this time it finally hit me. After all, it has been his constant mantra throughout the campaign that he’s the guy who reformed welfare, balanced the federal budget and, through his Contract with America, gained control of the House for the GOP.

That being the case, it seems to me that the most sensible solution is for Romney to be the President and Gingrich to run for Congress and once again become the Speaker.

©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 SILLY SEASON

2012-02-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

With football season finally over, we face the rest of the year, during which victories and awards are not usually determined by actual talent, true grit or any other standard that can be measured objectively. Instead, we will have some group of generally goofy individuals determine who will cart home Oscars, Nobel Peace Prizes and the U.S. presidency.

In fact, I’m convinced that the reason that so many people are addicted to sports is because they remain just about the only meritocracies in existence. While it’s true that injuries occasionally play a role in which team wins the World Series or the NCAA basketball tournament, it is nearly always the best team that cops the trophy.

The Academy snubbed Jimmy in 1939...

When it comes to Academy Awards, there is a long history of mind-boggling injustices. For instance,“Sweet Leilani” beat out the Gershwins’ “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”; James Stewart got the Oscar for The Philadelphia Story to make up for his losing it the previous year to Robert (Mr. Chips) Donat, when he starred in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington; Going My Way and its director Leo McCarey beat out Double Indemnity and Billy Wilder; The Greatest Show on Earth beat out High Noon, The Quiet Man and The Bad and the Beautiful; and, lest we forget, the Academy members, in their infinite stupidity, decided that “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” performed on the Oscarcast by the group that composed it, the 3-6 Mafia, was voted the Best Song of 2006. It thereby took its place on a list of honorees that included “The Lullaby of Broadway,” “The Way You Look Tonight,” “Over the Rainbow,” “The Last Time I Saw Paris,” “White Christmas,” “It Might as Well Be Spring” and “Moon River.” If you close your eyes, you can almost picture some bureaucrat in Heaven telling the likes of Harry Warren, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, to be sure and make room in their clubhouse for the dudes in the 3-6 Mafia.

I keep hearing that Newt Gingrich is a great idea man. That begs the question why he should be the president. It seems to me that if someone is an innovator, you don’t make him the CEO of the company, you put him in charge of the lab. In Newt’s case, I think he might make an admirable Secretary of State or, maybe better yet, as a John Bolton-like ambassador to the U.N.

So he won in 1940.

When it wound up taking Iowa weeks before deciding that Santorum and not Romney had won the caucus -- but even then they couldn’t be sure because they had somehow misplaced a ton of ballots -- I expected Florida’s governor, Rick Scott, to send Iowa’s Governor Terry Branstad a one-word telegram: “Thanks!” After those folks botched the counting of a mere 121,000 votes, it couldn’t help but take the onus off Florida. Iowa didn’t even have all those blankety-blank hanging chads to contend with.

Speaking of which, one of the absurdities of the primary system is how much attention it focuses for months on end on states such as Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. In addition to the 121,000 caucus votes cast in Iowa, there were 248,000 cast in New Hampshire and roughly 600,000 in South Carolina. In short, we have devoted endless time and energy to analyzing less than a million votes when, in the general election, more than 140,000,000 votes will be cast. To me, that makes about as much sense as judging a book by its first paragraph.

Tony Bennett and Elvis Costello sing “They Can’t Take That Away From Me”

Finally, as dumb as Obama’s nixing the Keystone XL oil pipeline is, it’s even dumber that we’re not drilling for oil in Alaska and in the lower 48. I still recall when Bill Clinton was railing against the endless demands that he “Drill, Baby, Drill!” In 1996, he actually had the gall to argue that even if they opened ANWR to the oil industry, it would still take 10 years before the oil would reach our local gas pumps. At the time, I pointed out that it would eventually be 2006 in any case, and wouldn’t it be nice if we no longer had to depend on the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Russia, to supply our energy needs.

The fact is, because of environmental Nazis and their advocate in the Oval Office, we have pretty much shut down the oil and coal industries. It seems to me that should be a constant source of shame for every member of Congress, including those on the right side of the aisle.

The very idea that America is still dependent on foreign oil makes about as much sense as Mexico having to import tortillas, Italy having to import olive oil and France having to depend on Luxemburg to supply them with snails.

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

2012-02-20T00:01:00.001-08:00

Don't miss today's bonus article, DIDDLING WHILE AMERICA BURNS. -ed.

by BurtPrelutsky

We all realize that the members of the media, including several of the talking heads who appear regularly on Fox News, have one thing in common; namely, that Barack Obama plays a leading role in all of their favorite wet dreams. But, still, wouldn’t you think that just once, some reporter would ask Obama to explain why Warren Buffet and all of his other millionaire and billionaire chums, the guys who plunk down $35,000 to hear him deliver a campaign speech, don’t simply send more money to the IRS?

We all know that there is a certain amount that every tax payer has to cough up on April 15th, unless you’re one of the 47% who pays no income taxes at all or someone like Timothy Geithner or Charles Rangel, who regards himself as a 47-percenter at heart; but there is not a maximum amount. There’s nothing in the tax code that compels anyone to take deductions. If, like Obama, you believe that the federal government spends your money far more wisely than you do, feel free to write a bigger check. After all, we all know that the best way to lead is by example. But the only example that Obama and his fat cat cronies set is one of blatant hypocrisy.

Talking about lousy examples, what is going on with our military? First, we had Major Nidal Hasan’s superiors at Fort Hood turning a blind eye to his doing everything but decorating his bunk with pin-up pictures of Osama bin Laden prior to murdering 14 people. Now, we have the administrators at West Point rescinding the invitation to retired Lt. General William G. Boykin to address the cadets at a prayer breakfast.

It seems that Boykin, a recipient of the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit with oak leaf clusters, the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart with oak leaf clusters, is a plain-spoken Christian who has ruffled Muslim feathers along the way. He has done this by quite rightly pointing out that, unlike Mohammad, Jesus Christ not only helped to civilize mankind, but also inspired our Founding Fathers in the creation of the United States. As a result of setting the record straight, he was targeted by a group called Vote Vets.org. It describes itself as “the largest progressive group of veterans in America.”

When Vote Vets isn’t attacking people like Boykin, Sean Hannity and Col. Oliver North, it finances political campaigns against such conservative stalwarts as Rick Santorum, George Allen, John Cornyn, Mitch McConnell, John Thune and Mark Kirk. It has also poured millions of dollars into promoting the global-warming hoax and opposing oil drilling in America.

It seems to me that if West Point is allowing itself to be pressured by these left-wing louts, we can expect they’ll next start taking their marching orders from the Occupy Wall Street anarchists and the loony ladies of Code Pink.

Speaking of the military reminds me that although I find Ron Paul’s cavalier dismissal of the threat posed by a nuclear Iran to be irrational, I share a few of his concerns about our role in the world. For instance, I think it is high time that we let Europe protect itself against Russia. No reason on earth why we should be borrowing money in order to do for them what they can do for themselves.

I would also suggest that we cut way back on the number of mutual defense pacts we have. Although we have a few actual allies in the world, including England, Canada, Australia, Japan, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic, I think we should at least be able to count on the support of a nation when it comes to U.N. votes before we enter into mutual defense pacts that are obviously “mutual” in name only. For instance, in what bizarre universe do you think we could actually count on the likes of Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Argentina, Kuwait, Bahrain or Turkey, to come to our aid? The answer, I’m afraid, is when Hell freezes over or the cow jumps over the moon.

Finally, I understand that there are some people who are convinced that Christian evangelicals might stay home on Election Day if Mitt Romney garners the GOP nomination. I truly hope that’s not the case. Not only because it would enable Obama to win a second term, but because it would mean that a significant number of my fellow Republicans are so religiously intolerant that they would spurn a presidential candidate simply because of his faith. For one thing, we don’t live in a theocracy and, for another, I think it would be pretty hard to find two more decent patriots in public life than Mitt Romney and his fellow Mormon, Glenn Beck.

On the other hand, honesty compels me to mention that a third notable Mormon is Harry Reid.

Which only goes to prove that no religion is perfect.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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DIDDLING WHILE AMERICA BURNS

2012-02-20T00:01:00.000-08:00

Don't miss today's bonus article, UNBURDENING MYSELF. -ed.

by BurtPrelutsky

The worst thing about the political debates isn’t the format or the content, but that it magnifies debating skills to such an extent. I keep hearing that Gingrich would demolish Obama in a debate. I disagree. Republicans would watch such a debate and decide that Newt had mopped the floor with Barack; Democrats would see it the other way around. And the next day, the liberal media would announce that Obama won by a knockout in the first round.

As we all know, a president no more needs to be a great debater than he needs to know how to juggle plates, play the accordion or yodel.

Apparently, in Jodi Kantor’s book, The Obamas, the thing that unites Barack and Michelle is the sincere belief that America needs to be radically transformed. Apparently, they both subscribe to the nutty notion that the gap that exists between those who are successful and those who are poor has nothing much to do with hard work, dedication, talent and ambitious goals, everything to do with “opportunity, power, access and wealth.”

Even I have to grant that power and access explain how it was that Michelle came to be paid an astronomical $350,000-a-year working as a part-time administrator at a Chicago medical center once her husband was elected to the Illinois legislature.

It also appears that when some of us have accused Obama of being arrogant and narcissistic, we weren’t just whistling “Dixie.” He has apparently told his staff that he knows more about banking than bankers, is a better writer than his speechwriters and knows more about issues than his policy directors. In 2008, he was quoted as saying, “I think I could probably do every job on the campaign better than the people I’ll hire to do it.”

That’s pretty big talk coming from a guy who never held an actual job prior to being elected president, unless you’re one of those people who believes that being a community organizer for ACORN looks impressive on a resume.

One of the scariest things I’ve gleaned from the book is that Barack relies on Michelle to let him know the pulse of the nation. This is a woman who is either jetting off on exotic vacations at taxpayer expense or hosting galas at the White House for the likes of Paul McCartney, Tom Hanks and Oprah. Using Michelle as a sounding board sounds a lot like Louis XVI relying on Marie Antoinette to tell him what was really bugging the French peasants.

Apparently, Obama, who in conjunction with his attorney general, Eric Holder, has created the most racist administration in American history, is of the opinion that the only reason he could possibly lose his bid for re-election is white racism. In his opinion, it can’t possibly have anything to do with ObamaCare; an additional six trillion dollars in national debt; taking his marching orders from George Soros and public sector unions; playing politics with the XL oil pipeline; the first ever downgrading of America’s credit rating; 47 million Americans on food stamps; an unemployment/underemployment rate of 16%; and his giggling like a school girl when he announced, after blowing a trillion tax dollars on his stimulus bill, that apparently shovel-ready jobs weren’t quite as shovel-ready as he’d insisted.

So, Obama would have us believe that the same country that elected him over John McCain in 2008 is now the land of bigotry if the folks don’t make that mistake again. He’d do well to recall the old adage: fool us once, shame on you; fool us twice, shame on us.

He reminds me of the black basketball coach who, a few years ago, sued the college that fired him, claiming racism. He somehow managed to overlook the fact that, one, over the course of three seasons, the team had lost three times as many games as they had won; and, two, that the bigots who fired him were the very same people who had hired him in the first place.

Speaking of “basketball,” over the past few years, conservatives are taken to task if they even utter the word in connection with Obama, even though he loves being photographed driving for an uncontested lay-up. He also enjoys establishing his “street cred” by talking about March Madness and the NCAA basketball tournament, lest people start thinking he spends all his time on the golf course, just like all those rich white guys he’s always whining about.

But conservatives are also accused of speaking in racist code if they even say words like “entitlements” and “food stamps.” As you may recall, Juan Williams, who’s no stranger to playing the race card, scolded Newt Gingrich for that very thing during the GOP debate down in Myrtle Beach.

It’s a strange world when white conservatives stand accused of bigotry if they vote against someone whose policies and philosophy they find equally offensive whether advanced by Obama or promoted by his white allies in Congress. But nobody dares mention racism, or even misogyny, when prior to giving 97% of their votes to Obama in the general election, a huge majority of blacks supported Obama in his run against the equally liberal Hillary Clinton.

Finally, I suppose most of you have heard about the policy recently introduced in Washington, D.C., mandating that exterminators treat rats as if they were an endangered species, and transport them painlessly to a different location. When I first heard the news, I threw my hat in the air and hollered “Hurrah!” The letdown came a few minutes later when I found out they were talking about actual four-legged rodents and not Harry Reid and his cronies in Congress.

Although it is difficult to understand why D.C. politicians would create such a goofy program, I suspect the answer lies in the old joke about the reason that sharks never attack lawyers swimming in the ocean; namely, professional courtesy.

©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 STATE OF THE STATES

2012-02-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

At times, it’s heartbreaking to find that some states are as inept as the federal government. Of course, living, as I do, in California, I’m in no position to throw stones. However, when I found that it took Iowa weeks to finally add up a mere 200,000 caucus votes and still not know the actual election results, I wondered once again why Iowa is allowed to be the kickoff state in presidential elections. I may have missed it, but I don’t recall seeing it mentioned in the Constitution that Iowa and New Hampshire were endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them were life, liberty and dibs on hogging the nation’s attention every four years.

On the flip side, we have had Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina, drawing the ire of Eric Holder by doing their best to rid America of illegal aliens. We also have several states waging the good fight against Obama and the Justice Department by insisting that voters have to provide photo IDs for something even more important than buying cigarettes and beer.

We should never lose sight of the fact that Ronald Reagan once said, “The federal government is not the solution; it’s the problem.” That is especially the case when it’s in the hands of socialist nincompoops who look at what’s happening to the nations of Europe and, with a straight face, say, “We should be more like them. Forget the glories of ancient Greece; it’s modern Greece we should be emulating!”

Although we keep hearing about the importance of a college education, particularly an Ivy League college education, what is one to make of people like Obama and cabinet members Hillary Clinton, Tim Geithner, John Bryson, Shaun Donovan, Arne Duncan and Eric Holder, all of whom got their degrees from Harvard and Yale? Let’s face it -- if a manufacturing company turned out such shoddy products, you would assume that the only reason they weren’t out of business is because Obama was shoveling billions of tax dollars their way to keep them on life support.

Speaking of Obama, why aren’t the labor unions who have seen Obama cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, depriving them of at least 20,000 jobs, raising a stink about it? You know for a fact that if it had been a Republican president who had caved in to the environmental fascists, killing jobs and forcing Canada to send the oil to China instead of Texas, they’d be marching on the White House with torches and pitchforks. But I suppose it’s a pipe dream to expect a union to turn on the arrogant ignoramus who handed GM over to the UAW.

I had assumed, as had most people, that the murder of 14 people and the wounding of 29 others by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood was the result of Islamic jihadism. The only reason that Hasan, whose business cards read “Soldier of Allah,” had not been sent to the stockade or an asylum was because his military superiors were afraid of being labeled religious bigots. What I had not known until learning of it from David Horowitz, is that Barack Obama said the 43 were victims of…(a drumroll, please)…work place violence.

In other words, it had nothing to do with Islam. According to the golfer-in-chief, those 43 Americans were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like those folks who get shot up when a disgruntled postal employee flips out. It makes it kind of hard not to sympathize with Hasan’s superiors when their own superior is so easily cowed by Muslims.

In a way, Obama is the inevitable end result of a half century of left-wing indoctrination in American schools, media and pop culture. For decades, we have raised kids with the idea that they’re entitled to have high self-esteem even if they’ve done nothing to earn it. They’re told that grades aren’t important and that nobody should keep score at athletic events because it’s the participation that matters, not whether one wins or loses. These loons insist they want equal playing fields, but what they really want are equal results. Nobody is supposed to be better, richer, smarter or stronger, than anyone else, because, if they are, it means that they must have cheated or their parents cheated. It can’t be the result of brains or genes, initiative or even luck.

Thomas Sowell, in a recent article, pointed out that all over the world some groups have always exceled financially and intellectually. He listed the Ibos in Nigeria, the Parsees in India, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Germans in Brazil, the Chinese in Malaysia, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Tamils in Sri Lanka. Although he didn’t mention it, I’ll add the Jews in many places. That’s just the way it is. That’s not to say that individuals in other groups can’t rise to the top, especially in America.

The odd thing is that while nobody would ever think to suggest that height and brawn are equally distributed, liberals somehow think that brains and ambition should be. And if they’re not, the federal government should somehow compensate for the grave injustice.

The fact of the matter is that every liberal is at heart a Utopian. They believe that if enough laws and regulations are passed, human equality is attainable. As goofy as that sounds, it’s easily explained. Liberals, you see, are morons. That’s why they continue to believe, for instance, that socialism is so much better than capitalism.

Their philosophy is all theory and no reality. To socialists, all human beings have equal potential, but that’s because they don’t stop to consider what actual human beings, as opposed to slices on a bureaucratic pie chart, are actually like.

As a result, human nature -- at least those parts of it that involve sloth, lust, stupidity and greed -- is the thing that Utopians never take into consideration.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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NUMBERS DON’T LIE, LIBERALS DO

2012-02-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Republicans are worried sick that the Democrats will be able to use all the nasty sound bites from the GOP debates in the general election. I’m not too concerned for a number of reasons, but the main one is that the GOP will merely have to produce ads in which we show Barack Obama saying, “I’m pledging to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office” and “If I don’t get the unemployment rate under 7%, I deserve to be a one-term president.”

For good measure, I would produce another ad in which I showed Obama and jobs czar Jeffrey Immelt giggling as the president says, “I guess shovel-ready jobs weren’t quite as shovel-ready as we thought.” The viewer would be reminded that this came a long time after Obama, Pelosi and Reid, shoved through a trillion dollar stimulus that they promised would turn around the economy.

Only a know-nothing know-it-all like Obama would even consider blowing hundreds of billions of tax dollars on solar panels and railroads, two things that Americans crave about as much as they do a case of measles or mumps.

In spite of Obama’s chief of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s insisting that our southern border has never been more secure, according to Townhall writer Katie Pavlich, there is at least one official sign posted in southern Arizona that reads: “Travel Caution: Smuggling and Illegal Immigration May Be Encountered in This Area.” But I suppose Ms. Napolitano can’t possibly see the sign from 2,000 miles away.

It’s also worth mentioning that the American Bar Association has rated a record number of Obama’s judicial nominees as “not qualified,” and they weren’t even referring to Kagan and Sotomayor. Or, for that matter, to Attorney General Eric Holder, under whose watch the feds allowed over a thousand weapons to be delivered to Mexican drug cartels and who, for good measure, refused to prosecute the Black Panthers for intimidating white voters. For purposes of comparison, the ABA rejection rate of Obama’s judicial appointments is four times as high as it was under Clinton or Bush. But I guess that’s to be expected when you keep trying to pay off hundreds of crooked Chicago cronies with federal judgeships.

Speaking of numbers, Newt Gingrich came under fire from the self-righteous Juan Williams for referring to Obama as the Food Stamp President. Led by Williams, liberals insisted that was a racist slur. But, then, those self-righteous ninnies consider every honest comment about Obama’s administration to be a racist slur.

Liberals were quick to point out that most of the 47,000,000 people now collecting food stamps are white. As typically happens when liberals start tossing numbers around, the purpose isn’t enlightenment, but obfuscation. Their intention, whether it’s food stamps or crime statistics, is to pretend that guilt can only be ascribed to white Americans.

In the case of food stamps, all they had to do was point out that the majority of those using food stamps are whites, not blacks. While that’s true, it’s also true that whites constitute two-thirds of the population, blacks roughly one-seventh. So while it’s a fact that whites are 34% of the folks on food stamps and blacks only 22%, 66% of the population is white and only 13% black. In case you’re one of those who never quite mastered percentages in junior high, let me try to clarify things. There are 310 million Americans, 205 million of whom are white, 40 million are black. That, we can agree, is quite a gap. On the other hand, of the 47 million Americans collecting food stamps, only about 16 million are whites, while nearly 10.5 million are black.

So, while I don’t favor Newt Gingrich in the primaries, I think we can all agree that he’s not a racist.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Juan Williams.

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

2012-02-13T00:02:00.000-08:00

Enjoy this bonus article. Be sure to read “YOU KNOW YOU’RE A LIBERAL...” -ed.

by BurtPrelutsky

Judging by the email I receive from my readers, there are a lot of Republicans who feel that Mitt Romney doesn’t pass the conservative litmus test. Some of them even threaten to sit out the presidential election if Governor Romney secures the nomination. Although I do my utmost to be polite in my response, the truth is, I regard such people as idiots and loons.

Burt endorses Mitt

First of all, in any competition, you can only choose the best of the contenders, not the ideal. So, would I be more enthusiastic about Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and Mitch Daniels? Yes, I would be. I would also favor George Washington, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, three other guys who are not in the race.

But when it comes to choosing between Newt Gingrich, Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, I find the choice an easy one. Newt Gingrich lugs around more baggage than a team of redcaps. When a politician has been involved in this many scandals involving sex and money, I just naturally assume he’s a Democrat. Besides, this is a guy who has sat on a couch with Nancy Pelosi and promoted the global warming hoax; he has attacked free market capitalism; and dismissed Paul Ryan’s economic plan as “right-wing social engineering.”

Ron Paul seems an amiable sort of guy. He reminds you of an elderly uncle who shows up at family reunions, has a few drinks and winds up asleep at the dinner table, with his head resting in the mashed potatoes. Although I would never wish to be accused of fomenting ageism, the fact remains that if he were elected, he would be in his 80s before the end of his first term. A guy that age should be taking naps regularly, not running the most powerful nation on earth.

In terms of policy, anyone who is cavalier about a nuclear Iran; believes that 9/11 was our own fault; and supports gutting and neutering the U.S. military, is someone who should not be trusted anywhere near sharp tools, heavy machinery or the Oval Office.

Rick Santorum strikes me as a decent man. He also strikes me as a perennial lightweight. He comes across like a male ingénue. Between his tinny voice and his sweater vests, I keep expecting him to run on stage and say, “Tennis, anyone?” Also, as Newt Gingrich has pointed out, as a senator, he was in the hip pocket of the Pennsylvania unions, supported Arlen Specter’s re-election and was the crown prince of earmarks.

As a personal aside, I should mention that when I interviewed Senator Santorum for my latest collection of interviews, I asked him if he was in favor of term limits. When he said he was, I asked him why, in that case, after serving two terms in the House and two terms in the Senate, had he run for a third term? He said, “Because I favor more than two terms for the Senate.” I told him that was what separated politicians from normal people.

Having explained why I would not like to see the other three contenders get the nomination, the main reason that I would like to see Mitt Romney carry the GOP standard is because I regard him as the best bet to defeat Barack Obama, the worst and the most dangerous president in American history.

Although many Republicans do not consider Romney a true conservative, the fact is America is not a truly conservative nation. It’s not Party bosses who shove people like Bob Dole, John McCain and the Bushes, down our throats, as some folks insist is the case. They happen to be the folks who win our primaries. The country is pretty evenly divided between conservatives and liberals. It is the 20% in the middle who call themselves moderates and independents who determine winners and losers, and they are put off by candidates, Democrat or Republican, they regard as extremists. They are far more likely to support Romney, a man whom even his opponents call a moderate, than they are either of the other three.

The thing to keep in mind is that if conservatives can’t win GOP primaries, what makes anyone think they can win general elections, when, for reasons I’ll never understand, liberals and middle-of-the-roaders are allowed to vote?

Most conservatives insist on litmus tests to determine the purity of Republican candidates. But the fact is they’re fooling themselves. They’ll dismiss Romney simply because he was the governor of a liberal state and had to compromise with a legislature that was jam-packed with Democrats. What they fail to acknowledge is that our hero, Ronald Reagan, would not have passed a similar test in 1980. As the governor of a liberal state, he twice raised taxes; he shut down California’s mental institutions, releasing thousands of psychotics who crowd our streets to this day; and he signed the most liberal abortion bill in America.

And while it’s convenient to overlook the fact, Reagan got played for a sucker by a left-wing Congress that promised to shut down the Mexican border, and foolishly signed the amnesty bill that saw our illegal alien population soar from three million to 15 million. Too bad that in this all-important matter, Reagan trusted, but didn’t verify!

Mitt Romney may or may not be a RINO, but the last one we had in the White House wasn’t all that terrible. As I recall, he got rid of Saddam Hussein; he prevented a repeat of 9/11; he placed Sam Alito and John Roberts on the Supreme Court; and, for good measure, he kept Al Gore and John Kerry out of the Oval Office.

If all that Mitt Romney does is evict Barack Obama, he will have earned his place on Mount Rushmore.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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YOU KNOW YOU’RE A LIBERAL IF…

2012-02-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

A friend recently sent me a list defining the differences between Democrats and Republicans. Because so many people write to me, insisting that they can’t see any difference, I’ll print out my slightly revised version as a public service:

If a Republican doesn’t like guns, he doesn’t buy one; if a Democrat doesn’t like guns, he wants them outlawed.
If a Republican is a vegetarian, he doesn’t eat meat; if a Democrat is a vegetarian, he expects the federal government to ban meat products, along with salt, sugar and chocolate.
If a Republican is a homosexual, he quietly leads his life; if a Democrat is homosexual, he demands that marriage be turned into a free-for-all.
If a Republican is poor, he thinks about how to best improve his situation; a Democrat demands a hand-out.
If a Republican doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches stations; Democrats demand that he be tossed off the air.
If a Republican is a non-believer, he doesn’t attend church; an agnostic Democrat wants all references to God, Jesus and Christmas, to be banished from the land and will lie about the First Amendment to help him get his way.

In spite of believing all of that, I still doubt that any of the Republicans seeking the nomination will be able to carry through on their promise to eliminate the departments of Commerce, Education and Energy, and all the federal regulations that Chairman Obama has put into place. It’s not that I doubt their sincerity, but getting rid of regulations means getting rid of regulators. And I simply can’t picture a Republican president adding hundreds of thousands of unskilled, essentially unemployable, bureaucrats to the unemployment rolls.

The fact that liberals are so sheep-like in their opinions has led me to conclude that they’re not born like the rest of us, but merely cloned.

I have spent years trying to get inside the mind of a liberal. I can only explain my failure as an inability to blast through all the concrete. One of the few things I have managed to figure out is that they are not unaware that socialism hasn’t worked out too well in China, the Soviet Union, Cuba, Cambodia, North Korea, France, Greece or Nazi Germany, but they have somehow convinced themselves that the only problem with the alternative to capitalism is that it has never been done correctly. In that way, as in so many others, they’re exactly like those goofballs who assume they can use heroin and cocaine without becoming addicted.

The only reason, I’ve decided, that people can be so easily convinced that day is night, black is white, and up is down, is because it’s only very small lies that are transparent to everyone. To see through big lies, lies that are foisted on us by those who want to peddle us bad drugs and even worse ideas, is that you actually require the ability to think for yourself.

This being an election year, I hear a number of people claiming what they seek in a president or a senator is a statesman. I, for my part, think “statesman” is a euphemism that politicians concocted for themselves in the same way that garbage collectors decided they preferred being called waste managers.

I say, if you got your job by running for office and getting elected, thus avoiding having to prove you’re qualified to do anything genuinely useful, you’re a politician. What’s more, if you owe your job to a politician, you’re a bureaucrat.

The only time a politician should ever be referred to as a statesman is when he dies. After all, nobody expects sincerity in obituaries, and his family will probably appreciate the gesture.

Cyril Northcote Parkinson was an Englishman who gave his last name not to the dreadful disease, but to the Law that states that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. It’s hard not to believe that he had the U.S. Congress in mind when he came up with that notion, but perhaps Parliament served equally well as his muse. Mr. Parkinson also observed that there’s nothing that an official loves more than multiplying his subordinates, which is why bureaucracies regularly rise by 5-7% annually, irrespective of the amount of work to be done, even in the midst of a financial meltdown.

C.N. Parkinson was also the fellow who pointed out that expenditures inevitably rise -- and I would add, generally exceed -- income. And that holds true for governments every bit as much as individuals.

Speaking of excess, we have an aristocracy in America, but instead of the dukes and lords Parkinson had to contend with, ours consists of actors, rock stars, professional athletes and people like Paris Hilton and the Kardashians, who seem to have glommed onto fame and fortune through the simple but mystifying process of drawing a number out of a cosmic hat.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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MINING FOOL’S GOLD

2012-02-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

[Starting this week, we’ll publish on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. - ed.]

by BurtPrelutsky

While I was on a recent vacation, I watched Fox News more than usual. Mainly what I noticed is that while Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, Leslie Marshall, Bob Beckel and Geraldo Rivera, are the five most annoying things to be found on the network, rounding out the top 10 are the commercials for the gold merchants, Merit Financial, Lear Capital, Goldline, Discount Gold Brokers and Rosland. The worst of the lot is Rosland, which day after day, enables three of the least appealing guys in America, Ben Ferguson, dentist Larry Pickard and Jeffrey Nichols, to enter our living rooms. For sheer gall, it’s hard to top the moment when young Ferguson asks Mr. Nichols why he purchases his gold from Rosland, while Nichols is simultaneously identified on screen as the senior financial advisor for the company!

It became increasingly difficult to take Romney’s rivals seriously when they spent all their time attacking Bain Capital instead of focusing their anger on Obama Capital. To my mind, “vulture capitalism,” which quickly replaced “at this point in time” as my least favorite expression, is when you take American tax dollars and hand them off to your fat cat contributors so that they, in turn, will send a portion of the loot back to Obama’s Re-election Campaign.

I must confess I got awfully tired of hearing that Newt Gingrich was a changed man, so it was finally a relief when, once the Iowa caucus was behind him, he could again show his true, obnoxious, colors.

Although I don’t hold most politicians in terribly high regard, at least when it comes to the ranks of the Republicans, it is hard to find anyone ranker than the former Speaker.

Even among the Democrats, it is rare to find anyone whose entire career has been motivated entirely by money, sex and revenge. While those are standard characteristics for a Shakespearean king, they’re not ideal when it comes to an American president. On second thought, it’s not all that rare among the Democrats. What could I have been thinking?

Sometimes the propaganda efforts by Obama are so clumsy that one can only laugh. For instance, he had a big bash at the White House for those so-called business owners whom he credited with “insourcing American jobs.” While it was true that I couldn’t recognize any of the people standing behind him at the photo op, it’s also true that I don’t know very many business owners. But, I finally caught on to the game when, after the staged event, we heard directly from two of the participants. The first was the Democratic mayor of Atlanta, and the other was the head of the Steelworkers Union. Only a former community organizer would identify such people as business owners. It reminded me of the charade when, in order to push his god-awful health care program, Obama had a bunch of shills don medical smocks and sit in the White House Rose Garden while gazing adoringly at him.

Even though the holiday season is now just a distant dot in our rearview mirror, it occurred to me the other day that the very same gremlins who annually wage war against the trappings and traditions of Christmas, parroting their favorite advertising slogan, “separation of church and state,” are the most vocal when it comes to promoting Sharia Law as a viable option for American Muslims. I will also wager that they wouldn’t voice the slightest objection if Kwanzaa were made a national holiday.

In much the same way, if the Tea Party favored liberals, but was otherwise unchanged in word or deed, we all know that Obama and his cronies would never in a million years accuse them of being racists, traitors and terrorists.

On the other hand, if the Occupy Wall Street movement consisted of conservatives, I find it highly unlikely that Nancy Pelosi would find the time or inclination to pay lip service to their spunk and youthful spontaneity.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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THERE’S WAY TOO MUCH FORGIVING GOING ON

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

[Starting this week, we’ll publish on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. - ed.]

by BurtPrelutsky

When Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour pardoned a number of murderers on his last day in office, he was acting in the proud tradition of several other political hacks. There was Bill Clinton, who not only pardoned Marc Rich, a major Clinton campaign contributor who had fled America with several million stolen dollars, but Harvey Weinig, a former Manhattan lawyer who had facilitated an extortion-kidnapping scheme and helped launder over $19 million for the Cali cocaine cartel. For good measure, among the 140 pardons he granted on getaway day were 16 members of the FALN, a Puerto Rican terrorist organization that had set off 120 bombs, mainly in Chicago and New York, along with Linda Sue Evans and Susan Rosenberg, who had been loyal members of the Weather Underground.

Compared to that, Governor Michael Dukakis was small potatoes, even though his presidential chances were fortunately scuttled when the world found out that he had allowed a Massachusetts murderer, Willie Horton, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, to be granted a weekend furlough. Predictably, instead of returning to prison as promised, Horton headed south, where, in Maryland, he twice raped a woman after pistol-whipping and stabbing her fiancé.

Governor Mike Huckabee, who also believes fervently in the rehabilitation of violent criminals, has Maurice Clemmons on his conscience. Clemmons, years after being pardoned by Huckabee, killed four police officers in Washington state.

Then there was Illinois Governor George Ryan, who in his last days in Springfield commuted 160 death sentences. But in his case, he may have just been planning ahead, because not too long after, he, himself, was sentenced to 30 years for political corruption, and a guy can’t have too many friends in the pen.

That brings us back to Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who decided that he wasn’t about to take a back seat to anyone when it came to playing the Good Samaritan. So it was that he decided that just because a bunch of convicted murderers hadn’t killed any of his grandkids when he had them working around the governor’s mansion in Jackson, he would return the favor by pardoning them.

You can almost see the appeal of bestowing forgiveness on the very worst among us. It allows these boneheads to regard themselves as godlike, behaving as they expect Jesus would if only He, too, could win a statewide election.

There are two obvious flaws in this sort of thinking, and the proof of the first is that these guys generally wait until they’re all packed up and ready to leave the key under the mat. That shows that they know there will be blowback from the public, who aren’t concerned with burnishing their holier-than-thou image, but with having to worry about their families with these killers running loose. God knows it’s hard enough to arrest and convict these bastards without then having some knucklehead springing them on a whim.

The second flaw is that even though Christians are supposed to hate the sin, but love the sinner, that doesn’t mean they’re supposed to park their brains and their common sense in the deep freeze.

Back in 1999, Pope John II, while on a visit to America, decided to campaign for the commutation of Darrell Mease’s death sentence. Mease had murdered three people, including a young paraplegic, but the Pope became convinced that he had experienced a religious conversion. It would have been too much to expect Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan to stand up to him, but I had hoped that he would at least have negotiated an agreement whereby Pope John II would have taken the 53-year-old Mease back to the Vatican with him, freeing Missourians of the obligation of housing and feeding this human slug for the next 30 or 40 years.

The irony is that Mease, who was a meth user and dealer, was also a religious bigot who despised Catholics.

In conclusion, I would say that the only people who are ever entitled to forgive a criminal are God, who apparently is in the business of forgiveness, and the criminal’s victims. And in the case of murderers, their victims have been permanently silenced, and it behooves the rest of us, including their parents, friends and siblings, to respect their silence by keeping our own self-righteous yaps shut.

I say the next time some political hack feels called upon to do a good deed, let him donate a kidney.

©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 GREAT AMERICAN NEWS QUIZ

2012-02-06T00:01:00.000-08:00

[Starting this week, we’ll publish on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. - ed.]

by BurtPrelutsky

It is obvious that when it comes to elections, the Democrats are always looking to game the system. That is why they are always campaigning to give voting privileges to prison inmates and illegal aliens. It also explains why people like Eric Holder make themselves look so foolish when they insist that the use of photo IDs on Election Day discriminates against young people and members of racial minority groups. You know, those very same folks who never seem to have a problem coming up with photo IDs when it comes to buying cigarettes and beer or getting on airplanes.

In fact, the real problem as I see it is that it is far too easy to vote. Any screwball, any crackpot, any drooling jackass, can show up and help determine who will be the President of the United States. I’m not suggesting that voting be limited to the landed gentry or white people or to people whose IQs are above 150. Each of those groups has its fair share of drooling jackasses, after all. But there is surely something terribly wrong with a system that allows people who ignore the political scene until the last possible moment and are then told that previous generations have fought and died so that these numbskulls can go out and vote. Instead of being encouraged to stay home, they are shamed into “doing their duty” when everyone in his right mind knows that the real duty of a citizen of the Republic is to first be informed.

This still being a free society, what previous generations fought and died for was the right not to vote. It’s only in dictatorships that 100% of the people are expected to go out and vote for tyrants like Joe Stalin and Saddam Hussein, and where people are sent to North Korean gulags if they don’t grieve long and hard enough when their dear leaders finally kick the bucket.

In the spirit of improving our system, I have come up with a sample quiz that people should be able to pass if they’re going to be granted voting privileges next November.

How large is our national debt?
1. $50 million
2. $100,000,000
3. $15 billion
4. $15 trillion
5. It’s a trick question. There is no such thing as a national debt.
Is the National Labor Relations Board one of the three branches of the federal government?
What is Harry Reid’s position in the U.S. Senate?
1. sergeant at arms
2. majority leader
3. wizard
4. men’s room attendant
5. there is no such person.
Eric Holder holds what cabinet position?
1. attorney general
2. token racist
3. Barack Obama’s best friend
4. president’s caddy
5. lightning rod for the administration.
Solyndra is the name of
1. America’s last space shuttle
2. a proposed oil pipeline
3. a defunct solar panel company
4. a vegetable
5. the Obamas’ older daughter.
What is Henry Waxman’s most notable accomplishment?
1. voting to continue funding ACORN when even the majority of House Democrats said “enough is enough”
2. chairing the committee investigating the use of steroids in major league baseball while under the impression that Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were chemists
3. hiring out as a garden gnome for children’s birthday parties
4. winning the “Biggest Nostrils in Washington” competition 30 years in a row
5. all of the above.
How long is a senator’s term?
1. two years
2. four years
3. six years
4. eight years
5. 759 years.
Where was Barack Obama born?
1. Chicago
2. Hawaii
3. Kenya
4. the brain of George Soros
5. under a cabbage leaf.
Nancy Pelosi serves what function in the House of Representatives?
1. tour guide
2. minority leader
3. ideal representative of her gay, lesbian and transgender, constituents
4. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s role model
5. Henry Waxman’s mistress.
Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D, FL) plays a major role in the Democratic Party. Is it
1. as the chairwoman of the DNC
2. to constantly remind every Jewish congressman of the last blind date he let his grandmother arrange for him
3. to make the likes of Maxine Waters, Barbara Boxer and Sheila Jackson Lee, seem almost regal by comparison
4. to constantly remind Henry Waxman of the girl that got away
5. all of the above.

The answers: (1) d; (2) No, it only thinks it is; (3) b; (4) a; (5) c; (6) e; (7) according to the Constitution, it’s c, but, for all practical purposes, it’s e; (8) no final determination has yet been made; (9) b,c.d and possibly e; (10) e. In an ideal world, if you scored 90 or 100%, you would be allowed to vote next November. If you scored 70 or 80%, you will probably vote for Obama, but it’s still a free country, if not an ideal world, and I guess there’s no way to stop you. If you scored below 70%, you will no doubt get lost on the way to your polling place, thereby earning the gratitude of a grateful nation.

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

2012-02-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

Part of the reason that people enjoy watching sporting events is because the outcome is clear cut. One team wins, another loses. Outcomes aren’t usually so black and white in any other area of life. That being said, my problem with sporting events is that far too often team defeats are laid at the feet of a single individual.

For instance, in 1991, with the score 20-19 in favor of the New York Giants, Buffalo Bills kicker Scott Norwood missed a game-ending 47-yard field goal in Super Bowl XXV. Buffalo fans haven’t forgiven him to this day. God only knows when Baltimore Ravens fans will forgive Billy Cundiff for missing a 32-yard attempt in the recent AFC playoff or San Francisco fans will cut Kyle Williams some slack for fumbling the ball during the NFC playoffs in the 49er loss to those same Giants. [Related: "7-year-old 49er fan commiserates with receiver"]

For most Americans, December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001 are dates that will live on in infamy. But for Chicago Cubs fans, a third date is October 14, 2003. That was the day when, with the Cubs leading the Florida Marlins 3-0, just five outs away from advancing to the World Series for the first time in 58 years, Steve Bartman, a fan in the stands inadvertently got between outfielder Moises Alou and a foul ball. By the time the smoke cleared, the Marlins scored eight runs in the eighth inning and 26-year-old Bartman was a marked man.

Back in 1951, Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca gave up the three-run homer to Bobby Thomson of the NY Giants, costing the Dodgers their shot at the World Series. It later turned out that the Giants had a spy tucked away in the scoreboard with a pair of binoculars who signaled the manager Leo Durocher, who in turn signaled Thomson what pitch to expect. Of course Thomson still had to hit “the shot heard ‘round the world,” as it came to be known. But Brooklyn fans didn’t know about Durocher’s shenanigans at the time, and it probably wouldn’t have mattered if they did. Sports fans don’t want excuses, except, of course, when it comes to their own fumbles, errors and mistakes.

In the same way that certain moments can taint a career, others can be magnified all out of proportion in the other direction. I am thinking of the moment during the South Carolina debate when Newt Gingrich used John King’s question about his first marriage to paint himself as the moral avenger. Because snippets of Marianne Gingrich’s ABC interview had been all over radio and television that day, everyone knew the question was coming. To his credit, Mr. King asked it first in order to get it out of the way, but it was the manner in which Gingrich employed verbal jujitsu to make himself out to be the victim of an unjustified attack that reversed the entire momentum of the campaign.

But I contend that Newt’s response had less to do with the reversal than the standing ovation it received from the folks in the auditorium. It was the thunderous applause that touched off the Pavlovian reaction in the voters at home. After all, what did his predictable slap down of the moderator, something he’d been doing regularly since the first debate, have to do with his electability or his qualifications to be president?

That is why my favorite debate was the one moderated by NBC’s Brian Williams. Before the first question was asked, Mr. Williams told the audience to hold their applause, thus providing the four contenders with more time in which to respond. As a result, it’s my opinion that all four men, including Rep. Paul, had the opportunity to make their strongest case yet to the electorate.

Recently, my friend Bernie Goldberg reported on a 2008 Pew Poll that indicated that it isn’t just conservatives who recognize that the elite media is filled with left-wingers. In the post-election poll, 62% of Democrats acknowledged that the media had been in the tank for candidate Obama. Of course every conservative is well aware of media bias, but I had assumed that most Democrats regarded themselves and their lap dogs in the fourth estate as middle of the road moderates and regarded the rest of us as being way out on the right shoulder of the road, along with the weeds and road kill.

Speaking of Obama, a friend sent me a definition of “ineptocracy,” a made-up word that is deftly defined as “a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society the least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.” It would be a challenge to do a neater job of summing up the Obama administration in 50 words or less.

Finally, lest anyone conclude that just because he isn’t my first or second choice, I would not vote for Newt Gingrich if he were to garner the GOP nomination, let me assure one and all that I will vote for any Republican running against Obama, and that includes Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes and William McKinley.

Granted, there are a number of things that I don’t like about Mr. Gingrich, but the main one is that I think he would have a tougher time defeating Obama than either Romney or Santorum. I also think that all the talk about the way Newt would manhandle the ex-community organizer in a debate is a whole lot of hooey. In the aftermath of those events, Democrats inevitably think their guy wins, Republicans think our guy wins, and independents, whose votes unfortunately determine the election, are busy watching “The Kardashians” or alphabetizing their canned goods.

For my part, I think Gingrich’s strengths would be wasted in the White House. Being quick-thinking and verbally adroit can certainly come in handy, but they happen to be skills I possess and I know only too well that I shouldn’t be allowed to come within a mile of the Oval Office.

With his short fuse and excess baggage, Newt Gingrich really isn’t cut out to be the president of the United States.

Instead, if he came to me for vocational guidance, I’d tell him to host a radio talk show or go be a judge on American Idol.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky. Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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SOME LIGHT BULBS ARE SCREWY

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

by BurtPrelutsky

When I heard Newt Gingrich seriously suggest that America, a nation perched on the edge of economic collapse because of Obama’s sending our debt soaring from $10 trillion to $16 trillion, should consider setting up a colony on the moon -- and, furthermore, granting statehood when the colony population reached 13,000 -- it occurred to me that “lunacy” is a word derived from Luna, a Roman deity who personified the moon.

When people insist that Gingrich would make a great president, they generally emphasize how many ideas he generates on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis. What they overlook is that a great many of his brainstorms are all wet.

Newt’s brainstorms are twisted

In the old days, whenever someone in the cartoons came up with an idea, the cartoonist would illustrate the event by showing a large light bulb floating over the character’s head. If I were drawing a strip called “Newt,” his ideas would be represented by those CFL twisty bulbs that not only provide very little illumination, but contain mercury, meaning that disposing of them is about as hazardous as trying to unload nuclear waste.

I’m not saying that all of Mr. Gingrich’s ideas are toxic, but it’s not as if the ones that aren’t are all that splendiferous. He’s merely a politician, after all, not a scientist trying to find a cure for cancer.

The nice thing about being president is that you don’t have to be the fountainhead of all ideas; the president has access to every good idea floating around in America. But because of Newt’s narcissism, which I don’t find all that different from Obama’s, I suspect that Gingrich doesn’t have too much interest in anyone else’s ideas and far too much love and respect for any and all that happen to spring from his own head.

Speaking of the egotist-in-chief, what I find so confounding about Barack Obama isn’t that he sticks to his guns in spite of one failure after another, but that so many Democrats still blindly support him. Understand, I don’t expect liberals to turn on him because he continues to promote the redistribution of wealth. After all, that’s what he promised to do as a candidate in 2008 and is one of the few campaign promises he has kept.

But when, during his State of the Union address, he had the gall to say that it’s not fair that Warren Buffet’s secretary, Debbie Bosanek, pays more in income taxes than billionaire Buffet, I don’t recall hearing any of the Party faithful call him on it. As we all know, tax rate is not the same thing as tax obligation. Even Ms. Bosanek, whom Obama had planted in the royal box with Michelle, knows she doesn’t write a bigger check to the IRS than her boss. We also know, as does Obama, that folks like Buffet and Romney already paid income taxes on the money they earned at a rate of 35% before getting to invest whatever was left and then pay an additional 15% on those capital gains. The IRS, a gang of ghouls who would cheerfully pry the gold from the teeth of the deceased, then gets a third crack at their money in the form of death taxes.

The notion that rich people don’t pay their fair share of taxes is such a blatant lie that only that half of the population that pays nothing, while in some cases collecting “refunds,” would be hypocritical enough to turn it into their favorite mantra.

One of the other gargantuan lies that leapt off the TV screen during Obama’s address was that, thanks to him, the U.S. has greater influence and garners more respect around the world than ever before. The idea that Obama could deliver that knee-slapper with a straight face, and that his puppets in Congress could compound the joke by giving him a standing ovation, suggests he just might be able to reverse Reagan’s career arc and end up as the president of SAG.

The fact of the matter is that he has about as much respect and influence on the world stage as Dennis Kucinich.

Otherwise, isn’t it safe to assume that the 2016 Olympic Games would be taking place in Chicago, and not Rio?

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

2012-01-30T00:05:00.000-08:00

[Enjoy a bonus article today. When you finish this article, be sure to read "No King Solomons in Sight"] by BurtPrelutsky

When people voice their disgust with the legal system, it’s not merely because of such obvious miscarriages of justice as O.J. Simpson and Casey Anthony being found not guilty by a jury of their (really stupid) peers or the nuisance lawsuits filed against doctors, forcing them to insist on unnecessary tests and procedures simply to protect their heinies; it’s because lawsuits have become so numerous and absurd, it’s become the equivalent of trick-or-treating for grown-ups.

A while back, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce listed the most ridiculous lawsuits of the past year. The following are the four that got the most votes: A convict sued a couple he had kidnapped for not helping him evade the police; a woman sued over a preview for the movie, “Drive,” because the coming attraction didn’t show enough driving; a woman disagreed with a store over an 80-cent refund and, so, sued for five million dollars; a man suing for age discrimination, after losing his case, then sued claiming the judge in the case was too old!

The one thing I’m certain of is that the Chamber of Commerce had a hard time choosing from among thousands of similar lame-brained lawsuits. The fact that there are hordes of these people among us is no surprise. After all, who did you think was voting for the community organizer in 2008? But the fact that these people have no problem finding lawyers to represent them strongly suggests that the ethical standards of the American Bar Association are every bit as lax as those of the Democratic National Committee.

A lot of people I hear from like to quote Thomas Jefferson’s line about refreshing liberty with the blood of Patriots and Tyrants, but, unlike them, I like to believe he was referring to foreign invaders. When people quote those words today, I don’t think about the American Revolution, but about the Civil War, the conflict that left 620,000 of our fellow Americans dead at places like Shiloh, Antietam and Gettysburg. So, no matter how lousy I believe Barack Obama is, I’m not prepared to spill the blood of my fellow Americans over an honest difference of opinion. November 6 isn’t that far off. Unlike the unfortunate folks in Egypt, Iran, Russia, North Korea and Libya, we have an easy way of ridding ourselves of tyrants and would-be tyrants.

One of the issues that divides most Americans is welfare. The dole, as it was best known during the Great Depression, was introduced by FDR and his fellow New Deal liberals in Congress. As originally conceived, it was intended to be a solution to a temporary problem. Instead, once the Democrats realized how easy it was to buy votes with tax dollars, it became a permanent problem with, even 80 years later, no solution in sight.

I know that Clinton and Gingrich are still taking bows for reforming welfare back in the 1990s, but they hardly scratched the surface. Of course these days, with the expanding numbers of public sector union members, nobody refers to enormous out-of-control pensions as welfare, but, euphemistically, as entitlements. But it is welfare, nonetheless, and its purpose now, as it was then, is to garner votes for liberal politicians.

Speaking of liberals, every time you hear one of them wail against photo IDs for voters, you know what they are really grousing about is that it would make it harder to cheat at election time. As usual, they, along with Eric Holder, try to pass off their criminal activities as compassion for young people and members of the black and Hispanic communities, pretending that photo IDs would disenfranchise millions of potential voters. On the face of it, it’s such blatant hypocrisy that only born liars and cheaters like Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, would even pay it lip service.

After all, as everyone knows, photo IDs are required if you want to drive a car, get on a plane or buy a six-pack of Bud. But the other day, the liberals in the Illinois legislature drove the point home when they passed a state law requiring that anyone who wanted to buy drain cleaner or any other caustic substance provide a photo ID.

While it figures that in Illinois, the state where governors regularly wind up in jail and dead people get to continue voting for Democrats, honest elections would not be a priority. Still, even in Chicago, it requires a monumental dose of cynicism to suggest that maintaining eternal vigilance over the sanctity of the hardware store trumps that of the voting booth.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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NO KING SOLOMONS IN SIGHT

2012-01-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

[Enjoy a bonus article today. When you finish this article, be sure to read "Screwballs and Screwdrivers."] by BurtPrelutsky

One good thing that candidate Gingrich did was open to discussion the role of the judiciary. Personally, I balk at his suggestion that judges should be called before Congress to explain and defend their dopey decisions. That is, unless members of Congress are then called before the judicial branch to explain their own follies. Still, there is no question that far too many judges have gotten way too big for their britches. Make that, their robes.

If it were up to me, I would limit Supreme Court justices to nine year terms. But I don’t want the president or Congress destroying the balance of power that the Founding Fathers worked so hard to create when they wrote the Constitution. Inasmuch as the president and the 535 members of Congress are every bit as prone to screw up as the Court -- and even more so when the Democrats are in charge! -- I can’t imagine why Gingrich felt those clodhoppers were qualified to judge the judges.

I, on the other hand, am quite prepared to point out any number of loons who get paid to wear their bathrobes to work. For instance, Federal Judge Susan Illston decided to lay down the law to Barry Bonds, baseball cheat and convicted perjurer. Unfortunately, what she laid down was more of a red carpet.

She ruled that, after the government had spent millions convicting the scoundrel, his punishment would consist of performing community service, being placed on probation for a short time and having to pay a $4,000 fine. To put the fine into proper perspective, Bonds was paid roughly $100,000 a game by the San Francisco Giants, meaning that he was paid more than $4,000 every half-inning. As for probation, I don’t think there was really much danger of the long-retired, 47-year-old ever juicing up again in order to hit home runs into Frisco Bay.

But to drive the point home that this was more than a mere slap on the wrist, Judge Illston also sentenced him to a few weeks of home confinement, ignoring the fact that his 15,000 square foot mansion in Beverly Hills was in no way to be confused with Soledad or San Quentin, except, perhaps, in terms of acreage.

I, myself, would have tossed his sorry butt in the slammer, not just for perjury, but for cheating and thereby erasing the legitimate accomplishments of better men, such as Hank Aaron and Roger Maris, from the record books.

It’s due to my friend Ronald Kessler, Newsmax contributor and author of The Secrets of the FBI, that I’m aware of the fact that John Hinckley, who continues to be classified as a Class III threat by the Secret Service, will soon be considered for release from St. Elizabeth’s, a psychiatric hospital in Washington, D.C.

It seems that U.S. District Court Judge Paul L. Friedman, who has been allowing Hinckley to visit his mother regularly for years now, will be the guy who makes the final call. During those visits, Hinckley, who not only shot President Reagan, but Press Secretary James Brady, Secret Service Agent Timothy McCarthy and D.C. Police Officer James Delahanty, is kept under constant surveillance by the Secret Service. So not only has this would-be presidential assassin been kept needlessly alive at taxpayer expense for the past 30 years, but we’ve had to pay extra so that his frequent furloughs could be monitored.

The questions that leap to mind are, one, why Judge Friedman has been so magnanimous to this lump of human excrement and, two, has Oscar-winning actress Jodie Foster, the object of Hinckley’s psychotic infatuation -- and his stated reason for seeking notoriety -- been informed that he may soon be resuming his interrupted courtship?

Finally, when it comes to judicial lunacy, is there a more glaring example than the fact that child rapists are ever allowed back on the streets once they’ve been caught and convicted? Every time I read about one of these monsters being released from jail on the condition that they stay a thousand or two thousand feet away from a school or park, I question whether judges or legislators, for that matter, are any saner than Mr. Hinckley. I mean, why on earth would anyone release into society a person who couldn’t be trusted not to rape another child?

Instead of counting off how many feet and inches it is to the nearest playground, why not accept that there is one very safe place to lodge these damn freaks? It’s called a prison.

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

2012-01-28T00:01:00.000-08:00

by BurtPrelutsky

All in all, 2011 provided us with some pretty good news. For one thing, our military took care of Osama bin Laden and Anwar al-Awlaki, God got rid of Kim Jong-Il and, for good measure, Barney Frank finally got around to announcing his retirement.

Kim Jong-Il

It was to be expected that Jimmy Carter, who insisted on paying his last respects to the otherwise unlamented Yasser Arafat, was probably the only person in the civilized world demented enough to send his sincere condolences to North Korea on the passing of its longtime dictator, the aforementioned Kim Jong-Il. So it is that although Carter’s claim to the title of Worst President of the United States has been usurped by Barack Obama, Mr. Peanut retains clear title to being the Worst Ex-President of the United States.

Speaking of titles, I had been unaware until reading his obituary that among Kim Jong-Il’s own honorifics were Best Leader Who Realized Human Wisdom; Master of Literature, Arts and Architecture; Humankind’s Greatest Musical Genius: World’s Greatest Writer; and, contrary to Al Gore’s opinion, Greatest Man Who Ever Lived.

One of the titles I fully expected to see, but didn’t, was Greatest Golfer in the Universe. After all, even the likes of Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson and Arnold Palmer, could only fantasize about shooting a round of 38 that included 11 holes-in-one. Although I have no reason on earth to doubt the North Korean news agency that reported such a miraculous round of golf, I have always wondered why Jong-Il required 27 shots to complete those other seven holes. I can only imagine that those damn little windmills threw him off his game.

An odd coincidence is that I believe 38 is the same score that Obama once reported bowling, a score that justifiably earned him the title of World’s Biggest Wienie.

Speaking of the man who is destined to take his place with the likes of James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding and Jimmy Carter, as America’s most inept one-term presidents, Obama has been accused of picking winners and losers in the business world by subsidizing the winners with our tax dollars. Furthermore, cynics claim that he selects them solely on the basis of the owners’ financial contributions to his re-election campaign. Pshaw! Even someone as openly partisan as I am can see how unjust that is. If that charge had any merit at all, Solyndra, as well as several other green energy concerns handpicked by this administration would be flourishing. So where, I ask on Obama’s behalf, are all these alleged winners? Instead, I say that Obama has exhibited the exact same questionable instincts when picking winners in the world of commerce that he’s shown in picking cabinet members, friends and religious mentors.

Finally, in all the squabbling between Republican presidential contenders, I have yet to hear anyone utter the unfortunate truth about Arabs and Muslims. For all the joyous blather that greeted the so-called Arab spring, the world has had no reason to rejoice over the results in Egypt, Libya or Syria. For their part, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, continue to be the same cesspools they were before America sacrificed blood and treasure in the hope of protecting one group of medieval terrorists from another.

In Saudi Arabia, one of our alleged allies in that part of the world, school textbooks continue to promote the official Islamic bilge that women are “weak and irresponsible,” that homosexuals “should be killed,” and that “the hour of judgment will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them.”

In the meantime, any Christian unfortunate enough to find himself in the Middle East is fair game for jihadists.

But all the while, we Americans are trained to parrot the lie, so often repeated by George Bush and Barack Obama, that Islam is a religion of peace and that America’s Muslims -- in spite of Major Hasan’s murderous rampage at Fort Hood, the campaign to erect a victory mosque at Ground Zero, and the Muslims in Dearborn, Michigan, who, along with their friends and relatives in Gaza, celebrated on 9/11 -- are every bit as benign and patriotic as the folks in the Tea Party movement.

Until we get a president who is willing to acknowledge that we are at war with Islamic fundamentalists; that Muslims played absolutely no role in the creation of the United States; that they are dedicated to a worldwide caliphate, whose primary goal would be the extermination of Jews and Christians; and that in any war waged between one Muslim sect and another, our place should be on the sidelines, cheering them on; we will continue being drawn into one bloody and ultimately futile enterprise after another.

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