Over the years, so many people have asked me how I’ve managed to maintain friendships with liberals that I had considered writing a book on the subject. Unfortunately, I haven’t figured out how to expand my one and only rule, which is to limit discourse to sports, movies and the weather, to book length.
I have already gone on record to suggest mother of 14 Nadya Suleman should be committed to an asylum, and that Dr. Michael Kamrava who, at taxpayer expense, performed the in vitro procedure, should be committed to the county lockup. But that still leaves those 14 innocent children to be considered. Perhaps because I kept hearing that Ms. Suleman was obsessed with Angelina Jolie, a solution occurred to me. Instead of adopting a kid here, a kid there, wouldn’t it make more sense if Ms. Jolie went whole hog and adopted the entire litter?
In a piece devoted to excoriating liberals, it might strike some folks as odd that I’d include John McCain. If that’s the case, they just haven’t been paying attention. Not only did Sen. McCain push through the McCain-Feingold bill and try to sneak through the McCain-Kennedy amnesty bill of 2008, but when he was running for president, he was far kinder and more respectful to Barack Obama than he was to Sarah Palin. I know he has already announced that he’ll be running for re-election to the Senate in 2010, but, along with a great many other people, I’m wondering who the Republican candidate will be.
The majority of the 535 senators and representatives voted to pass the Pelosi and Reid Pig Trough Bill of 2009, which will not only burden our grandchildren with a big fat I.O.U., but should finish the job begun by FDR of turning America into a socialistic state. What is particularly noteworthy about all this is that we are moving further and further to the left at the same time Europe, which has been suffering from the economic malaise of socialism, has begun moving to the right.
Isn’t it strange that left-wingers, who always love to pay lip service to Santayana’s line about those who don’t learn from history being doomed to repeat it, never seem to learn a damn thing? FDR, the patron saint of the secular left, kept the Great Depression going long after it might have ended if only he and his beloved Brain Trust hadn’t been more interested in promoting a leftist agenda and making American voters dependent on the federal government than in solving the economic crisis. Talk about history repeating itself!
What the American left has never acknowledged is that socialism has never succeeded or been able to compete with capitalism, and that communism, wherever it’s been tried, has quickly shown itself to be a bloodthirsty dictatorship – be it in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia or Cuba.
Although I usually rail against the blatant hypocrisy of Al Gore whenever I touch upon the monumental con game known as manmade global warming (aka climate change), I would be remiss if I didn’t focus some attention on his cohort, Robert Kennedy Jr. For the longest time, I had been aware that Kennedy, like most left-wingers, a sterling example of “Do As I Say, Not As I Do,” traveled by private jet as he flew hither and yon scolding the rest of us for driving to the supermarket.
What I had not been aware of until recently is that he’s been arrested twice. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind discussing, probably even boasting about, his arrest in 2001, when he was guilty of trespassing at Camp Garcia, the U.S. Navy facility in Puerto Rico. In that instance, he and a few of his fellow ecological fruitcakes were demonstrating against the Navy firing guns on the test range. No doubt the noise was interfering with the sleep or mating habits of some plague-bearing insect.
The arrest I have in mind was the one in 1983 that took place at the Rapid City, S.D., airport, when he was nabbed, at the age of 29, for possession of heroin. Being a Kennedy, he got off with two years probation and several hundred hours of community service. He chose to perform his service with the Riverkeeper, an organization dedicated to suing alleged polluters of the Hudson River. As soon as his community service term ended, Kennedy was hired as the Riverkeeper’s chief prosecuting attorney. And thus a high-priced environmental activist was born. You have to hand it to those Kennedys. Whether it’s somehow turning what might have been a manslaughter conviction into a half century in the U.S. Senate or a heroin habit into a career, those boys sure know how to turn lemons into lemonade.
In trying to see an upside to the current financial crisis, I’m afraid the best I could come up with is that a lot of parents can no longer afford to blow their hard-earned dollars financing their children’s indoctrination by an army of left-wing professors. Frankly, it’s always perplexed me when well-meaning adults blithely send their impressionable kids off to be force-fed four years of lies, such as the perils of global warming; the notion that America’s hog farmers, according to Robert Kennedy Jr., being a far greater threat to the nation than Osama bin Laden and his terrorism network; that all countries are equally good, except, of course, America and Israel; and that all religions deserve equal respect, except, of course, for Christianity and Judaism.
And, what’s more, four years and $100,000 later, the young grads, as often as not, still can’t do simple arithmetic or write a coherent sentence. But, like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have that liberal arts diploma, which qualifies them to sneer at their parents’ values and beliefs, and to flip burgers for a living.
Speaking of what we jokingly refer to as higher education, the one question I am asked far more frequently than any other, aside from whether I owe my stunning good looks to my mother or my father, is why so many well-educated Jews are Democrats, socialists and communists. The question isn’t usually meant to be insulting. Those who ask it know that I’m Jewish, and they are sincerely puzzled as to why Jews, who place such an emphasis on education and who are so well-represented in the arts, the sciences and the various professions, constantly parrot left-wing sound bites on any and all subjects. They are simply at a loss as to why such people vote by a 4-1 margin for any idiot so long as he’s a leftist.
In response, I start out by stating that religious Jews are usually conservatives, whereas it’s secular Jews who tend to be devoted to the left. I have tried to explain the seemingly inexplicable division between I.Q. and wisdom with historical and sociological references. But it so happens that I needn’t have bothered. A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt, who wasn’t speaking specifically about Jews, summed it up with the following observation: “Educate a man in mind and not in morals and you educate a menace to society.”
