The Patriot Post® · Bamboozlers and the Bamboozled

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/76782-bamboozlers-and-the-bamboozled-2021-01-11

Sometimes it seems to me that there are only these two groups sharing space in America — the conmen and their victims.

On the one side, you have the politicians pretending that diversity means something good when it’s just a smokescreen behind which they can garner grateful voters by providing favors for specific groups.

When you pander to one or two groups of people, it is inevitable that you are depriving others of their birthright. For instance, when a college makes it easier for blacks and Latinos to enroll by lowering the standards, it makes it more difficult for whites and Asians who are competing for those slots.

It is pretty easy to foresee the insanity that will ensue when you let criminals out of prison because groups of community organizers (Communists) insist that the only reason there are so many blacks and Latinos serving time is because our entire legal system is racially biased. Point out that they actually commit the majority of crimes and you’re labeled a racist.

Defined in realistic terms, diversity means moving native-born blacks to the head of the line because if left to their own devices, they would be at the very back of the line, behind even black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean and Asians who come to America not even knowing the language.

Diversity has been proclaimed our greatest strength by generals, pundits, professors and politicians. They all lie because in our society, virtue-signaling trumps honesty. Our greatest strength is or at least used to be the opportunity it offered to people, no matter their race, religion or national origin, to pursue their dreams.


Our legal system does leave a lot to be desired but being biased against racial minorities isn’t one of its problems.

Some of the problems are obvious. How can they not be so long as scofflaws like Jane Fonda, Hillary Clinton, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, John Brennan, Michael Hayden, James Clapper, Peter Strzok, Lois Lerner and George Soros, are all walking around free?

But what sort of legal system allows serial killer Samuel Little, who confessed to murdering 93 women in 19 different states, to die peacefully in prison at the age of 80?

One can only hope that now that he’s dead, he is finally receiving the sort of justice he deserved but failed to receive when he was alive.


As you may have heard, San Francisco, which can ill afford the expenditure required to change the names of its schools, is debating whether to do that very thing.

I am coming forward with a suggestion for the city officials looking into the question.

My advice is to keep as many of the names as possible, but to change the people associated with the name.

For instance, apparently President James Garfield is one of the targets. But why not keep it Garfield High but hang actor John Garfield’s picture on the wall. The kids won’t be able to recognize either.

In fact, Hollywood could help them right down the line: Jean Muir in for John Muir; Abby Lincoln instead of Abe; Ann Revere to replace Paul; and Denzel Washington, whom the kids would recognize, replacing George.


Speaking of Hollywood types, apparently, Alec Baldwin is angry, but not with his wife, who, it appears, lied to him along with everybody else, when she claimed for years to be a Spaniard who only came to the U.S. when she was 19, went by the name of Hilaria, and spoke with a thick Spanish accent.

Alec is upset with those on the Internet who have called her out as a big phony. In his usual style, when confronted by truths he’d rather avoid, he calls people “f—kers or m—er-f—kers,” whether they happen to be reporters, his young daughter or strangers on the Internet.

I suspect what has enraged him the most is that some of these people have been insisting that by carrying on the charade so convincingly for several years, Hilaria (born Hillary Lynn Thomas in Boston) is obviously the better actor in the family.


Until the other day, I had been unaware of the fact that there is a word that perfectly captures the essence of those juvenile college students who joined the ranks of the BLM and Antifa mobs to display their overabundance of hubris and ignorance in public by burning down stores and toppling statues in 2020.

The word is “altricial.” It’s an adjective used to describe those born in an undeveloped and helpless condition and requiring parental care and feeding for some time. The dictionary doesn’t define “some time,” but as we’ve seen, it can easily last for 20 years and even more so long as the parents have the patience of Job and don’t kick their altricial birds out of the nest and make them find a job.


After I critiqued the way the news covers something like the Nashville explosion, when, after six hours of non-stop reporting, the viewer knows nothing “beyond the fact that a bomb went off,” Mark Beach let me know I was mistaken.

He cracked: “We know the suicide bomber died of Covid!”


I haven’t always been Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s biggest fan, but my heart recently went out to him. That’s when I heard that his father is such a buffoon that in response to his son’s finally concluding the deal with Brussels that makes Britain’s exit from the EU official, Papa Johnson decided to re-claim his French citizenship.

To paraphrase Shakespeare: How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a demented father.


It occurs to me that if TV ever decides to blaze new trails, it could do so by producing sit coms in which white fathers behave like responsible grown-ups instead of goofy morons who trip over their own feet and their own tongues, and perhaps sit coms in which black mothers get to break the news to their sons that their father is one of those three oafs standing on the corner.


Whenever the Left accuses Trump and his supporters of being racist and sexist, the schoolyard response of “I know you are, but what am I?” always comes to mind.

They display their hypocrisy every time they take the side of black criminals over cops or illegal immigrants over the nation’s taxpayers.

These days, if you want to see what the world’s biggest hypocrite looks like, pay a visit to St. Peter’s Square and you might catch a glimpse of Pope Francis delivering a speech that would be more appropriate if he were delivering it in Red Square.

The man never tires of lecturing European nations and the United States about Jesus Christ’s admonition to welcome the stranger. But he never even mentions the immigrant’s obligation to respect the laws of these nations by not sneaking in or the obligation to assimilate themselves to the nation’s norms once they have been allowed to enter.

And while it’s possible that between one thing and another (I have been pretty busy), I may have missed it, I don’t recall this Pope throwing open the doors of the Vatican to Italy’s poor or to Middle Eastern Muslims.

On the contrary, it remains a sovereign state situated behind very high walls and defended by the Swiss Guard.


I know I should applaud the mass exodus that’s taking place here in California, but how can I when I know they’re only leaving here in order to destroy other states? Besides, there are 40,000,000 of us, 24,000,000 of whom vote for people like Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Eric Swalwell, Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff, so a few hundred thousand departures is barely noticed here, but it can wreak havoc in places like Colorado, Arizona, Nevada, Idaho and even Texas.

Apparently, their presence is already being felt in other places. Dick Barry, a proud Texan, is seeing it with his own eyes. His governor, Greg Abbott, has gone on Twitter to let the transplants know the facts of life: “Remember those high taxes, burdensome regulations and Socialistic agenda advanced in California? We don’t believe in any of that.”

In Dallas, the newspapers carry dire warnings about the awful “California-ing” of North Texas.

In Idaho, Boise mayoral candidate Wayne Riche proposed building a wall to keep out people escaping from the state formerly described as Golden.

When the inmates break out of the asylum, nobody is safe.

It may seem humane to capture them and return them to California, but I guarantee they’ll only escape again.

My suggestion is that you all shoot them on sight, lest they spread the contagion of liberalism, which is far more deadly than anything the Chinese can cook up in their labs.