Imagine Hillary in the White House
Whenever I look around at all the madness taking place, I take comfort from the fact that bad as things are, they could be ever so much worse. All it would have taken was for about 80,000 voters in the rustbelt states to have stayed home on Election Day or voted for Mrs. Clinton, and Donald Trump would be back in his tower overseeing his real estate empire and Mrs. Clinton would be extending the Obama nightmare into the foreseeable future.
Whenever I look around at all the madness taking place, I take comfort from the fact that bad as things are, they could be ever so much worse. All it would have taken was for about 80,000 voters in the rustbelt states to have stayed home on Election Day or voted for Mrs. Clinton, and Donald Trump would be back in his tower overseeing his real estate empire and Mrs. Clinton would be extending the Obama nightmare into the foreseeable future.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have plenty to worry about. There’s still North Korea, China, Iran, Russia and Chuck Schumer.
But until this past week, I didn’t think I’d be adding Donald Trump, Jr., to the list. I’m sure he’s spent the past several days kicking himself for taking that meeting with the Russian lawyer, but not as hard as I’d be kicking him if I were his father.
I would have warned President Trump if he’d asked that when you insist on surrounding yourself with advisors related to you, they’re a lot harder to fire than when they’re named Mike Flynn and James Comey. For one thing, those guys won’t be showing up for Thanksgiving dinner. For another, it’s a real headache when the people getting their names in scandal headlines have the same name you do.
The Left is forever going after Big Oil, Big Finance and Big Pharm. The one thing they exclude from their list of villains is Big Government. For my part, I prefer those who are motivated by profits to those consumed with power and position. I also prefer people who are running things because they are competent over those who have jobs merely because they got into politics, which only requires a person to get people even dumber than themselves to vote for them.
I mean, in what other field could the likes of Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Richard Blumenthal, Maxine Waters, Bernie Sanders, Hank Johnson and Patty Murray, rise to such stratospheric heights?
Speaking of competence, I have long regarded IQs as a gigantic con game. I happen to have a high one, so I know what I’m talking about. What IQs measure, so far as I can tell, is one’s ability to do well on IQ tests. It doesn’t measure perseverance or the will to succeed. Neither does it measure character, honesty, imagination, inventiveness or competence.
And yet people strut around thinking they’re something grand because they scored a number over 135. In the same way, some people consider themselves above the common herd simply because they got a degree in English Literature or Lesbian Studies, Communications or Sociology.
Frankly, if I were to find myself stranded on a desert island with a shipmate, assuming it’s a male, the question I ask myself is whether I’d want him to be a handyman or someone who got a degree in French Poetry of the 18th Century. My answer, I can assure you, would be the same if I were asked who I’d prefer to spend time talking to at a cocktail party.
Although I have a certain amount of information floating around in my head and a certain knack for getting it down on paper, I am reminded of my own limitations every time something goes haywire around the house, something begins to knock in my car’s engine or my computer crashes.
I’m not saying I’m entirely useless, but what good was my lofty I.Q. if it took Ronald Reagan going against Jimmy Carter before I got around to switching my party affiliation?
A lot of Republicans have wondered why Trump hasn’t replaced John Koskinen as the head of the IRS. Even more voices should be added to the chorus in the wake of the latest IRS scandal. In pursuit of a questionable $30,000 judgment against two elderly immigrants from Thailand, Tony and Somnuek Thangsongchareon (pronounced just the way it looks), who are naturalized citizens, IRS agents raided their store, Mii’s Bridal and Tuxedo store in Garland, Texas. They then proceeded to auction off their entire inventory, including sewing machines and fixtures.
In order to do so, the IRS had to pretend that items valued at $615,000 were worth only $6,000, meaning the cost of storing them would exceed their value. They also contended that the auction had to take place immediately because the items were perishable. I know it’s hot in Texas in July, but did they really worry that the clothes would melt?
It didn’t help their cause that some of the agents apparently took part in the auction, bidding as little as $4 for a bridal gown.
The Thangsongchareons are suing for about $1.5 million. I don’t think that’s enough, but I’m not their lawyer.
Henry David Thoreau once observed: “There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.”
For my part, I think that the IRS, and not money, not even the love of money, is at the root of, if not all evil, an awful lot of it taking place in America.
A line attributed to Bill Murray is: “The best way to teach your kid about taxes is by eating 30% of his ice cream.”
He almost has it right, but he forgets that you bought the kid’s ice cream in the first place. You’re entitled to eat all of it if you like. If you really want to teach him all he needs to know about taxes, have a stranger, preferably some s.o.b. from the IRS, eat 30% of it.
Secretary of Housing and Human Development Ben Carson stirred up a hornet’s nest when he said: “I think poverty to a large extent is also a state of mind. You take somebody who has the right mind-set, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be back up there. You take somebody with the wrong mind-set, you give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way right back down to the bottom.”
That is such a logical statement that only a liberal would bother denying it. That’s because it leads to the inevitable conclusion that no matter how generous a welfare program might be, a large percentage of urban blacks will find a way to remain bottom-feeders.
Dr. Carson wasn’t my favorite candidate in the GOP primaries, but I never questioned his integrity or his courage.
I had hoped that with Donald Trump in the White House and James Mattis heading up the Defense Department, social engineering would no longer be mandated by the Pentagon. But, apparently, I was mistaken. It seems the generals are still basing their decisions on political correction, military preparedness be damned! Why else would they be rolling out the red carpet for transgenders? What can that lead to but chaos and madness?
The argument that the military should be welcoming to anyone who wishes to help defend the nation sounds good, but, in reality, it means that male soldiers will have the right to infiltrate female barracks, showers and latrines, and that anyone who complains of the insanity will face military discipline.
It’s awfully hard for me to imagine that people who are that bewildered by basic biology are well-suited to complete basic training.
Speaking of loony ideas, reader Joe Neuner has confirmed some of my own suspicions about electric cars. Because I don’t have a science background, much of my initial queasiness about them was attributed to the fact that Barack Obama promoted them as the answer to our prayers for clean, cheap, renewable, energy. I assumed that if the one person on the planet who knew even less science than I did thought they were a miraculous cure, I was right to be skeptical.
When Neuner got into a serious discussion with a neighbor about the future of electric cars, they agreed that certain realities were being intentionally ignored. For instance, a home-charging system for a Tesla requires 75-amp service. The average house is equipped with 100-amp service. On their average block of 25 houses, if just three or four of them had a Tesla in the driveway, the local system would be severely over-loaded.
The neighbor had test-driven the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors. He reported: “For four days in a row, the fully-charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.
"It would take you four and a half hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph. Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14 ½ hours. That means that your average speed for the trip would work out to less than 20 mph.
"According to GM, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity. It takes 10 hours to charge a drained battery. The cost for the electricity to charge the car at an average cost of $1.16 per kwh would be $18.56. On average, it will cost 74 cents a mile to operate the Volt using a battery. A similar size gas guzzler that gets 32 miles to a gallon only costs 10 cents a mile.
"In short, the environmentalists and their stooges in Congress expect you to pay twice as much for an electric car that costs seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country.”
Today’s joke comes to you courtesy of Stephen Hanover, favorite son of Doylestown, PA.
According to Hanover, who apparently has connections in the Vatican, Frank Perdue was granted a private audience with the Pope. After a few minutes of small talk, Perdue got down to business. “Your Holiness, I’ve come to you with a proposition. The line about ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ has gotten, if you’ll forgive the pun, a little stale. I’m here to offer the Vatican $50 million if you’ll agree to change it to ‘Give us this day our daily chicken.’”
The Pontiff excused himself and said he’d have to discuss the offer with the cardinals. At the meeting, the Pope said, “Boys, I’ve got some good news and some bad news. The good news is that we’ve been offered $50 million to change the Our Father prayer to ‘Give us this day our daily chicken.’”
“And the bad news?”
“The bad news is we’d lose the Stroehmann account.”
It seems that during World War II, a man was arrested in London for calling Winston Churchill a fool.
The next day in the House of Commons, the leader of the opposition rose to condemn the Prime Minister: “Are we now living in a police state, where our citizens are not allowed to call the P.M. a fool?”
In response, Churchill allegedly growled: “The man was not arrested for calling the Prime Minister a fool, but for revealing a state secret during wartime.”
Because Disqus still won’t let me post responses to your comments, those who feel the urge are free to address me at [email protected].
If I’m a little tardy getting back to you, it’s because I’m scheduled to undergo eye surgery on Friday, July 21.
