Corruption in America - The Political Facts of Life

Corruption in America
by Burt Prelutsky
Monday, November 14, 2011

By now I’m sure that even people who have less interest in college football than I, if such a thing is possible, are aware of the sex scandal that tore Penn State apart. It does not surprise me that Jerry Sandusky got away with his vile activity for so many years or that Joe Paterno and the college administrators basically turned a blind eye to it. College football, after all, is a cash cow that is far more sacred in America than the cattle that wander blithely through India’s countryside. Even when I was just a kid, a popular joke was that such college super stars as Charlie “Choo Choo” Justice, Doak Walker and Hugh McElhenny, would all have to take pay cuts when they turned pro.

In all the years since, I have yawned whenever the NCAA would suspend various programs for infractions which generally consisted of bribing their top athletes. It always seemed to me that the folks at the NCAA would periodically flip a coin to determine which college would next be targeted for their wrath. I mean, really, do you actually believe that any college can play by the rules and field a top-20 team year after year after year? It’s one thing for the NY Yankees or the Boston Red Sox to be competitive decade after decade when they pay their players more than everyone else. But how would a college manage to rule the roost when their best players have to move on after three or four years? Quite simply, by emulating New York and Boston and spending more money than the competition!

That being said, what I found most disgusting in the aftermath of the Penn State scandal was the fact that hundreds of students rioted on behalf of Mr. Paterno. Just because he kept turning out winning teams year after year, decade after decade, these young pinheads felt compelled to rally on his behalf, looking and acting exactly like the scumbags who comprise the Occupy Wall Street mob. But, unlike those unwashed morons, the students actually knew why they were out there creating mayhem in the streets. They were, by god, showing their unflagging support for a man who had kept a child rapist on his coaching staff!

I’m sure that in their defense, the young louts would say that Paterno wasn’t the pervert. But would they say the same if the coach had been employed not at Penn State, but at LSU or Alabama, Oregon or UCLA? Would they say the same about the many priests and cardinals who had never engaged in pedophilia, but who maintained their silence about the small number who did?

Elbert Hubbard once observed, “Every man is a damned fool for at least five minutes every day. Wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.” I’m afraid that the students at Penn State have already exceeded their limit for at least the next 50 years.

But it’s not just at Penn State that corruption runs rampant. Take a look at Washington, D.C., where any number of politicians who opposed ObamaCare nevertheless voted for it because they were bribed or intimidated by the likes of Harry (“It’s just business as usual”) Reid and Nancy (“You’ll find out what’s in the bill after it’s passed”) Pelosi.

Or consider Barack Obama who comes out four-square against what they call swag, which consists of souvenir pens, pins and cufflinks, handed out by politicians. But he sends his family off to Africa at a cost to tax payers of $800,000. He then uses tax dollars to buy two buses so that he can conduct presidential business -- business that apparently can only be conducted in what figure to be swing states in the 2012 election -- thus saving the DNC’s war chest hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Or, for that matter, consider Solyndra, a beneficiary of 500 million tax dollars and personal visits by Obama and Biden, but which we’re told had nothing to do with the company being owned by a major Obama contributor.

But when it comes to corruption, unfortunately it’s not limited to Penn State and our nation’s capital. It seems that in New York, by the time they retire, 90% of railroad workers -- including those who only held desk jobs -- have applied for disability, which just happens to add $36,000 a year to their pension payments. In California, 82% of state troopers retire with some sort of disability. It almost makes you wonder why anyone would even dare consider taking such jobs. Am I the only person who worries about his health?

Finally, you have all these various women accusing Herman Cain of acting inappropriately. Not having been there at the time, I don’t know what he did or didn’t do. What I do know is that whenever a woman shows up in public joined at the hip with Gloria Allred, it is safe to assume that she either belongs in jail, a brothel or a psycho ward.

At this point, I suppose we should all be grateful that Anita Hill hasn’t yet come forward to claim that Mr. Cain once gave her a funny look
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The Political Facts of Life
by Burt Prelutsky

After years of being exposed to the American media in all its forms, I’ve concluded that conservatives resent being lied to nearly as much as liberals hate being told the truth.

It has also occurred to me that expecting socialists to be logical and to learn the lessons of history, even very modern history, is totally unrealistic. You might as well ask Gloria Steinem’s famous fish to ride that bicycle she once suggested a fish needed as much as a woman needed a man. Of course, to be fair to Ms. Steinem, that was many years before she met the millionaire of her dreams and married David Bale. Although rumor has it that she only married him because he faced deportation for overstaying his visa, who’s to say that at the age of 66, Ms. Steinem hadn’t simply outlived her voguish cynicism?

In a cheap and typically simpleminded shot at Governor Perry, Barack Obama recently blamed the horrific wild fires in Texas on, of all things, global warming. You can bet that Al Gore is kicking himself for not coming up with that one. But to make up for that glaring oversight, the fatuous and fat-headed Mr. Gore is now blaming global warming for the $15 trillion deficit, the late-season collapse of the Boston Red Sox and the rising cost of Twinkies.

As you’re probably aware, the Justice Department has been harassing the Gibson Guitar Company. Gibson is of course an American institution that has been turning out world-class instruments for decades. Eric Holder, otherwise known as Obama’s hit-man, denies that Gibson has been targeted because the company’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, is a longtime contributor to the Republican Party. They further deny that they are scapegoating him for negatively impacting the environment by using too many letters in his last name. (Scrabble enthusiasts, by the way, might be interested in knowing that if proper names were allowed, his would be worth 217 points.)

In spite of the fact that Attorney General Holder refused to prosecute the Black Panthers for intimidating voters; oversaw the program known as Fast and Furious, which saw to it that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of semi-automatic weapons wound up in the hands of Mexican gangsters; and has berated white Americans for, essentially, being guilty of being white Americans; I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt. But in order to do so, I’d also have to be the sort of bonehead who believes that Solyndra would have been the recipient of half a billion taxpayer dollars and personal visits from Obama and Biden if its snarky owner, George Kaiser, hadn’t been a major bundler for Obama’s election campaigns.

That brings us to a question that has long plagued me. Namely, why would politicians, people who live inside a large fish bowl, people, moreover, who are despised by at least half the population simply because they have a (D) or an (R) after their name, tempt fate and their countless enemies by taking graft and/or indulging in sexual escapades?

What on earth would ever lead these dunderheads to believe that they will somehow elude public exposure when the likes of Wilbur Mills, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Gary Hart, Anthony Weiner, William Jefferson, Duke Cunningham, Eric Massa and Mark Sanford, were all found out and suffered the predictable consequences?

Was it the appeal of danger? Was it sheer hubris? Or were they all simply high on crack or heroin when they tossed their careers, their reputations and their families, under the proverbial bus?

Which leads me to wonder why it is that thanks to cheaters like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, we now have drug tests for baseball players, along with race horses, but not for the creeps who decide our tax rates, write our laws and determine whether, in our old age, bureaucrats will get to tell doctors and surgeons whether to treat our ailments or turn us into mulch.

One can envision in our brave new ObamaCare world a little boy picking up a pack of wafers from the breakfast table, reading the label and asking his father what Soylent Green is; and the father tousling the lad’s hair and replying, “Why, Jimmy, that’s Grandma Becky.”
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