Columnist.
As you may have heard, Mrs. Clinton recently channeled Michelle Obama when she said "When they go low, we go high." Naturally, the "they" the ladies were referencing were Republicans. So when Hillary called Trump's supporters "deplorables" and "irredeemable," we're supposed to assume she was engaging in lofty rhetoric. Presumably, when she called Bernie Sanders' supporters "losers" and "self-righteous whiners," while she and her inner circle dismissed Catholics, Latinos and southerners, as second-raters, that was simply tough love. After all, how will these people ever measure up if Hillary, her campaign manager John Podesta or one of her other surrogates, doesn't share a few inconvenient truths with them?
I don't expect that the polls will indicate a huge surge for Donald Trump. I suspect the reason is that long before now, most people have made up their minds. The media, however, will insist it's because that by saying he might not accept the results of the election, Trump simultaneously turned his back on sacred tradition and expressed a fascistic disregard for democracy.
It was the legendary Art Linkletter who first pointed out that kids say the darndest things, but kids can't hold a candle to Democrats. Although Barack Obama has spent nearly eight years shortchanging NASA, forcing our scientists to hitch rides on Russian spacecraft, he has now announced that he wants to see Americans on Mars in the near-future. He didn't specify who those Americans would be, but I have a hunch it's Republicans he'd like to shoot a kazillion miles into outer space. Still, since it's nicknamed the Red Planet, you would think it would be a more natural habitat for communists and their fellow travelers in the Democratic Party.
No matter how awful we all know Hillary Clinton is, and no matter how many more terrible things we're finding out about her through the email dumps by Wikileaks, it doesn't seem to faze some Republican politicians and pundits the least little bit. They are jumping ship without even waiting for the lifeboats to be lowered. I readily admit I don't believe that Donald Trump has a very good chance of winning, but that doesn't mean it doesn't disgust me to see the likes of Paul Ryan and Glenn Beck showing their true colors and abandoning the GOP nominee. It's bad enough to hear Mr. Beck, who somewhere along the way presented himself with the deed to the moral high ground, pretending that Trump's vulgar speech is worse than all the things that Mrs. Clinton has said and done over the past several decades, but where the heck does Rep. Ryan get off?
For the past twenty years or so, more and more people have been gulled into believing they have the power to make Mother Nature say "Uncle!"
Last Friday was quite a news day. We finally got wind of what Hillary Clinton was telling the sharks of Wall Street for $250,000-a-pop. At the same time, we got to hear what Donald Trump says about women behind their backs. I don't want to sound as if I'm bragging, but I wasn't the least bit surprised by anything I heard or read. I mean, did anyone really think the Wall Street scumbags were coughing up big bucks to listen to sermons advising them to give up their money-grubbing ways if they ever wished to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Sermons delivered by the biggest money-grubber in America?
That is a line from Cole Porter's song "Anything Goes," but it fits our times like a glove. Consider, for instance, that at the Walmart in McDonough, GA, the bakers refused to decorate a cake for a cop's retirement party, and they got to keep their jobs! The man's daughter wanted to celebrate her father's 25 years on the police force, but the bakers refused, claiming that the blue line on the American flag she'd designed was racist. It was only because a family friend had posted the news on Facebook, and the response was so overwhelming, that the store manager offered the daughter a $50 gift card and offered to personally decorate the cake. But "personally" isn't the same as professionally, and the cake wound up a mess.
If there is one thing you can count on, aside from death and taxes, it's that in the wake of every Islamic attack on Americans, left-wing politicians and the media — as if one can still make a distinction between them — will be reminding us that that there are millions of peace-loving Muslims here and around the world. What I'd like to know is what makes them think so. Just because people aren't prepared to strap a bomb on their chest doesn't mean a lot. Most Japanese during WWII weren't prepared to be kamikaze pilots, but that doesn't mean they weren't rooting for them to sink American battleships.
In the old days, we had Gypsies with crystal balls, seers who saw the future through the medium of tea leaves and phrenologists who claimed to read your future through studying the bumps on your skull. Today, the whole gaggle of them are pretty much gone, but because Nature tends to abhor a vacuum, they've left the field clear to economists. There are those who insist that economics is a science. But whereas actual scientists all agree about such things as the existence of gravity, the distance to the moon and such laws as the one that holds that things in motion tend to remain in motion, economists can't agree about anything.
Until now, I had regarded computer hackers as evil incarnate. That's because I thought of them as jerks sitting in their parents' basement screwing with our computers just for the heck of it. But, I have recently had reason to modify my position, at least so long as they limit the activity to telling us the truth that the NY Times either can't or, far more likely, refuses to reveal. Starting with the hacking of the DNC files, exposing the fact that the Party big wigs really were stacking the deck against Bernie Sanders, exactly the way he claimed, I have found myself depending on the hackers for my news. Best of all, unlike Fox News, they don't pretend to be fair and balanced, so I don't have to put up with Juan Williams, Alan Colmes or Kirsten Powers.
I realize it will sound odd coming from me, but I often find myself wishing that Republican politicians were more like their Democratic colleagues. That's because those on the Left always know what they're for and what they're against. The tragedy, of course, is that they are always wrong, but they stick to their guns and eventually, when the stars are aligned, they get their way. One person who never shirked in her mission to define what being a Republican was supposed to be was Phyllis Schlafly, who recently passed away at the age of 92, after having spent more than half of her life fighting the good fight on behalf of conservatism. In a different America, the flags would all have been lowered to half-staff.
If Hillary Clinton hadn't collapsed in front of cameras, would she have ever come clean about the state of her health? I very much doubt it. I know that there were rumors floating around, but I didn't put too much stock in them. The truth is I never pay any attention to doctors or shrinks or political pundits, for that matter, who believe they can, or should, analyze people they've never even met. Having had pneumonia, I don't consider it life-threatening, although I was in my 20s when I came down with it and Mrs. Clinton is pushing 70. Still, I am more concerned about the decrepit state of her character and morals than I am with her lungs.
Hillary Clinton now claims she can't recall all or, perhaps, any of her security briefings at the State Department. Apparently she blames it on a concussion she suffered a few years ago. That must be one heck of an accommodating concussion. Apparently, it severely handicaps her memory, but would in no way interfere with her ability to carry out her duties in the single most difficult, stress-inducing, job in the world. When Bill got the news, he gushed: "Nothing? She remembers nothing?! Golly willikers, that's a relief!" At the rate that Mrs. Clinton lies, you'd need an abacus to keep count. For instance, in the beginning of the private server scandal, she said she only used one mobile device for convenience. Then it turned out that she had two. Now it appears she had 13, and would have her aides smash them with hammers when she was done using them. And still, James Comey insists there was no criminal intent behind her use of an easily hacked server.
One of the great mysteries of the world is the infatuation that some people have for socialism. It has never worked. In fact, if you had set out to invent an economic system doomed to failure, you would probably come up with socialism. After all, it is based on the notion that it is natural for people to share equally with each other, even with those who refuse to do their share of the labor. Competition is natural to human beings. You see it in ballparks, on school playgrounds, at the Olympics and in the workplace. Humans compete for money, prestige, position, mates, even for prom dates. But Karl Marx, a pinhead who rarely bathed, decided that on his mere say-so, he could reverse thousands of years of human nature. And just in case he couldn't, he also came up with communism, an inevitable adjunct that supplies a few individuals with the dictatorial power to enforce socialism on the masses.
Recently, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump traded insults, each of them accusing the other of being a bigot. Whereas most people cringed at the calling of names, I thought they were both right. Trump showed his own colors when he voiced resentment that a judge born in Indiana shouldn't be allowed to hear the lawsuit targeting Trump University for no other reason than that he had an Hispanic surname. For his part, Trump was right to hit Mrs. Clinton that she was the titular head of a party that treats blacks in much the same way that plantation owners treated their slaves, except that the DNC only requires that their black underlings vote, not that they pick cotton.
There are so many putrid aspects to Hillary Clinton that one hardly knows where to begin. There's the Hillary who attacked the women who had already suffered at the hands of her husband. There's the Hillary who accepted untold millions in bribes while Secretary of State from regimes where women can't drive or get an education and have to walk around wrapped in bed sheets, and then tries to sell herself as a feminist icon. She's Super Hillary, she'd have us believe, who cracks glass ceilings, always making certain that the broken glass falls on other people.
In compiling all the things that offend me, I'm not sure where to start or if I have the time or space to get to all of them. But let's give it a shot. I hate computer passwords. I hate having to keep track of unrelated letters and numbers just so that I won't be hacked. The thing is, everything I have to say about anything is stuff I write about. Besides, as we've seen with secret federal websites, if someone wants in, they're going to crack the code even if it's as complicated as my dog's name spelled backwards. And inasmuch as I'm not silly enough to do banking online, the only thing those passwords are good for is driving me nuts if I happen to forget one.
These are very weird times, indeed. For openers, we have the two most unpopular candidates in history facing off for the presidency. In the past, we were accustomed to 50% of the electorate being miserable once the votes were counted. In 2016, it appears that number will jump to 60 or 65%. Having said that, I still don't understand those people who by word or deed express a preference for Hillary Clinton. Although Trump can be oafish, rude and outrageous, those failings seem almost cute when compared to the endless lies, insatiable greed and risks to national security, for which Mrs. Clinton has come to be known.
It seems like only yesterday that we had a nation that prided itself on its strength, its productivity, its ability to differentiate between good and evil, and its obvious preference for the former. Today, when you look around, you find a younger generation that is far more concerned with how it feels than what it does. We have youngsters who demand their rights, but refuse to step up to their responsibilities. They demand that their education, such as it is, be paid for by others and insist on all the freedoms they see as their birthright, but show little or no interest in defending them. They insist on voting just like every other adult, but they feel no shame or even embarrassment at remaining on their parents' health insurance until they're 26 years old.
The FDA has pretty strict rules when it comes to labeling products. It will stop you in your tracks if you try to pass off ground chuck as ground sirloin or try to peddle something doused in sodium as being salt-free. But, unfortunately, there is no federal agency or even a law that can prevent people from mislabeling themselves. As a result, Elizabeth Warren could call herself a Cherokee in order to advance her academic career and land her a spot at Harvard, where apparently being or at least claiming to be a Native American counts far more than honesty, character and intelligence. In much the same way, left-wing activist Rachel Dolezal insisted that, in spite of being born to white parents, that she was a black woman, and Bruce Jenner, physical evidence to the contrary, could announce he was a she named Caitlyn.
