The UN and Other Plagues
One of the areas in which President Trump has most disappointed me is his apparent reversal on the United Nations. Years before he even considered entering politics, he dismissed the world body as a wart on the New York landscape.
One of the areas in which President Trump has most disappointed me is his apparent reversal on the United Nations. Years before he even considered entering politics, he dismissed the world body as a wart on the New York landscape. He suggested the U.S. resign from the organization, evict it from these shores, and allow him to buy the property and transform it into a five-star hotel.
Even as recently as last year’s campaign, he called the UN useless and corrupt. And yet he continues to fund it to the tune of several billion dollars a year, addresses its members and even calls upon the world body to act in concert with our interests. Even if he were far more naïve than he is, why on earth would Donald Trump imagine that an organization that represents the collective interests of dictators, Islamists and European socialists wants to do us any favors?
This is a group, after all, that spends an inordinate amount of time passing resolutions not against North Korea, Iran, Cuba, Syria and Venezuela but against Israel. Couple that with the fact that China and Russia have veto powers, and you have a recipe for disaster.
Under those circumstances, even our own deliberative body, the U.S. Senate, which, God knows, is filled to the rafters with fools, thieves and mountebanks, doesn’t look quite so bad by comparison.
When I consider the hypocrisy of liberals, I am filled with despair for the future of this great nation. How can we survive, let alone prosper, when so many millions of us hold groups of thugs such as antifa, Black Lives Matter and the DNC in high esteem?
What has become of the Founders’ noble aspirations when Democrats claim to hold the First Amendment sacred but only support free speech when they’re the ones doing the talking; and are ever ready and eager to trample on the religious rights of Christians while promoting those of Muslims?
It doesn’t help that millions of so-called feminists are not so much pro-women as they are anti-male. Otherwise, they would not so fervently support Hillary Clinton, who has spent most of her life aiding and abetting sexual predators, even going back to her early years when, as a young attorney, she crowed about getting a middle-aged client who had raped a child off with a light sentence.
And instead of demonstrating against Donald Trump while wearing silly pink hats that are supposed to represent vaginas, these alleged feminists should be picketing outside the embassies and consulates of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria and all the other Arab and Muslim nations that promote the subjugation of women.
Years ago, Carol, the wife of Walter Matthau and the former wife of William Saroyan, was asked to comment about her ex-husband. She said: “Bill loved humanity, but he hated people.”
I not only thought that was one of the pithiest and most profound descriptions of a hypocrite I had ever heard but that it could serve equally well as an indictment of most liberals.
They pay lip service to Muslims, illegal aliens, so-called indigenous people, urban blacks, campus Nazis, football thugs, homosexuals, transgenders and single women for no other reason than that they constitute the base of a demonic political party that hates, in no particular order, Christians, white gun owners, black and Hispanic conservatives, Israel, cops, the military, constitutionalists and patriots.
The failure of Cyrus Vance, New York City’s DA, to prosecute Harvey Weinstein may not be as bad as the NY Times and NBC spiking decades-old stories about Weinstein’s vile crimes, but it does remind me of something I would do if I somehow found myself in possession of a billion dollars.
As you may recall, in a recent article, I said that if such an enormous sum of money was dropped in my lap, I would dispose of it as quickly as I could, giving a few cash gifts to friends, financing a cure for Alzheimer’s and endowing a pediatric hospital. It slipped my mind, but one other use to which I’d put the money would be to fund the recall elections of those judges who give wrist slaps to rapists and child abusers. Just recently, some demented jurist in Michigan granted parental visitation rights to a twice-convicted rapist who had impregnated a 12-year-old victim.
When judges make those sorts of delusional decisions from the bench, they are telling us far more about their own dementia than they are about the various flaws and failings of the American legal system.
Sometimes when I see a left-wing politician on Fox trying to debate with Tucker Carlson, I wonder if they go home and watch themselves on TV and wind up banging their head against the wall and wailing: “Why didn’t someone stop me? God, why didn’t you strike me dead on my way to the studio?”
Just the other night, Carlson pointed out that when it comes to the number of murders committed by young black men — a glaring problem that politicians, such as the Chicago alderman he had on as a guest, always avoid mentioning — a major factor is the absence of fathers in the homes of their children.
In response, the alderman claimed the reason for their absence is that, although blacks only represent 14% of the state’s population, they represent 65% of the prison inmates, and “that’s why the kids don’t have fathers at home providing for their families.”
It sounded so ludicrous, I re-played the exchange a second time to make sure I had heard it correctly the first time. In other words, it’s all because white society insists on jailing criminals that black children are being deprived of their fathers.
In a way, it was reminiscent of the apocryphal tale of the man who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court because he was now (sniffle, sniffle) an orphan.
If you recall, one of my readers had written to complain that congressmen could start receiving a pension even if they had only served a year in the House. I let him know I was pretty certain that the minimum requirement was five years.
I’m happy to report I was right. A second subscriber, Ralph Irish, a proud resident of Shelby Township, Michigan, sent me the following information:
“Members of Congress are eligible for a pension at the age of 62 if they have completed at least five years of service. Members are eligible for a pension at age 50 if they have completed 20 years of service, or at any age after completing 25 years of service. The amount of the pension depends on years of service and the average of the highest three years of salary. By law, the starting amount of a Member’s retirement annuity may not exceed 80% of his or her final salary.”
But as I remarked earlier, if after five years on the job, they haven’t gotten rich through cash bribes or insider trading on the stock market, they really haven’t been trying.
I am all for a strong military and a Pentagon budget equal to its actual needs in a very dangerous world, but when I hear that we currently have 180,000 troops stationed in 140 nations, which works out to an average of 1,286 troops per country, I can’t help wondering what possible good they’re doing. I mean, aside from propping up 140 foreign economies with our tax dollars.
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to say farewell to a man who was a friend of mine for nearly 50 years. I refer to Merrill Heatter, who was the creator and co-producer of a score of TV game shows, including “Gambit,” “High Roller” and “Hollywood Squares.”
And just in case some of you old-timers are curious, Gabriel Heatter was Merrill’s uncle, not his father.
“Hollywood Squares” was so successful that for a long time it not only ran five days a week but was also a nighttime hit. It was essentially tic-tac-toe, but inside the nine boxes was a mix of different minor celebrities. While Paul Lynde, Cliff Arquette (under the persona of the rustic Charley Weaver), Rose Marie and Wally Cox were generally in attendance, they would be augmented by the likes of Jim Backus, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Kaye Ballard, Morey Amsterdam, Abby Dalton, Marty Allen, Charo, Soupy Sales, Mike Connors and Judy Carne, while Peter Marshall, Joanne Dru’s brother in real life, held forth as the affable host.
What made the show the long-lasting hit it was were the funny, often risqué lines the celebrities would ad lib. But as was the case with Groucho Marx’s quiz show, “You Bet Your Life,” those lines were ad-libbed only in the sense that Hamlet’s soliloquy was ad-libbed. In the one case, William Shakespeare was the source. In the case of “Hollywood Squares,” the lines were usually the work of my madcap friend, Merrill Heatter.
One day, when I asked Merrill which of the Q’s and A’s he had come up he thought were the funniest, he gave me the following three.
“Once, Marty Allen was asked what a person from Philadelphia was most likely to dip his pretzel in, and, instead of mustard, said: A girl from New Jersey.”
“Paul Lynde, when asked if anything could bring a monkey to tears, said: Learning that Tarzan swings both ways.”
“And once, in response to the line that, according to archaeologists, a pea can last 5,000 years, George Gobel said: Sometimes it sure seems that way.”
If up until now there have not been any game shows in Heaven, I have a feeling all of that is about to change.
