The most brainless and witless proverb is this French one. Ready? "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"; meaning "The more things change, the more they stay the same."
What counter-intellectual rot! Is the democratic government of Germany the same as that of the late Adolf Hitler? Is the Communist China of today, to which we owe trillions of dollars, the same China as the one we pushed out of South Korea and forced to accept a truce in 1953?
America used to be reasonable and flexible. We changed, and it's not the same.
Adm. Miklos Horthy was the Hungarian leader who led his country into an alliance with the Nazis. He was driven by that Eastern European fear of Communism, and he opposed what Germany was doing to the Jews. Horthy was able to shield Hungary's Jewish population for quite some time, and when the Germans began to demand he get serious about the Holocaust, Horthy came up with one suggestion after another to "find a place" for the almost 1 million Jews of Hungary. The Nazis kept bringing up more and more ridiculous reasons to reject Horthy's leniency toward the Jews. Finally Horthy lost it and shouted, "You're being impossible. We can't just kill them!"
I'm not calling President Obama a Nazi. I'm only saying he's being impossible! Obama's intractable insistence on harvesting more revenue by raising tax rates on the super-rich ignores history, economics and mathematics, and exposes Obama as being more interested in the destruction of the GOP than in the rescue of America. Who can deny that a tax code that encourages more job-holders – therefore more taxpayers and therefore more revenue – beats trying to squeeze more juice from the rocks atop Millionaires' Mountain?
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Obama's no Nazi; but he does remind me of those American officers after the American bust-out from the Belgian Bulge who jeopardized troops, supply lines and battle plans just to fulfill the vainglorious act of urinating in the Rhine River.
Obama proves why that French wisdom is so dumb. I remember "America, the Reasonable"; "America, the Flexible"; "America, the Successful"; "America, the Mighty"!
Once upon a time New York Mayor Robert Wagner used to disappear into a private room in City Hall with the Transport Workers' Union leader Mike Quill and a bottle of Irish whiskey. After an appropriate interlude, New York TV news icon Gabe Pressman would be invited in to get the word to share with the press corps: "We've got a deal!"
President Ronald Reagan and House Speaker Tip O'Neill even more famously used to huddle and give America bipartisan deals. And we had no nervous breakdowns en route. We all knew what the end would be even before the beginning.
One of Adm. Horthy's ideas was to let the Jews live in Hungarian army barracks that weren't being used any more. Great idea, if you wanted the Jews to live! Nauseating idea if you wanted them gassed. There are "great ideas" out there now for those who want to solve America's fiscal crisis; but those ideas give abdominal cramps to those Democrats who view Republican failure at the polls as a first step only. They seek nothing less than annihilation of the GOP. They honest-to-God believe Obama deserves that because of his re-election.
Example: Try to find fault with this idea:
Someone once asked Willie Sutton, America's celebrity bank robber, why he robbed banks. "Because," said Sutton, "that's where the money is." Well, entitlements are "where the money is" in strapped-and-flattened America today. Robert Peterson wrote a popular newspaper column in the last century entitled, "Life Begins At Forty."
Suddenly they changed the name of his column to "Life Begins At Fifty"! Why? Life expectancy in America had risen to the point where "Life Begins At Forty" was almost absurd. More and more people were living longer and longer. I think they wanted to raise the stakes to "Life Beings At Sixty" a few years later. The point is: People are living longer!
What excuse do those offer who despise and oppose the notion of raising the age of Social Security and Medicare eligibility for two years to bugle-rally our financial comeback? Hurts too much? Then make it active only after those 50 now begin to qualify. (Cowards!)
Nazi biggie Joachim von Ribbentrop made a state visit to Hungary's Horthy in the middle of the war and helped himself to a bit too much of that excellent Hungarian wine, Egri Bikavér; meaning, "Bull's blood from the Eger region." Just like in the old war movies, Ribbentrop's drunken laughter got coarser and coarser, and finally he raised his glass to his host and said, "Admiral Horthy. Admiral Horthy! Hungary doesn't have a navy. Hungary doesn't even have a seacoast. How can you possibly be Admiral Horthy?"
"Well," replied Horthy promptly, "Doesn't Nazi Germany have a Ministry of Justice?"