Columnist.
Some people were surprised that in their desperation to recover from some of the damage that Romney inflicted on Obama during the Denver debate, the Democrats sprang to the defense of Big Bird. Frankly, I saw it coming as soon as Romney told Jim Lehrer that as much as he liked Big Bird and Lehrer himself, he saw no good reason for the American taxpayer to subsidize Public Broadcasting. It figured that when recent events in the Middle East confirmed that Obama's foreign policy is every bit as awful as his fiscal policy, the Great Pretender was going to throw up some silly smokescreen. One time, it was Sandra Fluke and her birth control pills. The next time, it was accusing Romney of being the Grim Reaper where cancer victims are concerned. It stood to reason that David Axelrod would send his hand puppet off to defend the world's tallest Muppet.
I wouldn't want anyone to think I don't like Warren Buffet because he's rich. For one thing, I don't engage in class envy or any other kind. Maybe if I found out he could play the piano or do impressions of movie actors or even juggle, I might be slightly green. But the unvarnished truth is that I don't envy people like Buffet and Bill Gates their fortunes. I admit I'd like to be wealthier than I am because I don't like having to think about money at all. But once you get to be as rich as guys like that, I don't know how you have time to think about anything else. When you have 30 or 40 billion dollars, I would imagine that just keeping track of it would keep you pretty busy. I bet billionaires spend countless hours meeting with boring guys in suits who cart around attaché cases and are named Roger or Malcolm, talking about what to do with all that loot. I bet it keeps them busier than a Jack Russell herding sheep.
I was hoping that as I got older, I would find things less confusing. Instead, the mysteries of modern life seem to be multiplying like rabbits. For instance, why do so many movie lines that don't contain even a kernel of wit or wisdom seem to pass through society like a virus, leaving some of us with flu-like symptoms? Just a few of those that have enjoyed prolonged currency include: "Make my day" and "Do you feel lucky, punk?" Then there's "Show me the money," "Life is like a box of chocolates," "Hasta la vista, baby," "I'll be back" and the omnipresent "You can't handle the truth!" At least in the old days, when we got "I'm shocked…shocked" from "Casablanca," "Nobody's perfect" from "Some Like it Hot" and "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn" from "Gone With the Wind," the source material tended to be first-rate movies.
When you realize how many political careers and reputations have been destroyed because of sex scandals over the past several years, it's truly mind-boggling. David Petraeus is just the latest in a long line that goes back at least as far as John Kennedy and includes the likes of Gary Hart, Bob Packwood, Wilbur Mills, Ted Kennedy, Mark Sanford, Anthony Weiner, John Edwards and Bill Clinton. ... There's nothing wrong with admiring someone's accomplishments, but if you're looking for heroes, you should probably start looking closer to home. Find people whose honesty and character you're actually in a position to vouch for. Maybe it's your mom or dad, perhaps even a sibling.
I have no idea what will be happening in the Middle East by the time this article is posted, but it almost doesn't matter. If there's a ceasefire, as now seems likely, everyone knows it will merely be a temporary stopgap until Iran supplies the barbarians with more missiles. What I have found peculiar about events in that part of the world is how predictable they are. We all know that at some point, the Arabs and Muslims will start firing missiles into Israel, will plant bombs in buses and pizza parlors, and the news won't even make page 27 of the NY Times. Then, after absorbing weeks of attacks and burying their dead, Israel will fight back, and the world media will start harping on Israel's "disproportionate response" and start publishing photos of some Arab child's dead body being carted through the streets of Gaza.
Over the course of my life, I have occasionally been labeled a know-it-all, but I'm happy to say that those who've said it have generally been those who know nothing. The fact is that there are any number of things I can't begin to fathom. For openers, I am hopeless when it comes to things mechanical and electronic. I just don't get how things work. I don't look down on those who do; if anything, I'm in awe of them. That's one of the reasons that I wish our educational system made sense. Instead of acknowledging that most young people would be better off learning a trade, they are shuffled off to colleges and universities where they'll waste four years and a lot of their family's money as liberal arts majors.
If you depend on the mainstream media -- and why would anyone? – you would come to believe that Muslims are decent, law-abiding people and Christian conservatives are blood-thirsty ogres. It is because of promoting such head-spinning balderdash that the American press has earned the contempt of millions of us. Instead of speaking truth to power, they roll over for Obama and the Democrats. In dictatorships, you expect journalists to be propagandists because to be otherwise doesn't mean you lose your job; it means you lose your life.
The next presidential election is just four short years away. It seemed like just yesterday that we Republicans envisioned a future of Romney, Ryan and Rubio. Now we have to wonder if we were too quick to laugh when Joe Biden said that this wouldn't be his last hurrah, and that he would be on the ballot next time. These days, that seems all too possible. After all, if the majority of Americans don't object to his being a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, why would they object to his actually having the heart that some other Vice President would be monitoring on a daily, if not hourly, basis? After all, Biden will only be 73 when Obama vacates the White House. No doubt he will have even more hair and whiter teeth by then. Because the Republican Party will have gone the way of the Whigs and the Bull Moose, his only real worry will be whether Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton, who will be 69, but only 10 or 11 in dog years, decides to take him on.
Not being conversant in Latin, I may have bungled the title, but I figure that if "e pluribus unum" means one out of many, what we have turned into is an America that the Founding Fathers would never recognize. When you look at the election map, we more closely resemble the Balkans than the America that used to lie between the Atlantic and the Pacific. Even if, like me, you wonder what happened to those two million Republicans who saw fit to vote for John McCain, but decided to stay home this time alphabetizing their canned goods, there's no getting around the fact that Obama has managed to expand on FDR's base. Whereas Roosevelt managed to win four elections by appealing mainly to blacks, Jews and union members, Obama has cobbled together those three blocs along with Hispanics, homosexuals, single women, Asians, Muslims and college students.
Recently, Bill O'Reilly conducted one of his unscientific polls. The question put to his conservative viewers was whether they were able to maintain friendships with liberals. Apparently, 79% of the respondents boasted that they were able to do so. I'm with the 21% who can't. Keeping in mind that the question only asked about friends and not relatives, those people one can't avoid no matter how hard you try, I have to ask myself what sort of friendships the 79% had in mind. Clearly it's not a relationship that places any importance on values and character. Perhaps these "friendships" imply nothing more than a word we use to describe a group of guys getting together to bowl, play poker or shoot a round of golf. It certainly doesn't involve a mature concern over America's economy, security or future.
How is it, people wonder, that Obama could be re-elected with an economy that's barely breathing; a foreign policy that led to the Benghazi massacre and a cover-up that puts Watergate in the shade; soaring prices at the gas pump; a war on the oil and coal industries; a diminished military; increased taxes; ObamaCare; handing GM over to a labor union; and an unemployment rate that's worse than the one he's spent four years complaining he inherited? How, indeed? Well, for openers, Hispanics see the federal government as one big piñata, filled with goodies. Likewise, blacks, single women and immature males, think that Uncle Sam is really their Sugar Daddy.
Speaking of education, I found it fascinating that in a recent poll, 93% of Chicago's public school teachers rated themselves superior or excellent. This is in spite of 45% of students dropping out of high school. I bet Chicago's kids wish the teachers graded them as generously as they grade themselves
The most surprising thing about the election is that I, generally the most cynical of men, gave too much credit to the American people. Although I only lost a ten dollar bet on the election, I was sorely tempted to wager a lot more. Fortunately, I couldn't afford to risk it, even on what I regarded as a pretty sure thing. The truth is that when Dick Morris began talking about a Romney landslide, I began to entertain doubts. I've never forgotten the way that Bill O'Reilly's favorite oracle insisted in 2010 that Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina were going to trounce Jerry Brown and Barbara Boxer. But I figured that even a blind pig sometimes stumbles across an acorn and a broken clock is right twice every 24 hours.
I used to review movies, first for the Daily Bruin when I was attending UCLA, and then for Los Angeles magazine. Even I'm amazed that I could stand to do it for 12 years when, at the end of each year, I was hard-pressed to come up with a list of the 10 Best. To be perfectly frank, my list usually had three or four pretty good ones, another few that were okay, and two or three that were, at most, preferable to undergoing a prostate exam. Still and all, I will state that I had a far easier task than those who have to sit through movies these days and file reports on the experience. For one thing, people like Billy Wilder, William Wyler, John Huston and Alfred Hitchcock, were still making movies back then. Today, you've got James Cameron, Wes Anderson, Steven Spielberg and Kathryn Bigelow, and Hollywood is actually handing out Oscars to the likes of "The Hurt Locker," "Forrest Gump," "Crash," "The English Patient," "No Country for Old Men" and "Titanic."
I'm seated here at my computer on Thursday, November 1, 2012, five days before the most important presidential election of my lifetime and very likely, the nation's. According to most polls, it's a dead heat. Frankly, I don't believe the polls. I believe that in spite of crooked voting machines, dead voters and third party candidates who will draw anti-Obama votes away from Mitt Romney, Romney will win. To some people, that will sound like wishful thinking. I won't deny I have a rooting interest. But I have believed all along that Romney would win the election once people who had been bombarded with Obama propaganda saw and heard the man unfiltered through the media. That happened during the first debate. What some Democratic partisans fail to acknowledge is that Obama didn't lose his advantage because he appeared to be in a coma, but because millions of voters got to see how much better off they and the ship of state would be with Romney at the helm.
Liberals are always up in arms over what they deem to be pollution of the atmosphere, whether it takes the form of global warming, oil exploration, fracking, coal mining or the internal combustion engine. What doesn't concern them in the least is the polluting of society, whether it's obscenity on the big screen, the small screen or, worse yet, the endless lies spewed by left-wing politicians and their whores in the media. Consider that liberals are always demanding that tax dollars be used to subsidize NPR and Public Broadcasting on the grounds that they provide education for children and adults, alike. They deny that the actual reason they campaign on behalf of these enterprises is because they are run by and for liberals. Instead, they go to the ramparts to defend Big Bird. It should be understood that Big Bird can buy and sell Mitt Romney, and needs our tax dollars about as much as Bill Gates and Warren Buffet.
I won't beat around the bush. I watched all of the GOP debates, I watched the Biden-Ryan debate and I even sat through all three of the presidential debates, and I don't think it's fair that I only get one vote that can be canceled out by the vote of one of those louts who got a free cell phone, thanks to Obama, or one of the guttersnipes who befouled our streets as a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In spite of that, I am feeling pretty confident about the upcoming election.
I realize that some people have been raving about Obama's final two debate appearances. But, for the most part, those are people named David Axelrod, Jay Leno, Joy Behar, David Letterman and Chris Matthews. But the truth is that no rational person would ever say he mopped the floor with Mitt Romney; the most you can say for Obama is that he did better after awakening from his self-induced coma, even if in doing so, he spouted more fibs than Joe Isuzu. I have no doubt that Team Obama now wish they had gotten out of the first debate by claiming that their guy had come down with the flu. Up until then, their negative ads had convinced a lot of voters that Romney was a heartless plutocrat, the sort of ogre who would chuckle while helping Paul Ryan push old people off a cliff. Once they saw and heard Romney for themselves, saw a devout Mormon who regularly donates well over 10% of his income to charity -- and not just during election years -- a guy who knows how business works because he has spent most of his life running businesses, as opposed to someone who has spent most of his own life badmouthing capitalism while promoting Marxism, it was, as they say in tennis, game, set, match.
Recently, one of my readers, George Gunning, reminded me that in the bad old days of the Soviet Union, there were two major newspapers. One was Pravda, which translates to Truth; the other was Izvestia, which means The News. The joke on the streets of Moscow was that there was no Pravda in Izvestia and no isvestia in Pravda. Today, the same could be said about the New York Times, and just about every other major media outlet in America. Meanwhile, back in Russia, Vladimir Putin recently celebrated his 60th birthday. The former head of the KGB is known to friends, relatives and any other Russian who doesn't want to end up dead, as "The Most Kind Hearted Man." I'm serious. No doubt, he envied the late dictator of North Korea, Kim Jong-il, who, among various other pet names, answered to "Brilliant Leader," "Superior Person," "Father of the People," "Sun of the Communist Future" and, my own personal favorite, "Glorious General Who Descended from Heaven."
I was wondering how long it would take Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to take the blame for the murder of Ambassador Stevens and the other three Americans at the Libyan consulate. After the ensuing brouhaha promised to hurt Obama's chances in November, her only choice was to throw herself under the bus or wait to be thrown. Normally, in spite of the four murders by Islamic jihadists, the American media would have glossed over the event. The New York Times, whose motto used to be "All the News That's Fit to Print" but is now "All the News That Doesn't Embarrass Barack Obama," pretty much ignored the events in Benghazi until U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice went on a bunch of Sunday news shows and pretended the attack had everything to do with a video that had an even tinier viewership than The Chris Matthews Show. As it has proven since 2008, the MSM not only doesn't object to this administration lying to the American people, but is eager to aid and abet in the deception.
