Assorted Nuts

Assorted Nuts
by Burt Prelutsky
Saturday, November 19, 2011

Who was the dunderhead who came up with the primary system? I’m not referring to the primary elections themselves, but to the order in which they must be conducted. There are ancient religious rituals that aren’t held to be this sacred.

When Floridians quite reasonably suggest that their primary should come earlier than it has in the past, the GOP hierarchy threatens to excommunicate them and deny them full representation at the national convention.

But nobody has come up with a reasonable explanation why Iowa and New Hampshire should come first. If anything, there are good reasons why they shouldn’t. For one thing, Iowa doesn’t even hold a statewide election; they have something silly called a caucus. How dumb is that!

As for New Hampshire, it has such a small and unrepresentative a population that if they didn’t have an early primary, most of us could ignore the state all the time, and not merely, as we do now, three out of every four years. Instead, their importance is inflated in much the same phony way that the Wizard of Oz had his own magnified by billows of smoke, a curtain and a world-class public address system.

That brings us to the elections, themselves. I accept that we need to have a president, although the more I think about the ones we keep electing, I’m beginning to waver in that belief. But the truth is, as I have long contended, anyone who seeks the office is obviously insane, a mental case whose ego must live in a rented room somewhere because no human being could possibly cart around anything that huge.

I’m not kidding. I mean, just imagine that you wake up one day, look around at your fellow 310,000,000 Americans, and decide, “Yep, I’m the guy (or gal) who is best-equipped to run the most powerful nation on the face of the earth. I’m not saying I know everything I will need to know about the monetary system, Islamic terrorism, the military, the stock market, farm subsidies, Social Security, nuclear energy, the banking industry, the Middle East, education, the IRS, the SEIU, health care or even how to talk to members of the Black Congressional Caucus without giggling, but, doggone it, I’ve always been a fast learner. Now I just need to raise several hundred million dollars in order to run. I wonder how much my neighbor Charley will be willing to kick in.”

Or, as Thomas Sowell told Reason Magazine, in relating one of the most dangerous trends coming out of the current administration: “It’s the presumption that Obama knows how all these industries ought to be operating better than people who have spent their lives in those industries, and a general cockiness going back to before he was president, and the fact that he has no experience whatever in managing anything. Only someone who has never had the responsibility for managing anything could believe he could manage just about everything.”

Finally, the other day I received an email from one of my readers, an American currently living in Argentina. He started out by letting me know that on 9/11, he was living only a short distance from Dulles Airport, not all that far from the Pentagon. He decided that if someone wanted to kill us that badly, he should find out why. In the intervening years, he has read 40 books about Islam.

Because I had written an article in which I wondered why a suicide bomber wouldn’t realize that even though he started out with 72 virgins, he would soon have 72 disgruntled ex-virgins on his hands, my correspondent found that “Islamic theology states that virgins in heaven maintain their virginity for eternity. If you think this is strange, it also maintains that even though martyrs do a great deal of eating and drinking, that is when they are not too busy entertaining all of their sex slaves, there is neither feces nor urine produced.”

I wrote back to tell him that once a woman loses her virginity, it doesn’t merely change her physically, but psychologically. So the only logical explanation is that these “virgins” must be those large rubber dolls lonely guys purchase from mail order outfits. As for there being no need for bathrooms in the Islamic Paradise, the obvious answer is that in death, as in life, the suicide bombers are ambulatory cesspools.”

“Please don’t ask for a cogent explanation for any of this,” he went on, “because there isn’t one. Islamic theologians are still wrestling with a way to explain it.”

“Well, now that I’ve solved the mystery, you can tell them they can all go back to having sex with goats.”

“By the way,” he concluded, “I use the word theologian loosely, for in reality, Islam utterly rejects the need for theology. God’s word is simple, plain and clear, and it does not need interpretation. It only requires memorization and obedience. Even the idea of trying to interpret and understand God is considered heretical. Saludos, Richard.”

“Oddly enough, that’s pretty much how I feel about my own words. Regards, Burt"
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.