Meditations

Meditations
Wednesday, September 19, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky

On those occasions when he wasn’t trying to convince people that he had swallowed a dictionary and could break his habit of using arcane multi-syllabic words, William F. Buckley proved he could be both Solomon-like and pithy in his comments about those who infest the Left. One of my favorites was his observation that “Liberals claim to want to give a hearing to other views, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other views.”

Although in no way would I ever defend or endorse the institution of slavery, when you see how blacks, even in the 21st century, live in Africa and the Caribbean, no one can honestly pity the plight of modern-day American blacks. Compared to most of their brethren around the world, even those perennial underachievers who choose to remain uneducated and outside the mainstream of American life, manage to own TV sets, cars, refrigerators and cellphones.

Although I prefer being able to expend my time and energy deflating left-wingers, we conservatives should never forget how absolutely worthless the GOP was from 2001-2007, when the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. Aside from waging a war in Iraq, their only notable accomplishments were raising the national debt by several trillion dollars and kowtowing to the likes of Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold.

Among the many things they did nothing about was improving health care. If all they had done was to pass legislation that enabled people to purchase their insurance across state borders and deny insurance companies the right to drop customers who took sick and actually needed health insurance, they could have spared us the agony of ObamaCare.

It would also have behooved them to pass legislation to ensure honest elections by making it a federal crime with serious consequences to register illegal aliens and dead or fictional people to vote. They could have also made photo IDs mandatory in all elections, whether local, state or federal.

I can only hope that when the Republicans regain control this coming January, their to-do list contains something other than re-paint the office and hire additional staff. Otherwise, they’d do well to keep in mind that 2014 is just around the corner.

One thing that never fails to amuse me is when I happen to tune in the local (Southern California) news, and the reporter covering, say, a nine-car pileup on the 101 freeway, happens to be Hispanic. He will give his crash report in unaccented English, but as soon as it’s time to sign off, he suddenly sounds like a Tijuana street vendor: “Reporting from Sherman Oaks, this is Her-NAN-do DO-min-GUEZ. Back to you, Hal.”

Actress Ellen Barkin, 58, passed along a tweet that read: “C’mon Isaac! Wash every pro-life, anti-education, anti-woman, xenophobic, gay-bashing, racist SOB right into the ocean.” How I long for the days when aging actresses tried to desperately hang on to the last few shreds of fame by relating in a tell-all autobiography how they had once slept with Jack Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and/or the starting five of the Los Angeles Lakers. It was so much more dignified than by displaying their ignorance and bigotry by engaging in political discourse.

To me, the most astonishing thing about the emergence of entertainers into the world of politics is that there are actually people who, apparently, are swayed by the likes of George Clooney, Barbra Streisand, Billy Crystal, Danny Glover, Oliver Stone, Paul McCartney and Harry Belafonte.

I mean, why would anyone care who these people favored in a presidential election? They’re pretty much the same folks who, over the years, determined that Sweet Leilani was more Oscar-worthy than They Can’t Take That Away From Me, that Three Coins in the Fountain was a better song than The Man That Got Away, that How Green Was My Valley was a better movie than Citizen Kane, and not only decided that Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock never deserved to win an Oscar, but never even nominated Edward G. Robinson.

Normal people wouldn’t let these chowderheads pick out their neckties, let alone their presidents.

Speaking of chowderheads, considering that most of them can only get excited about elections when either Barack Obama or Ron Paul is a candidate, I’ve decided that it’s not youth that’s wasted on the young; it’s the right to vote.

Finally, a reader recently sent me an email asking me if I could possibly explain the difference between a socialist and a communist. When I wrote back that a communist is a socialist who has managed to gain control of a government so that he can torture and murder with total impunity, he seemed satisfied.

I hope it satisfies others, especially those who still haven’t decided whom to vote for in November.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.