Columnist.
I'm not one of those guys who took umbrage at the Women's Movement. If the ladies wanted to have careers, it was okay with me. If they wanted to be paid the same as men for doing the same job, that seemed fair to me. I admit I did get my back up when they started talking about comparable jobs, as if being a waitress were the same as, say, being a fireman. Jobs are not comparable. They are either the same or they're different. But that's a minor matter.
By this time, I don't think it will shock anyone if I come right out and admit that I'm not a bleeding heart. When I read about a lava flow or an earthquake taking 500 theoretically innocent lives on the other side of the world, my first reaction is to ask myself if I knew anyone who might be visiting Sumatra or Mongolia. If the answer is no, my second reaction is to get on with my life.
I believe that eventually there will be peace in the Middle East. It will probably only take a few more of these "peace process" sessions before Israel cedes so much land to its enemies that it will simply disappear from the face of the earth.
I would venture that the question over which Americans are most passionately divided isn't abortions or even whether or not Julia Roberts has any sex appeal, but the issue of capital punishment.
Recently, I heard from a guy who claimed that squirrel tasted just like chicken. Some days, I swear, I get the idea that everything's supposed to taste like chicken. But it brought home the fact that what we eat, as well as what we think, is often more a matter of geography than of anything else. Frankly, I wouldn't care if it tasted like chocolate ice cream, I've never had squirrel on my plate and I aim to keep it that way. As with frogs and snakes, there are some things I regard as food and some things I'd prefer not to think about at all. And that's how I want to keep it.
People used to talk about the seven year itch as the time in a marriage when one or both spouses was likely to start fantasizing about hooking up with another man or, as is more often the case, another woman. Well, I’ve reached that point. Not with my wife, you understand, but with Barack Obama.
I recently had to fly up to San Francisco in order to appear on Ronn Owens’ popular radio show. It was the third time I had done an hour with the affable Mr. Owens, and it was the best one yet because it marked the first time I ever had listeners in the ultra liberal Bay area calling in to agree with me. In fact, so many callers had nice things to say about my conservative commentary, I accused the show’s producer, Mark Silverman, of having fallen asleep at the switch.
One of the reasons that movies today are so devoid of compelling characters and engrossing plots is that the folks who make them are, more often than not, too young and too isolated from humanity. That’s not to say that writers and directors in their 20s and 30s can’t be talented, but, as a rule, what they have are a passel of petty grievances (the studios, their agents, the deals, other people’s success, etc.); what they lack is wisdom. They simply haven’t lived long enough or suffered enough major losses -- friends, parents, spouses, children -- to have developed a grown-up’s philosophy.
I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America. One minute, it seems, the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama. I feel their frustration. Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education.
The only people I’ve ever heard of who got to wear their bathrobes to work were Hugh Hefner and America’s judges, and however you may feel about the man from Playboy, I’d venture that judges have created far more havoc for society.
It will soon be Election Day and already I’m catching heck from a number of readers who are taking me to task for suggesting that it’s better to vote for a mediocre Republican than for a wonderful Democrat, although I can’t for the life of me think of anyone who fits that description.
As I sit here, I have no idea how things will play out for Charles Rangel and Maxine Waters, although I find it highly unlikely that either of them will end up in a congressional trial, no matter how much the defendants claim they wish to have the air cleared. When Nancy Pelosi insisted that under the Democrats, the swamp that is Capitol Hill would be drained, she should have kept in mind that after such a draining it’s not treasure chests and fields of four-leaf clovers that are uncovered, but creepy, crawly things.
When the Tea Party had its huge demonstration in Washington, D.C., the Democrats tried to portray the patriots as racists by taunting them, by having the undistinguished members of the Black Congressional Caucus parade up the steps of the House in single file. It was clearly Nancy Pelosi’s plan to use them as lightning rods for well-deserved invective. But in spite of a $100,000 offer to anyone who could supply visual or audio proof of racial epithets being hurled at the congressional boobies, nobody, including Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow or Keith Olbermann, has yet stepped forward to claim the dough.
Lately, you have probably noticed that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken to lecturing the rest of us on tolerance. I call it presumptuous, as well as ill-timed. It’s presumptuous because he believes that he, alone, is in a position to tell Americans how we should feel about a massive mosque being built next to Ground Zero, as if being wealthy and an elected official somehow provided him with a moral superiority that we mere mortals could never hope to match.
I suppose it’s only natural that politicians who wind up on Capitol Hill forget that they are mere mortals. After all, when everyone is vying for your attention and all the Sunday talk shows are eager to have you stop by and spout off, and you have as many flunkies at your beck and call as Marie Antoinette, it must be awfully easy to believe you have achieved royal status. In fact, all that you’ve really done is beat out some other schnook in a popularity contest.
Every so often, one of my readers who has apparently dipped once too often into the cooking sherry wonders why I don’t run for Congress. The short answer is that I don’t want to ever again wear a necktie. I also don’t wish to spend my life going hat-in-hand begging for campaign contributions. Worse yet, what if I actually won the election and then had to listen to Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank mouth off endlessly? Between her nursery school delivery and his lisping, I’m sure I’d soon be popping Excedrin like peanuts.
When I consider the brouhaha over the mosque at Ground Zero, the question that springs to mind isn’t why Islamics chose such a provocative site, but, rather, why so many Americans feel compelled to pander to Muslims.
By this time, I’m sure you’ve all heard Senators Coburn and McCain reporting on all the goofy nonsense that has been financed by Obama’s trillion-dollar stimulus bill. But in case you missed the announcement, some of the items were new windows for a tourist center that’s been closed since 2007 and that nobody plans to re-open; a study of grandparent roles in Alaska; international ant research; repairing a sidewalk that leads to a ditch in Boynton, Oklahoma; $760,000 to study improvised music; $200,000 to help Siberian communities lobby Russian policy makers; and $700,000 to study why monkeys respond negatively to inequity.
When it comes to liberals, there are simply not enough hours in a day for one person to record all of their mischief. Speaking for myself, even if I had a staff the size of Mrs. Obama, I’d probably still fall behind.
In all the old horror movies, the master villain always had an assistant. More often that not, his name was Igor. He tended to lurch and he was usually a hunchback. I always wondered how he got the job. I mean, how would you go about finding someone who’d round up a human brain at a moment’s notice? Was it by referral? Did they hook up during Career Day at the Academy for the Criminally Insane? Did he answer an ad in the New York Times?
