by Burt Prelutsky
Saturday, December 10, 2011
The only thing in shorter supply in America than jobs, shovel-ready or otherwise, is logic. And with most liberal arts professors taking their lead from Saul Alinksy and Noam Chomsky, not Socrates, it doesn’t appear that college students will start thinking for themselves anytime soon.
For instance, how is it that every other group in America has to go through the rigmarole of obtaining a city permit if it wants to conduct a two-hour parade down Main Street, and that municipalities can’t even put up Christmas trees in the public square, but the bozos in the Occupy Wall Street movement are free to turn entire neighborhoods into toxic dumps? And how is it that until a few women are raped or a few guys are murdered, America’s mayors and city councils all adopt a live-and-let-live policy to accommodate these creeps?
I say if a Christmas crèche can’t exist on public property, there’s no legitimate excuse for letting a thousand unwashed goons set up their tents and turn the city sidewalks into their personal latrine.
I’m not surprised that the Democrats are united in their opposition to photo IDs. It stands to reason that they’d oppose anything that served to guarantee that only American citizens could cast ballots. But I am surprised that it’s not just liberals who oppose a tamper-proof national ID number. Whenever it’s suggested, even conservatives get nervous. For reasons I can’t fathom, they seem to feel as if their individuality were being threatened. Inasmuch as we’re all carting around numbers by the bushel load, I don’t see why anyone but Islamic terrorists, biker gangs and deadbeat dads, would object to just one more.
While on the subject, I would also campaign for English as our official language, putting an end to foreign-language ballots, and regular drug-testing for all welfare recipients. And, yes, that would definitely include politicians.
Unlike most people, I like all of the top-tier GOP presidential candidates. Unfortunately, there are also some things I don’t like about them. Although Herman Cain appears to be sliding in the polls, I hope the reason has nothing to do with those unsubstantiated sexual harassment rumors. So far as I’m concerned, once Gloria Allred appears on the scene, all claims to objective testimony fly out the window. She is to the legal system, what Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa are to major league baseball, what Barney Frank and Nancy Pelosi are to Congress, and what Jerry Sandusky and Mike McQueary are to the state of Pennsylvania.
Although Mr. Cain seems like a nice guy, there’s no getting around the fact that he handled the accusations badly, that he shows a very slim grasp of foreign affairs and that he had a Rick Perry-sized brain freeze when asked a simple question regarding Libya.
However, I was already questioning his 9-9-9 tax plan. Unlike others who opposed it because they didn’t like that third “9,” a national sales tax, because they feared that giving Congress yet another tax stream is a lot like giving a book of matches to a child. The fact remains that Congress can never be trusted not to raise taxes, but that’s the case no matter what plan is in place.
My biggest objection was that Cain suddenly revised it to 9-0-9 in order to let poor people off the hook and provide for development zones in the inner city. One, I want everyone to pay income taxes. There is something terribly immoral about people who pay nothing on April 15th being allowed to vote for politicians who get to raise the levy on the rest of us. In short, if you have no skin in the game, you’re not entitled to have a say in how the game turns out.
Furthermore, I want the entire country to be a development zone, not just a few urban areas designated by pandering politicians. If a city needs to be rejuvenated, leave it to the city and the state. If the job is too big for them, as with Detroit, for instance, take a page out of Nero’s playbook and burn it down and start over.
Recently, a reader sent me an email. He said that he was surprised that I seemed to be such an optimistic person. He based his conclusion on the fact that I was certain Obama would lose next year’s election, and that I was rather sanguine about the various GOP contenders.
I pointed out that all the evidence I have at hand suggests Obama has no chance of winning, no matter how much money he spends. Also, I happen to be an odd combination of cynic and optimist. Perhaps that simply means that my expectations of the human race, being not particularly high, are often easily met.
As for the various candidates, I would settle for any of them, including Ron Paul and Rick Santorum, over Obama. I even find something worthy in both of them. In fact, if it wasn’t for the fact that Rep. Paul seems to believe that a nuclear Iran would like us if only we left the Middle East -- and even though Iran also insists that Israel leave with us -- I might even endorse his candidacy.
As for Rick Santorum, he is the one contender with whom I sympathize. He is obviously aching, just dying, to be the president, and he clearly can’t grasp why he doesn’t top the polls when he is the guy who, as he incessantly reminds us, is, first and foremost, for family, the flag and apple pie. Every time I see him on stage at one of these debates, his desire is so naked that I’m almost too embarrassed to look. It’s such a sad case of unrequited lust, I wind up feeling like a voyeur.
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