A Study in Pathology
In the world of psychology, there is something known as projection. It occurs when a person accuses others of sins, crimes or shortcomings of his own. Today, there is an entire political party that suffers from this condition.
In the world of psychology, there is something known as projection. It occurs when a person accuses others of sins, crimes or shortcomings of his own. Today, there is an entire political party that suffers from this condition.
If you guessed it was the GOP, you’re mistaken. Their major problem is one of cowardice. Even senators and House members who know they will never be voted out of office tend to shrivel up at the mere thought of the NY Times or the Washington Post insulting them in print.
It’s the Democrats who accuse their Republican colleagues of racism and call President Trump treacherous, dictatorial and just plain nasty. But they can’t even bring themselves to pass a resolution condemning anti-Semitism or censuring Rep. Ilhan Omar.
Actually, when I first heard that a resolution had been passed in the House 407-23, and that the 23 were all Republicans, I was dismayed. But that was before I discovered that the original resolution had been diluted into a feel-good message that suggested it was equally despicable to say negative things about Muslims, Catholics, Latinos, Atheists, Gays, Vegans. Eskimos and your Mother-in-Law.
The 23 Republicans, to their credit, simply balked at voting for a resolution that wasn’t worth the paper it was written on, and I applaud them. If I were a member of the House, the number would have been an even two dozen.
As Tucker Carlson recently pointed out, it’s bad enough that Martin County, Kentucky, is so poor that the sheriff recently had to send out notices to the locals that his department could no longer afford to provide the community with 24/7 protection. He seriously advised the folks to lock their doors, load their guns and get barking, biting dogs.
What makes it much worse is that while these poor, but loyal, tax-paying Americans can’t afford full-time protection, America has spent $78 billion building up the military and the police in Afghanistan. After 18 years, Trump and I both think it’s time to re-direct the cash flow, diverting it to places like Martin County.
Noted horticulturalist Luther Burbank (1849-1926) once said: “If we had paid no more attention to our plants than we have to our children, we would now be living in a jungle of weeds.”
Unfortunately, at some point, we began paying far more attention to our plants, leaving the cultivation of our offspring to left-wing teachers, obscene rap artists and Socialist propagandists like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, A O-C, George Soros, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and the doped-up writers of “Saturday Night Live.”
Sometimes women question why their seemingly intelligent spouses choose to spend so much time watching sports.
While accepting that in some cases, it provides husbands with a respite from the to-do lists provided by their spouses, I believe it’s because men understand that sports is one of the very few meritocracies that still exists.
This is especially true when it comes to baseball, a sport which, unlike basketball and football, doesn’t require unnatural height or massive bulk of its participants. Players ranging in height from 5-5 to 6-10 have excelled, as have players whose weight ranged from about 140 to more than 300 pounds.
With baseball season just around the corner, it doesn’t hurt to acknowledge that with millions of people playing the game around the world, and players from a dozen different nations represented in the major leagues, there will only be 750 players available on opening day.
And not a single one of them will be there because of whom they know, because a bribe was paid or because of whom they slept with.
I received a couple of cartoons. In the first, a donkey in a suit, sitting at a news anchor’s desk, is saying: “Don’t look on this as a national emergency on the southern border. Look on it as a Democratic voter registration drive.”
In the other, Nancy Pelosi is standing next to Adolf Hitler, saying: “Sure, he’s made some questionable comments, but I don’t think it was intentional.”
Linda Posto shared a poll she had recently come across. It seems that people from Chicago are the most likely to have had sex in the shower. “In the survey, 86% of Chicago’s inner city residents admit to having done so. The other 14% said they hadn’t yet been in prison.”
Penny Alfonso sent me a picture of the two new Muslim members of the House, the Jew-baiting Ilhan Omar and the foul-mouthed Rashida Tlaib, and posed the rhetorical question: “How did we let this happen?”
The first answer that comes to mind is that we allowed so many Muslims to enter the country after 9/11 that they now control certain congressional districts, especially in Michigan and Minnesota, and can easily elect those who reflect their own perverted beliefs.
The second answer is that the rest of us paved the way by electing a schmuck named Barack Hussein Obama a scant seven years after 9/11.
I once had occasion to interview the late comedian George Carlin. He was very pleasant and didn’t utter a single obscenity. But until the other day, I was unaware that this former Air Force veteran had ever said anything quite as profound as when he complained of “shell shock” being renamed “post-traumatic stress disorder,” pointing out that “the pain was completely buried under jargon.”
One of my subscribers, while commiserating about my shoulder injury, let me know that his own injury prevented him from extending his arm straight out and lifting it more than a few inches. He said he stopped demonstrating his limitation to friends after his wife alerted him to the fact that he appeared to be giving the Nazi salute.
I told him he was wise to heed his wife’s advice, “lest people assume you’re a Democrat.”
In case you are unaware, a malaprop (named after Mrs. Malaprop, a character in Richard Sheridan’s play, “The Rivals”) is the verbal mistake in which a word is substituted with another word that sounds similar but means something entirely different. An example would be if, on a visit to Argentina, you asked a cab driver to take you to see flamingo dancers when you had floor-stompers in mind and not tall, pink lawn ornaments.
A young Miss Malaprop would be likely to recite: “Mary had a little lamb, its fleas as white as snow.
Although often confused with malaprops, a spoonerism (named after an actual clergyman, William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), involves the transposition of the initial sounds of words.
Apparently Dr. Spooner was notorious for saying such things as "Is the bean dizzy?” (Is the dean busy?) “The Lord is a shoving leopard.” (The Lord is a loving shepherd.) “A toast to our queer old dean.” (A toast to our dear old queen.) “At a wedding, it is kisstomary to cuss the bride.” (At a wedding, it is customary to kiss the bride.) And in a fantastic example of verbal legerdemain, he somehow managed to turn “Pardon me, madam, you are occupying my pew. May I show you to another seat?” into the remarkable “Mardon me, padom, you are occupewing my pie. May I sew you to another sheet?”
If you ever saw “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” you might recall Rowan Atkinson’s Dr. Gerald and his brilliant send-up of the pixilated Rev. Spooner.
If only the nonsensical jibberish uttered by our politicians were even slightly this amusing, we’d all be a lot happier.
