The Patriot Post® · Bats in Their Belfry

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/54064-bats-in-their-belfry-2018-02-17

In case it may have escaped your attention, it’s not just Democrats who are deranged. It’s not even limited to the usual suspects, John McCain, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins and, on occasion, Ron Paul’s son, Rand. Consider that George W. Bush, who managed to maintain a polite silence through eight years of Barack Obama’s deliberate destruction of America, has turned into a motormouth ever since Obama vacated the White House.

For a while, he pretty much limited his insipid remarks to attacking Donald Trump, presumably for either keeping his brother Jeb out of the Oval Office or for showing America what an honest-to-God conservative looks like.

But now, it appears that Bush has taken total leave of his senses. While giving a speech in Abu Dhabi, for which I’m sure he was paid a fortune, he called for a general amnesty because “we need people picking cotton in 105-degree heat.”

Once I made sure he was serious, my reaction was to shuffle my feet, old felt hat in hand, and say: “Yes, suh, Massa Bush, we shore enough does.”


Closer to home, we had Nancy Pelosi vow to vote against the funding bill she had just helped negotiate. I was reminded of John Kerry running for the presidency in 2004 opposing the Iraq War just after having cast a vote in the Senate endorsing it.


It was recently discovered that Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), who has been among the most vociferous of those smearing Trump as a tool of the Kremlin, did a bit of colluding with Russia himself. It appears that in an attempt to get dirt on Trump, Warner communicated with a Russian oligarch with ties to the underworld. In an email, Warner asked for a private meeting because he didn’t want to leave a paper trail. Whoops!

The Democrats should have listened to me when I suggested that instead of trying to tie Trump to Russia, considering how conciliatory Obama and Mrs. Clinton had been in their own dealings with Putin, they should have tried connecting Trump to China, especially as I’ve heard he has a weakness for Cantonese shrimp.


Apparently, the hottest item to hit the fashion world in a long time is, of all things, the hijab. As a woman representing the wealthy pinheads who dominate NOW said to Tucker Carlson, it makes all the difference in the world if poor women are compelled to wear it in oppressive societies as opposed to privileged American females choosing to wear it of their own volition.

I suppose the next big news in the fashion world will be jackboots and blouses adorned with swastikas because it makes all the difference in the world if they’re worn by Nazis or by rich liberals who take every opportunity to wear vagina caps and demonstrate their opposition to Donald Trump.

I suspect that all it would take to stop this fashion farce in its tracks would be for Melania Trump to don a hijab. Of course, the irony is that on the First Lady it would probably look good.


When I was in junior high school, I belonged to an after-school sports team. Even back then, I thought it was ridiculous that everyone was given a ribbon just for participating. We were engaging in athletic competitions, so how could everyone deserve the same color ribbon?

The world of entertainment is a lot like junior high. They love giving meaningless awards to each other. Take the Oscars, for instance. If actors stick around long enough and haven’t picked up an Academy Award, they get one in recognition of never having won one.

Sometimes, as in the case of Elizabeth Taylor, they gave her one for a piece of cinematic cheese like “Butterfield 8,” because she had been gravely ill that year. It was sort of a great big get-well card.

Sometimes, they give people an Oscar they don’t deserve as a way of apologizing for not having given them one when they actually deserved it, as when they gave Jimmy Stewart one for “The Philadelphia Story” after not giving it to him for “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” the previous year, or when they honored Paul Newman for the crappy “Color of Money” when he probably had one coming for “The Hustler.”


The last I heard, a man named Arthur Jones was set to become the default Republican candidate for a congressional seat in Chicago. It seems that because the district is so overwhelmingly Democratic, no Republican wanted to waste his or her time signing up. The problem is that Mr. Jones is the former head of the American Nazi Party, a Holocaust denier and a virulent anti-Semite who now regrets voting for Trump because, as Jones puts it: “He’s surrounded himself with hordes of Jews, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner.”

If it comes to pass that Jones wins the nomination, the Democrats will spread the slander that the GOP is rife with white supremacists. I suspect that most people will see through the lies. The bad news is that the fake news media will do its best to make sure that a lot of people believe it by repeating it ad nauseam on CNN and MSNBC.


Although we don’t hear much about it lately, it still sticks in my craw that, like the Taliban and ISIS, we destroyed historical statues simply because yellow belly politicians caved in to the demands of bigots who demanded that they do so.

Even Lincoln admitted the Civil War was not fought over slavery, which explains why he only freed the slaves in the Confederacy and not those in the states that didn’t secede.

Most of the Southerners who fought and died didn’t own slaves and would not have signed up if that had been the issue. They fought to protect their homes and families. What’s more, they were brave Americans who fought in a war in which all the advantages were on the other side.

I am particularly angry because Gen. Robert E. Lee was a particular target of the brainless mob. It wasn’t just Gen. Ulysses Grant who greatly admired the military skills and character of his major wartime foe.

As revealed in the pages of The New American by Steve Byas, upon Gen. Lee’s death in 1870, he was eulogized in a newspaper with these words: “Never had a mother a nobler son. In him the military genius of America developed to a greater extent than ever before him. In him all that was pure and lofty in mind and purpose found lodgment. Dignified without pretension, affable without familiarity, he united all those charms of manners which made him the idol of his friends and of his soldiers and won for him the respect and admiration of the world. Even as in the days of triumph, glory did not intoxicate him, so when the dark clouds swept over him, adversity did not depress.”

Those words weren’t published in the Charleston Courier or the Savannah Morning News, which you might expect. They appeared in the New York Herald a scant five years after the end of the Civil War.

It took another 152 years before the barbarians had the opportunity to trash his reputation and vandalize his monuments. But all the moral pygmies really accomplished was to prove that even if they stood on their tiptoes that couldn’t have reached the top of the great man’s boots.