Saturday, September 1, 2012

Gathering My Thoughts Once Again

Gathering My Thoughts Once Again
Friday, August 31, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

I definitely hope and pray that Obama is evicted from the White House in the coming election. For one thing, it would dispose of the worst president we have ever had, a distinction I had assumed would be Jimmy Carter’s in perpetuity. Now even Carter’s title as the worst ex-president we have ever had will be in jeopardy if Obama somehow manages to live up to his potential.

But Obama’s defeat would also restore my faith in the American people. Not all of them, you understand. After all, even in defeat, Obama and Biden will manage to carry several states and garner tens of millions of votes in spite of overseeing an administration that has somehow managed to make a terrible economy worse, gutted the military, offended our allies and encouraged the very worst of our enemies.

If Romney and Ryan win, and the GOP manages to regain control of the Senate, the celebration will be short-lived unless they repeal ObamaCare; institute long overdue changes in healthcare; do away with several federal departments and cabinet positions; undertake welfare reform, taking millions of undeserving people off food stamps; passing a federal law against lying about disabilities in order to fatten up pension checks; get America out of the U.N. and the U.N. out of America; and revoking public sector unions.

Even as radical a left-winger as FDR knew that the very idea of allowing civil servants to unionize was insane. It was only after he saw how easily Robert F. Wagner, Jr., won re-election as New York’s mayor after allowing city employees to unionize that John Kennedy decided that he would help assure his own re-election by doing the same for federal employees.

We see the result of this madness in cities and states across America, as more and more of them go bankrupt as a result of the sweetheart union contracts that gutless, self-serving, politicians have cut over the past several decades.

But it’s not just the “what’s-in-it-for-me?” attitude of SEIU members that’s destroying the economy. There’s also a large group of old people who have reached an age where they no longer seem too concerned about the solvency of Medicare and Social Security, and whether those entitlements will be around for their children and grandchildren. Even when they’re assured that no major changes will be enacted in the near-future, they react as if those phony DNC commercials with a Paul Ryan lookalike pushing a dummy off a cliff were real-life videos.

Frankly, some of these people have forfeited title to being members of our greatest generation. Instead, they’re behaving very much like their own spoiled 20-something relatives, who whoop and holler every time that Obama promises to cut the interest rates of their student loans or allows them to stay on their parents’ health insurance policies until they’re middle-aged.

Lately, I’ve been receiving an email message that’s gone viral, insisting that Obama has ceded seven Alaskan islands to Russia, while getting nothing in return. The reason it’s so easy to believe is because Obama has made it a practice to bestow so many things on President Putin, ranging from vowing to unilaterally decimate our nuclear arsenal to depriving Poland and the Czech Republic of a promised missile defense system, that Obama has begun to resemble an ardent gay suitor, hopelessly smitten with Russia’s macho dictator.

Furthermore, Hillary Clinton’s State Department has been more than willing to carry out Obama’s wishes, whether it’s condemning Israel for building apartment houses in Jerusalem and protecting its borders from Arab and Turkish terrorists or by nixing the Keystone pipeline.

The truth in this case, however, is that back in 1991, G.H.W. Bush and the U.S. Senate, by a vote of 86-6, with Alaska’s two senators voting with the majority, agreed that the U.S. had no right to the islands, which, being closer to Siberia than to Alaska, were well within Russia’s territorial waters.

In the aftermath of the brouhaha involving Chick-fil-A and homosexuals, with gays calling for a boycott of the national franchise because its president had the audacity to state that, like most Americans, he was in favor of traditional marriage, I was reminded of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote: “Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted.”

I would go so far as to suggest that blacks, Latino activists, MSNBC commentators, Occupy Wall Street blockheads, Hollywood pinheads, left-wing college students, and NY Times editorial writers, would also do well to take those 18 well-chosen words to heart.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.

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