Notions

Notions
Monday, December 26, 2011
by Burt Prelutsky

Occasionally, a reader will take me to task for covering several topics in a single piece. I assume such people somehow regard themselves as my boss. Although I generally try to be polite about it, I feel obligated to set them straight. In short, I write these articles in order to let off steam. I generally try to leaven them with humor, but that’s just the way I am.

Inasmuch as most of my fellow commentators are quite happy to devote entire articles to a single issue, I generally just steer the malcontents to the competition. For my part, I have a rather short attention span, so I like to hop around, lest I bore myself.

The truth is that I get just as angry as every other conservative when I see the leftwing riffraff occupying the marble halls in Washington, our college classrooms, the editorial boardrooms of the MSM and the streets of America. I just try to maintain a sense of humor about these various creeps in order to keep my head from exploding.

I also find it helps me to maintain my emotional equilibrium by keeping in mind that when a glass is half empty, it’s also half full.

Moving on, I was delighted when I heard Barney Frank announce his decision to retire from the House. Short of Obama’s announcing his own retirement, I could hardly have been happier. But I had to laugh when Mr. Frank said that the best thing about stepping down is that he would no longer feel compelled to be nice to people he didn’t like. He didn’t specify whom he was referring to. We already know that he treats Republicans and his Tea Party constituents like dirt, so could he possibly have been referring to Pelosi, Reid, Obama or even just heterosexuals in general?

The notion of Barney Frank, one of the vilest individuals in Congress, even suggesting that there’s another, even nastier, version waiting in the wings brings to mind the image of Hitler’s announcing, “Okay, Poland, no more Mr. Nice Guy.”

Although I’d never vote for a Libertarian, I must confess that I agree with them when it comes to illegal drugs. I honestly don’t think you or I have any business telling people what they can smoke, ingest or shoot into their veins. But that is not the same as saying they have a right to be hired. I wouldn’t employ a drug addict and I don’t think anyone else should be compelled to do so.

In addition, I object to those who commit crimes or cause accidents while under the influence avoiding punishment by insisting that they are the innocent victims of their addiction. Nobody, after all, put a gun to their head and turned them into a coke, meth or heroin, addict. So, do the crime, do the time…and don’t whine. You wanted to be cool? Fine, go be cool in the cooler.

Recently, Dennis Prager devoted an hour of his daily radio show to deconstructing Oregon’s Governor John Kitzhaber’s pathetic case against capital punishment. Although I agreed entirely with Prager’s logic, I felt that he fell down in one instance. That was when an opponent of capital punishment called in to argue that the biggest danger with capital punishment is that an innocent person might be executed. [Read Prager’s article on this subject in the National Review. -ed.]

As an example, he presented a case in which two guys go off to commit a burglary, but one of them decides to rape and murder a woman in the house. The caller argued that the one burglar was innocent of those more serious crimes, but might very well suffer the same fate as his partner. For some inexplicable reason, Prager didn’t point out that if someone is killed during the commission of a felony, everyone involved is held to be as guilty as the person who pulled the trigger. But, moreover, if you stand by while your fellow burglar rapes and kills a human being, on what planet would anyone regard you as an innocent bystander?

Some people despise liberals because of their politics. Some people despise them because of their arrogance. Others despise them because of their double-standards and hypocrisy. I happen to believe that all the reasons are equally valid. Take the head of the DNC, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. If you’ve ever seen her, you know that when she was younger, her grandmother would try to find dates for her by telling the other mothers and grandmothers in her circle, “My Debbie’s not much to look at, but she has a wonderful personality.”

But Debbie, whose personality isn’t really all that wonderful, excoriated all the Republicans who are seeking their party’s presidential nomination, saying, “If it were up to them, we’d all be driving foreign cars. They’d have the U.S. auto industry go down the tubes.”

I wager that none of you are surprised to hear that Debbie drives an Infiniti FX35, a Japanese luxury car.

Lest anyone think that I only pick on Democrats, I heard Newt Gingrich say that because he made $60,000-a-speech, he didn’t really need to lobby in order to make money. Instead, he claims, he only lobbied on behalf of issues he really cared about.

Well, inasmuch as Newt was regularly sending mailers to my wife, seeking donations, for at least a year or two before deciding to throw his hat in the ring, I have to assume that taking his wife on cruises to the Greek islands and keeping her bedecked in jewelry were a couple of those issues he really cared about.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.