Columnist.
I can't pretend to understand a lot of things that other people do. For instance, I don't get why people carry on as if a turkey dinner is the cat's pajamas at Thanksgiving, but then rarely order it the rest of the year. Then there's the Olympics. At every possible level, I find its popularity confounding. For years, especially under the stewardship of Avery Brundidge, it engaged in anti-Semitic shenanigans. It was he, after all, who showed his true colors by deciding that Nazi Germany would be allowed to host the 1936 Games, providing Hitler with the recognition he craved for the Third Reich. Fortunately, Jesse Owens showed up to give the lie to der Fuhrer's claims to Aryan superiority.
I recently had the pleasure of addressing the members of the 405/605 Tea Party Patriots. I said the following: You folks don't know me and since I've never appeared on Fox and never had the opportunity to guest host the Rush Limbaugh Show, you probably have never even heard of me. So by way of introduction, let me say I don't admire politicians, not even Republican politicians, not even conservative politicians. But I do sympathize with them. At least up to a point.
If you had a split screen, you could have watched the 2016 DNC convention in Philadelphia and one of the Communist gatherings that used to take place in Madison Square Garden in the 1930s and, clothing aside, you would have had a hard time figuring which was which. If you tuned in the first night, you'd have seen more flags than they have at the U.N. What you wouldn't have spotted was the Stars and Stripes. The reason, I suspect, was because the only ones on hand were being burned outside the arena.
In case you weren't watching the DNC convention — and if you weren't, my compliments — you might have missed Khizr Muazzam Khan, father of a Muslim soldier who died fighting for the U.S. in 2004, giving Donald Trump what-for. In a moment that was obviously choreographed by someone connected to Hillary Clinton's campaign, Mr. Khan pulled out a pocket-size copy of the U.S. Constitution and offered to lend it to Mr. Trump. In case you did miss it, every network and the NY Times has made certain you eventually got to see it or read all about it. Since the convention, Mr. Khan has been on TV more often than Matt Lauer, Jimmy Fallon and "I Love Lucy" reruns.
In "The New Colossus," the poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty, Emma Lazarus put out a call for the wretched refuse of teeming foreign shores. I believe we have received our allotment and we can now stop advertising. Perhaps it's time we replaced the poem by the unrepentant communist with Irving Berlin's heart-felt lyrics to "God Bless America." But the more wretched the refuse, the more that left-wing politicians — who see in every 10,000 Muslims that Obama welcomes aboard 10,000 potential voters, not the hundred or two hundred potential jihadists the rest of us see — seem to like it. That also explains why Hillary Clinton thinks the numbers should be increased by a multiple of six or seven. But why shouldn't she? She has already proven with her private server that served as a direct pipeline to Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, that national security is the very least of her concerns.
The Democrats would have us believe that these are the best of times and that we are on the verge of seeing Barack Obama's head added to the four already immortalized on Mt. Rushmore. The question is whether in November the majority of Americans will actually ignore all of the disheartening facts concerning our economy, race relations, terrorist activity here and abroad and the fissures growing between us and our traditional allies, and vote for eight more years of the same or worse. If Hillary Clinton is able to rally the forces responsible for re-electing the tyrannical wannabe in 2012, she will be able to combine the worst ideas of Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders going forward. Worse yet, she will be able to leave, as her legacy, a majority of leftist loons in complete control of the Supreme Court.
My first reaction to the slaughter in Nice, France, was "Not again?!" My second was to wonder if that whirring sound I keep hearing is Charles De Gaulle spinning in his grave. I don't believe that France's wartime leader, the man who was so proud of France that he removed it from NATO, insisting that the nation must be solely responsible for its own defense, and who would go on to make France the fourth nation with a nuclear arsenal, would merely stand around like current President Hollande, seemingly content to wring his hands and deliver eulogies every few months.
My readers all know that I have been lukewarm about Donald Trump's candidacy from the very beginning. But I have seen the light. Any man who could generate so much respect and, well, love, from all of those who know him best — his wife and kids — must be far more than the sum of his occasionally goofy parts. As for his wife, Melania, I received two very telling emails in the wake of her address at the convention. A reader named Ralph wanted me to know that he was hoping that the convention would provide him with a reason to vote for Trump, and, happily, "It did! I'm voting for Melania."
In the wake of the massacre of the cops in Dallas, I have been thinking long and hard about race relations in America. I think that even Barack Obama, who has been a major contributor to the chasm that now exists between blacks and whites, would agree they haven't been this awful in decades. The problem with Obama is that his instinct is always to side with blacks, even when they are obviously thugs, punks and gangbangers. He will occasionally pay lip service to police officers and mouth the usual pieties about those who risk their lives to protect others, but its sole purpose is to camouflage his true feelings, which is that cops are brutes who take advantage of their badges and guns to wage open warfare on black people.
I have been wondering, now that Barack Obama only has another six months before he has to leave the key under the White House mat, what his presidential library will be like. With nothing to boast about in terms of foreign or domestic policy, with former allies not trusting us and current enemies not fearing us, with an economy that is on life support and a health care system that nobody envies, what could he possibly have on display? Heck, even at this late date, he refuses to divulge anything about his shadowy past, including school records, travel visas and even his questionable sex life.
If you were only to listen to those involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, you would think that America's cops are not dedicated to serve and protect, but, rather, to bully and brutalize honest, hard-working, black citizens. That is certainly the message that's been parroted by Barack Obama, Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. It certainly explains why Obama's only two attorney generals have both been black, and why the Justice Department has grabbed every opportunity to place our nation's police departments under its extremely heavy thumb.
For those unfamiliar with the term, it means that someone has fallen on his heinie. And you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who has ever taken a more embarrassing pratfall than the FBI's top dog when he delivered what surely sounded like an indictment of Hillary Clinton before letting us know that he was just kidding. Then, lest we attributed it to temporary insanity, he went before a congressional committee and doubled-down. Having heard from various usually reliable sources that Mr. Comey was one of Washington's few square shooters, I was particularly disheartened. The fact is, if they ever decided to remake "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," they could do a lot worse than cast him in the leading role. He certainly looks and sounds as idealistic as young Jimmy Stewart and, at 6'8" is even taller. But having met and spoken with Jimmy Stewart, I can't picture him reading off that bill of particulars and then letting Hillary Clinton scoot.
Unlike many others, I do not hold Abraham Lincoln in high regard. By his own admission, he did not wage a war that saw 700,000 die in order to eliminate slavery. He had the blood of what today would be the equivalent of eight million Americans on his hands in order to preserve the Union. Towards what end? What would have been so terrible about the two nations existing side by side? Slavery would have come to an end in fairly short order. The two Americas, both speaking English, would have banded together against a common foe at times of war and been obvious trading partners, just as we are with Canada. So what if we had different national anthems? Wouldn't it be better if, say, one country was deciding between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, while the other chose between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, instead of having to either wind up with Trump or Clinton, the ultimate winner being utterly repulsive to half of the electorate?
Perhaps it's because we get so little good news on this side of the Atlantic, but I found myself ecstatic when I heard that the Brits had bid bye-bye to the EU. Although they hadn't needed to fire a musket, they had nevertheless fought for their own independence and, like their American cousins 240 years ago, they won against seemingly impossible odds. We have our July 4th, they now have their June 23rd. In addition to which, Prime Minister David Cameron, Obama's partner in crime, read the writing on the wall and announced he will be stepping down in October. So, within three months of each other, the two schmucks who had the most to do with selling us out with the Iran nuclear deal will be history.
We shouldn't adopt too superior an attitude when condemning Islamic theocracies such as Iran. I'm not suggesting they don't have it coming, just that we aren't all that different. It's more a matter of degree and, of course, the foolish things that each side deems sacred, though equally foolish, are worlds apart. Ours has become a society that frowns on diversity of opinion, while ballyhooing diversity on college campuses, by which the Left means racial quotas. In the blink of an eye, we have devolved from being a democratic republic to being a totalitarian state with a theocracy based on a religious belief in green energy, along with a conviction that blacks and illegal aliens hold the moral high ground and that the source of the world's evil is the Caucasian race.
Whenever someone comes up with a sensible suggestion regarding guns, urban blacks, illegal aliens or Muslims, or, God forbid, dares to point out the constitutional limits on executive power, I can count on some high-profile Democrat stating: "That is not who we are as a nation." And because being a Democrat calls for a sheep-like subservience to the herd, once one of them bleats anything, you can count on all the other lambs chiming in. The House Democrats attempted to remind people of the Civil Rights movement by staging a sit-in. They even, to their shame, sang a few bars of "We Shall Overcome." But mainly they chanted like banshees about gun control laws. In the end, they were more reminiscent of the union members in Wisconsin who stormed the state capital a few years back to display their anguish over Gov. Scott Walker digging in his heels and refusing to cave to their demands, which would have bankrupted the state.
I would actually enjoy being a purveyor of good tidings, but, as a rule, I would have to engage in deceit to do so. But even I was over-whelmed by the amount of positive feedback I generated when I wrote the truth about Mohammad Ali. Apparently, a lot of you shared the piece with friends and relatives because I heard from a lot of strangers. But what made the response really terrific was that only one person took me to task. But he proved himself a pinhead because he made no attempt to counter my arguments against the glorification of Ali, but simply called me a few names.
We have become the most self-absorbed people the world has ever known. Galileo was persecuted because he had the gall to declare that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system. But, today, he would have most of the country, not merely the Catholic Church, condemning him as a heretic for suggesting that each of us is not the center of the universe.
I think the fanatics at PETA are all certifiable loons or they wouldn't dare compare the plight of chickens to the Jews who were murdered in Nazi concentration camps.
I assumed I would have to wait until Jimmy Carter, 91, died before the outpouring of love and respect over the passing of a public figure would make me quite this nauseous, but, then, I hadn't counted on Muhammad Ali passing at the age of 74.
