The Patriot Post® · These Are Embarrassing Times

I believe it was Confucius who warned about the hazards of living in interesting times. I assume that was because they tended to be times of war, famine and pestilence, the sorts of things that tend to appeal to historians seeking grist for their mills.

I am wondering if our current age, a time when just about everything from our pop culture to our political leaders, but definitely including our idols, our media and even those places laughingly referred to as centers of higher education, are better described as embarrassing than interesting, will be a lode worth mining for anyone but scamps like me.

For instance, because the fascists who run CAIR, a front group for Hamas, object to Ms. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s message, she was uninvited to speak at Brandeis University. Actually, Ms. Ali, who has collected death threats the way a magnet collects steel shavings because she dares speak of the horrors that women face in the Islamic world, was slated to receive an honorary degree and deliver the commencement address until Brandeis President Frederick Lawrence, proving that even a man without a spine can somehow manage to stand erect, rescinded the invitation.

For those unaware, Brandeis was founded in 1948 as a Jewish-sponsored secular liberal arts university. Two of its founders were Rabbi Israel Goldstein, who retired to Israel, and Albert Einstein. For personal reasons, Einstein quickly cut his ties to Brandeis. But I feel I am safe in assuming that both men would be spinning in their graves if they heard that the same university that has bestowed honorary degrees on the likes of playwright Tony Kushner and the Nobel Prize winning anti-Semite, Desmond Tutu, two men who despise Israel even more than I hate barley soup, had caved to Muslim fascists.

As a Jew, the cowardice shown by Brandeis gives me that same warm feeling in the pit of my stomach usually associated with the onset of nausea.

It might be worth noting that in his former life, Frederick Lawrence was a lawyer specializing in civil rights. To me, that sounds a lot like having “ex-community organizer” on one’s resume.

But when it comes to cowardice, Lawrence is no more craven and corrupt than the media and the rest of academia, which consistently portray the Palestinians as the good guys in the conflict between them and Israel. One constantly hears that it’s five million Israelis pushing two million Arabs around when the reality, to anyone who isn’t a rabid Jew-hater, is that the two million Palestinians are merely the poisoned point of the spear used by 200 million Arabs and Muslims who refuse to even recognize Israel’s right to exist.

In addition, we should never lose sight of the fact that it is often the case that those who relish in promoting themselves as underdogs are sometimes simply sons of bitches.

As for those American Jews who believe that by siding with Israel’s enemies, they are showing themselves to be tolerant, highly principled and holding the deed to the high moral ground, they only prove that no matter how well-educated you might be, no matter how weighted down with college degrees, if you lack wisdom and commonsense, you merely come off as foolish and arrogant.

Speaking of which, I recently saw a photo of Gloria Steinem, the rich and spoiled doyen of the feminist movement. She was wearing a t-shirt that boasted “I Had An Abortion” and she’s holding her arms aloft and grinning, like a boxing champion. And somewhere, I suspect some schmuck was wearing a t-shirt that bragged “I Knocked Up Gloria Steinem” and, instead of just grinning, he’s laughing out loud.

In his desperate attempt to ward off a Republican takeover of the Senate in November, Obama has predictably fallen back on the old chestnut about women earning only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Even though his own Department of Labor calls that one a whopper and even though his own White House was called out for paying females 88 cents compared to a man’s dollar, Obama pushed ahead.

He did it because women, particularly single women, who at other times tell the world how empowered they are, thanks in good part to grotesque role models such as Gloria Steinem, Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, seem to enjoy being treated like simpering little girls by the Big Daddy Democrats.

But even the lying liberals never say women get paid less for doing the exact same job, but for comparable jobs. They then get to work fictionalizing which jobs are comparable. They will say, for instance, that being a nursery school teacher is comparable to being a cop or a fireman, but never address the fact that women who wear a police badge or fight fires are paid the same as their male colleagues, and they have to cope with things even more dangerous than a pissed-off four- year-old who’s missing his oatmeal cookies.

The proof that the campaign is a fraud is as plain as the nose on my face. And believe me, that’s about as plain as it gets. After all, if it were true that companies could get the same work done by paying women 77 cents on the dollar, why on earth would they ever pay men more? Do you know any companies that are so misogynistic they would add 23% to their payroll rather than hire women?

To be fair, when they talk about the White House underpaying female staffers, it’s because they’re comparing people in different positions, cabinet members, for instance – nearly all of them male – with their secretaries. Now I’d be the first to acknowledge that the secretaries of the various Secretaries are undoubtedly more honest and competent than the likes of John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Jack Lew, Thomas Perez, Arne Duncan, Eric Shinseki, Ernest Moniz, Jeh Johnson and Eric Holder.

But we all know that, as is often the case, honesty and competency have to be their own reward. In Obama’s White House, especially, they have as much place as a time-of-arrival betting pool on the Titanic.