The Patriot Post® · Grievances for Sale

If I ever decided to get into the retail trade, I wouldn’t want to sell cars, clothes or electronics. I’d want to open a market where people could go shopping for grievances. I wouldn’t even have to pay for advertising. Word of (loud) mouth would be enough, and best of all, I’d have ready buyers in every strata of society, in every city and town in America.

The problem is that grievances are free for the taking. People already have more grievances than they can shake a fist at, so in order to cash in, my plan is to provide a license of some sort, an official-looking certificate with some embossed writing on it, that would entitle them to hold rallies and shoot their mouth off in public places.

That way when people told some annoying Muslim, black, gay, illegal alien, Native American or disgruntled college student, to shut up and stop bellyaching, they could whip out one of my certificates and announce, “I don’t have to. I have one of Burt’s licenses. I paid for the right to be as boring, stupid and obnoxious, as I want to be.”

By then, I would, of course, have escaped with my untold millions to an island in the South Pacific, where the coconuts would all be in the trees where they belong, and not in the media, the public schools, the colleges, the White House or the Senate.

Personally, of all the unlicensed troublemakers that get away with irking me for free these days, I think it’s the illegal aliens who top the list. For one thing, they have no right to be here.

The liberal politicians and Church leaders who are forever defending their presence are always saying we need to bring these people out of the shadows. What shadows? So far as I can tell, they spend half their time tying up traffic on the streets, demanding our largesse and a higher minimum wage, while waving foreign flags in our face.

A higher minimum wage, $15-an-hour, for doing things that teenagers used to do in order to have money for a Saturday night date or to buy a few Perry Como 45-rpm records? A minimum wage, for crying out loud, was never intended to be enough to support a man, his wife and a brood of children.

When liberals were waging war on behalf of sodomy and, later, same-sex marriages, their call to arms consisted of telling society to stay out of other people’s bedrooms. But, now that the war is being waged on behalf of the terminally bewildered transgenders, they’re now insisting that the topic of who gets to use which bathrooms is also off-limits.

Even when it comes to closets, they’re closed to us because while you and I might be thinking about hanging up an overcoat, some gay person may be lurking in there, considering coming out.

Soon, the only rooms in the house that will be available to straight people will be kitchens and dens.

A friend sent me an op-ed written by Micah Avni, the CEO of an Israeli finance firm. It told of the man’s 76-year-old father, a retired elementary school principal from Connecticut who was among the 19 people who were killed or injured while on a bus in Jerusalem by two young Palestinians who stabbed and shot the passengers. Mr. Avni’s father was one of those killed.

Apparently, the two Palestinians were well-educated, belying the usual baseless narrative that these Arab and Muslim butchers are victims themselves, devoid of opportunity, the hopeless victims of poverty; having nothing, the apologists would have you believe, to do with their rancid religion and their perverted values.

As horrific as the events on the bus were, in a way the aftermath was even more revolting. Palestinian newspapers praised the killers as “martyrs and intellectuals.” A Palestinian scout master held them up as “examples for every scout.” President Abbas called them heroes.

The father of one of the killers, Baha Alyan, was invited to speak at Palestinian schools and universities about his son, “the martyr.”

As the late Israeli Premier, Golda Meir, once said, “There will never be a lasting peace until the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

For decades, every American president has felt the need to try his hand at bringing about a solution to the conflict, a peace settlement that would satisfy both sides. They have tried to appear to be honest neutral brokers, which, in itself, is or at least should be a lie. After all, on one side, you have Israel, one of our few allies and a western-style democracy in a part of the world where just about every other government is a totalitarian state led by a dictator calling himself a sheik, an ayatollah or a run-of-the-mill terrorist. Opposing Israel, you have people who live by Sharia, a set of medieval religious laws that deny the people every freedom guaranteed by our Constitution and who celebrate those who slaughter those they’ve never met simply because they happen to be Jews or Christians.

I dare anyone to bring peace to a conflict where one side is willing to live side by side with its sworn enemies, while the opposition has as a guiding principle the annihilation of Israel.

To our shame, Barack Obama has been the second president, following Jimmy Carter, who has shown a definite preference for the bad guys. But even the other presidents often felt compelled to call on Israel to surrender land and settlements. And Israel, ceding to pressure, kept giving and giving, and her enemies kept taking and taking. In return for its patience and cooperation, Israel had to stand by and watch Obama and John Kerry fork over $150 billion and a clear pathway to a nuclear arsenal to Iran with absolutely no strings attached.

Once Donald Trump finally has the GOP convention in his rearview mirror, I trust that he will make use of an inconvenient truth involving Hillary Clinton. And although I’m not referring to her cold-blooded response to the congressional committee, when she said: “What difference, at this point, does it make who killed the four Americans in Benghazi?” that should be run on an endless reel from July until Election Day.

The chilling campaign spot I have in mind would be one quoting eugenicist Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, who believed that the human race could be greatly improved if there were a lot fewer blacks around corrupting the gene pool. She is alleged to have said, perhaps during her 1938 address to the women of the KKK in Silver Lake, New Jersey: “Colored people are like human weeds and need to be exterminated,” to be followed by Hillary Clinton’s claiming a sisterhood of sorts with Ms. Sanger: “I admire Margaret Sanger enormously, her courage, her tenacity and her vision.”

But, to be fair, Mrs. Clinton wasn’t the first notable to sing Sanger’s praises. It seems Adolf Hitler was also a big fan, finding a rationale in her writings for his campaign to rid the world of Jews.