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 And while we’re on the subject, it’s high time the 26th amendment was repealed.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. ©2011 Burt Prelutsky 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.