The Patriot Post® · America Is Barely Hanging On

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/25078-america-is-barely-hanging-on-2014-04-24

I have heard for the longest time that ours is a nation of laws. So how is it that Barack Obama and Eric Holder haven’t gotten the word? In 2014, it seems that they get to pick and choose which laws to enforce and which to ignore. And as if it’s not bad enough that they turn a blind eye to laws dealing with illegal immigration, traditional marriage and drug traffickers, Obama gets to bypass Congress and revise his signature piece of legislation three dozen times. Then, for good measure, if anyone cries “Foul!,” Holder and Obama pull out their matching His and Her crying towels and insist it’s only because they’re blacks.

For the longest time, I’ve said that political life should be a hardship, so that fewer lowlifes would be attracted to it. Maybe if we made members of Congress sit on rickety chairs or have offices the size of broom closets, we’d see a better sort of human being going to Washington, more Mr. Smiths and fewer Mr. Reids and Mr. Boehners.

For reasons I’ve never figured out, Presidents are expected to make an appearance at the site of natural disasters, be they floods, earthquakes or giant mudslides, such as the one that recently buried Oso, Washington. In the case of Barack Obama, I gather the purpose of his showing up is to remind people that there are far worse disasters than the one they just survived.

Speaking of survival, prior to the 2012 presidential election, I wrote that I believed that America could survive four more years of Obama, but I wasn’t at all certain it could survive an electorate that would elect him to a second term after we’d seen what a wretched job he’d done during his first four years.

Nothing he’s said or done since then has changed my mind or dispelled my fears. How can one not fear for the future of the Republic when so many people are oblivious to what Obama and his cronies have been up to when it comes to tapping the phones at the Associated Press, covering up the killing of four Americans in Benghazi and turning the IRS into an arm of the Democratic Party – with its power to punish, truly the strong arm of the Democratic Party.

But millions of Americans, including the liberals in Congress, don’t seem to object to the fact that their President spent three years lying to them about the Affordable Care Act, insisting they would be able to keep their doctors and their health insurance when he not only knew those statements to be false, but that he’d have never gotten the bill passed in the first place if he hadn’t lied, no matter how many members of Congress he, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, bribed and bullied.

In Nevada, the Bureau of Land Management confronted a cattle rancher, Cliven Bundy. Apparently, the BLM (or BM, for short) had the law on its side, Bundy having had several judges rule against him, insisting that he pay the feds for grazing rights, in addition to the fees he’s been paying to the county and the state.

One can safely assume he holds the courts in much the same contempt as the rest of us. And by us, I’m including Mr. Obama, Mr. Holder, Joe Biden, Elijah Cummings, Chuck Schumer and Lois Lerner.

Still, you would think the storm troopers who showed up to steal Mr. Bundy’s cattle would be aware that optics matter. The big trucks and heavy artillery was bad enough, but it made me sick to my stomach seeing them bring in snarling German shepherds. Surely I wasn’t the only one who flashed on Nazi death camps and Birmingham’s Eugene (“Bull”) Connors.

The three things I hadn’t known about the State of Nevada v. Cliven Bundy was, one, that the alleged crime he was committing was grazing cattle in a tortoise habitat; two, that the federal government owns 86% of the entire state; and, three, that Sen. Harry Reid wanted Bundy’s spread in order that his friends could build solar panel power stations.

My take on it is that turtles aren’t that fussy, and could be moved to Arizona to work on their tans. The federal government shouldn’t own any land unless it’s used as a military base or a national park. And it should be enough that Reid has so many generous friends in the unions and the casino business. After all, Nevada is a very small state, so it doesn’t cost all that much to run and win an election.

In case you hadn’t heard, the IRS is going to withhold tax refunds from about 400,000 people because they claim that 30 or 40 years ago, one of their relatives received a disability check or a Social Security payment to which they weren’t entitled. All of these shenanigans by the feds make you wonder if Putin would consider invading the United States if we said, “Pretty please.”

While John Kerry makes an ever-bigger fool of himself trying to promote a two-state solution in the Middle East, while ignoring the fact that the Palestinians refuse to even recognize Israel, I can’t help thinking that he would be better served if he advanced a two-state solution here in America, so that liberals and conservatives could finally and peacefully go their equal, but separate ways.

While delivering a speech to a gathering of fawning females, Hillary Clinton had a shoe thrown at her. “Was that a bat? Was that a bat? Is that someone throwing something at me?” she yelped.

To which I would have responded, “At this point in time, Mrs. Clinton, what difference does it make?”