Columnist.
There are many lessons to be learned from the demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin. First and foremost, workers in the public sector should never have been allowed to unionize. Once that happened, it was inevitable that civil servants would wind up being better-paid and better-pensioned than the folks in the private sector. That's because they got to wind up negotiating with politicians who had nothing to lose by giving in to union demands. It's only in the private sector that the difference between resisting unreasonable demands or caving in is often the difference between a company's making a profit or going out of business.
Frankly, I have to confess that I was a bit surprised that Harry Reid managed to keep the Senate Democrats in line and unanimously vote not to repeal ObamaCare. I mean, when you realize that last year, he had to bribe and intimidate a number of those bozos to pass the legislation, I actually thought that between the Democrats who are bowing out in 2012 and those who will have to seek re-election with that multi-trillion dollar albatross hanging around their necks, a few liberal rodents might actually jump the sinking ship.
It isn't merely that they're always wrong about everything that makes leftists so damn obnoxious, it's their unshakeable belief that they're always right. In a world that calls for logic, they have an endless supply of emotion. Talk about bringing a knife to a gunfight, these lunkheads bring a crying towel.
Between 9/12/2001 and January 2009, George Bush and Condoleezza Rice spent so much time telling us what a wonderful, peaceful religion Islam is, I kept expecting them to convert. Then Barack Hussein Obama took up residence in the White House and we got more of the same hooey. If anything, he put their gushing in the shade. He was a regular Old Faithful. He not only thought it was a swell idea to build a mosque near Ground Zero, but he kept telling the world that Muslims had been instrumental in the creation of the United States, all but referring to the founding fathers as Ibn Madison and Mahmud Washington.
Sometimes I feel like I'm a research scientist. But instead of pursuing a cure for a dread disease, I keep trying to figure out liberalism. On second thought, it is something of a dread disease. What makes it unique is that it's only those suffering from it who are unaware that they have it. But, say we have two brothers raised in the same household. What I want to know is why it is that one will grow up to be honest, decent and intelligent, while the other sibling, who has shared all the same advantages, will turn out to be a Democrat.
When Bill Clinton was caught up in that messy bit of monkey business with Monica Lewinsky, liberals and the French sprang quickly to his defense. The French, especially, couldn't wait to sneer at us for our obvious lack of sophistication, although their linguists, to their credit, expressed some contempt for Clinton's apparent inability to define "is." The French feel that a man without a mistress is something of a freak. In fact, if it ever got out that a French politician didn't have a woman or two tucked away, the Parisian press would label him a sissy boy or, worse yet, an American.
As I sit here, Cairo is ablaze with Molotov cocktails, and nobody knows if Hosni Mubarak has booked a flight aboard Deposed Despots Airlines. Come to think of it, perhaps the reason he wants to stay put until September is because he realizes how much cheaper airline tickets are when you can order them six or seven months ahead of time. A lot of people in America are elated by the sight of mobs gathering in the streets of Egypt. They view it as an oppressed people longing for liberty. They rejoice at the prospect of a dictator being dumped in favor of democracy. That is because a lot of people who are forever quoting Santayana's quip, "Those who can not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," have apparently remembered precious little themselves. It would seem that the extent of their historical knowledge begins and ends with the final score of the recent Super Bowl.
I tried, but failed, to find a sucker who would bet me that the Illinois Supreme Court would keep Rahm Emanuel off the ballot. Even people who would bet that the sun would rise in the west tomorrow, if the odds were enticing enough, knew better than to wager that a court run by and for Democrats would allow the law to get in the way of corrupt politics.
I have long pondered why people want to get into politics. I'm aware of the obvious perks and I understand that some people want to be the center of attention. But, still, how can anyone stand having to spend hours in the company of egomaniacal dunderheads like Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer? But then I realized that politics serves the same purpose as show business for those people who can't act, sing, dance or play a musical instrument. But whereas show business attracts the gifted, the talented and the good-looking, politics attracts those who are none of those things.
As usual, I did not make any noble-sounding New Year's resolutions. I am a realist who knows his limitations. Like the fellow who resolves to gain weight or read even less in the ensuing 12 months, I know who I am and where my good intentions are likely to lead. The best I can do is promise to keep needling liberals. That is my calling and my pleasure.
In spite of Barack Obama's belated call for civility in political discourse, we had Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) comparing Republicans campaign to repeal ObamaCare to Goebbels' use of Nazi propaganda to bring on the Holocaust. Some people wondered why, after this vulgar display of obvious lunacy, the president didn't call him on the carpet. I suspect it was because Rep. Cohen might have said something pertinent about pots insulting kettles.
If I had the authority, I would use enhanced interrogation methods on progressives. It wouldn't be my intention to hurt them. At least that wouldn't be my sole intention. I would simply want to compel them to face facts and to quit parroting left-wing lies. For one thing, no matter what AARP and the New York Times would have you believe, most Americans don't favor ObamaCare. Even a lot of Democrats don't. That's why it took bribery and intimidation by Obama, Pelosi and Reid, to get the damn thing enacted.
It recently dawned on me that even though Hollywood couples often avoid marriage even when they have children together, while others are often married for embarrassingly short periods of time, the movies continue to promote the old-fashioned notion that marriage constitutes a happy ending in every romantic comedy they churn out. They do this because they realize that even though shacking-up and one-night stands are typical for them, it does not constitute the norm or the ideal for most people in the audience.
When you saw the lengths to which the left went in their attempt to connect loony Jared Loughner to Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and/or the Tea Party, the surprise is that they never thought to connect the dots between Charles Manson and Barry Goldwater or Jeffrey Dahmer and Ronald Reagan. Even though it was obvious that Loughner was as crazy as a bedbug and as political as a beanbag, it didn't stop the likes of Dick Durbin, Paul Krugman, Steny Hoyer, Charles Rangel, Al Sharpton or Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, from trying to turn him into the poster boy for the Republican party.
For years, I have argued against the very existence of the National Endowment of the Arts. If an artist can't be self-sustaining in a capitalist country as large and as rich as America, he should get into another line of work. It's certainly not the business of the politicians and the bureaucrats, who you notice aren't spending their own money, to support him and his artistic pipedreams.
When I used the Yiddish word "schlemiel" in a recent article, a reader asked me to define it. I suggested it referred to a dummy, a dunderhead, a mental dwarf. I added that to help you identify them, they generally come with a (D) after their name. So it is that in King County, Washington, the schlemiels have now banned those non-tobacco cigarettes that emit vapor because, public officials have decided, kids might see grown-ups puffing air and conclude it is cool to smoke. Or, unless they're as dumb as bureaucrats, the kids might figure out that it's simply a form of breathing, and far preferable to sucking in tobacco and nicotine.
I have never understood why the rest of us have sat idly by while unions have gobbled up so much power and money. Even as their numbers in the private sector have steadily declined over the years, they have surged in the public sector. My question is, just exactly when did we lose our senses and allow civil servants to unionize and strike? It had always been understood that the trade-off was that the members of the Civil Service had forfeited possible riches in the world of entrepreneurs and risk-takers for the security that went with a steady paycheck from the city, the state or the federal government.
When people insisted that there was no real difference between politicians, whichever party they belonged to, I would invariably defend Republicans as the lesser of the two evils. However, when I watched the GOP louts hop on Obama's bandwagon during the lame duck session, supporting everything from the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" to the passage of START, thereby doing all they could to nullify the mid-term elections, I understood those who cursed both parties. Speaking of which, how much longer are we going to allow left-wingers to mislabel themselves as Independents? Bernie Sanders, Michael Bloomberg and Joe Lieberman, who all have an (I) after their names, haven't had a thought independent of the DNC since they were in knee pants.
The reason I devote so much time to liberals is because I find them endlessly fascinating. I simply cannot fathom how so many people manage to be wrong about so many things, ranging from same-sex marriage and the Second Amendment to tax rates, open borders and affirmative action. How is it, I wonder, that liberals find capital punishment far more abominable than they do the criminals who commit capital offenses? And why is it they find it so impossible to acknowledge that America has a problem with Islam? Japan only had to attack us at Pearl Harbor to convince us that we were at war. But the Islamics have attacked us time and again for more than 30 years, and we still have millions of Americans who refuse to acknowledge that they are our sworn enemies.
Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of people taking bows because, let us say, they're the first members of their families to go to college (even though they can't spell or do simple math); or the first person to do the backstroke across the English Channel (there is a tunnel, you know); or the first woman to be the Speaker of the House (while ignoring the fact that she is the worst of the 51 people who have had the job).
