From Red, White and Blue to Just Plain Red

From Red, White and Blue to Just Plain Red
by Burt Prelutsky

Before last year’s election, I heard a lot of people claim they didn’t feel they knew who Obama really was. For my part, I felt I knew him all too well. Which was why I didn’t like him and wouldn’t have voted for him even if he’d run unopposed, which, now that I think about McCain’s campaign, was pretty much the way it was.

Boneheads would have you believe my opposition to Obama is based on racism. I, on the other hand, would insist that when a presidential candidate announces that once his energy plan is in place, our energy costs will soar; that he will bury you if you have the temerity to own a coal company; and that he believes, as he told Joe the Plumber, that it is government’s job to re-distribute wealth, what does race have to do with it? I hated all that stuff back when it was being promoted by such white con artists as Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Saul Alinsky.

Furthermore, the way that blacks and other liberals label everyone they’re against as racists, I think conservatives should start suing these punks for slander. Make them either prove it in court or pay through the nose.

Obama would have you believe that anyone who doesn’t buy into his squandering trillions of dollars on pork, his cap & trade insanity or his attempt to turn America’s health care over to such left-wing loonies as Nancy Pelosi, John Conyers and Henry Waxman, is a racist. It’s the-one-size-fits-all insult.

When people insisted that Obama was an enigma, I assumed they just hadn’t been paying attention. In his own words, he described his coming of age politically in college when he’d begun seeking out Marxist professors for instruction, and radicals, Communists and Third World activists for companionship.

It’s funny how years ago, everybody laughed when Bill Clinton said he’d smoked marijuana, but he hadn’t inhaled. But when Obama told a much bigger whopper, one that came with cheese and fries, about sitting in a church for 20 years without ever hearing Rev. Wright utter a single unseemly remark about America or white people, I seemed to be one of the few people who found it amusing.

Even the fact that Obama chose to marry a woman who, in her college thesis, wrote that Princeton served as a perfect microcosm of racist America, tells you something about the man.

When Obama, a veteran of Chicago’s gutter politics, dismissed any connection to the likes of Tony Rezko, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, I could hardly stop laughing. Those on the Left predictably started flapping their gums about McCarthyism, insisting that whenever conservatives bring up guilt by association, it’s a sure sign the accused is as pure as the driven snow. Which is a lot of hooey. If it’s a sure sign of anything, it’s that the accused is an unrepentant Red who longs for the days of gulags and the KGB. Guilt by association happens to be one of the surest signs of guilt there is. There is, after all, a reason that felons on parole aren’t allowed to hang out with other felons. There is a reason that your granny was likely to point out that if you lie down with dogs, you were very likely to rise up with fleas.

There are conservatives who see FDR when they look at Obama, but I’m not one of them. There’s no doubt that Obama shares FDR’s dream of centralizing all power and wealth in the hands of the federal government, and whereas FDR liked and admired Joseph Stalin, Obama has fond feelings for Castro and Chavez. (Chavez, by the way, suggested to Castro, after Obama took control of GM, that there was a very real possibility that the two of them would eventually wind up to the right of the President. He may have meant it as a joke, but I don’t think so.) The major difference I see between Roosevelt and Obama is that I believe FDR, for all his faults, loved this country and regarded it as a special place based on a very special set of principles, whereas Obama believes it’s an arrogant country run solely by and for rich white people.

But, of course, by this time, even lunkheads who managed to sleep all the way through 2008 should be able to figure out that, as president, Obama hasn’t changed his colors, but only his address. His circle of acquaintances has certainly widened, but it hasn’t improved. All you have to do is look at the thugs in ACORN and the SEIU, at people like self-proclaimed Communist Van Jones, who serves as one of Obama’s czars, and Jeff Jones, another close advisor, who joined with Bill Ayers in creating the terrorist group known as the Weathermen.

And, lest we forget, Attorney General Holder, who has now decided to prosecute members of the CIA whose gravest sin was doing what needed to be done to protect America from a recurrence of 9/11, but decided to drop all charges against the Black Panther pluguglies who disenfranchised white voters by scaring them away from the polls. For anyone who knows the history of the anti-slavery movement in America, it’s certainly ironic that these days blacks are in the business of intimidating Republicans on behalf of their Democratic masters. Ironic and more than a little bit disgusting.

By now, I’m sure you’re aware that there’s a concerted effort to get Glenn Beck knocked off FOX by scaring off his sponsors. Even though I’m a fan of his and even though I believe in free speech, I have no problem with Americans trying to generate boycotts of goods and services. For instance, I happen to be all in favor of boycotting Scotland for sending Abdel Basset al-Megrahi back to a hero’s welcome in Libya, so there will be no shillelaghs, tams or bagpipes on my Christmas shopping list this year.

Still, before we get too big for our moral britches, we should keep in mind that whereas one football player got two years for merely shooting himself in the leg, another served a scant 18 months for hanging, beating, drowning and electrocuting, a large number of dogs. Therefore, I have no moral objection to ColorOfChange, a black activist group co-founded by that very same Van Jones, from threatening to boycott companies that dared to sponsor Beck’s TV show.

But, I think it should be noted that the guy who currently runs ColorOfChange is James Rucker. Mr. Rucker formerly worked for MoveOn.org, a left-wing propaganda organ financed largely by George Soros, yet another ex-con in Obama’s inner circle. Soros is also the fellow who offered to help his own mother commit suicide. While it’s true that she was a member of the Hemlock Society, it certainly helps explain why Soros thinks so highly of Obama’s approach to revolutionizing health care for seniors in America.

If anyone questions my use of “left-wing propaganda organ” to describe MoveOn.org, let me just say that when I paid a recent visit to their website, the first thing I saw was a picture of an old man holding a sign that read: “83% of Americans Favor Obamacare.” God knows I rarely quibble with my elders — and hope that, impressed with my shining example, those people younger than 69 won’t quibble with me — but unless there was very tiny print on the sign and what it actually said was, “83% of Americans who belong to MoveOn.org Favor Obamacare” or “83% of Americans Who Are in George Soros’s Will Favor Obamacare,” that’s a bald-faced lie. Actually, if you reversed the eight and the three, you’d be far closer to the truth.

As I was saying, ColorOfChange has every right to try to persuade companies to withhold their advertising dollars from Glenn Beck. In the same way, there’s nothing to prevent all of you from withholding your own dollars from the likes of Proctor & Gamble, Sargento Cheese, S.C. Johnson, Men’s Wearhouse, Lawyers.com, GEICO and State Farm Insurance, and letting them know what you think of companies that allow themselves to be intimidated by a small group of nasty, self-righteous radicals. (I have been told by a reliable source that there are four or five other companies that have knuckled under, but I’ve been unable to identify them. It’s telling, though, that ColorOfChange keeps insisting that they got over 30 companies to turn tail, even though most of those they’ve named never sponsored Beck’s show or anything else on FOX.)

Finally, I could hardly believe my ears when Barney Frank told a woman at his town hall meeting that arguing with her would be like arguing with his dining room table. His usual arrogance and bad manners aside, I would actually pay good money to see Barney Frank debate his dining room table. What’s more, I’d give odds and take the table.