Still The Land Of The Free?

Still The Land Of The Free?
Thursday, January 12, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

There seem to be two kinds of Americans. There are those who wish this nation could once again be what it used to be, a beacon for those who cherished freedom and liberty. Then there are those who look at America and wish it could be more like Cuba, of all places. Or if not Cuba, perhaps Spain or Mexico or Venezuela, with maybe just a smidgen of Iran or Egypt or the West Bank tossed in, and a dash of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In short, they prefer a swamp to a melting pot.

I can’t pretend to understand those on the Left. I don’t know why they think the way they do. Once I was being interviewed on a radio show and the host asked me if I was proud to be an American. I shocked him, and even myself a little, when I said I wasn’t. I told him that I was proud of my various grandparents, proud that they had the gumption to make their way across a continent and an ocean to get here. But what did I have to be proud of? I was simply handed a gift. I was just lucky. I won the big lottery. I got to be born an American. What I can’t fathom is why all those liberals, progressives and run-of-the-mill Democrats, don’t seem to share my sense of gratitude, harboring only resentment.

I also have no idea why they continue to ballyhoo Barack Obama. He’s a hypocrite, a liar and he’s supremely arrogant. If he were only your neighbor, he’d be so obnoxious, you’d consider moving. But here he is the commander-in-chief, and these louts carry on as if the sun shines out of his backside.

His view of America is a place where the dumbest, the laziest and the least grateful, are entitled to everything that the smartest, most decent, hardest-working individuals have. Redistribution of wealth has a nice, uplifting tone to it, but when you cut through the slag, it comes down to taking by force what taxpaying, law-abiding people have and handing it over to those who want it.

It strikes me as pretty obvious that when you pander to those whose most over-riding emotion is envy, you destroy a nation. It is Obama’s game plan now, just as it was in 2008 . Unlike any other president, Obama hopes to conquer by dividing blacks and whites, rich and poor, union members and the rest of us. It’s atypical in America, but it is business as usual in every communist country that has ever existed.

If Obama were to be re-elected, it would be the death knell for this country. Not because of any specific thing he would accomplish over the next four years, although he would very likely have the opportunity to re-create the Supreme Court in his own distorted image, but because of what his re-election would say about us.

Were he to win in November, it would prove that less than 250 years after the creation of this republic by such giants as Washington, Madison, Adams, Franklin and Jefferson, the majority of Americans are prepared to hand the country over to moral and intellectual pygmies. It would mean that most Americans now subscribe to a life consisting of cradle-to-grave government-provided entitlements, even though anyone who has paid the slightest attention to what is happening in Greece knows the inevitable result of such insane policies.

Speaking of so-called entitlements, it is high time that pensions be re-examined. If I had my way, salaries would be raised across the board and pensions would disappear. Although nobody holds cops, firemen and members of the military -- particularly those who have risked life and limb in combat -- in higher esteem than I do, it simply makes no sense that these men and women should be able to put in their 20 years and then, starting as young as 38 or 39, begin collecting monthly checks for the next 40 or 50 years. Even alimony doesn’t last that long!

Finally, I’d like to address those Republicans who get on my case whenever I say something nice about a candidate they don’t regard as a hard core conservative. Invariably, the candidate and I get slimed as RINOs. No matter how often I contend that while I would prefer a conservative, most Republicans clearly don’t. That is why it’s people like Dole, McCain and the Bushes, who keep winning GOP primaries.

When I insist that, imperfect as they were, the Republican candidates over the past two decades were better than Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry and Obama, were or would have been, they remain unconvinced. What they like to say is that the only difference between a RINO and a liberal is that a RINO will destroy America at a slower rate.

Although I don’t happen to agree with them, what I say in rebuttal is that even if they’re right, that is a hell of a big difference. After all, we all know that nobody lives forever, but would they prefer to die sooner or later? Or would they, like dumb mules, stubbornly stick to their guns and insist it really doesn’t matter?
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.