The Patriot Post® · The World's Gone Mad Today

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/45178-the-worlds-gone-mad-today-2016-10-10

That is a line from Cole Porter’s song “Anything Goes,” but it fits our times like a glove. Consider, for instance, that at the Walmart in McDonough, GA, the bakers refused to decorate a cake for a cop’s retirement party, and they got to keep their jobs!

The man’s daughter wanted to celebrate her father’s 25 years on the police force, but the bakers refused, claiming that the blue line on the American flag she’d designed was racist.

It was only because a family friend had posted the news on Facebook, and the response was so overwhelming, that the store manager offered the daughter a $50 gift card and offered to personally decorate the cake. But “personally” isn’t the same as professionally, and the cake wound up a mess.

So while the cops in Charlotte, NC, were simultaneously doing their best to protect that city’s Walmart from looters, a group of Walmart bakers 270 miles away were getting away with this nonsense.

I realize that Walmart prides itself on its low prices, which, in part, they manage to offer their customers by paying their employees as little as possible. But it seems to me that with all the Christian bakers being driven out of business because they’re reluctant to bake cakes for same-sex marriages, Walmart could easily replace the arrogant schmucks in McDonough.


It turned out that Donald Trump’s microphone really wasn’t working at the first debate and that the folks in the auditorium had a difficult time hearing him. Frankly, I was surprised. Because he complains about so many things, things that have nothing to do with the nation’s well-being, but only with his own ego, that you begin to tune out his whining after a while.

He was also right when he complained that debate moderator Lester Holt might as well have been on Hillary Clinton’s payroll, judging by the way he attempted time and again to nail Trump, while at the same time straining to reach across the stage and kiss Hillary’s behind.

I assume that Holt, like all the other moderators, sees the gig as an opportunity to audition to be Mrs. Clinton’s presidential press secretary. But you’d think they’d be a bit subtler about it.

The one laugh I got out of the debate was when I heard that Holt was a registered Republican. Yes, and I’m the king of Siam. If he’s registered with the GOP, there can only be one explanation. NBC must have insisted on it, so that, like Fox, they could claim to be fair and balanced, and then, to a fanfare of drums and trumpets, rolled out their token Republican.


I keep hearing that Donald Trump has shortchanged employees, including contractors and architects, but he must be paying his advisors a ton of money. Why else would so many people take on the thankless job of advising him? I can only imagine how many people in his entourage have developed ulcers during his campaign. Every time they think they have managed to tame the beast, he has wandered off to insult an American judge with a Hispanic surname, a Gold Star family or an over-weight ex-beauty queen.

A kid running for class president of the 10th grade would do a better job of staying focused on his opponent. And in case Trump needs reminding, that person is Hillary Clinton, not her husband. By this time, everyone over the age of 30 knows that Bill Clinton is a sexual predator. If they’re liberals, they don’t care. If they’re under 30, they also don’t care, but that’s because they can’t believe that anything that happened before they were born is of the slightest consequence.


If Trump wants to win, and not merely increase the name recognition of the Trump brand, he might quit talking about the birther business and what a superb leader Vladimir Putin is, and concentrate on Hillary Clinton’s endless failings. He might consider pointing out that she called Assad a reformer. Perhaps point out that when Obama called ISIS “the jayvee team,” Hillary didn’t bother correcting him. And as far as Russia is concerned, it was Obama, not Trump, who assured the Russkies he’d be more flexible after the election and that it was Hillary, not he, who not only giggled while pressing the reset button with Russia, but then mislabeled the button peregruska, which actually means over-charged.

If I had the power to call for an intervention, I would have everyone involved in Trump’s campaign, including his wife, sit him down and call him every name in the book before the St. Louis debate.

Perhaps if even his beloved Ivanka would call him “Stupid” and “Fatso” and, worst of all, “Loser,” by the time he takes the stage, he’d be immune to childish taunts and stop being so easily distracted by Hillary and the moderators.


The media might actually be more corrupt than Hillary or perhaps it just strikes me that way because whereas I recognize that her lies are motivated by an insatiable hunger for money and power, I don’t really see what’s in it for them. After all, every time they lie on her behalf, they’re offending half of their potential readers and viewers.

For example, the L.A. Times recently headlined a front page story “Scope of Trump’s Lies Unmatched.” The sub-head read: “No modern-day major presidential nominee has been so provably dishonest — not that his loyalists mind.”

There is nothing that the Left loves more than a false equivalence, whether it’s comparing Islamic terrorism to Israel’s attempts to defend itself, or a businessman’s falsehoods to that of an American Secretary of State selling her office to the highest bidder and maintaining a private server that made our national security secrets easily available to our enemies.


I had hoped that with the departure of Roger Ailes from Fox, Juan Williams would soon be following him out the door. That’s because I assumed Williams owed his job to the fact that he had not squealed about Roger’s lechery. I mean, why else would a reputable news network provide a megaphone to someone so dumb as to say: “We all know that if you’re a poor Hispanic or African-American male, you have a much better chance of being shot by the police than if you’re white.”

It’s not entirely Juan’s fault that he’s stupid. Liberals, after all, are raised a certain way, meaning they can never bring themselves to acknowledge that “If you’re a poor, but honest, hard-working, Hispanic or African-American, you have a much better chance of never being shot by the police than if you’re a white male criminal.”

It is reminiscent of the way that liberals tend to leave “illegal” out of the mix when they accuse Republicans of being anti-immigrant.


Speaking of which, I keep hoping that we are past talking about someone’s being the first Hispanic, the first woman, the first black, the first Muslim, the first Jew or the first dwarf, to be or do something. It’s enough already. It’s time we Americans started being a lot more concerned with someone’s being the best at something.


Brit Hume recently reminded us that economist John Kenneth Galbraith once observed: “Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the distasteful and the unpalatable.”

Which leads me to wonder why people who already have long names, such as John Galbraith, feel the strange need to add another seven letters. It’s one thing if your name is Tom Brown or Jack Smith, but were there really so many John Galbraith’s around that he needed to distinguish himself from all those other guys?

I mean, as a world-renowned economist, wouldn’t you think he’d have been more economical?