Cinderella and Other Liberal Fairy Tales

Cinderella and Other Liberal Fairy Tales
by Burt Prelutsky
Saturday, July 23, 2011

A great many left-wingers, especially those employed in the media, are upset that Governor Rick Perry is a devout Christian. Even as a Jew, I find it bizarre that anyone but an orthodox Muslim would object to a person attempting to use Jesus Christ as a role model.

What makes their objections so risible are that these very same people worship at the feet of an ex-community organizer whose own disciples include avowed Communists, unrepentant terrorists, race-mongering ministers and run-of-the-mill Chicago ward heelers.

Speaking of the media, I wasn’t terribly surprised that England’s oldest tabloid, the News of the World, engaged in tapping phones and bribing Scotland Yard officers in pursuit of scoops. America’s own tabloids do the same sort of thing. Every time one of our rags reports that some celebrity has had plastic surgery or runs the mug shot of a Hollywood star who has been booked for drunk driving or drug abuse, you can bet your bottom dollar that some nurse, waiter or cop, is a little bit richer.

What I did find somewhat shocking is that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., the parent company of the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fox News, as well as the now defunct News of the World, has, through its PAC, News America Holdings, donated more money to Democratic politicians than to Republicans. The single largest recipient of its largesse has been Barack Obama. For my part, I’d call that carrying “fair and balanced” to an absurd extreme. But perhaps it helps explain why the likes of Juan Williams, Leslie Marshall, Alan Colmes and Geraldo Rivera, get so much face time on Fox.

But Obama has no end of friends and enablers. In spite of farcical reports that 98% of his re-election contributions have been $250 or less, the truth is that at last count 634 donations have been upwards of $30,000. I don’t think those people were breaking open their piggy banks.

Throughout the battle over raising the debt ceiling, various polls indicated that the public regarded Obama, not congressional Democrats or Republicans, as the responsible party when, in fact he was the party responsible for creating the crisis by raising the debt more in 30 months than Bush had raised it in eight years.

It would be like a person who, upon being rescued from drowning, lavished praise on the guy handing him a towel, forgetting it was the very same jerk who threw him in the lake.

In America, we like to pretend that there is something very special about the man, any man, sitting in the White House. What we should keep in mind is that he’s only someone who managed, by hook or by crook, to win a number of primaries and then a general election. Nothing in the way of courage or self-sacrifice is required. He merely has to garner more votes than the other guy. What’s more, unlike the grand prize winner on “American Idol,” he doesn’t even have to carry a tune.

While I am willing to acknowledge that certain individuals -- Gershwin, Bach, Shakespeare, Puccini, Newton, Rembrandt, Salk, Da Vinci, Edison and Einstein, come to mind -- make unique contributions, the likes of Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, are no more distinguished than Justin Timberlake, Charley Sheen or Lindsay Lohan. They’re all just celebrities. That is why I cringe when people say we must respect the Office of the President, no matter how we feel about the person occupying the Oval Office. Respect must be earned or it’s meaningless.

The expression “garbage in, garbage out” refers to the data supplied to computers. It meant that if the programmer provided it with misinformation, there was no way the machinery could correct it. That happens to be the way I view Congress and the White House: Garbage in, garbage out. Too bad we have to wait until November, 2012, for the trash collector.

I find it odd that George W. Bush was the only president whose critics were always trying to psychoanalyze him. How many times did we hear liberals theorizing about his dysfunctional relationship with his father? But, strangely enough, they never put Bill Clinton on the proverbial couch, even though his father was a drunken bully, or Obama, who was abandoned by his father, his step-father and eventually his dingbat mother, all by the time he was 12-years-old.

And how is it that we are all supposed to marvel at FDR’s overcoming paralysis to become president, but not to delve into whether his crusade to expand the nanny state wasn’t his way of turning a nation founded on self-reliant individuals into a nation of invalids, looking to Daddy Roosevelt to take care of them?

Unfortunately, every liberal isn’t a James Bond-like villain. It would make it a lot easier to recognize them for what they are if they sat around petting their pet Persians or plotting ways to feed 007 to their pet sharks.

Instead, liberals are full of good intentions. But, as we all know, good intentions don’t pave the road to Heaven.

In my experience, most liberals are childish. And just as children believe that a pumpkin can be magically transformed into a golden carriage, mice into mighty steeds, and rats into grooms and coachmen, so they believe that the world can and should be transformed into an Eden where stupid, selfish, lazy louts are entitled to everything that decent, intelligent, hard-working, people have.

Finally, in their spooky version of “Cinderella,” it’s Barney Frank’s foot that fits neatly into the glass slipper.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.