Columnist.
I happen to love the English language, but I can see where others might not. Some people must look at such pitfalls as "its and it's," "whose and who's," "there and their," "for, fore and four," along with "to, too and two," and conclude the language was invented by a practical joker whose only motive was to trip them up. There are also words that have so many different meanings that it can take half a page in the dictionary to list them all. They end up as the linguist equivalents of those old time steamer trunks people used to pack before taking off on round-the-world voyages.
My title is half a line from Shakespeare's "The Tempest." The conclusion reads: "All the devils are here." More and more, as you look around the world or at our own political landscape, it seems to be the case that Satan has thrown open the doors and furloughed the worst offenders, perhaps following the lead of his friend and close associate, Barack Obama, who is doing his best to release killers, rapists and terrorists, from our prisons and from Guantanamo.
When Hillary Clinton was asked at a campaign event how her administration would differ from Barack Obama's, she replied in that voice that brings to mind a cat walking across a blackboard: "I'm a woman." Her silly response naturally garnered a huge ovation from the liberal yahoos in attendance. How is it that women, who have claimed to be empowering themselves for the past four decades, turn into simpering little girls every time Mrs. Clinton makes pandering statements about their gender?
The best things about the latest Republican debate were the candidates. Even the ones I don't particularly care for, like Rand Paul and John Kasich, had their moments, although I'm not sure I can say the same for Jeb Bush, who more and more resembles the tallest nerd in everyone's high school yearbook.
I first wrote this piece in October, 2001. I believe that because of what has been taking place over the past 14 years — the past seven in particular — it's time once again that I posted this reminder of what America means to a great many of us.
Because I make it a practice to point out what everybody else is doing badly, I thought for a change I would offer solutions or at least suggestions. The problem with guns, as even Barack Obama would admit if you could water board him into telling the truth, has nothing to do with law-abiding citizens, everything to do with loons and thugs having access to weapons when, in a sane society, the only things those two groups would have access to are insane asylums and jails, respectively.
I realize that some of you assume that we pundits live glamorous, exciting lives, filled with galas where we get to rub elbows with equally bright and beautiful people. Well, sure, it's mostly that way. But every once in a while, we have to hop off the merry-go-round and check up on the little people.
I'm not sure how long people have been complaining that ours is a disposable society, but it's been a long time and things are not getting any better. At least in the beginning, it was usually clocks, razors and small kitchen appliances, they were referring to, pointing out that it was cheaper to replace these things than to repair them.
The question is whether Barack Obama realizes how silly he sounds when he begins pontificating about guns. I realize he isn't as smart as his defenders like to pretend, but is it possible that he's really so stupid that he thinks the cause of violence in America is guns, the inanimate objects that are powerless until someone picks them up and uses or misuses them?
Recently, a friend of mine asserted that dogs don't have souls. Inasmuch as I nearly always agree with her, I found it surprising that we were in opposing camps on this particular subject. Because I respect her opinion, I found myself questioning my own belief system somewhat more than usual. Is it possible, I asked myself, to have four legs, a tail, fleas and a soul? While I'm not absolutely certain what souls are, I finally decided that if they are what I think they are, dogs definitely have them.
Fresh from reminding the Republican contenders that there aren't as many "f—ing Jews" in America as they seem to think when they pledge their commitment to the survival of Israel, Ann Coulter has come up with a new litmus test, basing their fitness to be president on the college or university they attended. She stoops to this nonsense because she wishes to remind us that not only did she attend Cornell and graduate from the University of Michigan Law School, but that her current heart throb, Donald Trump, graduated from the prestigious Wharton School of Business.
As some of you are aware, I was recently AWOL. I was off my computer because I was overseeing the shooting of one of my comedy screenplays, "Angels on Tap," down in El Segundo, a beach community adjacent to the south side of LAX. Because we were using the local Moose Lodge, we only had access from 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., the hours when it wasn't open to its members. When you are accustomed, as I am, to going to sleep after midnight, you can understand that I was a basket case from sleep deprivation long before we had crossed the finish line.
We are told that there are three equal branches of government, but I'm not buying it. If that were the case, how would the unelected members of the Supreme Court be able to legislate on such matters as abortions and same-sex marriages? If things were equally divided, how would Barack Obama be free to decide that he didn't have to call the suicidal nuclear deal he cut with Iran a treaty, which would have required passage by two-thirds of the Senate? For that matter, if the legislative branch is a co-equal of the executive branch, why is it that it requires 60 senators to stop the nuclear deal in its tracks, but Obama only needs 40 senators to over-ride a Senate veto?
All that Dr. Carson said was that he would not want to see a Muslim in the Oval Office, and the politically correct jackals fell on him as if he were a gazelle with a bad limp. But why would anyone want to see a Muslim president? It's bad enough that Barack Obama has filled so many positions in his administration with them that he barely has room for all the transgendered freaks and homosexuals he has crammed onto the federal payroll.
I would like to thank all of you who took part in my recent poll. The question was which three Republican candidates you liked best and which you disliked the most. Although there were many more men than women who took part, there wasn't much of a gender divide when it came to those you preferred and those who would force you to hold your nose in the voting booth when casting your vote against Hillary, Joe or Bernie, in 2016. Although there is no exact way to measure the difference in enthusiasm between a first place vote and a third place vote, the top first place vote-getters were Cruz (58), followed by Fiorina (29), Carson (21) and Rubio (20. The only other contenders in double figures were Walker (19), Trump (16) and Jindal (10).
I am still not on board for Donald Trump, but there's a part of me that almost wishes he gets the nomination so I can watch Jeb Bush have to live up to his pledge to support the GOP nominee after Trump has given him, by actual count, 4,819 verbal noogies and another 1,734 wedgies. Inasmuch as Trump has so far provided so many of the crowd-pleasing sound bites that Republicans are obviously hungry to hear, I am surprised that he hasn't reprised his offer from some years ago to boot the U.N. out of America and convert its building into a first class hotel. Frankly, I'd be in favor of his turning the building into a trailer park, a wading pool or, perhaps more appropriately, a garbage dump. If there is a more corrupt organization in the world, at least outside the city limits of Washington, D.C., I haven't heard of it.
Let me make it perfectly clear that I think that even the notion of same-sex marriages flies in the face of nature and commonsense. Still, I do not support Kim Davis, the county clerk in Kentucky who refused to grant marriage licenses to homosexuals, who had the legal right to receive them. Unlike the bakers, photographers and wedding planners, who drew the line at servicing such events, homosexuals help pay her salary. The right that was hers was the right to resign.
If a few people tell enough lies, a lot of people are sure to believe them. That is certainly the case when it comes to the 14th Amendment. When it was adopted in 1868, its clear intention was to grant citizenship to black slaves, people who were captured and brought to America against their will. In the years since, it has been twisted into a defense for granting the children of those who sneaked into the country the same rights as those born to American parents. You don't have to be a constitutional scholar to understand that nowhere else are people allowed to be the beneficiaries of criminal acts. You can no more make the legal case for anchor babies by saying that the babies didn't commit a crime than you could argue that just because the children of a bank robber didn't drive the getaway car, they get to keep the money.
In case you haven't noticed, America is doing everything it can to not only trash the Constitution, but to eliminate from the national landscape some of the major players in the creation of the United States. For openers, Alexander Hamilton is on the verge of being replaced on the ten dollar bill, and the Democrats are about to quit calling their annual fund-raising soirees Jefferson-Jackson dinners. I'm not sure why Hamilton has fallen out of favor, but apparently the Democrats, who can't win an election unless every black person in America turns out to vote a couple of times, have decided they can no longer pay homage to Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson because they owned slaves.
Because Barack Obama says he wants his administration to look more like America, he recently appointed Raffi Freedman-Gurspan to be the director of the White House Office of Personnel. I'm not sure what that title means, either, but that's not really important. What matters is that Mr. Freedman-Gurspan is the first transgender to ever be a White House official. At least his/her/its being a transgender makes that goofy hyphen slightly more appropriate than is usually the case.
