The Patriot Post® · Burt's Lemonade Stand

Although I’m not a fan of “Peanuts,” I do sometimes find myself feeling a lot like Lucy, the sassy little know-it-all who offers psychiatric advice for five cents a session. And like Lucy, who keeps conducting an experiment on Charlie Brown wherein she snatches the football away just as the kid with the balloon head tries to kick it, I find myself conducting similar experiments on the voting public.

For instance, even after Super Tuesday, Hillary Clinton had only won 190 more delegates in the primaries and caucuses than Bernie Sanders. However, she led him overall 1,052-427 because the so-called “super delegates” had given her a 457-22 advantage. Now why on earth would millions of Democrats even bother casting ballots if a handful of governors, senators, representatives and influence peddlers, can essentially cancel out their votes?

So much for one man/one vote; when you’re a big shot Democrat, your vote counts as much as that of ten thousand poor schmucks in South Carolina, Nevada or Vermont. They’re the party of the people, they claim, but just certain people.

When I watch the rallies for Bernie Sanders, I’m reminded of very small children who never ask questions about Santa Claus. They don’t ask how Santa can afford the material, how he pays the elves, how he carries millions of gifts in his little sleigh, how he manages to go up and down chimneys, get into homes and apartments that lack chimneys, fly around the world on reindeer power and still get home before daybreak in time for cocoa and cookies with Mrs. Claus.

In similar fashion, our college students don’t ask how the self-proclaimed Socialist is going to pay for all the goodies he’s promised them. You would think that at their advanced age, they’d no longer believe in Santa Sanders, but their doting parents, left-wing-professors and highly partisan media, have colluded to keep them perpetually infantile.

I’m reminded of a riddle: A Socialist, a Democrat and a Progressive, walk into a bar. Question: Who pays for the drinks? Answer: You do!

The fact that Sen. Sanders is so reluctant to even mention Benghazi or Hillary’s private server tells me that he’s hoping she’ll follow Obama’s example and make her primary opponent Secretary of State as a consolation prize. And inasmuch as the job apparently only calls for pushing the reset button with Putin, appeasing the Ayatollah and shadowboxing with Islamic jihadists, I suspect Bernie could do the job every bit as well as Mrs. Clinton and John Kerry.

On December 31, 2015, there were 600,000 high skill construction and manufacturing jobs in America that were going unfilled. In the meantime, American college students who, for the most part, were masquerading as scholars, were majoring in booze, drugs and sex. Instead of attending trade schools where they might actually have learned to do something productive that other people would be willing to pay for, they ran up huge debts while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in stupidity.

One of the big mysteries of this election cycle has been the failure of so-called evangelicals to recognize one of their own, Ted Cruz; instead, lining up in support of Donald Trump, who might well be a great businessman, but with three marriages and a world-class pottymouth on his resume — not to mention a neutral stance when it comes to Israel and its existential enemies — he is hardly a poster boy for born-again Christianity.

I understand that Trump has won a lot of converts because of his promise to deport 11 million illegals, which is less a promise than an impossible dream, but inasmuch as most of the trespassers are now sneaking in on visas, isn’t it time that he and the others told us exactly how they plan to deal with the problem that a 50-foot wall can’t prevent?

And while I’m on the subject, could someone please explain why we haven’t yet changed the law that makes illegal entry a mere misdemeanor? How is it that joyriding is a full-fledged felony, but sneaking into the United States and making oneself a fulltime ward of the American taxpayer isn’t?

Finally, now that the juvenile Oscars are out of the way, it’s time to turn our attention to what the grown-ups are doing. I refer to the Walter Duranty Awards.

Lest his name doesn’t ring a bell for you or makes you wonder if he’s the guy with the big nose who used to sing “Ink-a-dink-a-do,” Mr. Duranty was the foreign correspondent who was posted in the Soviet Union by the New York Times during the 1930s.

More than any other single person, he is the man who convinced Americans that the slaughterhouse known as the Soviet Union was really a Workers’ Paradise. While Joseph Stalin was holding show trials as a front while assassinating his political opponents, and starving millions of Ukrainians who objected to having their homes and farms confiscated by the Communists, Duranty was filing reports that made Stalin sound like God and made the USSR sound like a snake-free Eden.

Not only was Duranty awarded the Pulitzer Prize by the gullible saps at Columbia University, but he was on salary to both the Times and Stalin. Even when the truth finally came out, the Times refused to give back the Prize. It would appear that so far as the Times is concerned, truth is as transient as the morning dew, but Pulitzers are forever.

In any case, the Duranty Awards are given to the allegedly non-fiction movies, and to those who make them, that take the greatest liberties with the facts. So, without further ado, the 2015 winners are: Movie: “Trumbo,” which depicted Communist screenwriter Dalton Trumbo as a Cold War martyr.

The Actor prize went to Bryan Cranston for his portrayal of Trumbo, who commemorated the man and the role by announcing: “Aspects of socialism are a very good thing.”

Oliver Stone won for producing and directing “Mi Amigo Hugo,” a “documentary” shown on Venezuelan TV that portrayed the late dictator, Hugo Chavez, as a “man of the people.”

The Lifetime Career Award in historical fiction went to none other than Michael Moore, who has made a career out of attacking America, Christians and the Second Amendment, while genuflecting to the likes of the Castro brothers, and the Cuban health care system, a system he wouldn’t be caught dead using, unless, of course, he happened to be dead.

The best that moral relativist Steven Spielberg could do was cop Honorable Mention for “Bridge of Spies,” which managed to humanize Soviet spy Rudolf Abel (nee Vilyam Genrikhovich Fisher), while neglecting to reflect even slightly on the evil nature of those for whom he was stealing atomic secrets.

When people condemn Hollywood as a village of idiots, they’re not just whistling “Dixie.” Whether you were tuned in to the Academy Awards or are only now reading about these other award-winners, it’s hard not to conclude that those who engage in make-believe for their livelihood often can’t tell the difference between fact and fiction themselves.

Worse yet, they like it that way.