People as Props
Once Jesse Jackson faded away, we had Al Sharpton inheriting the goons.
I think I first became aware of people replacing flags as props when Jesse Jackson seemed to be on TV 24/7. Every time I saw him, he had a dozen or so thuggish-looking guys standing behind him on stage. Once Jackson faded away, we had Al Sharpton inheriting the goons.
These days, no politician would dare be seen making a statement without a crowd standing behind him. Guys like Charles Schumer and Mitch McConnell wouldn’t be caught dead standing on the steps of the Senate or in the Senate rotunda without having a bunch of their Senate colleagues huddled behind them, trying to look somber and perhaps even presidential for the TV cameras.
I believe Donald Trump may have been the first to bring members of the audience on stage with him, so that you were sure to see blacks, Latinos and women, wearing MAGA hats and holding up placards that let you know that blacks, Latinos and women supported him.
Only Joe Biden stands alone. Which is unfortunate for Biden because it forces us to concentrate on the doddering old man who is leading this once proud nation into the toilet.
But it’s not just our leaders who should embarrass us. It’s the people who elected them. It’s those of us who have capitulated, allowing politicians to dictate how we live and going along with the loss of our inalienable rights because corrupt bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci tell us whoppers, such as the danger to vaccinated people from unvaccinated people.
For over a year, we have allowed petty tyrants like Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo, J.B. Pritzker, Bill DeBlasio, Deborah Birx, Phil Murphy, Ralph Northam, Kate Brown, Gretchen Whitmer, George Gascon, Rochelle Walensky, Larry Krasner, deny us religious services and prevent us from visiting sick or dying friends and relatives.
They not only closed our schools, but spoon fed our youngsters a load of crap intended to make them view all of American history as racist and sexist.
And now they are pushing for vaccination passports, which will speed our descent into the depths we generally associate with the likes of Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, China and California.
The powers that be are also at work turning us into a third world nation, not merely by federal edict, but by bringing the folks who help make the third world what it is to our country.
The airlift bringing untold thousands of Afghans to flood our country should remind people of the old expression “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad, Muhammad must go to the mountain.”
If we owed anything to the Afghans for helping us fight their civil war for them, at a tremendous cost in lives and tax dollars to ourselves, it would have consisted in our helping them move to one of the other many Islamic nations in the Middle East.
It’s bad enough that we have suffered at the hands of native-born Muslims without going out of our way to import thousands more.
Just the other day, a popular British politician who was known to support Israel was stabbed to death by a Somali living in London. The Brits, not wishing to leap to any obvious conclusions, haven’t yet labeled it an act of terrorism.
If you pay close enough attention, you will occasionally come across statements of such political candor coming out of Washington that you can barely believe your ears.
For instance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently sloughed off the suggestion that perhaps she wasn’t doing a good enough job of selling Biden’s $3.5 trillion so-called infrastructure bill. In response to the challenge, she turned the tables on the Washington press corps, insisting it was they who weren’t doing a good enough job.
What’s more, she was right.
After all, the media had spent four years trying to destroy Donald Trump and then spent a year doing everything in its power to get Joe Biden elected, even going so far as pretending that the man who had tried and failed twice before to be the president and who had campaigned from his basement, received 16 million more votes than anyone else in American history!
So Mrs. Pelosi was within her rights to ask why the reporters weren’t making the extra effort to push Biden’s radical agenda.
It shouldn’t have been that difficult. After all, millions of Americans (though nowhere near 81 million) had swallowed his promise to serve as a moderate, as a uniter.
The truth is this nation is too deeply divided to be governed by a compromiser. I can’t even imagine what that person would look like when the two parties are so far apart when it comes to the border, taxes, inflation, schools, abortion, mail-in ballots and photo IDs, Critical Race Theory, welfare, the police, black rioters and the justice system.
With Christmas just two months away and the bottleneck at our ports, it is inevitable that a lot of kids are not going to get the gifts they expect from old Saint Nick. But the youngsters should not be too hard on him. After all, he’s been working shorthanded all year, thanks to the great many elves who have opted to stay home and collect their extended unemployment checks.
I would say that a meme shared by Greg Palko sums up my feelings on mask mandates. It reads: “People aren’t actually bothered by you not being vaccinated. So long as they are vaccinated, it wouldn’t matter to them if you were or if you weren’t. They are bothered that you’re disobedient. They are bothered that your strength shines a light on their weakness.”
Maralyn Polak let me know that in Germany, people who aren’t vaccinated are banned from entering food stores.
Clearly, we will soon be following suit. I expect I will be forced to stand outside the local supermarket begging strangers to shop for me, the way that teenagers used to stand outside liquor stores begging strangers to buy them beer.
Bob Hunt passed along a meme that points out that American-made products don’t get stuck on cargo ships.
Bob also passed along one that showed a young Bill Gates suggesting “Let’s infect computers with viruses and then sell people anti-virus software” and an older Bill Gates suggesting “Let’s infect people with viruses and then sell them anti-virus vaccines.”
You can email Burt directly at [email protected].
