Socialism, Soccer, and the Supreme Court
Outside of baseball, I have absolutely no interest in watching spectator sports. That doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions about them. As you may have noticed, I have opinions about everything.
Outside of baseball, I have absolutely no interest in watching spectator sports. That doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions about them. As you may have noticed, I have opinions about everything.
For instance, I despise college sports because they’re so corrupt. When it comes to recruiting athletes, every college cuts corners and evades as many of the rules as they can because they know that a great many alums base the size of their donations on the success of their alma mater’s football and basketball teams. Worse yet, the college coaches are invariably the best-paid people on campus.
When it comes to events like the Olympics and the World Cup, I accept that other people are going to be more excited about them than I am. In fact, if the day ever comes that I show the slightest bit of interest in competitions involving, say, tobogganing or synchronized swimming, please just shoot me.
As for the World Cup, the most amazing thing to me is that people all over the world — and not just those in the Third World, where one might expect a game that only calls for an empty field and some round object to kick would be popular — seem to take an avid interest.
Still, so long as I didn’t have to tune in, I wouldn’t object to their holding the event every year, instead of every four, except that I feel my head exploding every time I see cars in my neighborhood drive by with Mexican or Salvadoran flags flapping in the breeze. And that’s even before the U.S. has been eliminated from the competition.
Something about Donald Trump that tends to get overlooked is that, unlike every other president, his moving into the White House was not a step up in luxury for him and Mrs. Trump.
Whenever I’d see Barack and Michelle entering or departing the White House, I found the theme song from “The Jeffersons” floating around in my head (“Well, we’re movin’ on up to the east side, To a deluxe apartment in the sky, Movin’ on up to the east side, We finally got a piece of the pie”).
But Trump and his family already had the entire pie and it was a la mode. If the man was motivated by anything other than a patriotic desire to help the nation dig its way out of the mess that Clinton, Bush, and Obama had created, he was nuts to let himself in for the stones and mud incessantly slung his way by the morons on the Left. And I don’t happen to believe he’s nuts.
Speaking of other inspired patriots, I always found it astonishing that three of America’s first five presidents died on the 4th of July — two of them on the same day in 1826: John Adams, 90, and Thomas Jefferson, 83; and James Monroe, in 1831, at the age of 73.
The odds against that must be astronomical. But not nearly as staggering as the fact that in a sparsely populated country, those three men, together with the likes of George Washington, James Madison, and Benjamin Franklin, should be in the same place at the same time, in order to create the greatest nation on the face of the earth.
Even if you’re agnostic, it’s awfully hard to avoid seeing the hand of God in all this.
After I referred to the concentration camps where FDR interred Americans of Japanese descent, one of my subscribers, a fellow Jew, wrote to say: “Burt, please do not refer to the camps where the Japanese were placed as concentration camps. There was no forced labor, starvation and no killing.”
“Sorry,” I replied, “but of course they were concentration camps. Not Nazi ones, but concentration camps, nevertheless. Although these people had committed no crimes, they were imprisoned. They were forced to leave their homes, their farms, their businesses and their non-Japanese friends and neighbors, with nothing more than they could carry. If they had been Jews instead of Japanese, I suspect you would have called them concentration camps, especially if you and your family had wound up in one.”
Among the zanier things that are taking place in this country is that the freakish individuals who identify themselves as transgenders are being allowed to compete in athletic events against women, even if they haven’t gone through surgery or even hormone treatment.
For the life of me, I don’t get why anyone is pandering to these anomalies, allowing them, for heaven’s sake, to determine their own sex. If the rules governing biology can be ignored, how about if the rest of us decide we’re zebras and rhinos and are not to be constrained by traffic laws?
In a nation of 330 million, one can safely assume that a certain percentage of us will be certifiably insane. But that’s no reason to turn common sense on its head for no better reason than to accommodate the perpetually confused.
The other evening, on Tucker Carlson’s show, I saw a woman who had lost her husband on 9/11 and has spent years trying, in vain, to sue Saudi Arabia for its major role in planning and financing the attack.
It seems that because President George W. Bush didn’t want to do anything to upset his business colleagues in the oil-rich Arab state, he, together with the director of the FBI, Robert Mueller, contrived to cover up the connection to the Saudi royals.
It’s time that President Trump began declassifying every document being concealed by Rod Rosenstein that is connected to either 9/11 or the current scandals swirling around the FBI and the Justice Department. Furthermore, it’s past time that the Deep State bureaucrats be prevented from redacting every single document that casts the slightest bit of light on their treasonous shenanigans.
It was Justice Brandeis of the Supreme Court who, in 1913, observed that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and he was referring to the transparency that is the birthright of every American to know what the government is doing in his or her name.
Back in the 1930s, when the Supreme Court began reining in some of FDR’s most outlandish policies, he attempted to pack the Court by adding five or six judges. Even his allies in Congress drew the line when it came to something that confirmed the belief of a great many Americans that the man wasn’t satisfied with merely being a president, but that he wanted, like his colleagues in Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, to be a dictator.
It seems that bad ideas never die; they just wait for a later generation to dust them off and pass them off as new and shiny. So, it should come as no surprise that the same idiots who want to get rid of ICE and swing open the borders are talking up the notion of adding a few more judges to offset the conservatives on the Court.
What they seem to forget is that if they succeed in adding any more seats to the bench, it’s Trump, not FDR or Chuck Schumer, who will be filling them for quite a while.
I don’t want to get too carried away, but when I hear Democrats like Senators Elizabeth Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand and other party notables parroting the American Socialist Party’s call for an end to profit, borders, and prisons, I’m beginning to think that the GOP might actually increase its numbers in both the House and Senate in November.
After writing that, in spite of the temporary problems that might result from a trade war, I supported Trump’s increasing tariffs because we have been treated like rich but backward children for far too long by Mexico, Canada, and our trading partners in Europe. They’ve been hitting us with crippling tariffs for decades, but as soon as Trump tries to merely level the playing field, they cry “Foul!” and toss a penalty flag.
I received the following message from one of my readers: “One of my three degrees is in economics. As you correctly pointed out, our so-called allies have been shaking us down on trade for decades. Trump is doing the right thing. Halfwits like Macron and Merkel may threaten us with a Russian equation, but what the hell can the Kremlin offer that is better than what we can?”
I replied: “Thank you. It always comes as a delightful surprise to be vindicated by someone who actually knows what I’m talking about.”
We’ll conclude with the latest from Russ Mothershed, the clown prince of Knoxville, Tennessee.
A blonde lady motorist was about two hours from San Diego when she was flagged over by a man whose truck had broken down.
The man asked if she was headed to San Diego. “Sure thing,” she replied, “do you need a lift?”
“Not for me. I have to wait here for a tow. My problem is that I have two chimpanzees that have to be taken to the San Diego Zoo. They’re already a bit stressed. I was wondering if you could possibly take them to the zoo for me. I’ll give you a hundred dollars for your trouble.”
“I’d be happy to,” said the blonde.
So the two chimps were placed in the backseat of her car, carefully strapped in, and off they went.
Several hours later, the truck driver was driving through the heart of San Diego when, to his horror, he saw the woman walking down the street, holding hands with the chimps, much to the amusement of passersby.
With a screech of brakes, he parked and ran over to the blonde.
“What are you doing here? I gave you a hundred dollars to take these chimpanzees to the zoo.”
“I know you did,” said the blonde. “But we had money left over, so now we’re going to Sea World.”
