Double Standards?
It has been said and not only by me that if it weren’t for double standards, Liberals would have no standards at all. But that’s not entirely true.
It has been said and not only by me that if it weren’t for double standards, Liberals would have no standards at all. But that’s not entirely true. As a rule, in fact, their standards aren’t double, but merely rotten.
It’s not odd that Conservatives should despise Liberals every bit as much as Liberals despise Conservatives. What is peculiar is that we hate them for the things they actually say and do, whereas they hate us as a result of the lies they tell about what we allegedly say and do.
When it comes to determining whether people are optimists or pessimists, they are generally separated into two groups, those who see the glass as half full or half-empty. When Liberals look at American history, they tend to focus on the white man’s ill-treatment of blacks or on the fact that a few of the Founding Fathers owned slaves, never on the fact that the U.S. was one of the first countries to not only outlaw slavery, but extended citizenship to ex-slaves and accepted immigrants who not only represented every nation on earth, but every religion, and granted them the freedoms denied to most of them in their birth nations.
To recognize the major divisions between Liberals and Conservatives, it might be best to consider how Donald Trump is treated by his political foes with the way that Conservatives dealt with Barack Obama.
For eight years, Obama insulted Christians every chance he had, while sweet-talking Muslims, even as they fought wars against us in the Middle East and conducted terrorist attacks in the homeland.
He ruined the healthcare system; destroyed businesses; chased manufacturing jobs from the U.S. with endless taxes and regulations; consistently sided with black thugs and against cops; airmailed $150 billion to Iran; and turned a blind eye to his Secretary of State’s financial and national security transgressions. But all that Conservatives did was question his birth certificate, his college records and his travel documents, things he had gone out of his way to conceal.
I don’t recall Republican members of Congress calling for a Special Counsel based on a phony dossier. I also don’t remember leaders of the GOP describing Obama as a traitor or demanding his impeachment. I’m not saying I never did any of these things, but most Conservatives, including those in Congress, refrained from behaving so boorishly. Especially when, unlike Maxine Waters, Beto O'Rourke, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro, we had truth on our side.
Although I tend to pooh-pooh gender bias suits as political correctness gone berserk, I take the recent lawsuit filed against the FBI by two dozen women seriously.
That’s because, one, several of the women are currently employed by the Bureau and I doubt if they would make the allegations knowing that they’re not doing their careers any good by coming forward; and, two, because there’s nothing rotten about the Bureau that has been led for the past two decades by Robert Mueller, James Comey and Christopher Wray, that I wouldn’t believe.
It would appear that a breath of journalistic reality has made its way into the upper echelon of the New York Times. It seems that CNN and MSNBC reek so openly of anti-Trump bias that even the Times can no longer ignore it. Henceforth, it is barring its reporters from irreparably damaging their reputations by appearing on the amateur hours hosted by Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell and Don Lemon.
At the same time, the paper has banned their reporters from appearing with Sean Hannity or Tucker Carlson on Fox, but as I don’t believe they do or ever have, that might just be the NY Times’ way of attempting to be fair and balanced.
HBO is planning to enhance Beto O'Rourke’s chances of garnering the presidential nomination in 2020 by airing a documentary about his Senate race against Ted Cruz.
I’m not exactly sure how showing a skateboarding, middle-aged, dunce lose an election in which he out-spent his opponent by millions of dollars is supposed to burnish his image, but I guess HBO figures it can’t hurt to get on the good side of Democrats. Democrats, after all, have a long record of doing favors for their friends in Hollywood, in the teacher’s union, in Silicon Valley, in the solar panel industry and in the hood.
A few more examples of lexophiles have come my way. I will share them with the understanding that you keep your groans to yourself.
“Haunted French pancakes give me the crepes.”
“I changed my iPod’s name to Titanic. It’s syncing now.”
“I know a fellow who’s addicted to drinking brake fluid, but he insists he can stop any time.”
Nicholas Carlson is the Editor in Chief of a major website, Business Insider. He recently tweeted the following: “I am super embarrassed to report that I only learned this week that all 435 members of the House of Representatives are up for re-election every TWO years. That’s insane! No wonder they’re all grandstanding like their in the middle of a campaign all the time. Because they are.”
No, Mr. Carlson, you’re mistaken. Although I admire your candor, what’s insane is that a guy pushing 40, who is allegedly a news maven, believed a House term is four years and that every two years only half of the members are up for re-election.
What should add to his embarrassment is the fact that he’d confuse “their” with “they’re” when writing “their in the middle of a campaign all the time.”
One of my friends, Nancy Thorner, recently sent me an AP story I had never seen, but which she found while checking me out on the Internet.
It appeared in a Florida newspaper in 1971. You can imagine my shock when I opened it on my computer and read an article headlined “Hollywood Rejoices, as Prelutsky Retires.”
The first paragraph broke the news that “There’s good news for film makers today: Burt Prelutsky is retiring as a movie critic.”
The biggest surprise to me is that while my resigning didn’t seem to cause a ripple in L.A., where I had reviewed movies for Los Angeles magazine for 12 years, a Florida paper devoted about 10 column inches to it. I can only imagine they had a hole to fill and the story filled it.
Or possibly they wanted an excuse to quote some of my snappier lines, such as writing about “Tora! Tora! Tora!” that it was “a bore-a, bore-a, bore-a.”
Or about “Flap” that it starred Anthony Quinn as an American Indian. “It’s Zorba the Creek.”
Or about “Song of Norway” that it’s a series of picture postcards in search of a movie.“
Or about "Rabbit Run” that Anjanette Comer “steals the movie, but under the circumstances, it’s petty theft.”
The story ended with “Prelutsky, a small, slender man whose quiet manner contrasts with his acidic pen, will continue writing on other matters.”
And so he has. But would it have killed them to mention my charming smile, smoldering eyes and winning ways?
