Editor’s note: Michael Ackley’s columns may include satire and parody based on current events, and thus mix fact with fiction. He assumes informed readers will be able to tell which is which.
“If you please, General, I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me ‘sir,'” said Sen. Kingsly Plotkin during testimony by Brig. Gen. H. Humphry Humphries. “Address me as ‘senator.’ It’s a title I’ve worked hard to attain.”
“Certainly, senator,” replied the general affably.
And so the testimony continued, to the rolling of eyes and the nudging of elbows by staffers standing out of Plotkin’s view.
Later, Humphries told the media he was “not at all offended by the request from a member of the committee that controls our budget.”
But editorial writers across the nation were offended, and eagerly quoted Jill Poke, legislative aide to Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif.
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call Sen. Plotkin a pompous, self-important twit,” said Poke, “but our good friend from the other side of the aisle displayed an ignorance of military address, as well as a twit-like self-importance that verged on the pompous.”
“Can you imagine the outcry,” she asked, “if Sen. Boxer had objected to the general’s calling her ‘Ma’am’? Why, the male-dominated media would make it a cause célèbre for weeks.”
Fortunately, such a thing could never happen. Not with our gelded, male-dominated media.
It must be love: Two governors, two scandals, but how does South Carolina’s soon-to-be-former Gov. Mark Sanford differ from New York’s former Gov. Eliot Spitzer?
Spitzer paid $5,500 a night to “sleep” with strangers. Whatever Sanford was getting he received free of monetary consideration.
Spitzer broke the law he was sworn to uphold. Sanford violated the Seventh Commandment and his promise to his wife.
Spitzer’s wife, Silda, stood by at his “I have sinned” press conference. Either Sanford’s wife, Jenny, had too much self-respect to attend Sanford’s press conference, or the governor had enough residual class to leave her out of it.
Spitzer laid about with a string of prostitutes. Sanford’s dalliance was with one woman, a long-time friend.
Spitzer, a Democrat, already is working on his rehabilitation as a public figure. We predict Sanford, a Republican, will simply be through.
Spitzer’s tom-catting was driven by lust, which is given a pass under Democrat moral standards, as a mental illness. Sanford’s fall appears to have been driven by love, a far deadlier disease.
Speaking of mental illness: Not even voters’ landslide rejection of new taxes was sufficient intervention to break California Democrats’ spending addiction. They’re pushing for $8 billion in tax and fee increases to balance the state budget.
But perhaps more important than monetary considerations is the Democrats’ unflagging dedication to cultural degeneration. Quietly inserted in their budget plan is a provision allowing school districts to eschew the high school exit exam.
Party leaders always have regarded the standard for passing the exam – 10th grade level skills – as grossly unfair to unmotivated students. So they see the budget crisis, dire as it is, as an opportunity to return to the palmy days when high school graduates could be assured ready access to the career paths of gardener, day laborer and domestic.
Why, you ask, is President Obama adding immigration “reform” to a to-do list already packed with difficult challenges? Obviously, he has read his Machiavelli. The Florentine courtier advised “The Prince” to commit all his evils at once, for popular outrage can be overwhelmed by the volume of malign actions.
Another triumph for criminal rehabilitation: The fabled Assembly Speaker/San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown is out of politics, but his legacy lives on through the women with whom he was (in media euphemism) “romantically involved.”
Take, for example, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris. The former Brown “girlfriend” is seeking the Democratic Party nomination to be California’s attorney general. For this she is nominally qualified, as she is an attorney. To San Franciscans she is super-qualified, as she is a bleeding-heart loon who has kept her vow never to seek the death penalty.
Her loon-itude was enhanced by a revelation in last week’s Los Angeles Times (which commits actual journalism on occasion). It seems the Harris-administered “Back on Track” program not only kept citizen felons out of jail, it also keep illegal immigrant felons free, thus affording some of them the latitude to commit new crimes.
“Back on Track” counsels and trains convicted felons – without incarceration – for 12 months, after which rehab they may have their criminal records expunged. She told the Times that participation by illegal aliens was “a flaw in the design” that has been fixed. One must assume violent crime by some participants also may be viewed as a flaw. This suggests a new entry in the Blind Partisan’s Dictionary:
Design flaw: an intentional idiocy that comes to the public’s attention.
