The Patriot Post® · Lamentations From La-La Land

By Burt Prelutsky ·
https://patriotpost.us/opinion/8167-lamentations-from-la-la-land-2010-11-22

I continue to receive condolences from friends around the country. They’re worried about how I’m holding up after the mid-term elections in my home state. While they’ve been celebrating the results in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, Florida and so many other places, they realize that what took place in California has to depress any true conservative.

The truth is that the only thing that keeps the disappointment from overwhelming me is that the election results were so predictable. This is California, after all, so why would I, or anyone other than Dick Morris, be shocked that the liberals ran the board?

Let’s face it – if California were one person instead of nearly 40 million, that poor soul would be institutionalized for his own good.

Things are so bad out here that the one question that plagued me during the entire campaign season wasn’t, as it was with so many others, why Meg Whitman would blow $140 million running for governor, but why she’d even want the job. The money, after all, was inconsequential. Did anyone really worry whether Ms. Whitmore had a billion dollars set aside for a rainy day or whether she’d have to struggle by with a mere $860 million?

But why, when nearly every single member of the state legislature is a leftwing loon, would she imagine that a Republican governor could get anything done? I finally decided she wanted to be governor simply because she wanted to be governor, so that one day, if someone called her “ma'am,” she’d have been able to say, “Would you please call me Governor? I spent a lot of moolah to get that title.”

While I’m sure that most people are aware that Jerry Brown is once again our governor, they may not know that he is the answer to both of the following questions: One, who was the youngest person ever elected governor of California, and, two, who was the oldest person?

They may also be unaware that our newly elected lieutenant governor is Gavin Newsome. His victory, like that of Brown and Boxer, was never in doubt. After all, as mayor of San Francisco, he had pulled off the liberal trifecta. He had given his official blessing to same-sex marriages, he had made San Francisco a sanctuary city for illegal aliens and he had once been involved in a nasty sex scandal involving him and the wife of his best friend/campaign manager.

I say, keep an eye on that one. Newsome’s a comer. With his track record, it’s written in the stars that the Democrats will some day run him for president.

That brings us back to Jerry Brown. He is now 72. When he was first elected governor, he was 37. Being a liberal, it’s no surprise that his politics haven’t evolved the least little bit over the course of 35 years. You know the old saying: If a man isn’t a liberal at 20, he has no heart; if he isn’t a conservative at 40, he has no brain; and if he’s still a liberal at 72, it’s a safe bet he holds public office in New York, Massachusetts or California.

The wisdom and seasoning that normally come with marriage, children and holding a job in the private sector, was side-stepped by Jerry Brown, who didn’t get around to tying the knot until he was 68 and who has rarely spent more than a few days over the past half century when he wasn’t passing himself off as a public servant. Come to think of it, it’s not all that different with academicians who never leave a college campus from the time they’re 18 until they keel over in a lecture hall, while informing their young charges that Washington and Jefferson were villains and Che Guevara and Mao Tse-tung were heroes.

Even when Jerry Brown was first elected governor, back in the mid-70s, California was hardly ideal. It was, after all, the nation’s capital when it came to pot-smoking, wife-swapping and crackpot religious cults. But at least we still had pretty decent schools, a thriving economy, and once in a while we managed to elect Republicans.

Because the weather was great and the natural environment, which included mountains, deserts, forests and hundreds of miles of magnificent coastline, even non-believers were known to call it God’s country.

These days, as it plunges ever deeper in debt, God might very well be facing a foreclosure notice.

So, when well-meaning friends ask me how it is conceivable that the people of California would continue electing the very same creeps who created the monumental mess in the first place, all I can do is shrug and say, “Our weather is balmy, but our voters are balmier.”