The Patriot Post® · I Get Email

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/13087-i-get-email-2012-04-02

I’m well aware that every radio talk show host insists he has the smartest listeners, but I suspect I have the smartest readers. I don’t say that simply because they’re wise enough to read what I write, which would certainly be a strong indicator, but because I read what they write.

For instance, I recently heard from Patrick Miano, of Phoenix, Arizona. In his opening, he mentioned that not too long ago a wealthy, charitable Arizona couple named Shapiro had been brutalized, robbed and murdered by a gang of five professional criminals. Recalling the way the liberal media had jumped all over the lunatic who had killed six people and injured a dozen others, including Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, insisting on the basis of absolutely no evidence that he was a right-wing fanatic, Mr. Miano sent the following letter to Ed Montini, a liberal columnist for the Arizona Republic:

“I blame the liberal media and the Democrats for the murders of Mr. and Mrs. Shapiro and similar crimes that have occurred in this country. The president is also responsible for his tirades against ‘millionaires and billionaires flying in corporate jets.’ They incite poor people who have nothing to commit violence. They inflame the vast unstable element on the Left, fill them with class envy and resentment. Directly or indirectly, they encourage them to commit crimes against wealthy people like the Shapiros who have all the things they don’t. They rant about civility, but show none themselves. The murders of the Shapiros and other violence committed against our most productive and generous citizens are on their heads. They have created a counter-culture consumed with an entitlement mentality.

"Does the above paragraph offend you? Is it unfair? Is it based on fabrications and exaggerations? Does it wrongly attack people who have done nothing more than use colorful language to exercise their right of free speech? You’re absolutely right! It is and it does. I reject such thinking. But if you felt offended, now you know how Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, conservative news commentators and Republicans, felt when the Left blamed them and their rhetoric for the attempted murder of Rep. Giffords and the murders of six innocent people by an assassin who was accused of being a rightist fanatic, but was only a madman with no political leanings. It doesn’t feel good, does it? Ed, I know you were not involved in that slander and libel campaign, but at least some of your left-wing colleagues were. Maybe you’d like to show this to them.

"If conservatives in Arizona try to exploit the Shapiro tragedy using propaganda like the inflammatory falsehoods I wrote above as an example, remember where they got the idea.”

My only problem with the letter is that, unlike Sarah Palin, the Tea Party, conservative talk show hosts and Republicans, the Left does intentionally foment violence. You need look no further than the Occupy Wall Street movement that has devastated city streets around the country and the rioting by the public sector unions in Madison, Wisconsin, to see examples of it.

The other email came to me from Clarence MacKenzie, a reader up in Canada. A keen student of politics in both our countries, he reminded me that the Liberal Party of Canada had dominated their national scene for nearly a century. “No one,” he wrote, “predicted their sudden and almost complete collapse. However, in retrospect, it now seems obvious.”

He continued: “From the mid-70s onward, the Liberals vacated the center and moved to the left. The center right Liberals began to lose influence in the party and started retiring or jumping ship (as with Sen. Joe Lieberman and the Democrats). As they moved to the white collar unions (teachers and public employees), the traditional trade unions began to lose enthusiasm, as happened when Obama’s nixed the Keystone XL pipeline. As the Liberals became more secular, they started to lose the Catholic vote, which migrated to the Conservatives. (I call your attention to Obama’s contraception move.) The Liberals began dithering on Israel and the Jewish vote, which had always constituted a strong liberal bloc, began to evaporate. In their move to the left, they fully embraced the Anthropogenic Global Warming stuff and became the darlings of the environmental extremists. (Sound familiar?) Over the decades they had gradually lost the western farm vote and the rural vote west of Toronto. (Check the present Red State/Blue State distribution in the U.S. and it’s intriguingly similar.)

"Basically they became a conglomeration of intellectual elites, bureaucrats, teachers, environmentalists, and other dribs and drabs. Over the past two elections, they have completely imploded and even the most ardent pundits cannot see them even back in the race in the foreseeable future.

"Like the Democrats, they always enjoyed the support of the mass media, but even that was not sufficient to prevent their demise.”

There you have it, folks. Now do you understand why I am so absolutely confident that Obama will not be re-elected this November? After all, as everyone knows, as Canada goes, so goes America.