Icons With Feet of Clay
I know there are people who can’t understand how it is that some folks make heroes out of athletes and entertainers. But the fact remains that especially during World War II, a great many actors, singers and professional sports figures defended this country at great personal risk.
I know there are people who can’t understand how it is that some folks make heroes out of athletes and entertainers. But the fact remains that especially during World War II, a great many actors, singers and professional sports figures defended this country at great personal risk.
There were some that got by putting on exhibitions at military bases or touring with USO troupes, but even they weren’t always far from enemy fire. But others, like Jimmy Stewart and my friend George Kennedy, were in the thick of it, Stewart flying bombing missions over Germany, Kennedy freezing his ass off at the Battle of the Bulge.
I, on the other hand, have a tough time coming to terms with the fact that Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King are generally regarded as saintly figures.
Lincoln, a former well-paid lawyer for the railroad moguls, sacrificed 700,000 young Americans to allegedly save the Union, but save it for what? It’s 150 years later and we are more divided now than we were then.
If the Confederacy had been allowed to split off and become another country, what would have been so awful? We get along fine with Canada. We have even fought side by side with them against common enemies.
I won’t even get into the financial motives behind the Civil War. Let us just say that we now have 11 times more people in the country than we did then and so, proportionately, it would mean the loss of nearly 8,000,000 young Americans today.
If Trump got us into a similar war, I doubt if anyone would be likening him to a biblical patriarch even if he donned a frock coat and grew a beard.
As for Martin Luther King, he was a Communist and a sexual philanderer. If he hadn’t labeled himself another Mahatma Gandhi, would anyone else have made the comparison? His most famous quote is the one about people being judged by their character, not by the color of his skin, but, like Obama, color seemed to be his obsession, second only to his libido.
Even the liberal likes of the Kennedy brothers regarded him and his associates with suspicion, which is why Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to tap his phones and conduct other surveillance on him.
If you aren’t convinced that he was essentially a self-aggrandizing con artist in a shiny suit, keep in mind that, like Woodrow Wilson, Henry Kissinger, Le Duc Tho, Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Barack Obama, the EU and, multiple times, the U.N., he was a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Right, Martin Luther King deserves the Prize, but not the Brits and the Americans who fought and defeated the Axis of Evil during the 1940s.
Speaking of people who have garnered far too much attention, consider Anthony Scaramucci. In today’s America, the second quickest way to become the darling of the media is to attack President Trump. The quickest way, though, is by starting out as his ally and then turning on him. It is supposed to convey the notion that a person has evolved morally, sort of like Saul in the Bible who starts out as a sinner but mends his ways once he hears the voice of Christ on the road to Damascus.
The Mooch, as he likes to be called for reasons I can’t fathom, who became super rich through working at Goldman Sachs and other questionable financial institutions, got a gig as Trump’s White House Director of Communications, a job for which he immediately proved himself unqualified, leading to his dismissal after nine days.
Suddenly, in recent weeks, he went from being Trump’s loudest cheerleader to being the most popular guest at CNN and MSNBC at least since Michael Avenatti was garnering more airtime than Don Lemon and Rachel Maddow put together. And all because the Mooch is now using Trump’s face as a dartboard.
Scaramucci claims the tipping point for him was Trump’s racism. Anyone dumb enough to believe that could probably get a gig of his own on MSNBC.
After I recently called for a basement-to-attic housecleaning at the FBI, I received a first person account of an FBI raid from a subscriber who lives in the small rural town of Hayfork, California, close to the Oregon border.
“The FBI hit my town a couple of weeks ago. The local newspaper tried to find out more about the raid from the FBI field office in Sacramento, but they refused to comment.
"They swooped down on a residential area with Blackhawk helicopters at 5:30 a.m., terrorizing dogs and children, rattling the house trailers that most of us live in.
"Then they broke into an Asian food market in town, tossing a flash-bang grenade inside and damaging the store. The store was closed at the time. It was later determined that the target of the attack (and warrant) was for the business next door to the market, which had been closed for months.
"Apparently, they were targeting some illegal marijuana growers, but since growing and selling marijuana is now legal in California (and 85% of everybody in Hayfork is growing it in one form or another), the worst that can be cited is a misdemeanor tantamount to having chickens in a residential area or fishing without a license.”
I replied that these are the same clowns who staged a dawn raid on 73-year-old Roger Stone’s home, all because he supported Donald Trump.
This certainly isn’t the FBI we’ve seen depicted for decades on TV and in the movies These are a bunch of heavily-armed goons who get their rocks off terrorizing women, kids, dogs and old men, while wiping their dirty jackboots on the Constitution.
Worst of all, under Trump’s handpicked director, Christopher Wray, they’re no better than they were under Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch and Barack Obama.
My friend Art Hershey, feeling I might need help dealing with the occasional critic, sent me a bunch of rejoinders. I generally tend to rely on my own instincts, but I am happy to share with those of you who might have a more difficult time than I do when it comes to avoiding Liberals.
“I don’t know what your problem is, but I bet it’s hard to pronounce.”
“I’ll try being nicer if you try being smarter.”
“Too many freaks, not enough circuses.”
“Errors have been made. Others will be blamed.”
“You are validating my inherent distrust of strangers.”
“I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.”
“The fact that nobody understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist.”
“What am I? Flypaper for freaks?”
“This isn’t an office. It’s Hell with fluorescent lighting.”
“If I throw a stick, will you leave?”