The Swamp Overflows
Donald Trump vowed to drain the swamp. That may have been his honest intention, but it was and remains an impossible promise to keep. A person might as well set about emptying the Pacific Ocean with a tablespoon.
Donald Trump vowed to drain the swamp. That may have been his honest intention, but it was and remains an impossible promise to keep. A person might as well set about emptying the Pacific Ocean with a tablespoon.
The latest person to fall prey to swamp fever is Tom Price, Trump’s secretary of Health and Human Services. In the few months he was a member of the Cabinet, he chartered private jets to the tune of $1,000,000. You would think in order to run up a bill that large, the guy would have had to be using a plane to commute between his home and his office.
Never having been employed by the federal government, I have no idea how I would deal with the temptations such jobs seem to confer. But I do know that if I were the president, I would announce on Day One to my Cabinet and to all my White House aides that if any of them were ever discovered to have taken personal advantage of their position, they would not get away with simply resigning; that I would make examples of them by prosecuting them to the full extent of the law, and that I would testify on behalf of the prosecution at their trials.
Moreover, with the exception of the president and the vice president, no government official, including Cabinet members, senators and members of the House, should be provided with a car and driver. They should, as public servants, deal with the same traffic nightmare as everyone else in Washington, DC. If that’s too great a hardship, don’t take the job!
I would also deny politicians the use of bodyguards, unless they wished to pay for them out of their own pocket. They should share the same jeopardy as every other American who lives in a major city. The fact is, they are very replaceable, as proven every time an election rolls around. They possess no particular skills or talents. All that is required of them is that they win an election, just like teenagers running for class president in the 10th or 11th grade, which explains the constant presence of people like Maxine Waters, Al Franken and Nancy Pelosi in the halls of Congress.
When it comes to the people’s representatives, they confuse their fame with actual accomplishments. The truth is, we don’t honor their achievements because they simply don’t exist. Casting a vote is not an accomplishment, it’s merely an action, usually partisan and predictable. What we do acknowledge is their celebrity, as we have become accustomed to do with the likes of Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian and sex freaks like Chelsea Manning and Caitlyn Jenner, people not known for what lies between their ears or even in their hearts but what is or isn’t between their legs.
Even I am getting tired of writing about the overgrown thugs of the NFL, but so long as the players and owners are going to keep pretending that they’re simply taking advantage of the First Amendment, it behooves all of us to set them straight, either with our words or by boycotting their shoddy product. Nobody is impinging on their right to speak freely, although they’re not really saying anything. We’re merely taking advantage of the same right.
They would have you believe that when they show their contempt for the flag and the national anthem, it’s their way of expressing their solidarity with the so-called black community in its ongoing war with the police.
For openers, it’s a very odd, circumspect way to go about it. For another, perhaps if so many of the players hadn’t had direct involvement with the cops, thanks to having been arrested on drug charges, DUI, illegal weapon possession, domestic violence, rape and assault, one might have an easier time accepting that their motives were even slightly altruistic.
I have long wondered how those who are always railing for employment quotas in the workplace would react if the NFL and NBA, which are 70-80% black, were forced to begin fielding teams that are more in line with the nation’s population, which is only 13% black.
I have now been forwarded something that purports to be an NFL rule at least half a dozen times. It spells out how players are expected to behave during the playing of the national anthem. As I expected from the first time someone sent it to me, it is not in the rule book. And why would it be? Who would ever have assumed it was necessary to teach grownups something most people knew by the age of five? And now, of course, it’s too late, because the 300-pound bozos would insist the rule of conduct infringed on their right to free expression.
Every time that a Democrat speaks out on race, you are certain to be reminded that more young blacks go to prison than to college. And while I grant that there’s more freedom of speech in our jails than on our campuses, I’d be the first to acknowledge that’s not good news. But whose fault is it?
Are we supposed to stop incarcerating those who commit felonies? Granted, that was Obama’s solution, when he decided that dealing drugs was not a violent crime, although it is the motive behind most of the thousands of murders committed every year in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta and Houston. But, then, Obama was always far more concerned with disarming members of the NRA and all the other law-abiding Americans he dismissed so contemptuously as “those clinging to their guns and their religion.” He never made a single move to disarm the black gangbangers in the urban jungles of America. He preferred disarming America’s cops.
As a sidebar to the restraints that the Left have placed on law enforcement, cops have done far less policing than they did prior to the pushback from Obama and his Justice Department for fear that every legitimate traffic stop might lead to their own arrest or at least to losing their job. It is the reason that crime stats have soared over the past few years. It only makes sense that when there is less of a police presence, the criminals will take it as an open invitation to ply their trade.
Black racism has become so pernicious in 2017, and so seemingly acceptable to those on the Left, who continue, as a matter of political survival, to pander to race hustlers, I find myself fearing a future civil war, one that could ironically lead to a restoration of slavery in America.
Eerily, many of the same people who think laws shouldn’t apply to illegal aliens or drug dealers have insisted that climate change denial should be a crime, perhaps even a capital offense.
What makes the climate change controversy so weird is that it has led those who call themselves scientists to take on the guise of religious fanatics, insisting that a hoax is actually “settled science,” lest they be denied federal grants and professorships. In point of fact, nothing has been settled, unless you’re going to accept Al Gore as a final authority, and, what’s more, nobody has yet made the case why a slight uptick in the temperature would be a bad thing for the planet.
My friend, actor-comedian Orson Bean, having just returned from a vacation, let me know that all over the airport in Boston, and again when he and his wife, actress Alley Mills, landed at LAX, “There were these big electronic posters asking people to donate money to help the victims of the various hurricanes. The posters were of every living president. There’s Obama, Bush pere and fils, Clinton and Carter….but no Trump! How dare they?!”
A very good question. On the other hand, I’m not sure that whoever made the decision wasn’t doing President Trump a favor by not including him in a group as questionable as that quintet, who, by my lights, run the gamut from mediocre to reprehensible.
It occurs to me that along with just about everything else I can think of, martyrs have gone downhill over the years.
Their numbers used to include the likes of Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc, Paul Schneider and Martin Luther King. Today, at least in certain quarters, they have been replaced by Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray.
And you all thought it was just movies that have gone to hell.
Finally, something that has been on my mind from the first time I noticed my dog’s instinctive response to felines: Do dogs tell each other Polish jokes, substituting cats for Poles?
