Enemies to the Left of Me

Enemies to the Left of Me
Monday, June 11, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

A fact known to most people is that when you get a lower tier job in show business, a job that a lot of people covet simply because they seem glamorous from the outside, a job that generally combines the duties of a nanny and an errand boy, the pay is going to be minimum wage even if your boss is making millions.

That’s simply life in Hollywood, and one would assume the same would hold true for people who get to brag that they work in the White House. But much to my chagrin, I saw a list recently of the 20 White House jobs that received the largest raises since 2008. Before the Obamas moved in, four of the jobs paid less than $50,000, while another seven paid between $50,000 and $62,500. Four of the positions paid between $100,000 and $130,500. These days, nobody is making less than $70,000 and half of them are pulling down between $100,000 and $172,200.

The difference isn’t that Obama’s gofers are working harder than the ones in Hollywood, and it certainly can’t be attributed to our booming economy. The difference is that Obama is paying them with our money. Just for the record, the Director of African-American Media is making $78,000-a-year. I’m not sure what the duties entail, but I would imagine that maintaining the White House subscription to Ebony is a priority.

I was listening to Michael Medved’s radio show the other day and I heard about a franchise operation down in Texas, Pizza Patron, that’s offering a free pepperoni pizza to anyone who comes in and places his order in Spanish. Being a supporter of the free enterprise system, I don’t have a problem with the promotion. I even think that restaurants should be able to offer their patrons the option of smoking if they want to, just so long as they let non-smokers know when they make a reservation. However, having said that, if I were down in Texas, I wouldn’t be caught dead ordering a Pizza Patron pizza in any language.

My reason is that nobody should be encouraging people to speak a foreign language outside a foreign language class. My maternal grandparents came from Russia about 20 years before I was born. By the time I was speaking, they still had not learned English. Do I wish I had learned to speak Yiddish or Russian? Not really. Do I wish they had been compelled to learn English? You bet.

America is making it far too easy for Latinos to remain outside the national culture, turning e pluribus unum (out of many, one) on its head. And I don’t want some pizza operation doing its part to promote the insanity.

In case you missed the news, Dr. Shakel Afridi has been sentenced to 33 years in a Pakistani prison for conspiring against the state. He was found guilty of helping the United States track down Osama bin Laden. And, in case you were wondering, yes, we are still sending foreign aid to Pakistan, thus helping to provide Dr. Afridi’s food and lodging until 2045.

Michigan’s former governor, Jennifer Granholm, recently came out four-square against photo IDs for voters. With the logic that left-wingers are so well known for, she said that having to show the same proof of identity that’s required for the purchase of airline tickets, cigarettes and beer, amounts to voter suppression laws. Moreover, she went on, those who support these laws are guilty of nothing less than treason. Wow, treason, no less! The last time I looked, that’s still a capital crime. Even David Axelrod hasn’t called for executing people who think that voting in our elections is a more sacred right than buying a six-pack.

Ms. Granholm, who has apparently memorized portions of the Democratic playbook, insisted that photo IDs are a Republican plot to disenfranchise five million potential voters. She said that most of them are Hispanics, blacks and young people, which, ironically, are the very groups that seem to buy most of the cigarettes and beer in this country.

Because I am not running for office, I will confess that I wish photo IDs really would prevent Granholm’s five million from voting. That’s because those three groups, Hispanics, blacks and young people, gave Obama roughly 67, 95 and 66%, of their respective votes in 2008, and will probably do so again.

But I am still wagering that Obama will lose the election. And no matter that the polls are calling the election a toss-up, I don’t think Obama is getting a lot of sleep these days. After all, in the West Virginia Democratic primary, Keith Judd, a guy doing time in a Texas prison, managed to get 41% of the vote.

As if that wasn’t discouraging enough, in the Arkansas primary, running against a lawyer named John Wolfe, Jr., Obama once again only received 59% of the vote. While it’s true that Mr. Wolfe is not serving a prison sentence and has had earlier experience running for office, he only garnered 34, 33 and 28%, the three times he ran for Congress, and a pathetic 2.8% when he ran for mayor of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Quite obviously, he had far stronger competition on those occasions.

Finally, in the Kentucky primary, where his only opposition on the ballot was “Uncommitted,” Obama squeaked by with 57.9% of the vote. In other words, a switch of just eight percent would have sent Uncommitted to the Democratic convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, with Kentucky’s delegates in his hip pocket, if only good old Uncommitted had hips or a pocket.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.