Columnist.
I recently received an email from a reader named Roy who said that he wished he could put together a single GOP presidential candidate who had the best attributes of all the announced candidates without all the things there are not to like about them. He went on to ask how I would go about cobbling together this ideal composite. I agreed to give it a try, although I acknowledged that if I left out all the things I don't like about the 15 or 20 contenders, I would be left with more spare parts than Dr. Frankenstein. The winner I came up with was someone who possessed Carly Fiorina's intelligence, Marco Rubio's smile and ethnicity, Dr. Ben Carson's speaking voice, Scott Walker's record as governor and public union-buster, Jeb Bush's bankroll and my charm, good looks and sense of humor.
Recently, I realized the reason that liberals are so unhappy is that everything throws them into a panic. I'm not just referring to things like armed men in uniform, be they members of the military or law enforcement, but, literally, everything, including the weather. In fact, in the midst of a world that sees the Russian bear expanding westward, the Chinese dragon expanding eastward and the entire Middle East going nuclear, we have such liberal icons as Barack Obama and Pope Francis insisting the greatest threat facing mankind is global warming. They base this contention on unscientific computer models, while ignoring the fact that the earth's temperature has remained stable for the past 17 years. What's more, none of the nonsense Al Gore began spouting in the 1990s about rising sea levels, melting icebergs and drowning polar bears, has come to pass. But when one's actual mission isn't to save the planet, but to destroy capitalism and to become enormously wealthy doing it, facts are simply an inconvenient truth.
Every time you turn around these days, there's a new Clintonian scandal in the news. Among conservatives, the scandals raise hackles, while among liberals, they don't even result in a raised eyebrow. It's unfortunate that liberals only care what you say, not what you do, but, unfortunately, that's the only way it can work with that crowd. Once you sign on to be a Democrat, the contract demands that you never dare question why, for instance, Barack Obama has kept all of his documents under lock and key or why Bill Clinton has never served time for sexual assault, accepting bribes or fudging on his income taxes. So long as politicians on the Left utter the customary pieties about urban blacks, illegal aliens, Muslims, public schools, homosexuals, unions and single women, while blaspheming religious people, corporations, gun owners and conservatives, they will continue to hold their own in national elections.
Ronald Reagan was right when he stated that the federal government is not the solution and again when he said that the nine scariest words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Having said all that, I do not share the fears of a great many on the Right who apparently lie awake nights worrying about the NSA listening in on their phone calls. From my earlier defense of the National Security Agency, I know that a number of my readers disagree. So be it. When push comes to shove, I prefer siding with Charles Krauthammer and John Bolton to sharing Rand Paul's paranoia. For one thing, even if Obama and his stooges wanted to listen in on a few billion phone calls a day, I don't believe they are up to the task. But it does make me somewhat envious of all you folks who are having all those fascinating phone calls that you imagine others are dying to tune in on. For my part, anyone tapping my line will, ninety-nine times out of 100, hear me hanging up on a telemarketer who has just addressed me as Mr. Potsky.
I grew up loving the movies. Thanks to there being several reissue houses in L.A. when I was at my most impressionable age, I grew up mainly a fan of the movies produced in the 30s and early to mid-40s. By the time the 60s rolled around, I still loved the movies, but mainly those produced in the 30s and early to mid-40s. That's not to say I haven't enjoyed a great many films made over the past 50 or 60 years, but most of the stars don't measure up, in my estimation, to the likes of Cary Grant, Irene Dunne, Spencer Tracy, Jean Arthur, William Powell, Myrna Loy, Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Jimmy Stewart, Katharine Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Jimmy Cagney. These days, just about the only people who can lure me to a movie theater are Helen Mirren, Jeffrey Rush, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth.
I really would like to put the recent riot in my rearview mirror, but Obama and the clucks running Baltimore won't let me. For instance, what Obama took away from the creeps running wild was that urban police should not be allowed to use the best equipment available to protect themselves or their cities from the barbarians. Instead of dropping the hammer on those who riot, Obama has decided that cops should be deprived of riot gear. For her part, Marilyn Mosby, the prosecutor who assured the mob that she would deliver justice on their behalf, has urged a judge to place a gag order on the six cops she indicted and their lawyers. In the meantime, she constantly attacks the defendants in the media. Unless the entire state wishes to see itself humiliated, Ms. Mosby must be called on the carpet by the Maryland Bar Association for displaying such obvious contempt of the First Amendment.
When Megyn Kelly asked Jeb Bush if he would, knowing what we know now, have invaded Iraq in 2003, it was not a gotcha question. She is not a liberal shill looking to eviscerate every GOP presidential candidate. She was actually giving him the opportunity to separate himself from his big brother, even though big brother George had already said that absent faulty intelligence, he would not have gone after Saddam Hussein. Jeb's problem was that, like most politicians, he prefers the sound of his own voice to that of all others. He was so anxious to give his canned answer that he tuned out the all-important "Knowing what we know now." The fact is we have all misheard and misspoken on occasion. The problem is that he didn't immediately say, "Oh, sorry, Megyn, I was preoccupied, worrying about my father's failing health" or something equally self-serving. Instead, he and his people wasted a few days trying to make sense of his response.
A few years ago, I gave a talk at a local Rotary Club. During the Q&A session, a member of the audience identified himself as a liberal and took me to task over something I'd said about Muslims. After trying, and no doubt failing, to set him straight, I asked him why he was a liberal. He puffed himself up, as these jerks are prone to do, and said it was mainly because he believed in social justice. I'm not sure if I called him a fool or only thought it, but I did point out to him that justice is justice, and doesn't require any adjectives. In fact, once you begin to modify it, you're perverting its meaning. The ideal, I explained, was one set of rules for rich and poor, black and white, men and women, young and old, liberals and conservatives, Muslims and Christians. It was bad enough having to explain all this to a fellow American. What made it worse is that he had identified himself as a lawyer.
When liberals set out to prove that conservatives are hypocrites, they will generally point out that many of the same people who are most opposed to abortions turn around and support capital punishment. In doing so, the liberals merely confirm they lack anything even faintly resembling a moral compass. After all, who but a leftist would ever equate the life of an innocent baby with that of a cold-blooded sadist? When comparing human lives, it helps if those on both sides are recognizably human. To suggest that some degenerate who has raped and murdered a child or eviscerated an entire family be allowed to live simply because he possesses fingerprints and human DNA seems fatuous at best, repugnant at worst. But, then, on those occasions when liberals aren't immoral, their tendency is to be amoral, seemingly unaware that there are principles and values without which we are no better than the beasts of the jungle.
Because we are quickly approaching January 20, 2017, although not quickly enough to suit some of us, the usual paranoia has risen to the surface. I am receiving the very same sort of email I was receiving when the administrations of both Clinton and Bush were winding down. People are once again alerting me to the news that the next election will not take place because the man in the White House will cobble up a national emergency that requires him to call out the federal troops and deny the American people the opportunity to evict him from the Oval Office. While I agree that Obama is far more likely to behave that way than either of his predecessors, I really don't think that Michelle, Valerie Jarrett, Juan Williams, Josh Earnest, Loretta Lynch and the Congressional Black Caucus, are up to the task.
In spite of all the attention we have recently paid to Baltimore, it's nothing new. We've had race riots on a regular basis for nearly 50 years. I'm not referring to events like Selma, which were peaceful demonstrations that were turned into riots by the racist cops. But even the assassination of Martin Luther King was merely an excuse for black people to run amok, making asses of themselves by burning, breaking and looting. What a great way to pay tribute to the man who preached passive resistance to racial injustice! Ever since then, this has been an urban form of entertainment in every major city in America. Sometimes the fuse is lit by the local team's winning or losing a championship game. More often, the trigger, so to speak, is some good-for-nothing being shot during a police pursuit. Out here in L.A., we experienced a major riot simply because four cops were acquitted for beating on Rodney King, a career thug who had just led the cops on a 100-mph car chase and then resisted being cuffed, probably because he was high on PCP.
When Hillary Clinton decided to give her campaign vehicle a cutesy pie name, I can only imagine that she and Bill preferred that the media would say that they were throwing people under the Scooby Doo rather than under the bus. After all, it is impossible for a Democrat to run for president without leaving a wake of people with tire tracks on their carcass. In 2008, let us remember, Obama tossed his friend and religious mentor, Jeremiah Wright, under the wheels once we all began to hear the vile remarks that Rev. Wright had spewed for 20 years while the Obamas sat savoring every reprehensible word in a front row pew. That same year, when former V.P. candidate Geraldine Ferraro, at the time serving as a major advisor to Mrs. Clinton, said what everyone was thinking — namely, that Obama would not have been running for the presidency if he hadn't been black — Hillary didn't even wait for the bus to slow down before giving her the old heave-ho.
In the old days, I recall my mother would occasionally have to empty the little pan under the ice box into which water would collect. With so many items winding up in my in-box, every so often I have to do a little emptying myself. To begin with, I thought Charles Krauthammers's comment regarding the peddling of influence by the Clintons was well worth sharing: "If there isn't a shred of evidence that they accepted bribes in exchange for favors, it's because they shredded the evidence." The more I see of Bill and Hillary doing everything imaginable in pursuit of a few extra dollars, the more I find myself thinking of them as the Kardashians on steroids. As for Hillary's presidential aspirations, I think that the only people who would like to see her elected more than Bill and Chelsea are America's editorial cartoonists. With her snarky smile and her multitude of pantsuits, she is easily drawn, although some of us would prefer to see her drawn-and-quartered.
So far as liberals, including Barack Obama, are concerned, dead people only count if they happen to be black criminals killed by white cops, not if, as in the majority of cases, they're black people being killed by other black people. Similarly, so far as that crowd is concerned, innocent lives only matter when we're talking about Muslims, not Jews or Christians. Frankly, that's not too surprising when it comes to Europeans. It's been a great many years since most of them even thought of themselves as Christians. Thanks to socialist policies, which have seen Greece's economy go belly-up, most Europeans are now devout secularists whose only religion is Liberalism, and whose tenets consist of the 35-hour work week, four week paid vacations and "free" health care. Having granted all that, it is still mind-boggling how it is that the West has turned a blind eye to Islamic carnage that includes the burnings of churches and people, beheadings, crucifixions and, most recently, the drowning of 12 Christians by a shipload of Muslims, who just happened to be escaping the joys of Islam.
I know that a lot of people are waiting to hear Mrs. Clinton answer tough questions from reporters, but I'm not one of them. I'm pretty old and I'm not sure I have the time to sit through too many of her answers. For instance, Morton Michaels reminds me that in 2014, when asked about her accomplishments as Secretary of State, she responded: "Well, I'm glad you asked me that! My proudest accomplishment in which I take the most pride, mostly because of the opposition it faced early on, you know … the remnants of prior situations and mindsets that were too narrowly focused in a manner whereby they may have overlooked the bigger picture and we didn't do that and I'm proud of that. Very proud. I would say that's a major accomplishment." The scariest thing of all is that tens of millions of Democrats would listen to that incoherent drivel, nod and say, "Yep, she's the smartest woman in the world."
Marco Rubio got an ovation when, while announcing his intention to run in 2016, he took a swipe at not only Hillary Clinton, but Jeb Bush, by pointing out she represents yesterday while young Rubio represents tomorrow or even a week from next Thursday. The problem is that George Washington, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson and Ronald Reagan, all go back even further than Mrs. Clinton. Her problem isn't that she's been around Washington for a quarter of a century or that she's in her late 60s, but that all she has to offer is the same liberal drivel which states that the federal government is the fount of all wisdom and that politicians and bureaucrats spend our money more wisely than we do and are in the best position to determine how the rest of us live our lives.
Like everyone else who can't wait for the Obamas to vacate the White House, I want to tell 2017 not to dawdle. No stopping to smell the roses while the rest of us are sniffing the swamp gas emanating from what has come to be known over the past six years as the Offal Office. I have long believed that you could get a pretty good handle on a person if you knew his friends and his enemies. In Obama's case, his friends, those folks for whom he doesn't mind going that extra mile, seem to consist of Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollah Khamenei and the Castros, which explains why Raul Castro recently declared that "Barack Obama is a decent man." As commendations go, that's rather like having Hitler calling you a nice guy. On the other hand, Obama's enemy list includes Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, Egypt's President el-Sisi, Jordan's King Abdullah II, Christians, America's conservatives, law-abiding gun owners and, of course, Fox News.
When the Rolling Stone devoted a great deal of space to a cocked-up story about a gang rape that took place at a University of Virginia frat house, they had a pretty good idea it never happened. After all, they knew that the reporter had not spoken to anyone but the alleged "victim." Even the Stone wouldn't cover a traffic accident without interviewing those involved, the police and any eye witnesses. All of that is covered in the first week of Journalism 101. However, all the rules are tossed out when the story involves any of the left's favorite narratives. So if black hooligans riot, it's reported as if it were an insurrection of slaves in 1850 Mississippi. If a white cop shoots a black thug, it's reported as if it's 1950 Mississippi. And if college boys are accused of rape, it's assumed the rape actually took place, although even government statistics indicate that it's just about as likely that the sex was consensual and that the coed woke up the next day, entertaining second thoughts.
There is a war taking place in the Middle East that pits Muslims against Christians, Jews and those Muslims who belong to a different cult. Here in America, there is a war taking place that pits liberals and homosexuals — to the extent there exists a smidgen of difference between them — against Christians. One merely has to look at every situation in which Christians attempt to defend their religious rights. Whether it's companies that don't wish to provide birth control in the form of contraceptives or provide funding for abortions; or devout individuals, who are even willing to accept homosexuality as an optional life style, but draw the line at playing any role in a same-sex wedding, the gays and their journalistic, corporate and political, henchmen will unite to put them out of business.
Politicians have even found a way to make presidential races boring. As you may have noticed, nobody ever just says, "I'm running." First they have to announce they're forming an exploratory committee, meaning they're not only calling everyone they've ever laid eyes on, hoping they'll cough up a few bucks, but haranguing the rest of us suckers. Next they announce that they'll make an announcement in a month. Then the day before the month is up, they announce their decision is coming tomorrow. Finally, the big day arrives, the politician shows up at a venue where nobody is likely to throw a ripe tomato in his direction and admits that after checking with his wife, kids, God and, most importantly, the guy in charge of collecting campaign funds, he has decided to do us all a favor by running for, if not the best job in the world, at least the job with the very best perks.
