Columnist.
Christians are being persecuted, often murdered, in over a hundred countries at this very moment. Most of the massacres and church burnings are taking place in the Middle East, a gigantic swamp whose only redeeming features are oil and Israel, and the Orient, where China, Vietnam and North Korea, are proving themselves the swinish equals of Egypt, Syria and Iran. In the meantime, the Obama regime goes along to get along, saving its quota of moral outrage for the Israelis who refuse to jump through hoops for the Palestinian rabble and John Kerry.
Now that the Winter Olympics are over for another four years, let me say, at the risk of being regarded as a party pooper, that I think the Games are one of the worst ideas anyone has ever come up with. As far back as 1948 and 1952, I knew that when people praised them as a way to bring nations together in peaceful competition, with the emphasis on the individual athletes, I knew I was listening to high-sounding hooey. I knew that because every day, the newspapers would let us know how many medals the U.S., the Soviet Union and East Germany, had won. And if it happened that the Commies were winning more gold medals than we were, we'd make a big deal about the larger number of silver and bronze medals we were taking home.
While recuperating from surgery and the flu, I risked a relapse by watching Bill O'Reilly interview Barack Obama in an event that could have been titled "The Clash of Egos." I understood what was in it for the two of them. O'Reilly got an audience several times larger than the few million who tune in to his show on Fox. Obama got to tell people that Benghazi, the IRS and ObamaCare, not only weren't scandals, but were old news. The real question is what the heck I was doing watching the farce unfold. Sacrificing for my art, I suppose.
I understand that right-wing celebrities are in such short supply that we conservatives can't help swooning over those whose politics jibe with ours. Still, should we be so enchanted that we are willing to overlook the fact that Ted Nugent appears to be both dumb and a potty mouth? Mr Nugent certainly has the right to say whatever he pleases about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but when conservatives applaud his every obscenity, they do a disservice to our movement, and when Republican politicians like Greg Abbott, who hopes to be the next governor of Texas, embrace him, they do a disservice to their campaigns.
As you may have heard, an Academy Award nomination for the title song from the movie "Alone Yet Not Alone" has been rescinded. Naturally, even the Motion Picture Academy lacked the nerve to say it was because the song and the low-budget film promoted Christian values. Instead, they insisted it was because emails had been used to help promote the song to Academy voters. That's the sort of bald-faced lie that should even have secular liberals in Hollywood chuckling. The fact is that everyone in Hollywood campaigns for nominations and awards. It would take a Jesuit to explain why it is okay to mail DVDs to voters and to take out any number of ads in the Hollywood trade papers, but employing the far less expensive alternative of emails is strictly verboten.
Several hundred years ago, an Italian astronomer named Galileo Galilei, which sounds like something a Swiss shepherd might yodel, was found guilty of heresy and placed under house arrest for insisting that the earth revolved around the sun. Unfortunately for Signor Galilei, this contradicted Church doctrine that had long contended the earth was the center of the universe. Today, polling shows that one in four Americans actually believes that the sun spins around the earth. But it's not because the Church tells them falsehoods. Rather, it's because they're stupid and because they, like the knuckleheads who parrot the nonsense about man-made global warming, are convinced they are dealing with "settled science," a term concocted by liberal nincompoops for the purpose of silencing logical skeptics.
A question that keeps repeating itself in my mind is whether only creepy people run for public office or if, somehow, it's winning elections that transforms normal people into some distasteful form of alien life. For instance, with all the billions of dollars that the government wastes year after year, was it really essential that they cut pensions for military veterans? God knows I'm all for saving money, but the amount these mopes saved by chiseling the veterans is hardly enough to fund the government from midnight to 12:05 a.m.
Between the surgery and the flu, I have been pretty much housebound for a few weeks now. Between coughing, sneezing, taking meds and doing the hand exercises prescribed by the physical therapist, you wouldn't think I'd have time to also be annoyed on an hourly basis by external events. But God, in putting me through Job's trials, has not even spared me that. For instance, David Ortiz, the 38-year-old designated hitter for the Boston Red Sox has been negotiating a new contract. He has asked for a multi-year deal, but because of his advanced age, the team has been reluctant to oblige. Mr. Ortiz is certainly within his rights to ask for the moon, but it's the basis of his demand that has me reaching for the double strength Tylenol. It seems that Ortiz, who has been a major leaguer for 17 seasons and received $112 million in salary, exclusive of endorsements which, last year alone, brought in an additional five million, is requesting the multi-year deal for the security it would provide! I'd say Ortiz gives a whole new meaning to financial "insecurity."
Is it too much to ask that the media stop adding "gate" to every political scandal? Has everyone forgotten that Watergate was actually the name of the building where Nixon's plumbers, who clearly channeled their inner Three Stooges, broke in to the DNC headquarters. I mean, if the place had been, say, the Park Sheraton, would every subsequent scandal have had "Sheraton" pinned to it? I suppose I should be grateful that the recent furor over the former Defense Secretary's expose wasn't labeled Gatesgate. Still, I say 40 years is long enough; it's time for the media to move on because it has become something of a tritegate.
I've never made a secret of the fact that I liked the films of the 30s and 40s much more than the stuff being churned out today. I actually reviewed movies, first at UCLA and then for Los Angeles magazine, from 1959 to 1971. Even then, I was hard-pressed to come up with even half a dozen movies a year I could in good conscience recommend. Half of the movies I squirmed through were very dumb comedies starring either Jerry Lewis or Peter Sellers. Many of the others were designed as tributes to the beatnik generation, directed by young no-talents straining to appear cool. Those are definitely years I wish I could get back. One of the things I enjoyed the most about the old movies was that even the lesser efforts often included character actors and actresses it was a delight to watch. The ones who come quickly to mind include Claude Rains, Charles Coburn, Fay Bainter, Beulah Bondi, William Demarest, Eugene Pallette, Franklin Pangborn, Helen Broderick, Edmund Gwenn, Cedric Hardwicke, Charles Bickford, Ethel and Lionel Barrymore, Oscar Homolka, Clifton Webb, Eve Arden, Raymond Walburn, Thelma Ritter, William Bendix, Frank Morgan, James Gleason, Edward Arnold, Spring Byington, Sydney Greenstreet, Thomas Mitchell, Peter Lorre, Basil Rathbone, Jack Carson, Robert Benchley, Al Bridge, Harry Davenport, Una Merkel, Gene Lockhart and Felix Bressart.
Because simply recovering from surgery that involved my hand, wrist and thumb, didn't strike me as being all that challenging, I decided to add a case of the flu. And because even that didn't seem to be daunting enough, I decided to throw caution to the wind, and watch Obama's State of the Union Address. Predictably, that just about did me in. My first impression was that I was watching something that could best be described as "Groundhog Year." I mean, there were times during his 2014 Call to Action, I was certain that, thanks to my meds, I was hallucinating and reliving his earlier addresses to Congress. The words were the same, all about economic recovery, comprehensive immigration reform, income inequality and even, bless my soul, shutting down Guantanamo.
For a long time, I've thought that people must be really starved for role models if they keep looking to those in the public arena to fill the vacuum. I am not one of those people who believe that every politician is venal and corrupt, but neither am I someone who thinks that we should admire those whose only accomplishments consist of casting votes and giving speeches. Recently, Robert Gates garnered a great deal of attention for writing a book in which he took Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, to task. Once you got past the totally insincere compliments he apparently felt obliged to pay the first two, he basically made a case that none of them was to be trusted. Inasmuch as I had already come to that conclusion without his prompting, my question is why he didn't resign when he first discovered the truth about them.
Eric Holder, whose greatest ambition was clearly to be the worst Attorney General in history, helped solidify his claim on the title by insisting that the Justice Department will not allow profiling on the basis of religion or national origin. I had assumed that was already the policy of an A.G. who is so corrupt, he refuses to prosecute racial hate crimes unless the target of the investigation is a white individual or a Tea Party group. We've been engaged for the past 35 years in an undeclared war with Islam -- undeclared by us, that is -- but Mr. Holder regards it as rude if we concentrate on the religion or nationality of those sworn to murder us.
In case you have never heard of the Razzies, they're prizes handed out at a black tie event the night before the Oscars are bestowed. And unlike the Oscars, which are often awarded for no better reason than that some aging director has never won one before or because a sex symbol of either gender appeared in a movie without makeup or a toupee, the Razzies always go to the most deserving. That's because they're in recognition of the worst movies and the worst performances of the previous year. Some of the people who have won multiple times include Sylvester Stallone, Kevin Costner, Adam Sandler, Demi Moore, Bo Derek, Sharon Stone and Madonna. Frankly, I think the network would get bigger ratings airing the Razzies than the Academy Awards. After all, how many times do we really need to see Meryl Streep on stage, clutching the little gold eunuch to her bosom, and blowing kisses to her various co-stars in the audience?
There are those who believe that in their natural state, people are kind, generous and good-natured. I, however, don't believe they are any of those things. Unless they are raised by parents with decent values and taught at a very early age that evil actions have dire consequences, people will grow up to be savages. I still recall an experiment in a college psych class some years ago. In test after test, three students seated behind mirrored glass were told that they were free to administer electric shocks to other students in a lab, and that nobody would be able to tell which of them was responsible. Well, no surprise to me, those holding the controls kept turning the knobs, believing they were delivering shock after shock. It was only later that they learned that their "victims" were being alerted by a noise and, so, in spite of their feigned spasms and grimaces, weren't actually being tortured.
Every so often, so many items capture my attention that I either have to get them down on paper or accept the fact that I can never hope to catch up. But never let it be said that Prelutsky took the easy, logical, sane, commonsensical, approach. To get the ball rolling, let me confess that I not only tend to shy away from non-fiction books in general, but even more so when it comes to biographies. I have multiple problems with them. To begin with, they are written by researchers and academicians, and so I usually find the writing dry and humorless. For another, they tend to begin with a rundown on the subject's ancestors. Although parents and grandparents may have played a huge role in the way the person turned out, if I wanted to read about them, I'd be reading *their* biographies. My third reason, shameful as it must sound to many of you, is that I'm not that interested in reading five or six hundred pages about any one person.
Income inequality is very much in the wind because Obama keeps whining about it, convinced that resentment over the likes of Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and Ted Turner and their billions will lead people to vote for Democrats in November. This is sloppy thinking for several reasons. One, even if those guys didn't exist, I'd be no richer than I am today. Two, this administration has done nothing to diminish the inequality; in fact, during the past few years, wealthy people have seen their fortunes increase enormously, while the poor and the middle class have fallen even further back than they were when the Obamas moved into the White House. And, finally, Gates, Buffet and Turner, along with billionaires Oprah Winfrey, David Geffen, Russell Simmons and the Weinstein brothers, are all card-carrying Democrats.
Colorado recently beat out Washington to become the first state in the union to legalize marijuana. Although I have long railed against the so-called War on Drugs because it was a waste of time and resources, I can't help thinking that legalizing pot is not going to improve the world. For one thing, aside from cleaning up crash sites and re-directing traffic, just exactly how are cops supposed to deal with stoned drivers? At least with booze, they can measure intoxication levels with breathalyzers.
While rehabilitating from my operation, I keep seeing TV ads in which an off-screen voice tries to lure business to New York State by insisting "it's open to innovation, ambition and bold ideas." Clearly it's not the voice of Gov. Cuomo, who has said that unless you are in favor of abortions and homosexuals, and opposed to the Second Amendment, New York is no place for you, no matter how bold your ideas happen to be. But that is consistent with the way that liberals think or, rather, fail to think. Consider the way they muddy up the language. The opposite of Pro-Life, after all, is not Pro-Choice; it's Pro-Death. And only liberals would think of naming the world's biggest abortion mill Planned Parenthood.
In one of the few Hollywood epics that wasn't entirely wretched, there was a stirring moment in "Spartacus" when the Roman general stands before the slaves huddled on the ground and demands that Spartacus, the leader of the revolt, stand and identify himself. As Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) begins to get up in order that his fellow prisoners not be tortured on his behalf, the others rise, each of them insisting "I am Spartacus." I think that when Obama and his thugs demand that an order of nuns or anyone else who holds sincere religious beliefs caves to the power of the state, it behooves us to stand and declare, whatever our religion or gender, that we are all Sisters of the Poor.
