Columnist.
I realize that the late Sen. Goldwater is anathema to liberals, even to those who only know him as the unfortunate victim of a famous TV spot in which a little girl picking a flower appears to be vaporized by a nuclear bomb. The vile message in 1964 was that Goldwater was a nutburger who was anxious to get us involved in a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union. Because most voters 50 years ago were just as dumb as they are today, 61% of them voted for LBJ, who took that as a signal to sink us even deeper into the quagmire of Vietnam. What more people should remember about Goldwater is based on fact, not a slander perpetuated by a cynical political operative; namely, that he was the man, the Republican senator, who went to Richard Nixon and told him to his face that it was time to resign, that he was an embarrassment not only to the nation, but to the political party to which they both belonged.
My two favorite movie writer-directors were Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder. Both worked at Paramount Studios in the 40s, which was fortuitous for Wilder. That's because they were both successful screenwriters when Sturges persuaded the studio to let him direct his own scripts. That decision led to a flurry of such classic, huge-grossing, comedies as "The Great McGinty," "The Lady Eve," "The Palm Beach Story" and "Hail the Conquering Hero." It also led Wilder to plead his own case. "The bosses at Paramount," he once told me, "gave me permission, assuming I would do something artsy-fartsy, which would flop, and that I'd then go back to being a nice little screenwriter. Instead, I made the comedy, "The Major and the Minor," which was a big success."
A friend of mine, after taking note of Obama's approach to foreign affairs, has decided that his doctrine is to speak softly and carry a big grudge. But if you stop and think about it, that also sums up his domestic policies, which seem aimed at burdening the middle class with additional taxes; a health system that will be the envy of nobody on earth, including the folks in Bangladesh; and an EPA and IRS that are out to target anyone who didn't contribute to Obama's re-election campaign. In other news, John Hinckley, 58, would-be assassin and would-be swain of lesbian actress Jodie Foster, is now a free man. It's only a rumor that in his rush to appoint left-wing dingbats to the federal bench, Obama is considering appointing Mr. Hinckley to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, where he would be right at home with the other liberal nutburgers. After all, he established his bona fides by trying to off conservative icon Ronald Reagan.
I get very discouraged when I come across polls that show Barack Obama's job approval rate as high as 43.9% and a generic congressional ballot that has Democrats leading Republicans 43% to 42.3%, even though the percentage of those thinking that America is headed in the right direction stands at just 29.8%. Apparently, about 14% of us are incapable of connecting even two or three dots. So much for public education! Still, being an eternal optimist, I take some comfort from the fact that Obama is the only two-term president who ever received fewer votes the second time around, and that since 2008, the GOP has won most of the elections, whether it was Senate and House seats, or a governor's mansion, that was up for grabs.
Because of my rheumatoid arthritis, I have been seeing a certain doctor for several years. Even with ObamaCare, I can continue seeing him. What has changed is the nature of the paperwork involved. Today's visit, which would normally entail a 10-minute discussion with Dr. Ratiner, followed by a 5-minute drawing of blood, took me over an hour. That was due to all the additional forms the government is now insisting be filled out. It's my guess that even though Obama's policies have crippled just about every other area of the economy, the paper industry must be blowing him kisses. I say that because in the past I used a credit card to pay for the office visit, and received the yellow copy as a receipt, whereas today they had to run off an entire page for me. And when the receptionist gave me my notice for the next visit, instead of the usual little piece of cardboard with the time and date scrawled on it, they wasted a second sheet of computer paper to let me know I was expected back on 07/31/14 at 11:30.
There are times when I suspect that people like Obama, Reid, Pelosi, Schumer, Boxer and Durbin, should have their photos on the wall of the post office as suspects in the killing of America. Other times, I remember that all of these people, along with the likes of Elijah Cummings, Brad Sherman, Henry Waxman, Sheila Jackson Lee and Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, have all been elected numerous times, so perhaps it's America that's chosen to commit suicide. As many of you recall, a doctor named Jack Kevorkian was generally reviled for assisting the terminally ill achieve a painless death. Some people called him a vulture. I was not one of them. It seems to me that if a person chooses to end his pain and suffering by ending his life, he shouldn't be denied that which we bestow, ironically, on both our beloved pets and the vilest serial killers.
Whenever I think about liberals, I feel the wires in my brain begin to sizzle. What in the world makes them say and do such absurd things? For instance, why do journalists insist on lying about their political affiliation? When half of them claim to be Independents and only 20% confess to being registered Democrats, whom do they think they're fooling? After all, their friends and relatives, as well as their colleagues, know better. But so do the rest of us. Last year, after spurning several years of invitations to attend a monthly gathering of former L.A. Times employees, I broke down and drove out to Pasadena for one of the geezer luncheons. Because even though I had written a weekly humor column for the paper for 11 years, I had always been a freelancer (no pension, no health insurance) and therefore only knew one person at the get-together. After we ate, the few of us who were first-timers were asked to stand up and describe what we had been doing since leaving the paper.
Seriously, is it possible that liberals actually believe the nonsense they go around spouting? I mean, I understand that as majority leader of the Senate, Harry Reid has to appear to be in sync with Barack Obama, but when in the wake of swapping five anti-American jihadists with unpronounceable names for one calling himself Bowe Bergdahl, Reid said, "I'm glad to get rid of them," did he not understand that most of us completed the thought with "and put them right back on the battlefield where they can resume killing our soldiers"? For his part, Obama, after comparing himself to such wartime presidents as Washington, Lincoln and FDR, said that an exchange of POWs is typical policy at the end of a war. That must have come as surprising news to the thousands of troops still risking life and limb in Afghanistan. As for the Taliban, they're still giggling over Obama's announcement in 2012 that Al Qaeda was decimated.
Although I am by nature an optimist, I must admit that even I have begun to suspect that our nation's best years, like my own, are behind us. As some of you will recall, just prior to the 2012 presidential election, I wrote that I was confident America could survive another four years of Obama, but I wasn't at all certain it could survive an electorate that would provide him with four more years. I still feel that way, and the thought that Hillary ("What difference does it make?") Clinton could be next in line, chills my bones and curdles my blood.
Because simply keeping track of all the absurdities that make our lives so troubling makes my in-box expand to its breaking point, I occasionally have to clear it out. So consider this a spring cleaning. For openers, I would suggest that in the wake of the spineless administrators at Rutgers uninviting Condoleezza Rice to deliver this year's commencement address, it's time for conservatives to quit behaving like Charlie Brown, who never seems to catch on that Lucy Van Pelt is going to snatch away the football just before he kicks it. In the future, conservatives should insist on a $50,000 cashier's check when they agree to speak at a college. If they get to say their piece, the check is returned to the college. Otherwise, it gets cashed.
It's an odd paradox, but I understand those who commit cold-blooded murder better than I do those people who attend vigils outside prisons where killers are being executed. The murderers, after all, are evil, making their acts, along with those of rapists and child molesters, comprehensible. When such a crime is committed and people say, "How could anyone do such a thing?" conservatives know the answer is: "They're the evil spawn of Satan." Liberals, on the other hand, assume that nobody, except conservatives are truly evil, and that bad behavior can inevitably be traced back to capitalism. If it weren't for money, they're convinced we'd all be living in condos in the Garden of Eden. They never bother explaining how money or the lack thereof motivates rape or the sexual abuse of children, but logic, as you may have noticed, is never their strong suit.
I can't quite decide which recent news item aggravated me the most. First there was Obama's latest salvo in his war on coal, followed by Mrs. Clinton's clumsy attempt to put Benghazi behind her and, finally, the swap of five Islamic terrorists for one Army prisoner. Even though Obama's plan to finish off the coal industry through the use of EPA regulations are expected to cost America 224,000 jobs each year for the next 16 years and send energy costs soaring across the board, the Democrats are all on board for it. It is amazing to me that so many Americans, the very people it will hurt the most, continue paying lip service to the hoax known as global-warming.
The U.S. Senate under the guidance -- or, if you prefer, the thumb -- of Harry Reid isn't interested in getting to the bottom of scandals involving the IRS, Benghazi or the Veterans Administration. But half the Senate -- 50 members, count 'em, 50 -- decided that the worst problem facing us was that their hometown football team continues to call itself the Washington Redskins. Even though a poll has shown that 80% of actual Native Americans have no problem with the name, Harry Reid and his coven of chowderheads have decided that something must be done. The very idea that Reid, who refers to Republicans as un-American -- and that's on one of his more civil days -- and calls cancer victims liars if they complain about ObamaCare, should set himself up as a moral arbiter and as the last word on decorum is ludicrous at best, stomach-turning at worst.
As most of you know, I am often pointing out the problems I have with liberal arts colleges. I am bothered by the cost of their tuitions, by the radical politics of their professors and by the craven cowardice of their administrators. Taken in order, there is no good reason why parents and students should have to go into debt. The price of books hasn't increased to such an extent that an education that used to run a few thousand dollars now runs to six figures. Next, if there is any place where freedom of thought and expression should be encouraged, it's on college campuses. But, thanks to an ever-vigilant academic gestapo, conservatives are persona non grata, both on the faculty and in the student body.
It's true that for a long time, an inexcusably long time, I was a registered Democrat. But even then, I never called myself a liberal. Because I came of age in the 1960s, I associated liberals with the punks I knew who called cops "pigs," called soldiers "baby killers" and used any and all means to dodge the draft, and then had the hypocrisy to announce they did so because they were avowed pacifists. Being in my 20s myself, I knew these people and I knew it was fear of battle or being bossed around by top sergeants, typically tough guys from the South, that motivated them to head off either to Canada or to one of the many left-wing shrinks who were willing to lie about their mental disorders and or verify they were homosexuals.
I don't think that most people would disagree with the statement that race relations in America were better before Barack Obama took office. Between him and the race card hustler Eric Holder, the divide hasn't been this large in decades. In similar fashion, I believe that Pope Francis has set back Catholic/Jewish relations. Although his recent trip to the Holy Land was trumpeted as ecumenical in nature, in reality it was about as unifying as the blade of a guillotine. When Israel's Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu observed that Jesus spoke Hebrew, school marm Francis piped up: "Aramaic." To which Netanyahu, the perhaps too polite host, said, "Jesus spoke Aramaic, but he knew Hebrew."
H.L. Mencken, who was referred to as "The Sage of Baltimore" by people besides H.L. Mencken, at least until he shared his Nazi sympathies, at which point they began referring to him as "The Loony Tune of Baltimore," once observed that "For every complex question, there is an answer that is simple, obvious and wrong." And every day, the left-wingers in Congress and the Oval Office prove how right he was. Whether the question revolves around how best to deal with health care, Vladimir Putin, Islamic jihadists, the economy, environmental zealots, the IRS, the Veterans Administration or racist thugs like Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and Eric Holder, the current administration, against extraordinarily long odds, somehow manages to be wrong every single time.
When I was young, a lot of conspiracy theorists (aka crazy people) were convinced that fluoride in our water was a Commie plot to destroy America one glass at a time. Back then, I discounted it as a result of the Cold War jitters, but for the past six years I've found myself wondering if young Barack, in addition to cocaine and marijuana, used to mainline fluoride back in Hawaii. You would think that millionaires and billionaires would finally tell Obama to either stop using them as scapegoats for what's wrong with this country or stop diving into their pockets every chance he gets. Instead, they keep showing up at his $35,000-a-plate fund raisers. Just recently, he went so far as to invite the future heirs of those people to the White House, softening them up for the DNC.
The oracles at the New York Times recently announced that, economically, our own middle class has fallen behind that of our neighbor to the north. I'm not sure what their intention was in sharing this bad news. Heaven knows they'd never think of laying the blame for this embarrassment at the feet of Barack Obama and his absurd economic policies, which have included destroying the world's preeminent health care system; extending unemployment benefits to the end of time; encouraging the EPA to do its best to regulate the oil and coal industries out of existence; and seemingly doing everything in his power to destroy capitalism. The two things that the Times neglected to mention by way of explanation was that, unlike the left-wing slacker in the White House, Canada is being led by a conservative prime minister, Stephen Harper, who has lowered taxes and passed a balanced budget, which just happen to be two things that Obama would never even consider, lest the mere concept sent him to bed with a severe case of shingles.
A very bright reader of mine wrote, calling for Obama's impeachment. Although I share his concern for the harm the man has caused America and the world, I wouldn't like to see the GOP once again crawl out on that very precarious limb armed only with good intentions and a chainsaw. As I see it, it is the one sure way the Republicans can blow the midterm elections. Most people don't want to see election results, no matter how wrong-headed they are, overturned by sore losers. As we saw in Bill Clinton's case, he became more popular than ever when people viewed him as a martyr. And in Obama's case, in spite of a general dislike of his policies, the split when it comes to him personally is dead-even.
