The Political Facts of Life
After years of being exposed to the American media in all its forms, I’ve concluded that conservatives resent being lied to nearly as much as liberals hate being told the truth.
It has also occurred to me that expecting socialists to be logical and to learn the lessons of history, even very modern history, is totally unrealistic. You might as well ask Gloria Steinem’s famous fish to ride that bicycle she once suggested a fish needed as much as a woman needed a man. Of course, to be fair to Ms. Steinem, that was many years before she met the millionaire of her dreams and married David Bale. Although rumor has it that she only married him because he faced deportation for overstaying his visa, who’s to say that at the age of 66, Ms. Steinem hadn’t simply outlived her voguish cynicism?
After years of being exposed to the American media in all its forms, I’ve concluded that conservatives resent being lied to nearly as much as liberals hate being told the truth.
It has also occurred to me that expecting socialists to be logical and to learn the lessons of history, even very modern history, is totally unrealistic. You might as well ask Gloria Steinem’s famous fish to ride that bicycle she once suggested a fish needed as much as a woman needed a man. Of course, to be fair to Ms. Steinem, that was many years before she met the millionaire of her dreams and married David Bale. Although rumor has it that she only married him because he faced deportation for overstaying his visa, who’s to say that at the age of 66, Ms. Steinem hadn’t simply outlived her voguish cynicism?
In a cheap and typically simpleminded shot at Governor Perry, Barack Obama recently blamed the horrific wild fires in Texas on, of all things, global warming. You can bet that Al Gore is kicking himself for not coming up with that one. But to make up for that glaring oversight, the fatuous and fat-headed Mr. Gore is now blaming global warming for the $15 trillion deficit, the late-season collapse of the Boston Red Sox and the rising cost of Twinkies.
As you’re probably aware, the Justice Department has been harassing the Gibson Guitar Company. Gibson is of course an American institution that has been turning out world-class instruments for decades. Eric Holder, otherwise known as Obama’s hit-man, denies that Gibson has been targeted because the company’s chairman and CEO, Henry Juszkiewicz, is a longtime contributor to the Republican Party. They further deny that they are scapegoating him for negatively impacting the environment by using too many letters in his last name. (Scrabble enthusiasts, by the way, might be interested in knowing that if proper names were allowed, his would be worth 217 points.)
In spite of the fact that Attorney General Holder refused to prosecute the Black Panthers for intimidating voters; oversaw the program known as Fast and Furious, which saw to it that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of semi-automatic weapons wound up in the hands of Mexican gangsters; and has berated white Americans for, essentially, being guilty of being white Americans; I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt. But in order to do so, I’d also have to be the sort of bonehead who believes that Solyndra would have been the recipient of half a billion taxpayer dollars and personal visits from Obama and Biden if its snarky owner, George Kaiser, hadn’t been a major bundler for Obama’s election campaigns.
That brings us to a question that has long plagued me. Namely, why would politicians, people who live inside a large fish bowl, people, moreover, who are despised by at least half the population simply because they have a (D) or an ® after their name, tempt fate and their countless enemies by taking graft and/or indulging in sexual escapades?
What on earth would ever lead these dunderheads to believe that they will somehow elude public exposure when the likes of Wilbur Mills, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Gary Hart, Anthony Weiner, William Jefferson, Duke Cunningham, Eric Massa and Mark Sanford, were all found out and suffered the predictable consequences?
Was it the appeal of danger? Was it sheer hubris? Or were they all simply high on crack or heroin when they tossed their careers, their reputations and their families, under the proverbial bus?
Which leads me to wonder why it is that thanks to cheaters like Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, we now have drug tests for baseball players, along with race horses, but not for the creeps who decide our tax rates, write our laws and determine whether, in our old age, bureaucrats will get to tell doctors and surgeons whether to treat our ailments or turn us into mulch.
One can envision in our brave new ObamaCare world a little boy picking up a pack of wafers from the breakfast table, reading the label and asking his father what Soylent Green is; and the father tousling the lad’s hair and replying, “Why, Jimmy, that’s Grandma Becky.”