Monday, July 23, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky
With the election just a few months off and Obama’s departure in January just around the corner, I have already begun to wonder what I’ll be writing about in 2013. But down deep, I know I probably won’t have a problem. So long as we have liberals in Congress and holding nearly all the political offices here in California, I won’t lack for grist. Besides, I have always felt that writers block is just God’s way of letting people know they need vocational guidance.
I read about a Putnam County (Florida) judge who sentences shoplifters to carry signs outside the stores they robbed that read “I Stole from This Store.” What a great idea! It has always been my theory that embarrassment is a greater deterrent than incarceration. That’s why I always figured that if you arrested and convicted a young gang member, the silliest thing to do was to send him to jail, which would only earn him street creds when he got out. Instead, I would put him on the back of a flatbed truck, deck him out him in a dress and lipstick and drive him around the neighborhood. Perhaps you could even fund the plan by selling snapshots of the young thug to friends, neighbors and victims.
I would also extend the judge’s notion to include congressmen and senators whose own misbehavior is rotten even by Washington standards. Can’t you just see people like Eric Holder, Charley Rangel and Anthony Wiener, on the back of a truck riding down Pennsylvania Avenue? I mean, either do away with censure votes and contempt of congress proceedings altogether or see to it that misdeeds have actual consequences.
Bill Clinton has been ridiculed endlessly over his parsing of the word “is,” but liberals manage to get away with using the word “big” as a pejorative only when referring to financial institutions, oil companies and pharmaceutical firms. They never refer to big unions, big Hollywood and big deficits, although those are the big items that are truly wrecking this country.
Speaking of liberals always puts me in mind of children. And while there are some tykes who are so adorable, they should be turned into the human equivalent of bonsais, those dwarf trees that the Japanese dote on. Others should be locked away in cellars until they properly mature, say at the age of 45 or 50.
What makes generalizing about children so difficult is that, technically, everything from a toddler to a teenager comes under the general heading. And under the ObamaCare provision that kept so-called young adults on their parents’ insurance policy, the upper limit of childhood has been raised to 26. Still, whereas a four-year-old is often charming, amusing and affectionate, his older siblings quite often combine the less admirable traits of goats, burros and Benito Mussolini.
Given a choice of spending quality time with adolescents or a pack of wild dogs, a wise person would go with the dogs because, slim as his chances are, he’d at least have a shot at domesticating the four-legged beasts.
This is not to suggest that being a child is as easy as it looks. The choice they face often comes down to being a bully, a victim or a craven suck-up. Churchill’s description of appeasers as those who hope that the crocodile will eat them last pretty much describes 90% of all school children.
It helps explain why such a high percentage of people who spend years being droned at by members of teachers unions and tenured liberal arts professors emerge from school with cotton batting for brains, prepared to vote for any schmuck who promises to give them stuff paid for with other people’s money.
Speaking of Obama, you may recall that his old chum, Rahm Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago, listed safe streets as one of his top three priorities when he ran for office last year. For the record, Chicago is now the murder capital of America. The homicide rate increased 38% under Emanuel’s stewardship, which translated to 240 people killed in the first six months of 2012. Chicagoans looking for safer streets are encouraged to move to Kandahar or Homs.
By the way, I believe Emanuel’s other two priorities were to stop those icy winds off Lake Michigan and to get the Chicago Cubs a World Series championship this season.
Jimmy Carter, an erstwhile supporter of Obama, has now denounced him because his drone strikes not only “violate international human rights, but abet our enemies and alienate our friends.” If his words confuse you, it’s because he doesn’t really mean our friends; he means his friends. The 39th president, in case, it escaped your notice, was a personal buddy of Yasser Arafat and was able to call mainly on Arabs and Muslims to fund the building of the Carter Presidential Library. He is living proof that anti-Semitism needn’t be merely a pastime, it can also be a profitable career.
Finally, it seems that last year there was a campaign to garner an Oscar for Uggie, the charming Jack Russell terrier who did so much to earn “The Artist” its Best Picture Oscar. The attempt was thwarted when the Motion Picture Academy insisted that only humans could be in the running for acting awards.
I, for one, contend that flies in the face of prima facie evidence, and is merely a clumsy attempt to conceal Hollywood’s blatant anti-canine bigotry.
After all, if only humans are eligible to win Oscars, how is it that Sean Penn and Jane Fonda have each won twice?
________________________________________
To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment