Friday, February 17, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky
At times, it’s heartbreaking to find that some states are as inept as the federal government. Of course, living, as I do, in California, I’m in no position to throw stones. However, when I found that it took Iowa weeks to finally add up a mere 200,000 caucus votes and still not know the actual election results, I wondered once again why Iowa is allowed to be the kickoff state in presidential elections. I may have missed it, but I don’t recall seeing it mentioned in the Constitution that Iowa and New Hampshire were endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among them were life, liberty and dibs on hogging the nation’s attention every four years.
On the flip side, we have had Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina, drawing the ire of Eric Holder by doing their best to rid America of illegal aliens. We also have several states waging the good fight against Obama and the Justice Department by insisting that voters have to provide photo IDs for something even more important than buying cigarettes and beer.
We should never lose sight of the fact that Ronald Reagan once said, “The federal government is not the solution; it’s the problem.” That is especially the case when it’s in the hands of socialist nincompoops who look at what’s happening to the nations of Europe and, with a straight face, say, “We should be more like them. Forget the glories of ancient Greece; it’s modern Greece we should be emulating!”
Although we keep hearing about the importance of a college education, particularly an Ivy League college education, what is one to make of people like Obama and cabinet members Hillary Clinton, Tim Geithner, John Bryson, Shaun Donovan, Arne Duncan and Eric Holder, all of whom got their degrees from Harvard and Yale? Let’s face it -- if a manufacturing company turned out such shoddy products, you would assume that the only reason they weren’t out of business is because Obama was shoveling billions of tax dollars their way to keep them on life support.
Speaking of Obama, why aren’t the labor unions who have seen Obama cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, depriving them of at least 20,000 jobs, raising a stink about it? You know for a fact that if it had been a Republican president who had caved in to the environmental fascists, killing jobs and forcing Canada to send the oil to China instead of Texas, they’d be marching on the White House with torches and pitchforks. But I suppose it’s a pipe dream to expect a union to turn on the arrogant ignoramus who handed GM over to the UAW.
I had assumed, as had most people, that the murder of 14 people and the wounding of 29 others by Major Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood was the result of Islamic jihadism. The only reason that Hasan, whose business cards read “Soldier of Allah,” had not been sent to the stockade or an asylum was because his military superiors were afraid of being labeled religious bigots. What I had not known until learning of it from David Horowitz, is that Barack Obama said the 43 were victims of…(a drumroll, please)…work place violence.
In other words, it had nothing to do with Islam. According to the golfer-in-chief, those 43 Americans were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, just like those folks who get shot up when a disgruntled postal employee flips out. It makes it kind of hard not to sympathize with Hasan’s superiors when their own superior is so easily cowed by Muslims.
In a way, Obama is the inevitable end result of a half century of left-wing indoctrination in American schools, media and pop culture. For decades, we have raised kids with the idea that they’re entitled to have high self-esteem even if they’ve done nothing to earn it. They’re told that grades aren’t important and that nobody should keep score at athletic events because it’s the participation that matters, not whether one wins or loses. These loons insist they want equal playing fields, but what they really want are equal results. Nobody is supposed to be better, richer, smarter or stronger, than anyone else, because, if they are, it means that they must have cheated or their parents cheated. It can’t be the result of brains or genes, initiative or even luck.
Thomas Sowell, in a recent article, pointed out that all over the world some groups have always exceled financially and intellectually. He listed the Ibos in Nigeria, the Parsees in India, the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, the Germans in Brazil, the Chinese in Malaysia, the Lebanese in West Africa, the Tamils in Sri Lanka. Although he didn’t mention it, I’ll add the Jews in many places. That’s just the way it is. That’s not to say that individuals in other groups can’t rise to the top, especially in America.
The odd thing is that while nobody would ever think to suggest that height and brawn are equally distributed, liberals somehow think that brains and ambition should be. And if they’re not, the federal government should somehow compensate for the grave injustice.
The fact of the matter is that every liberal is at heart a Utopian. They believe that if enough laws and regulations are passed, human equality is attainable. As goofy as that sounds, it’s easily explained. Liberals, you see, are morons. That’s why they continue to believe, for instance, that socialism is so much better than capitalism.
Their philosophy is all theory and no reality. To socialists, all human beings have equal potential, but that’s because they don’t stop to consider what actual human beings, as opposed to slices on a bureaucratic pie chart, are actually like.
As a result, human nature -- at least those parts of it that involve sloth, lust, stupidity and greed -- is the thing that Utopians never take into consideration.
____________________________________________
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky
Republicans are worried sick that the Democrats will be able to use all the nasty sound bites from the GOP debates in the general election. I’m not too concerned for a number of reasons, but the main one is that the GOP will merely have to produce ads in which we show Barack Obama saying, “I’m pledging to cut the deficit in half by the end of my first term in office” and “If I don’t get the unemployment rate under 7%, I deserve to be a one-term president.”
For good measure, I would produce another ad in which I showed Obama and jobs czar Jeffrey Immelt giggling as the president says, “I guess shovel-ready jobs weren’t quite as shovel-ready as we thought.” The viewer would be reminded that this came a long time after Obama, Pelosi and Reid, shoved through a trillion dollar stimulus that they promised would turn around the economy.
Only a know-nothing know-it-all like Obama would even consider blowing hundreds of billions of tax dollars on solar panels and railroads, two things that Americans crave about as much as they do a case of measles or mumps.
In spite of Obama’s chief of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s insisting that our southern border has never been more secure, according to Townhall writer Katie Pavlich, there is at least one official sign posted in southern Arizona that reads: “Travel Caution: Smuggling and Illegal Immigration May Be Encountered in This Area.” But I suppose Ms. Napolitano can’t possibly see the sign from 2,000 miles away.
It’s also worth mentioning that the American Bar Association has rated a record number of Obama’s judicial nominees as “not qualified,” and they weren’t even referring to Kagan and Sotomayor. Or, for that matter, to Attorney General Eric Holder, under whose watch the feds allowed over a thousand weapons to be delivered to Mexican drug cartels and who, for good measure, refused to prosecute the Black Panthers for intimidating white voters. For purposes of comparison, the ABA rejection rate of Obama’s judicial appointments is four times as high as it was under Clinton or Bush. But I guess that’s to be expected when you keep trying to pay off hundreds of crooked Chicago cronies with federal judgeships.
Speaking of numbers, Newt Gingrich came under fire from the self-righteous Juan Williams for referring to Obama as the Food Stamp President. Led by Williams, liberals insisted that was a racist slur. But, then, those self-righteous ninnies consider every honest comment about Obama’s administration to be a racist slur.
Liberals were quick to point out that most of the 47,000,000 people now collecting food stamps are white. As typically happens when liberals start tossing numbers around, the purpose isn’t enlightenment, but obfuscation. Their intention, whether it’s food stamps or crime statistics, is to pretend that guilt can only be ascribed to white Americans.
In the case of food stamps, all they had to do was point out that the majority of those using food stamps are whites, not blacks. While that’s true, it’s also true that whites constitute two-thirds of the population, blacks roughly one-seventh. So while it’s a fact that whites are 34% of the folks on food stamps and blacks only 22%, 66% of the population is white and only 13% black. In case you’re one of those who never quite mastered percentages in junior high, let me try to clarify things. There are 310 million Americans, 205 million of whom are white, 40 million are black. That, we can agree, is quite a gap. On the other hand, of the 47 million Americans collecting food stamps, only about 16 million are whites, while nearly 10.5 million are black.
So, while I don’t favor Newt Gingrich in the primaries, I think we can all agree that he’s not a racist.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of Juan Williams.
_____________________________________
To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment