Even Wide Awake, I'm Having Nightmares

Even Wide Awake, I'm Having Nightmares
Burt Prelutsky
Monday, August 03, 2009

When people used to conjure up an example of a man frazzled to within an inch of his life, they would refer to a one-armed paperhanger. On film, we had Mickey Mouse, cast as the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in “Fantasia,” bedeviled by a battalion of marching brooms. But so far as I’m concerned, when it comes to impossible tasks, nothing quite compares to being a conservative columnist trying to keep tabs on all the dreadful mischief being perpetrated by the loonies on the Left.

We could begin with whether or not Dick Cheney actually kept Congress out of the loop when the CIA was formulating a plan to assassinate Islamic terrorists. But, as usual, the liberals have it ass-backwards. The scandal would have been if Cheney had ever uttered a single word about it to an elected official. Next to having lunch with a generous lobbyist, there’s nothing a congressman or senator enjoys more than currying favor by passing along state secrets to the New York Times, so that our own version of Pravda can splash a traitorous headline across its front page. Liberals will occasionally make a movie about the courageous Germans who attempted to assassinate Hitler, but they get their panties in a knot when our government tries to kill Islamic terrorists. Hell, they even break out in hives if the human scum locked up in Gitmo don’t get their prayer mats dry-cleaned on a regular basis.

When it comes to our national security, keeping the likes of Barbara Boxer, Barney Frank and John Kerry in the loop would be the height of insanity. The only loop appropriate for most of the ninnies in Congress is one hanging from the branch of a very tall tree.

So far as I can tell, the only real difference between members of Congress and cockroaches is that one of the two species has a few more legs than the other.

Friends of mine keep trying to make me feel better by insisting that Obama’s poll numbers are falling. The trouble is that all he has to do is get a dog or nominate a female Hispanic to a job above her pay scale and the numbers start to rise. The guy is doing his best to destroy our industries with Cap and Trade; bankrupt our economy with trillion dollar stimulus bills; bring Cuban-style socialized medicine to America; turn a blind eye to nuclear-armed enemies; fund a criminal organization like ACORN with taxpayer dollars; allow the DNC to take control of the census; threaten to silence the opposition through the so-called Fairness Doctrine; and do everything but fly the hammer-and-sickle from the roof of the White House, and yet let him be photographed holding hands with Michelle and the kids, and millions of us seem ready to give him a “Well done!” and a friendly pat on the back.

Which is why I’m even more frightened of the electorate than I am of the elected. Politicians, even those as dangerously demented as Pelosi, Reid, Waxman and Obama, come and eventually go, but really dumb voters, it seems clear, are here to stay.

What Obama and his corrupt cronies are trying to do to health care should not only anger every American, it should have them reading up on guerrilla warfare. Ever since the presidential campaign, when Obama told the guy with the ailing elderly mother that instead of an operation, he should consider pain pills as the more sensible option, I knew this cold-blooded good-for-nothing was a man born, not to govern a nation, but to run a gulag.

But what makes it even worse is that the people in Washington who’d like to put old folks on ice floes and stick the rest of us in under-staffed medical clinics have no intention of sharing our sorry fates. Do you think Charley Rangel is going to take a number and twiddle his thumbs if he needs to have his 79-year-old gall bladder removed? Do you think that Marian Robinson, Obama’s 72-year-old mother-in-law, is going to be given a pain pill if she ever needs a liver transplant? As George Orwell put it in “Animal Farm,” which could well have served as a training manual for Obama’s administration, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

Still, say what you will about the Obamas, no one can deny that they aren’t doing all they can to combat unemployment. For instance, Barack is appointing so many czars, you’d think his last name was Romanov. In the meantime, Michelle has gathered a larger staff of courtiers and ladies-in-waiting than Madame Pompadour and Madonna put together. There were, at last count, 22 people answering directing to the First Lady, costing the taxpayer roughly $1.6 million a year. In Mrs. Obama’s case, these servants are called, among other things, Director of Communications for the First Lady, Deputy Social Director, Director of Scheduling and Associate Director of Correspondence. I swear there’s even an underling who goes by the title of Deputy Associate Director of Correspondence. In the Obama White House, it seems that even the gofers have gofers.

Finally, as a baseball fan, I was annoyed to see Obama all over this year’s All Star Game. Even before we were all treated to the embarrassing sight of this adult male tossing out the first pitch like a little girl, we had to watch him making small talk with the players in the locker-room. As if that wasn’t more than enough Obama at a sporting event, he next popped up in the broadcast booth with Tim McCarver and Joe Buck, trying his best to sound like a regular guy. I was reminded of John Kerry during the 2004 campaign when he tried his darndest to pass himself off in his spanking new Abercrombie & Fitch outfit as an outdoors man. Right -- there was nothing good old John ever enjoyed more after a day spent tramping through the woods stalking bears than taking off his boots and speaking French with his hunting buddies over some aged brie and a whimsical little Cabernet.

And, finally, although I wasn’t at the All Star Game in St. Louis, I know someone who was, and she insists that there were more catcalls than cheers for the Commander-in-Chief when he was driven out in the royal golf cart, but that the boos were apparently toned down mechanically by those in charge of the telecast. However, his handlers didn’t want to take any chances of a slip-up, especially not after the president’s generally reliable TelePrompter had recently broken down and left the great orator speechless, and that was the actual reason Obama was sporting a Chicago White Sox jacket. It wasn’t because he’s such a diehard fan or, as he said to McCarver and Buck, “My wife says I look cute in it,” but because it would then appear to the TV audience that he was being booed by the home crowd because he wasn’t wearing a Cardinal jacket.

Call me a cynic, but I have to assume that after Obama’s carefully choreographed appearance at the baseball game, his poll numbers went up.


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