Columnist.
The language of liberalism is the language of liars. They pretend that the Affordable Care Act was divinely inspired and handed down in the form of stone tablets when everyone who doesn't have his head in the sand knows that it only got passed because Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi browbeat or bribed their left-wing colleagues to get it enacted. Even then, they had to promise that no senator or House member would be lumbered with the worst thing that's come down the pike since unsliced bread. Obama might as well have said with a nod and a wink, "Don't worry, my amigos, this is strictly for the suckers."
ObamaCare is merely the natural extension of the welfare state we've evolved into over the past century. We now offer 99 weeks of unemployment insurance, which acts to discourage its recipients from seeking employment; affirmative action, which officially condones racism; a disability insurance program that's an open invitation to fraud; food stamps for nearly 50 million Americans, including the young and able-bodied; an immigration policy that encourages foreigners to sneak into the country and become wards of the state; the unionization of civil servants, which means that those bureaucrats, whom it's nearly impossible to fire, now make more money, have bigger pensions and better health care, than those of us who are forced to pay their salaries; and Social Security, which was a Ponzi-like con game from its inception.
It recently occurred to me that Washington, D.C., is like a supermarket for lobbyists. It provides them with the convenience of one-stop shopping. Speaking of our nation's capital, in response to the controversy swirling around the Washington Redskins, some wag suggested that the truly offensive word wasn't Redskins, it was Washington.
Whenever I see Obama deliver a speech, I have a visceral reaction unlike anything I've ever experienced without having first eaten something I should have left on my plate. It isn't his politics, alone, that brings on the gag reflex; it's the fact that he lies compulsively and then never acknowledges his lies when the facts inevitably show him to be lying.
Politicians are always floating trial balloons to test the winds for their various programs. I have my own balloons, and I often wish I could use them to float off to another planet For instance, I received an email from a fellow who had spent 40 years working in procurement for the U.S. military. He was calling my attention to how quickly the federal government got those signs announcing the shutdown printed and posted all across the country, at every national park and monument. As he says, it's not as if they just happened to have those thousands of 3x4-foot signs lying around since the last shutdown 17 years ago.
There are any number of females who can be found on the membership rolls of NOW or in the audience at Sandra Fluke speeches or raising funds for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign, who make my skin crawl. They are the creatures whose major concern isn't equality in education, equality of opportunity in the work place, or protection of children from sexual predators. Instead, the issue that motivates them to get out of bed in the morning is abortion on demand.
Barack Obama says more dumb things in a day than some people say in a lifetime. For instance, regarding the shutdown, he said: "The House Republicans are holding the government hostage." I know that Obama isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer and that he has only a passing relationship with the Constitution, but someone should tell him that the House is a part of the government, no matter how he feels about it. So, were we to take him at his word -- always a bad idea! -- the House Republicans would be guilty of holding themselves hostage.
For those who don't have enough irony in their daily diet, let me point out that the Founders fought a revolution in order to free themselves from King George. Now, a scant two hundred-odd years later, we are forced to support the Obamas in a style more lavish than anything ever dreamed of by even the most self-indulgent of the French monarchs.
When it comes to the possible GOP presidential candidate three years hence, the names we hear most often are Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and Chris Christie. For some reason, possibly because he was part of a losing ticket in 2012, you don't hear much about my personal favorite, Paul Ryan. What I fear most is that whoever emerges victorious from the bloodbath known as Republican primaries will resemble the survivor of a train wreck after all the other contenders have had at him with brickbats, blackjacks and broken bottles.
There are times when I can't help wishing I were a Democrat. It certainly would have helped my writing career. I mean, look at the folks who make a handsome living for no other reason than that they're liberals. I'm not even referring to politicians. Obviously, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson Lee, Henry Waxman and Barbara Boxer, would be begging at freeway off-ramps and sleeping under bridges in a logical world. But I'm talking about all those others.
Even being incarcerated isn't enough to make some hardened cases walk the straight and narrow. O.J. Simpson, who, among his other sins helped make household names out of creeps like Johnnie Cochran and Robert Shapiro, was recently busted by prison guards while trying to smuggle a dozen oatmeal cookies from the mess hall back to his cell. In related news, Nabisco is negotiating with Simpson's representatives to make him their corporate spokesman. And, if he gets paroled, "Sesame Street" is considering making him their Cookie Monster. After all, nobody answers the job description better.
Over the past couple of years, I made a couple of prophecies. The first was that in spite of Obama's threats, Bashar al-Assad would remain in power longer than Obama would. The second was that although America could probably survive another four years of Obama, I doubted if the nation could survive an electorate that would re-elect him. Nothing I've seen in the intervening months since last November has caused me to change my mind. Apparently, according to polls, even if the Republican House agrees to fund everything but ObamaCare and Obama then shuts down the government in a fit of pique, the majority of voters will hold the Republicans responsible if their Social Security checks are a week late. I mean, just how dumb are we as a nation?
The Democrats apparently think they can get away with anything simply because the major media outlets are in the tank for them, and perhaps they can. I suppose we'll have to wait until the mid-term elections to find out if America really is prepared to pull the plug on itself. Clearly, Obama and his gang thought it wouldn't cost them any votes if the Department of Defense suspended death benefits to the widows and children of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. Apparently, they were equally copacetic about shutting down the outdoor World War II Memorial to military veterans, while throwing open the National Mall for a demonstration by illegal immigrants and some of their publicity-crazed supporters in the House.
Having spent a good deal of my life studying the behavior of politicians, particularly those in our nation's capital, I have concluded that the Potomac River gives off noxious fumes. It's the cause of the common malady known as Potomac fever. The usual symptoms are a loss of mental faculties, a diminished moral sense and a swelled head. We're all aware of the ways it affects the likes of people like Obama, Biden, Reid, Pelosi and John McCain. But even lesser lights exhibit signs of contamination. For instance, Jay Carney used to be a respected journalist, or at least as respected as a Time magazine reporter could possibly be. But once he went to work as a press secretary, he has learned to lie for a living. And not just once in a while, but every single time he finds himself standing at a podium.
The United States isn't going to the dogs, which would be a good thing. Instead, it's going to the dolts. You want proof? Okay, ABC asked a group of typical voters three questions. One: Is ObamaCare a socialistic program? (Yes, they replied.) Two: Is the Affordable Care Act a socialistic program? (No, they said.) Three: Is the Affordable Care Act better than ObamaCare? (Definitely, they decided.)
Barack Obama insisted he would not negotiate with House Republicans so long as they allow the government shutdown to continue because they were holding a gun to the heads of the American people. Have you noticed how everything with this schmuck comes back to guns? As I sit here, I have no idea how the shutdown will play out. But speaking of guns, I hope the Republicans stick to theirs. For one thing, I don't see any harm in an occasional shutdown. For another thing, it's always a relief when politicians aren't on the job, creating mischief. For a third thing, I get a kick out of it when they separate bureaucrats into essential and non-essential, and I'm always left wondering what possible excuse there is for allowing the non-essential ones to return from their paid vacations.
I realize that those on the Left hold anyone who questions where Barack Obama was born in contempt. They even came up with a silly term, Birthers, for those who aren't satisfied that a president who continues to keep documents related to his college applications and grades under lock and key is being entirely forthright.
The Catholic Church came up with the concept of excommunication. But as you may have noticed, such Catholic luminaries as the Kennedy clan, Nancy Pelosi, Dick Durbin and Joe Biden, all spent years promoting abortion on demand and nobody in the Catholic hierarchy even raised an eyebrow, let alone said anything about denying them communion. However, let a Republican take two steps in any direction, and his fellow Republicans want him drawn and quartered. I'm not suggesting that we Republicans should follow the lead of our opponents and turn ourselves into robots. Frankly, I don't know why Senate Democrats even bother going to work. Harry Reid not only decides how they're going to vote, but even decides what legislation they'll be allowed to consider.
How is it that Obama gets to decide how ObamaCare will be administered? As he keeps saying, it's the law of the land. So where does he get off unilaterally granting waivers to his supporters while forcing everyone else to abide by the rules? And how is it that the GOP hasn't forced the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of what he's doing? No one is going to convince me that he has the legal authority to grant waivers to big businesses while forcing individuals to toe the line.
When Alice followed the White Rabbit down the hole, she got to meet a very strange group of individuals. Besides the Rabbit, who was always in a hurry and had a pocket watch to remind him he was late, she encounted a dormouse, a blue caterpillar, the obnoxious Queen of Hearts and a host of other very boring oddities. For the life of me, I never understood why anyone ever claimed to enjoy the book. I always figured those were the same people who pretended they thought the madcap comedies the Marx Brothers churned out for Paramount were funny.
