Our Infantile Society,G. B. Shaw Was a Horse's Patootie

Our Infantile Society

While I acknowledge that there is a world of difference between conspiring to do something and merely considering it, when Ahmed Ghailani was found guilty of conspiring to blow up a government building, I bet there were millions of us who briefly flashed on those occasions when we thought about blowing up courthouses, city halls, DMV offices and the U.S. Senate.

In the wake of the Ghailani debacle with a civilian jury, we were told that even a military tribunal wouldn’t have found him guilty on those 284 other charges because “enhanced interrogation” had been used on the main witness. Frankly, that seemed insane to me. No matter what was done to make the witness come clean, what does that have to do with Ghailani’s involvement in blowing up American embassies and murdering hundreds of innocent people? It is at such times that I find myself wondering if Sharia law could be any more ludicrous than the legal system we already have.

Is it just me or does all the recent rioting seem even more embarrassing than usual? In England and the U.S., the most disgusting, most privileged generation the world has ever known seem to feel entitled to run wild any time the cost of college tuition is raised. What makes their childish hissy fits all the more reprehensible is that these punks rarely pay their own way. If anyone is going to riot, it should be their parents. But the targets of their outrage should be themselves for having raised these hordes of arrogant, obnoxious louts. And while we’re on the subject, it’s high time the 26th amendment was repealed. If 70 is the new 60, and 60 is the new 50, it’s fair to say that 18 is the new eight. Giving the vote to a bunch of brats who are still collecting an allowance, thus allowing them to cancel out the votes of their elders is insane. The sad irony is that the only youngsters who deserve to vote are members of the military, and they’re the ones whose ballots are least likely to be counted.

Running the young squirts a close second when it comes to causing trouble are the creeps in France who are running amok because economic circumstances demand that the retirement age be lifted from 60 to 62. These are the same folks who get six weeks of paid vacation every year. That’s one more month than Americans get, which means that in the course of 40 years, they are already working 40 fewer months than we are.

On the other hand, there was a huge outcry when a committee designed to get America out of its own financial morass suggested we might consider raising our own retirement age to 68…60 years or so down the line! Judging by the hue and cry, you might have thought we were all little children. And maybe we are.

When people wonder why the Democrats spend so much time pandering to black voters, the answer is that they have no choice in the matter. Democrats have to pander and blacks have to agree to play the role of poor, oppressed victims. That’s because Democrats can’t win a presidential election if they don’t continue to garner 90% of black votes. The truth is that in no presidential election since LBJ trounced Barry Goldwater in 1964 has the Democratic candidate, whether he won or lost the election, received 50% of the white vote!

The odd thing is that blacks used to resent the way they were depicted in the movies, when performers like Stepin Fetchit (nee Lincoln Perry), Willie Best and Thelma “Butterfly” McQueen, spent their entire careers acting stupid, shiftless and superstitious. These days, Hollywood shows us blacks like Denzel Washington, Samuel Jackson, Halle Berry and Morgan Freeman, smart, wise and highly competent. Yet a great many blacks in real life seem to be modeling themselves on those earlier portrayals.

But it’s not just the liberals who have been babying blacks for far too long. Whether it’s their violent crime statistics, their illegitimate birth rate, their involvement with illegal drugs or their basic illiteracy, white America chooses to either ignore the damning truth or to don the mantle of guilt. We even employ euphemisms, referring to those “bad sections of town” we’d be wise to avoid, whether we live in Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Houston, Detroit or L.A., when we all know it’s code for those urban areas mainly populated by blacks. We pretend we’re talking about poor sections, but there are plenty of poor rural sections of America, and nobody fears they’ll be killed, mugged or raped, if they go there.

Furthermore, far too many blacks have an intolerance of education that verges on the psychotic. One of the sorriest aspects of all this is that it’s not atypical for black kids who show the slightest sign of scholarship being accused of acting white. It is simultaneously a nasty insult to the black kids and an unwarranted compliment for white ones.

Until we all start speaking openly and honestly about the facts of racial life, we’re doomed to be led around by the nose by such scoundrels and hypocrites as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the members of the Black Congressional Caucus.

I acknowledge I might be asking for a miracle. After all, we have become such a nation of wusses that our own president won’t even identify our sworn enemies as Islamics, and Homeland Security has to pretend that five-year-olds and their grandmas are every bit as likely to blow up planes as 25-year- old Saudis named Mohammad.

Write to: [email protected]. To enjoy more Burt, go to: BurtPrelutsky.com. G. B. Shaw Was a Horse’s Patootie by Burt Prelutsky

Although I loved what Lerner and Loewe made of it, it’s a shame that George Bernard Shaw wrote Pygmalion. That’s because all his other plays, including Candida, Man and Superman and Major Barbara, were snoozearamas and it would make it so much easier to dismiss him as an over-rated creep. This way, a fair-minded person has no option but to admit that the over- rated creep wasn’t entirely without talent.

When I was a kid, I recall seeing Shaw in newsreels. As he aged — eventually making it to 94 — reporters would make an annual pilgrimage to his cottage to find out how the aging Irish dramatist felt at 80 or 85 or 90. He would inevitably emerge into his garden dressed in tweeds and plus fours, looking as if he was on his way to the local golf course. By that time, it was as if he were playing a role in one of his own productions — the querulous, but loveable old vegetarian.

In truth, Shaw, a devout socialist, was an outspoken fan of his fellow socialists, Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. To be fair, he didn’t share Hitler’s hatred of Jews; instead, he argued that the chemists of the world should concoct a humane gas that could be used to eliminate capitalists and other unproductive members of society. By unproductive, I assume he meant people who had neither written Caesar and Cleopatra, nor bought a ticket to see it. Even if, knowing what I do about the playwright, I now find it harder to laugh at Professor Higgins’ frustrations with Eliza Dolittle, I find I can still chuckle at Andy Rooney’s buffoonery. Recently, for instance, in pooh-poohing a Gallup Poll that showed Obama having an approval rating of just 44%, Rooney announced that he had proof that Gallup was in the pocket of the GOP. It seems that Rooney had asked nine of his pals how they thought Obama was doing, and eight of them said he was doing a bang-up job. Or, in other words, according to the Rooney Poll, the president has an 88% approval rating, which is exactly twice as high as those rotten bastards at Gallup are letting on.

I guess it all comes down to whether you’re going to accept Rooney’s final word on the subject or if you’re actually going to believe what those 90,000 lying racists allegedly told Gallup’s pollsters.

For my part, I marvel at the notion that the 91-year-old sour puss still has nine friends.

Speaking of polls, a recent one conducted by Newsmax suggested that if the Democratic primary were held today, Hillary Clinton would trounce Obama by 20 percentage points. When I read that, I must confess that I found myself sharing some of Rooney’s skepticism about polls. Frankly, I didn’t get the point of even asking the question. It’s not that I doubt that the Iron Maiden is more popular than the president, but even if the unemployment rate remains where it is until 2012, how could she possibly defeat him in the primaries and still get herself elected in the general? Does anyone, including Dick Morris, think black Americans are going to vote for the white woman who brought down the first black president?

You needn’t be Charles Krauthammer, after all, to understand that if 90% of blacks didn’t turn every election day into Christmas for the Democrats, nobody with a (D) after his name would ever win another national election.

As a conservative, there’s nothing I’d enjoy more in 2012 than to see Mrs. Clinton challenge Mr. Obama, and if she got the nomination, even I might be tempted to run against her.

Speaking of the 2012 election, a number of pundits are insisting that the Republicans don’t yet have a frontrunner. That, I would suggest, is because there are so many first-rate possibilities in the mix. They include past candidates Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, Newt Gingrich and, if she can tear herself away from the glories of Alaska, Sarah Palin. There are also a herd of attractive rookies on the roster, including Bobby Jindal, Paul Ryan, John Thune, Rick Perry, Mike Pence, Michele Bachmann, Tim Pawlenty, Mitch Daniels, Bob McDonnell, Marco Rubio and my personal favorite, Chris Christie.

On the other hand, when the Democrats refer to a fresh face, they only mean that Nancy Pelosi has just returned from getting another Botox injection.

Rohrschaching the Left

Back in 1921, Hermann Rorschach developed a set of cards to be used in analyzing possible personality disorders in psychological patients. Theoretically, at least, if a person “saw” certain images in the inkblots, he was considered normal. Otherwise, if, for instance, where most people spotted a butterfly, he saw Leon Trotsky getting bashed with an axe, he stood a good chance of being hatched with the other boobies.

Speaking of boobies, I have often wondered if one liberal has ever said to another liberal: “I know what the playbook says our position is, but do you actually know why we’re opposed to law-abiding citizens owning guns?” or “Why are all the people on our side, like Joy Behar, Rosie O’Donnell, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Chris Matthews, Anthony Weiner, Bill Maher, Keith Olbermann and Jimmy Carter, so damn obnoxious?” or “What makes us think that George Bush is stupider than John Kerry, Al Gore and Joe Biden? Those guys seem really, really dumb to me.” or “Why are Republican First Ladies so much classier than ours?” or “Why are multi-millionaires like the Obamas, the Clintons, Dianne Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller, Charles Schumer, Barbara Boxer and Michael Bloomberg, always declaring war on the wealthy? And if they think the rich aren’t paying enough in taxes, why don’t they set a good example and pay more of their own? Instead, guys like Charley Rangel and Tim Geithner don’t believe in paying any.”

College students are known for experimenting with drugs, booze and sex. Wouldn’t it be nice, not to mention novel, if once in a while they experimented with thinking for themselves, instead of parroting the claptrap espoused by leftwing professors who are as besotted with the likes of Noam Chomsky, Saul Alinsky and Che Guevara, as teenage girls are with the Jonas brothers?

When you hear such dunderheads as Michael Moore, Bill Maher and Nora Ephron, get together to deride George Bush, Sarah Palin and Tea Party members, as knuckle-dragging Neanderthals, you realize that the liberal elite have brought the caste system over from India. Instead of the untouchables, they’ve decided that those on the lowest rung of society are those who disagree with them.

It’s fascinating how in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, leftists continue to regard themselves as the highest form of intelligent life. For instance, they persist in believing that even though private companies do a better job of delivering the mail, it makes perfect sense to continue subsidizing the postal service to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

Their faith in government goes far beyond the zealotry of religious converts. Like the rest of us, liberals will grumble about nobody ever answering the phone at the DMV; they will grouse about congressional ethics committees winking at corruption; they’ll gripe about a trillion dollars being blown on “shovel-ready” jobs; sometimes they’ll even acknowledge that it’s not right that those working for the government get more in salary, pension and medical benefits, than the folks in the private sector who have to support them with their taxes. But in spite of all that, liberals remain convinced that Big Brother knows best.

At least that’s what they believe so long as Big Brother has a (D) after his name. They never seem to fathom that any freedom and liberty they surrender to the Democrats will eventually wind up in the hands of the Republicans. Apparently because they are as stupid as a bag of rocks, that obvious fact consistently eludes them.

The latest example of liberal insanity is the program they came up with to keep airliners safe. I have no way of knowing if Janet Napolitano dreamt it up after dining on ice cream and pickles, but it seems like the sort of spooky brainstorm that the Penguin, the Joker or Osama bin Laden, might have devised in one of their more diabolical moments.

Knowing full well that liberals would rather see an American city obliterated by a nuclear device — at least so long as it was a city in the Midwest or the South — than run the risk of embarrassing or annoying a Muslim, it was inevitable that they’d find a new way to embarrass and piss off the rest of us. As if it wasn’t bad enough that they made it national policy to confiscate shampoo bottles, tiny nail clippers and our “I Hate the TSA” buttons, the Obama administration decided to double down by giving airline passengers the dubious choice of being sexually assaulted or being zapped with radiation. As a result of the new policy, fewer people are flying. But airport parking lots continue to be jam-packed. That’s because a great many people, very sad and lonely people, are showing up, insisting they be patted down by security personnel on the outside chance that they may have inadvertently stuck a bomb in their underpants.

The Lamest Duck of All by Burt Prelutsky

The question, boys and girls, is: Just how dumb do you have to be in order to be a Republican politician?

I actually believed those ignoramuses had learned their lesson after the elections of 2006 and 2008. I was convinced that they’d seen the error of their ways, that cozying up to the likes of Ted Kennedy and Russ Feingold could only lead to both liberals and conservatives holding them in utter contempt.

I was certain that the recent mid-term elections would drive home the point that most voters were experiencing buyers remorse after four years of Pelosi and Reid, and two years of Barack Obama. But, as the lame duck session proved, you can never go wrong underestimating the intelligence of Republican office holders. From this vantage point, it appeared that at the very time when Obama was on the ropes and being chastised by the most left-wing elements of his party, the Republicans decided to buck him up. Instead of waiting for the newly elected congress to deal with the Bush tax cuts by forcing Obama to either keep them at their current level for everyone or to let them rise on the middle class, something even he wouldn’t have done, the Republicans elected to extend unemployment insurance by 13 months, thus providing Obama with his latest budget-busting stimulus program. When I was young, you got six months of benefits. Now you can get three years. At this rate, soon only natural-born suckers will bother working at all.

Then, in spite of those members of the military who are actually fighting and dying in Iraq and Afghanistan being opposed to repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the GOP used the most cockeyed poll in history as an excuse to go along with the liberals.

Finally, in order to make Christmas, 2010, the best one ever for Obama, a fair number of Republican lunkheads voted for the START treaty, which simultaneously served to fill Vladimir Putin’s head with visions of sugar plum fairies.

The first question that comes to mind is why we’re still making nuclear treaties with the Russians. Rumor has it the Cold War is over. Inasmuch as the preamble to the treaty suggests that we might be denied the right to pursue missile defense systems, which was the only reason Russia negotiated the treaty in the first place, what was the big rush to make it the first treaty ever enacted during a lame duck session?

Charles Krauthammer refers to Obama as the Comeback Kid, basing that conclusion on the fact that he rebounded so miraculously after the shellacking the Democrats received in November. Krauthammer is right, but the comeback is entirely due to the Republicans taking a collective dive. Talk about snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory!

I think that those folks who assumed that, like Clinton, who was forced to move to the center after the 1994 mid-term elections, Obama would become more moderate over the next two years, might be whistling in the dark. With the Republicans acting as his enabler, there might not be any reason at all for Obama to kick his addiction to socialist policies.

I can only hope that the new congressional Republicans will be up to the challenge facing them not only from the progressives on the left, but from the gutless biddies in their own party. If they falter, I’m confident that Tea Party patriots will be around to remind them what happens to RINOs. As any number of them learned during the last election, there’s another elephant graveyard besides the one in Africa.

In the meantime, like Santa Claus, I’m keeping my own list of who’s been naughty and who’s been nice. I don’t want to forget the names of those who filled the President’s Christmas stocking with so many goodies.

Just to help you along, the 13 “Republicans” who helped provide Barack Obama and Harry Reid with the super majority required to pass START, they were Corker and Alexander from Tennessee, Snowe and Collins from Maine, Brown (Massachusetts), Bennett (Utah), Murkowski (Alaska), Voinovich (Ohio), Cochran (Mississippi), Gregg (New Hampshire), Isakson (Georgia), Johanns ( Nebraska) and Lugar, the pride of Indiana. The reason that the vote was 71-26 when there are 100 members of the Senate was because three Republicans, Bond (Missouri), Bunning (Kentucky) and Brownback (Kansas), all decided to play hooky because they apparently had more important things to do than vote on a major arms treaty.

I’m sure that Obama’s only regret is that he didn’t ask Santa for Cap & Trade, card checks and the opportunity to make Ramadan a national holiday, while he was at it.

Write to: [email protected]. Can’t get enough Burt? Go to: BurtPrelutsky.com. Trials and Errors

Radio talk show host Dennis Prager posed the following question: What’s the difference between the voters in California and the passengers on the Titanic? The obvious answer was that the poor souls on the doomed ship didn’t vote to hit the iceberg.

That’s a very funny line, unless you happen to be a conservative living in California.

The problem with liberals is that they never learn from their mistakes. What’s worse is that they never stop making mistakes. Instead of changing their awful ways, the only lesson they derive from their endless failures is to double their efforts. Thus, when they find themselves in a hole, instead of climbing out, they merely dig faster.

When you consider their recent setbacks, you’d think liberals would finally conclude they don’t know squat about decision- making. For instance, Obama makes a highly publicized trip to Asia and comes back with nothing to show for it except an aversion to shrimp and another 20,000 frequent flier miles.

He got back in time to see a New York jury acquit Muslim terrorist Ahmed Ghailani on 284 charges. Inasmuch as Obama and Holder had pretty much guaranteed that Ghailani would be found guilty of everything, including jaywalking and neglecting to separate his trash, this left their decision to try him in a civilian court looking not only naïve, but down right criminal.

During the same time frame, after spending two years and millions of dollars, a congressional ethics committee found Charles Rangel guilty on all counts. His punishment was cruel and but not unusual; he had to sit and listen to his equally corrupt colleagues pretend they existed on a higher moral plane. It made Charley cry. It made me cringe.

I have always found it odd that the folks of West Virginia keep electing Jay Rockefeller to the U.S. Senate. I can see electing him once, hoping he’ll use his own money to bail out the state. But once that didn’t happen, there’s no explaining such bizarre behavior.

Recently, Rockefeller urged the FCC to knock Fox and MSNBC off the air. Aside from the fact that this senator didn’t know that cable stations don’t come under the purview of the FCC, we once again have a liberal politician exhibiting his fascistic tendencies by voicing his displeasure with that pesky 1st amendment.

The mere idea that Rockefeller would attempt to pass off this bit of verbal excretion as balanced by adding MSNBC as an after-thought shows how inept the left is even when it comes to propaganda. Is anyone really supposed to believe that this limousine lib is offended by the likes of Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Chris Matthews or that MSNBC comes anywhere close to having the power and influence of Fox?

What’s more, whereas conservatives are rarely invited to even make an appearance on MSNBC, the following liberals not only show up regularly on Fox, but most of them are on salary: Geraldo Rivera, Lis Wiehl, Greta Van Susteren, Juan Williams, Al Sharpton, Jon Stewart, Alan Colmes, Marc Lamont Hill, Bob Beckel, Leslie Marshall, Lanny Davis, Doug Schoen, Ellis Henican, Chris Wallace, George Stephanopoulos, Mara Liasson and Scott Fenstermaker.

What more do you think Fox could do to satisfy John D. Rockefeller’s great-grandson? Perhaps cancel Glenn Beck and replace him with “South American Idol,” starring that delightful Latin merrymaker, Hugo Chavez? Finally, when I consider the amount of time and taxpayer money squandered on the trials of tax cheat Charley Rangel and Al Qaeda operative Ahmed Ghailani, I’m reminded once again of the dangers inherent in people being tried by a jury of their peers.