The Patriot Post® · The Freedom Caucus Goes Berserk

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/48184-the-freedom-caucus-goes-berserk-2017-04-03

I thought the replacement bill that Paul Ryan cobbled together and that President Trump endorsed stunk, but if I’d been a House Republican I would have held my nose and voted for it. Politics is a blood sport and those who are afraid of contamination should best consider a career in the priesthood.

Forty members of the House proved how pure and well-nigh perfect they are by pissing on the bill and handing a victory to Schumer, Pelosi and, in absentia, Barack Obama. The head of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Mark Meadows (R, NC) and his holier-than-thou chums can boast that the operation was a rousing success, but the patient died.

Once again, a minority of Republican legislators have shown that they are far better-suited to gripe, whine and complain, about those big, bad Democrats than they are to govern.

By burnishing their conservative credentials with the Republican fringe, they have only made it even less likely that Trump will be able to carry through on tax reform and possibly every other part of his agenda.

What confounds me is that 40 congressmen who merely have to garner a few hundred thousand votes to win their elections felt entitled to thwart the plans of the fellow who just received more Republican votes five months ago than all of them put together.


Perhaps because unelected members of the so-called intelligence community have been stonewalling congressional committees, we still don’t know whether the Obama administration was conducting illegal surveillance of Trump’s campaign headquarters. But those who insist Obama would never have condoned it are either placing their partisanship or their naivete on full display.

Let us remember that in 1972, despite facing certain victory over George McGovern, whom he would go on to trounce 520 electoral votes to 17, Nixon’s cohorts were caught breaking into the offices of the DNC at the Watergate complex. Nobody has ever been able to explain why such a nutburger plan was hatched in the first place.

In 2016, with Hillary Clinton’s victory far less certain, why wouldn’t Barack Obama have greenlighted a technological break-in of Trump’s headquarters? After all, Obama knew that the future of his legacy depended on Mrs. Clinton’s winning his symbolic third term. It was the reason that he and his wife had spent months campaigning on her behalf. In addition, he had gone so far as to tell black Americans that he’d regard it as a personal insult if they didn’t get out the vote for her.

If we also keep in mind that Obama had backed Lois Lerner and the IRS agents who had targeted conservative groups, it doesn’t require flights of fancy to imagine that he’d use whatever means he had at his disposal to defeat Trump.


If your son or daughter is considering a career, you might suggest they consider becoming a school superintendent. The fellow who has that job in Montgomery County, Maryland, a pinhead named Jack R. Smith, who has expressed more sympathy for the two illegal aliens who raped and sodomized a young school girl than for their victim, is paid $275,000-a-year. What’s more, his salary can only go up, never be decreased.

In addition, the Montgomery taxpayers contribute $40,000-a-year to his retirement fund, provide him with a car, and continue to pay him when he’s on vacation or taking advantage of school holidays.

Believe me, even if your kid isn’t the sharpest tack in the drawer, if Jack can handle the job, believe me, anybody can.


If any further proof of Obama’s affection for dictators is required, consider that Joanne Chesimard (aka Assata Shakur), who was convicted in 1977 of killing a New Jersey state trooper before escaping to Cuba, continues to reside on the island 40 years later as a guest of the Castro brothers. Obama never even requested her extradition in return for his normalizing relations with the tyrannical regime.


Notre Dame students are vowing to drive sociologist Charles Murray from their campus, where he’s been invited to speak, just as the brats at Middlebury College, in Connecticut, did last month.

As a Jew, I’ve had no personal experience with those no-nonsense nuns we’ve all heard about. You know, the ones who cart around yardsticks in their classrooms and know how to rap out “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on the knuckles of young troublemakers. It sounds to me like Notre Dame needs to import a flock of them and let them teach the young upstarts that children, especially spoiled ones, should be seen and not heard.


Speaking of teachers, in high school, no doubt as penance for past sins, I wound up having the same teacher three times. I had the jerk for driver’s education, English and Senior Comp. To call him a maniac is to slander maniacs.

His favorite part of driver’s ed was reporting in grisly detail traffic accidents he claims he had witnessed. It’s a wonder that any of us ever dared drive after 20 weeks of listening to Herman Quick describing severed limbs and faces that turned into goo after smashing into windshields.

I still recall that he called Chevrolets Chivies. Funny, the things you remember after 60 years.

One of the other things I remember was how difficult it was to get into his Senior Comp class. That’s because we were told the class was essential if we were planning to go to college. Fairfax was 99.9% Jewish, so, naturally, we all intended to go to college. The single exception was Phil Spector, who apparently planned to go to prison.

It would have been easier for us to get into a gentile country club than it was to get into Quick’s Senior Comp class. In order to winnow the 60 of us down to a manageable size, it was decided that only those students who had received straight A’s in English in high school and junior high would make the cut. That probably eliminated two kids. Then it was decided to make more cuts by eliminating students based on their character grades. I think we may have lost another one or two after that.

It was finally decided that there would have to be a second Senior Comp class to handle the overflow, but by then it was too late. I was stuck with Herman Quick, a three-time loser.

I hope by now you have some idea of the quality of these students. I was never surrounded by a smarter group in any college class I ever took. At the end of the year, 29 students who had never received less than an A in English received their first B. The one person who received an A was Marsha Janofsky, who filled out a sweater better than Lana Turner did.

Clearly, Herman Quick believed in grading on the curves.

When, about 10 years later, I was writing a humor column for the L.A. Times, I was invited back to address the student body, I had only one question: Was Mr. Quick still on the faculty. He was. I immediately began honing my razor wit.

Revenge should have been sweet. After all, I spent most of my allotted time insulting Herman Quick. The kids loved it. But, damn it, so did he! I saw him standing in the aisle to my right, laughing his fool head off.

In spite of my worst intentions, I had made the schmuck a star.


A once-in-a-lifetime offer: For the first 10 people to contact me at [email protected], I am offering my two latest books, “The Story of My Life” and “Angels on Tap, inscribed and autographed, for just $35.