The Patriot Post® · Ron Paul Is Dating Cassandra
Cassandra was a mythological prophetess who became world-renowned for being the bearer of bad news. But because even the daughter of Priam and Hecuba can’t be expected to carry the entire load, the former 12-term congressman and perennial presidential candidate, Ron Paul, has stepped forward to lend a hand.
The first time I realized that Mr. Paul had traded a life in politics for one as a doom-and-gloom huckster was when he began popping up on TV shilling for Frank Porter Stansberry’s financial advisory outfit, where his message was: “We’re on the verge of the complete destruction of our economic system, and there’s not much time for you to prepare.” He advised us all to send away for one of Mr. Stansberry’s over-priced investment guides, which advocated buying gold. He neglected to mention that Stansberry had been hit in the past with a $1.5 million fine by the SEC for engaging in securities fraud.
Not satisfied with painting a bleak future in which America’s economy would inevitably go belly up, I just heard Mr. Paul on my car radio clearly suggesting that the Apocalypse is on the horizon and that we had better prepare by stocking up on Harvest Right Freeze Dryers.
Between the financial meltdown and the nuclear holocaust that the former congressman envisions, one would assume that he must be the most pessimistic of men, the sort of guy one usually encounters in cartoons dressed in sackcloth and bearing a sign announcing “The End is Near.”
But even midst the dark clouds Mr. Paul painted, one could catch a glimmer of a silver lining. After all, if we saw the future through his eyes, wouldn’t we at least contemplate suicide? But, wait, right there, in the midst of the Harvest Right pitch, Mr. Paul is letting us know that he got his freeze dryer because it can keep any food, including ice cream, delicious for 25 years.
Okay, perhaps I wouldn’t want to be first in line to try a dish of chocolate swirl that had been sitting around for a quarter of a century, but when a guy who’s 81-years-old suggests that he’ll be ready to dig in when he’s 106, I know an optimist when I hear one.
Not since Geraldo Rivera garnered Super Bowl-size ratings for the opening of Al Capone’s empty vault has a non-event been as over-hyped as Rachel Maddow’s sharing two pages of Donald Trump’s 2005 tax return on her MSNBC show.
She obviously thought she would somehow drive Trump out of office with the illegally-obtained bombshell. But, it proved to be a total dud. The only thing she exposed was how desperate she is to achieve ratings parity with Fox News.
Clearly, she must have been aware that it was an exercise in futility. After all, what did we learn? Well, for one thing, it showed that in 2005, Mr. Trump made $150 million, so he actually is as rich as he says he is. For another, it showed that despite taking a huge loss in the 1990s, he hadn’t gone 18 or 19 years, as had been rumored, without paying income taxes. Instead, he had paid the IRS $38 million, which meant he was paying at a rate of about 25%. Which, by the way, compared favorably to the 19% and 13% paid respectively in 2016 by Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, two schmucks who never got tired of complaining about wealthy Republicans not paying their “fair share.”
The best news of all is that the 150 million was all in the form of American dollars, and not a single ruble.
Still, I couldn’t help thinking that he was paying way too much, and that perhaps I should recommend my accountant to President Trump.
If there’s one thing that leftists enjoy even more than rioting in the streets and shouting down Republicans on college campuses, it’s bolstering each other’s self-esteem. Just a partial list of the partisan awards they hand out on an annual basis, and which no conservative should even fantasize winning, are Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, Tonys, Golden Globes, the People’s Choice, Peabody’s, Pulitzers and Nobel Peace Prizes.
I just learned of another. It’s an award for excellence in journalism, so naturally it carries the name of the man who set the standard for blatant partisanship that ultimately led to the rise and fall of such pinheads as Dan Rather and Brian Williams; namely, Walter Cronkite.
Naming a journalism award after Cronkite, the left-wing propagandist who did everything in his considerable power to ensure that the U.S. would not defeat the North Vietnamese, would be like bestowing a patriotism medal bearing the name and likeness of Benedict Arnold.
Not too surprisingly, the 2017 honoree was Jose Ramos, the anchor for the Spanish-language TV network Univision, who declared during the presidential campaign that journalists shouldn’t be neutral and objective in reporting on the monster known as Donald Trump.
If the name sounds familiar, but you can’t place his face, you might remember Senor Ramos as the loudmouth advocate for open borders who kept shouting questions at Donald Trump during a campaign rally until he was ushered out of the arena by security personnel.
And that, my friends, is how a political operative cops a journalism award in 2017.
When I declared a while back that I tended not to enjoy jokes because I could usually spot the punchlines long before they arrived, a lot of you apparently took it as a personal challenge.
The jokes keep coming. In most cases, a child could spot the payoff from a mile off. But it seems only fair to share the few that caught me by surprise. The latest, which I only anticipated near the very end, was submitted by Dr. Richard Stiso, the pride of Florham Park, New Jersey.
Yossel Zelkovitz worked in a Polish pickle factory. For many years, he had an overwhelming desire to put his penis in the pickle slicer. Unable to fight the urge any longer, he sought professional help from the factory psychologist.
After six months, the therapist threw up his hands. Believing that Yossel was on the verge of insanity and would otherwise never again experience peace of mind, he advised him to go ahead and do it.
The next day, Yossel came home so early, his wife, Sacha, became alarmed and demanded to know what had happened.
Tearfully, Yossel confessed his tormenting desire to put his penis in the pickle slicer. He said that today he had gone ahead and done it.
Sacha gasped in horror and ran to her husband. She quickly yanked down his pants and shorts only to find a normal, completely intact penis.
She looked up and said: “I don’t understand. What about the pickle slicer?”
Yossel shrugged, and replied: “I think she got fired, too.”
My publisher has asked me to announce that my two recent books, “The Story of My Life” and “Angels on Tap,” are now available on Kindle. He assured me that most of you would know what that meant.