Catching Up On The News

Catching Up On The News
Monday, October 31, 2011
by Burt Prelutsky

Recently, I took a rare vacation. Inasmuch as I am not gainfully employed, I agree it’s a strange concept. “A vacation from what?” is a question that would certainly spring to my mind. In this case, it meant that I was out of town and off the computer. But, apparently being something of a masochist, I continued to monitor the news of the day. Or, to be precise, I should say the news of the week.

During that period, the leader of the Libyan rebels confirmed that the country would now exist under sharia law. As I expected when I first heard about the Arab Spring, only simpletons can ever be overjoyed at the notion of a tyrant being overthrown in that part of the world. King Farouk was bad, Gamal Nasser was worse. The Shah of Iran was bad, the Ayatollah Khomeini was worse. Hosni Mubarak was bad, the generals are worse. Muammar Kaddafi was bad, his assassins will be worse. I understand that the Muslim Brotherhood has already sent roses and a box of candy to NATO.

When I say that Arab and Muslim coups and revolutions inevitably end badly, I mean for America. For those who live in those countries, it’s merely a matter of trading one set of sadists for another. Because we are the people who benefitted from the efforts of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, we tend to have a soft spot in our hearts for those who rise up against despots. But, as the results of such uprisings bring the likes of Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro, to power, I’d say that the optimism over such bloody events merely proves that we have an even larger soft spot in our heads.

In the wake of Obama’s announcing that all American troops will be out of Iraq by year’s end, I saw that someone came up with a figure in excess of $800 billion as the cost of the war. Frankly, I was surprised that it hadn’t been even more expensive. The reason I say that is because the price tag was the same as that for Obama’s Stimulus. Frankly, even I was shocked that the Democrats could pass a single piece of loony legislation that cost the American taxpayers as much money as we spent conducting a decade-long war halfway across the world.

Watching as much news as I did, I began to think that I may be the only American who hasn’t been polled in the past month. For some reason, the Occupy Wall Street crowd brought the pollsters out in droves. For instance, I read that 37% of the public agrees with the demonstrators, although none of the pollsters were able to determine what it is that the nebbishes are demonstrating against. What we have been told is that a third of them are okay with using violence to get their way, a third of them find a moral equivalency between the United States and Al Qaeda and, I’m guessing, at least a third of them, who are zealots when it comes to banning tobacco, fossil fuels and those they deem corporate polluters, regard personal hygiene as a sure sign of selling out to a capitalist society.

Harry Reid, who is often in the running when it comes to competing for the most bone-headed statement of the day, week or month, made a valiant attempt to cop the crown by announcing that unemployment in the private sector is in fine shape and now we only need to concern ourselves with government employees. But close, as we all know, only counts in horseshoes.

The clear winner in the competition was Joe Biden for warning us that if the Republicans didn’t pass Obama’s Jobs Bill, aka Bastard Son of Stimulus I, America would be faced with soaring rates of murder and rape.

Now, so far as I can tell, the sociopaths who commit those particular crimes are in no way influenced by the state of the economy, but solely by their own lack of empathy and plain old human decency. Therefore, I can only assume Biden meant that the rapes and murders would be committed by those disgruntled teachers, firemen and cops. You know, the same folks that liberal politicians are forever trying to forge into yet another voting bloc composed of alleged victims.

In short, his basic message is that if you know what’s good for you, you’ll either keep over-feeding the beasts known as public sector unions or you can expect -- and fully deserve -- to suffer the violent consequences.

I must confess that until the Vice-President called it to my attention, I never even suspected that if we downtrodden taxpayers merely asked these people to contribute to their own pension and health plans, we would be personally responsible for turning all these dedicated firemen and seemingly benign math teachers into wild-eyed rapists and murderers.

My own advice is to be sure you pack a .45 the next time you attend a PTA meeting.
_________________________________________

To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.