There Ought to Be a Law
How is it that it’s apparently illegal to remove labels from pillows and mattresses, but politicians are free to mislabel themselves? After all, manufacturers are not permitted to mislabel their products.
How is it that it’s apparently illegal to remove labels from pillows and mattresses, but politicians are free to mislabel themselves? After all, manufacturers are not permitted to mislabel their products. Supermarkets are just begging for trouble if they try to pass off ground round for ground sirloin, so why should it be any more permissible for politicians to blatantly lie about themselves?
Why should people like Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain, to mention just three of the most flagrant examples, be allowed to continue calling themselves Republicans? Or, for that matter, why should the Senate’s proudest and most prominent Marxist, Bernie Sanders, get away with labeling himself an independent?
Speaking of labels, how stupid is Joe Manchin that he wishes to continue calling himself a Democrat when he represents and clearly wishes to continue representing West Virginia, a state that Donald Trump carried by 300,577 votes, trouncing Mrs. Clinton 489,371 to 188,794?
Manchin still has a few months in which to change his registration before the 2018 election. But he shouldn’t wait too long. After what Trump has done for the coal-mining industry by defanging Obama’s EPA, he’d win by an even larger margin than he did last year.
Something that confounds me about black voters is that there is no discernible difference between the way that welfare junkies cast their votes than the way that responsible blacks who get up in the morning, go to work to support their families and come home to help raise their children vote.
How is it that decent, hard-working black men vote for the same people as the black riffraff who refuse to marry their pregnant girlfriends and who peddle or use illegal drugs?
I understand that black celebrities are as stupid and egotistical as white ones, which explains black millionaires taking a knee at sporting events, pledging fealty to Black Lives Matter and encouraging Johnnie Cochran to free O.J.
But how is it that the 30% of blacks who do get married and raise their children in two-parent homes vote the same way as the 70% who don’t, resulting in Democrats garnering roughly 95% of the total black vote in one election after another?
I mean, even my fellow Jews, who are notorious for voting foolishly, aren’t as slavishly devoted to liberals as blacks are, and have been known on occasion to give 25-30% of their votes to Republicans.
A friend wrote, asking if I thought that Tyler Perry, a black entrepreneur best known for starring as a sassy black woman in a series of comedies that he also wrote, directed and produced, was a worthy role model for black kids.
I said that so far as I knew, he was okay, so long as you didn’t hold his friendship with Oprah Winfrey against him, but I doubted if black kids lacked for idols. I mean, they’ve grown up in a world where blacks haven’t lacked for fame and fortune, achieving the highest level possible in entertainment, athletics and even, God help us, politics.
“However,” I went on, “I suspect that most of their heroes are neighborhood gangbangers, the people they see every day, the ones that are so easy to emulate because it doesn’t require that the kids crack a book, only someone’s head.
"That is why I have always said that part of sentencing black and Hispanic gang members should be to put them in dresses, slap some lipstick and rouge on them, and then drive the schmucks around on a flatback truck in the hood, so the little kids could see them shamed in front of their friends and relatives.”
In reading about the depravity of Harvey Weinstein, it occurred to me that an awful lot of women remained silent for decades not because all of the authorities would have been as complicit in Weinstein’s crimes as the NYC DA, Cyrus Vance, but because they were so utterly determined to become movie stars.
That got me to thinking about the fates of so many of Hollywood’s sex symbols. There was Jean Harlow, dead at 26; Jayne Mansfield, 34; and Marilyn Monroe, a corpse at 36. I wonder how many of the aspiring actresses who allowed themselves to be used and abused by Swinestein would have done so, even if they had somehow known they’d never make it to 40.
If that seems outlandish, consider the large number of celebrities who were dead of drug overdoses in their 20s and 30s. They certainly knew the risk. I even recall Dick Cavett interviewing the father-daughter combination of John Phillips, Papa John of the Mamas and Papas, and Mackenzie Phillips, co-star of the TV sit com “One Day at a Time.”
Cavett asked them, both admitted drug users, if it didn’t give them pause when they’d hear about one of their friends overdosing on heroin or cocaine. They exchanged a knowing look and nearly laughed at his naivety; both assured him that they’d immediately want to find out the friend’s drug connection because it meant the stuff he was supplying was high-grade.
One of my subscribers who prefers to be identified as Citizen X wrote to say that one of the troubles with those readily available college loans isn’t just that it forces parents and students to go into debt but that it keeps colleges and universities from having to compete with each other by offering lower tuitions.
There are a great many pinheads, especially in academia, who object to competition because they think it fosters ill-feelings, which explains why some schools have resorted to report cards that don’t mention grades at all but merely indicate pass or fail; and some have even done away with valedictorians because they subscribe to the bizarre belief that if everybody can’t be one, nobody should.
Is it any wonder that by the time the young morons get to college, they’re in desperate need of sanctuaries filled with security blankets and teddy bears if someone dares object to one of their insipid opinions?
If I’m driving on the weekend, when political talk radio tends to disappear from the airwaves, leaving mushy-mouthed jocks to hold forth on football, I tend to listen to the classical music station.
Last Sunday, I was stuck with opera. And not just opera, but German opera. I can’t even imagine why German composers ever bother writing love songs. After listening to just 30 minutes of the stuff, I felt myself overwhelmed by a strange desire to invade Poland.
Thanks to Kim Jong-un, I have been giving more thought than usual to the idea of a nuclear holocaust. It occurred to me that the only two species likely to survive the devastation are cockroaches and bureaucrats.
I recently mentioned that Pat Sajak, best known to the world as the benign host of “Wheel of Fortune,” is not only an ardent conservative and a member of the board of Hillsdale College but a very witty guy. But because I don’t tweet or follow other people’s tweets, aside from those of Donald Trump that are passed along on news shows, I miss out on a lot of Sajak’s witticisms.
In the aftermath of the uproar over Columbus Day, I am grateful to Chicago’s Penny Alfonso for finding the time to pass along one of Sajak’s recent tweets: “Looking forward to my upcoming trip to Indigenous People, Ohio.”
