Wednesday, October 17, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky
Over the course of my life, I have occasionally been labeled a know-it-all, but I’m happy to say that those who’ve said it have generally been those who know nothing. The fact is that there are any number of things I can’t begin to fathom. For openers, I am hopeless when it comes to things mechanical and electronic. I just don’t get how things work. I don’t look down on those who do; if anything, I’m in awe of them.
That’s one of the reasons that I wish our educational system made sense. Instead of acknowledging that most young people would be better off learning a trade, they are shuffled off to colleges and universities where they’ll waste four years and a lot of their family’s money as liberal arts majors.
As the story goes, most jobs in the future will require a college degree. That is a load of hooey. What it really means is that employers may demand the sheepskin, but performing the actual job will probably require nothing more than half an hour of instruction.
Although doctors, lawyers, engineers and mathematicians, have their own trade schools, the system dictates that they, too, squander four years running up enormous tuition bills as undergrads. But the truth is that most people are far more grateful when a plumber or an electrician shows up at their front door to solve a problem than when a literature major or a sociology grad drops by for dinner.
As far as academic types go, I recently read a fine description of them in Robert Barnard’s The Case of the Missing Bronte, in which he has a Scotland Yard detective observe: “Of course, you could say I don’t as a rule see them at their best; mostly when I’ve met them it has been in connection with some kind of offence or other -- thieving from bookshops, mostly; or sexual offences of a slightly ludicrous nature. But I have to admit that they have seemed the most sniveling, self-important scraps of humanity you can imagine, and as windy and whiney a bunch as ever demanded special privileges without doing anything to deserve them.”
Why so many people are dedicated to the notion that a B.A. in any way is a measure of wisdom, intelligence, competence or commonsense, is one of the great mysteries of modern life. Another puzzle is why Fox feels compelled to provide a bully pulpit for so many left-wing ignoramuses. I seriously question the wisdom of constantly airing the cockeyed views of Alan Colmes, Geraldo Rivera, Leslie Marshall, Marc Lamont Hill, Bob Beckel, Kirsten Powers and Juan Williams. I understand that their motto is “Fair and Balanced,” and they want to present both sides of every issue. But do they really imagine that in a media world dominated by the NY Times, the Washington Post, Time magazine, Newsweek, NBC, ABC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC, we conservatives aren’t hearing often enough from the other side?
Hell, even in my dreams, I’ve got Juan Williams, Joy Behar and Jay Carney, spinning nonstop on behalf of Barack Obama.
It confounds me that there are millions of Americans just itching to re-elect a guy who owes everything to affirmative action and a gang of thieves and political fixers who crawled out of the Chicago sewers. To me, those voters who will happily cast their ballots for any schmuck with a (D) after his name are even more inscrutable than soccer fans. In fact, it’s my guess that there’s a great deal of overlap between those two groups. I mean, who else but a nincompoop could look at a 3-1 outcome and wonder why the winning team felt compelled to run up the score that way?
Baseball, the greatest game ever invented, has no clock. Basketball and football each have a clock, although the final two minutes of a game will often expand to fill half an hour. Then there’s soccer, a sport so boring that instead of a clock, they use a sundial.
The greatest mystery of all is why so many people seem to still be infatuated with Obama. How does any American relate to the guy? It’s not that he’s black and has an odd name, either. It’s that he throws a baseball like a little girl and that he once bowled a game, which means sending 20 balls down the alley, and he only knocked down 39 pins.
Furthermore, in a nation that likes muscle-cars more than hot dogs, he keeps trying to get everyone to drive little kiddy toys that might as well be propelled by foot power. He hates oil and coal the way most of us hate Islamic jihadists and Madonna.
He says nicer things about the religion of our enemies than he has ever said about the one he claims to follow.
His friends, mentors and advisors, people such as Frank Marshall Davis, Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, David Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and Valerie Jarrett, are all people that most of us wouldn’t have in our homes. Then, to further show his contempt for us, he selects as his second-in-command, Joe Biden, a world-class goofus we wouldn’t trust to pick out our socks.
Over the course of the years, I have put together three collections of interviews. In the process, I have questioned well over 200 notable figures in a variety of fields. One of my standard questions is to ask them to list any eight people who have ever lived that they would invite to a dinner party, assuming that for this one evening they could all speak English. The person mentioned most often has been Jesus Christ, but running a close second is Winston Churchill.
I’ve never had the opportunity to interview Barack Hussein Obama, but, inasmuch as he attended a racist church for 20 years, I very much doubt if Christ would make his list; and, considering that the first thing he did when he moved into the Oval Office was to remove the bust of Churchill and send it back to the British embassy, it’s obvious that he also doesn’t share America’s affection and respect for our greatest wartime ally.
Obama would have you think that I regard him as unfit to be the commander-in-chief because of his race and his name, but of course that’s not true.
Otherwise, why would I think so highly of a black woman who happens to be named Condoleezza, for crying out loud?!
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.
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