Friday, April 20, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky
I realize that every conservative has plenty to complain about. Everything from media bias to popular culture to the Marxist in the White House springs to mind. But I, personally, have my own particular complaints. I refer to the fact that even though those on the Left have taken to heart the Saul Alinsky dictum that in the unending war between liberals and conservatives no weapon is quite as effective as ridicule, we conservatives ignore the pronouncement at our peril.
Every time you turn around, professional clowns like Bill Maher, David Letterman, Jon Stewart, Chris Matthews, Ed Schultz, Maureen Dowd, Rachel Maddow, Joy Behar, Whoopi Goldberg, Billy Crystal, Lawrence O’Donnell, Joe Biden, Henry Waxman, Michael Moore and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, are happily mocking those of us on the Right. In rebuttal, we roll out Ann Coulter, Dennis Miller and Greg Gutfeld, and while it’s true that one conservative wit is easily the equal of a dozen liberal nitwits, these three shouldn’t be forced to do all the heavy lifting on our behalf.
Although I readily acknowledge that every time a liberal opens his mouth, he or she pretty much makes our case, and while I’d never want to discount the role that such serious-minded individuals as Charles Krauthammer, Dennis Prager, Bernie Goldberg, Mark Steyn, Steve Hayes, Laura Ingraham, Hugh Hewitt, Bret Baier, David Limbaugh, Mike Gallagher, Lou Dobbs, Neil Cavuto, Mark Levin, Michael Medved, Andrew Napolitano, Glenn Beck, Bill Kristol, Brit Hume and Sean Hannity play, when it comes to ridicule, it couldn’t hurt to go on the offensive a little more often.
You would think that conservatives would be desperate to fight back in kind, and yet I have never been able to get the Wall Street Journal, Townhall magazine, USA Today or the Weekly Standard, to publish a single one of my articles and, for good measure, have never been invited on Fox News. Go figure.
Well, enough about me. Moving on to lesser matters, I keep hearing Obama describing his energy policy as “all of the above,” while neglecting to mention that by “all,” he means everything but coal, oil and nuclear power. However, I can see where he gets the idea that an industrial nation can get by with those alternative sources of energy he keeps subsidizing with our tax dollars. After all, in search of campaign donations, he gets to fly all over the country on America One, and so far as he can tell, it’s entirely fueled by his own considerable wind power.
Both Obama and Secretary of Energy Steven Chu agree that Americans are addicted to oil, apparently seeing it as akin to heroin or crack cocaine. It is the reason that both of them have done everything in their power to make gas prices rise, at least until they risked having those soaring prices jeopardize Obama’s re-election.
But it occurs to me that when fuel costs skyrocket, it raises the price of everything we buy because retailers have to adjust their prices upward to cover their own overhead. That leads me to wonder if along the way, Obama will take us to task for our shameful addiction to food and clothing.
Something else we keep hearing from the soon-to-be ex-president is that we must be respectful of Islam, even when allegedly trusted Muslim allies shoot our soldiers in the back of the head; when people we’ve squandered blood and treasure protecting have the gall to insult us; and when in 2011, in Pakistan alone, 943 women and girls were murdered for offending their family honor. Odd, isn’t it, that it’s never Muslim males who are guilty of these alleged transgressions?
Pakistan, by the way, is a nation in which there is no law against domestic violence, and so-called honor killings are casually dismissed by the police as family matters.
One is tempted to wish that these people would be bombed back into the Dark Ages, but it would be a meaningless threat because, for all intents and purposes, they’ve never left.
Finally, Joe Biden, the man who took the vice-presidency, which has traditionally been a non-speaking part, and turned it into a feature role as the Court Jester, once famously described ObamaCare as “one *%$#@% big deal.” But that was two years ago and people have short memories, so Biden recently reminded us of his well-deserved reputation by describing Obama’s role in signing off on the Osama bin Laden raid as the most audacious plan in the past 500 years.
While some of the more historically-minded among us have suggested that Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, the Boston Tea Party and the D-Day invasion, have all dwarfed Obama’s providing the thumbs-up to our Navy Seals, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I was being dismissive of Obama’s audacity for strictly partisan reasons.
Instead, having actually looked up “audacious” in the dictionary and discovering that among its various definitions are “unrestrained,” “in defiance of convention and propriety,” “impudent,” and “reckless,” I would say that one of the most audacious things Barack Obama has ever done was to select a cluck like Joe Biden to be a mere heartbeat away from the presidency.
In a related matter, it has been determined by a panel of experts that the single most audacious thing the American people have ever done was to elect Barack Hussein Obama the 44th president of the United States.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.
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