The Patriot Post® · Is Stupidity Contagious?
I haven’t been afraid of Covid-19, not because I don’t think it exists, but because it kills so few of the people it infects. It’s the same reason I don’t fear catching a cold. In a nation of 325 million and a world of seven billion, the Wuhan virus has only killed off a tiny percentage. So I like my odds, vaccine or no vaccine.
It’s become abundantly clear that the collateral damage to businesses, schools, religion, freedom and the American economy will be far more devastating than the over-hyped disease.
The media is telling us how many people in Florida, California and Texas, are testing positive for C-19, but not how many unemployed people will remain jobless once the panic subsides, or how many people will commit suicide, get hooked on drugs or beat up their wives and children along the way.
Once you factor in the way that governors and mayors all over the country are pandering to the BLM vandals, it gets harder and harder not to at least wonder if the nation has reached the point of no return.
And while I try to pooh-pooh the polls showing the demented Joe Biden leading President Trump in most of the battleground states, when I look at what’s happening in America, I am starting to think that Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may just have the hand puppet they need to take control of the White House.
It wasn’t that long ago that reasonable people would have insisted that Sanders and A O-C represented the loony fringe of the Democratic Party, but in 2020 that is no longer true. Today, the loony fringe is the Democratic Party.
All of that being said, we can still get a few laughs at their expense. And we better get those laughs while we still can, before the lunkheads try to add that to the list of freedoms, such as free speech, religion and gun ownership, they would deny us.
Joe Biden announced that Covid-19 had killed 120 million Americans. It’s true he quickly corrected himself, probably after getting an alert on the little receiver I suspect his handlers have installed in his ear. He meant to say 120 thousand, but he overshot by 119,880,000. Even in horseshoes, that would not be regarded as a near-miss.
For her part, Nancy Pelosi claimed that a House bill being proposed would honor George Kirby. She naturally meant George Floyd, a man who was a career criminal that the Democrats felt should be honored because he was killed by a rotten cop. For the record, George Kirby was the name of a pretty well-known black comedian, but I’m pretty sure the House Speaker didn’t have him in mind. For one thing, he’s been dead since 1995. For another, he wasn’t as funny on purpose as Nancy Pelosi is by accident.
And finally, making his own inevitable contribution to the general festivities, we had Chuck Schumer going Pelosi one better by referring to George Floyd as “Lloyd Taylor, uh, George Taylor…uh, George Lloyd” and finally, out of nowhere, “Breonna Taylor.”
I guess he actually went Pelosi three better. Or worse, depending on how you count these things.
People sometimes ask if I’m worried about being dismissed as a racist because of the negative things I often write about blacks. I let them know I’m not even slightly concerned because I know what’s in my heart. If I write what I regard as the truth about the 90% who regularly trot out to vote for the plantation owners; the 70% who have babies out of wedlock; and the 50% who don’t even bother getting a high school diploma; while at the same time acknowledging the intelligence and decency of Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, Jason Riley, Candace Owens and Shelby Steele, how can I possibly be a racist?
When judging people, skin color is as irrelevant to me as hair color. What does concern me is character, values and behavior.
After all, I spend more time ripping into the likes of people like Pelosi, Schumer, Biden, Nadler, Schiff, Comey, McCabe, Strzok, Clapper, Durbin, de Blasio, Newsom and Cuomo, and nobody would ever think to accuse me of bias against white people.
As a baseball fan, I, like many others, have sometimes wondered how many more home runs and runs batted in Ted Williams would have accumulated if he hadn’t lost about five seasons to World War II and Korea or how many more wins Warren Spahn would have compiled if he hadn’t lost four years to WWII.
But I have also wondered how many fewer homeruns Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, would have hit if they hadn’t cheated their way into the record books by using illegal steroids.
But that led to my wondering what sort of career Michael Jordan would have had if the referees had ever called him for “steps.” “traveling” or “double-dribbling” as he went to the basket for a lay-up or a dunk.
Robert Moore shared a quote by H.L. Mencken, while stating that he knew the “sage of Baltimore” was not one of my favorite people. The quote was: “Democracy is the naïve belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one ever lost money betting on the stupidity of the average citizen.”
I admitted that I didn’t care for Mencken, who had destroyed his over-inflated reputation by being an admirer of Hitler. In my response to Mr. Moore, I wrote: “Mencken’s problem is that he never recognized that he was as ignorant as those he so delighted in ridiculing. He just happened to know more big words than they did.”
In case anyone is wondering what may lie in store for us now that pandering politicians have given a green light to vandals and bullies, Dennis Stockton sent along a reminder that “During the nascent years of the Nazi Party, a gang of roughnecks was created to keep order at Party meetings and protect Party leaders. Before long, this brown-shirted auxiliary, the Sturmabteilung, had gone on the offensive against other political parties, breaking into their meeting halls, beating up their leaders, and chasing their members through the streets. Hitler urged them on, vowing openly to disrupt ‘all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow countrymen.’”
This isn’t a fantasy, not when 53% of young people claim to prefer Socialism to Capitalism, primarily because they’ve swallowed the bilge fed them by left-wing professors who pretend that Socialism means free stuff you don’t have to work for, and 63% of Americans allegedly support the aims of Black Lives Matter.
Someone reminded me that it is in the business world that you find the true innovators; in government is where you find the reactionaries. It is they, the bureaucrats, who force the innovators to jump through hoops, tie them up in red tape, and force them to get licenses and pay taxes.
In short, to paraphrase, George Bernard Shaw, those who can, do; those who can’t, punish those who can.
Finally, Joseph Neuner shared a story that is allegedly true. If it isn’t, it should be.
It seems a lawyer bought a box of 24 expensive cigars and then had them insured against, among other things, fire!
After he smoked the two dozen stogies, he filed a claim with the insurance company. When they balked, the lawyer took them to court, where the judge ruled in the plaintiff’s favor, pointing out that the company hadn’t thought to consider the inevitable fate of cigars.
Rather than go to the trouble and expense of appealing the decision, the insurance company wrote the lawyer a check for $15,000. But that’s not the unhappy end of the story.
As soon as the guy cashed the check, the company had the lawyer arrested on 24 counts of arson.