All the Usual Suspects
Politicians are like baseball managers. There are only 30 major league teams and they just keep shuffling around the same 30 guys.
One of the worst things about politics is that bad people never leave the scene. If you question that observation, how is it that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, are very much with us after all these years?
Politicians are like baseball managers. There are only 30 major league teams and they just keep shuffling around the same 30 guys. The only shot a new guy has is if one of the 30 dies. Otherwise, it doesn’t matter if a guy has five straight losing seasons with, say, the Milwaukee Brewers; everybody knows it isn’t his fault that the owner won’t go out and spend money on the best players, mainly because Milwaukee is a small market and he can’t compete with the wealthy teams. When the owner gets around to firing him, tossing a bone to the disgruntled fans, the chances are he’ll go to a good team that had a disappointing season, probably because their star players were injured. Typically, the former losing manager will find success with the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Cubs, the Cardinals or the Red Sox and win the Manager of the Year award. His predecessor will probably spend three or four seasons losing with the Brewers, the Rangers, the Padres or the Mariners, before he’s once again allowed to return from exile and start winning again.
That’s why even the so-called great managers generally wind up with a career winning percentage hovering around 52%. If they manage to stick around for 25 years, they’re a shoo-in for the Hall of Fame for having won about 2100 games while losing only 1950.
Of course, politicians and bureaucrats don’t even have to wind up with winning records. They just need to get on The List. Once they get on it, they never drop off. That’s why Biden is filling up his own lineup with the same crowd that served in Obama’s administration, with a few going all the way back to Clinton.
Nobody in his right mind really believes that anyone connected with Obama is among the best and the brightest, but those kinds of people don’t often make The List.
Those kinds of people start out in Milwaukee and they never get to leave.
Word is out that Bernie Sanders feels he’s been hornswoggled. Generally, when people are hoping to receive a cabinet appointment, they act as shy as a virgin bride on her wedding night. But not Bernie. He did everything but pay for a giant neon sign that flashes “Bernie for Secretary of Labor” every five seconds. Rumor has it, he did hire a guy with a plane to skywrite “Feel the Bern, Biden!” over Biden’s house twice a day.
You could almost feel sorry for the old dude. But he’s been around Washington long enough to know that you make your deals before the election and then get the paper notarized and into a safe deposit box before the ink dries.
I wasn’t around during the Great Depression, but I’ve seen plenty of pictures and newsreels of poor people lined up outside huge warehouses to get their allotments of free rice.
This Thanksgiving, I also saw long lines of people coming to food banks to get their free turkeys and boxes of fixings.
But they didn’t look anything like their ancestors. They weren’t wearing rags with newspapers shoved in their shoes to make up for worn-out soles. They weren’t even standing outside in the cold and the rain.
Instead, they were mainly driving late-model SUVs. What gives?
Was there another line around the corner where they were giving poor people expensive cars?
Who would have ever guessed that America’s future could depend on a couple of run-off elections in Georgia? Probably because Georgia has inspired so many songwriters, a few titles keep popping into my head, including “Georgia On My Mind” and, more ominously, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “The Nights the Lights Went Out in Georgia.”
After all the hanky-panky that took place in the presidential election, I was already concerned about the integrity of the vote in the two Senate races. My fears were not relieved when I heard that Stacey Abrams, who combines the worst features of Maxine Waters, Joy Reid and Michelle Obama, had already harvested 800,000 absentee ballots.
There is really no justification for certain black women to even exist, especially when they can’t carry a tune.
Speaking of creeps named Obama, Barack recently complained that President Trump placed unaccompanied Latino youngsters in cages. My question to Obama is, did he think he’d be the only one who could ever use the cages just because he’s the guy who built them.
And let’s have no false modesty, the dude really did build them himself.
I know that most of us now regard polls with skepticism, but I have heard that the three most respected women in the world are Michelle Obama, Angelina Jolie and Queen Elizabeth, in that order.
It’s bad enough being on such a list but winding up in third place to a pair of divas is an insult not only to the Queen, but to her entire nation. Ah, for the good old days before “I’ll sue” became the ultimate threat, and a queen could say “Heads will roll!” and mean it.
Norm Silvers reported a few mildly embarrassing facts about his bar mitzvah and asked me about my own.
I confessed I had never had a bar mitzvah. My parents weren’t religious. But they would go through the motions, so when I was about 12 ½ my mom asked me if I wanted to have one. I said I’d pass, “I’d rather play ball after school, not go off to another, even more boring, school.”
She told me I’d get lots of presents on my 13th birthday if I went through the ceremony. I told her the last time I’d endured a Jewish ceremony, some guy with a scalpel was slicing off something that didn’t belong to him.
No, just kidding. Actually, I told her I’d probably get the same number of presents if I didn’t send everyone into a coma with my reading from the Torah, which, being in Hebrew, I would need to have written out phonetically on cue cards.
So, instead of being cooped up in a stuffy Hebrew School classroom for six months, I got to spend it outdoors perfecting my jump-shot. And on my birthday, the gifts magically showed up. No gold, frankincense and myrrh, but a new Schwinn bike and a Marty Marion baseball mitt.
Sometimes, an old expression will suddenly grab my attention and I’ll notice it as if for the first time. The other day, I actually heard one person tell another “If you haven’t got your health, you haven’t got anything.”
I’ve heard the one bandied about for decades, but for the first time I realized how silly that is. Of course you have something. You have illness, disease, maybe even death.
So don’t sell yourself short just because someone says you’ve got nothing, which is just another way of saying you are nothing.
To which I say, you don’t have to take that kind of crap from anyone. You are so something. Maybe even contagious.
Another nonsensical expression is “Shoot first and ask questions later.”
Assuming you’ve shot correctly, just what questions are you expected to ask the corpse? “How does it feel to be dead?” “Is it better or worse than you expected?” “See anyone you know?” “Hot enough for you?”
When one of my readers voiced mock annoyance at some of my probing questions, I replied that it’s my nature. “It’s what I do. I’m Prelutsky, private nose, licensed to snoop.”
Once I got him loosened up, he admitted that his wife could get pretty annoying at times.
I let him know that “She’s a wife, it’s what she does. She’s licensed to aggravate.”
To which he replied “And still we marry them. Doesn’t say much for our judgment.”
“Ha!” I responded. “Men don’t have judgment, we have hormones.”
