MINING FOOL’S GOLD

[Starting this week, we’ll publish on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. - ed.]

by BurtPrelutsky

While I was on a recent vacation, I watched Fox News more than usual. Mainly what I noticed is that while Alan Colmes, Juan Williams, Leslie Marshall, Bob Beckel and Geraldo Rivera, are the five most annoying things to be found on the network, rounding out the top 10 are the commercials for the gold merchants, Merit Financial, Lear Capital, Goldline, Discount Gold Brokers and Rosland. The worst of the lot is Rosland, which day after day, enables three of the least appealing guys in America, Ben Ferguson, dentist Larry Pickard and Jeffrey Nichols, to enter our living rooms. For sheer gall, it’s hard to top the moment when young Ferguson asks Mr. Nichols why he purchases his gold from Rosland, while Nichols is simultaneously identified on screen as the senior financial advisor for the company!

It became increasingly difficult to take Romney’s rivals seriously when they spent all their time attacking Bain Capital instead of focusing their anger on Obama Capital. To my mind, “vulture capitalism,” which quickly replaced “at this point in time” as my least favorite expression, is when you take American tax dollars and hand them off to your fat cat contributors so that they, in turn, will send a portion of the loot back to Obama’s Re-election Campaign.

I must confess I got awfully tired of hearing that Newt Gingrich was a changed man, so it was finally a relief when, once the Iowa caucus was behind him, he could again show his true, obnoxious, colors.

Although I don’t hold most politicians in terribly high regard, at least when it comes to the ranks of the Republicans, it is hard to find anyone ranker than the former Speaker.

Even among the Democrats, it is rare to find anyone whose entire career has been motivated entirely by money, sex and revenge. While those are standard characteristics for a Shakespearean king, they’re not ideal when it comes to an American president. On second thought, it’s not all that rare among the Democrats. What could I have been thinking?

Sometimes the propaganda efforts by Obama are so clumsy that one can only laugh. For instance, he had a big bash at the White House for those so-called business owners whom he credited with “insourcing American jobs.” While it was true that I couldn’t recognize any of the people standing behind him at the photo op, it’s also true that I don’t know very many business owners. But, I finally caught on to the game when, after the staged event, we heard directly from two of the participants. The first was the Democratic mayor of Atlanta, and the other was the head of the Steelworkers Union. Only a former community organizer would identify such people as business owners. It reminded me of the charade when, in order to push his god-awful health care program, Obama had a bunch of shills don medical smocks and sit in the White House Rose Garden while gazing adoringly at him.

Even though the holiday season is now just a distant dot in our rearview mirror, it occurred to me the other day that the very same gremlins who annually wage war against the trappings and traditions of Christmas, parroting their favorite advertising slogan, “separation of church and state,” are the most vocal when it comes to promoting Sharia Law as a viable option for American Muslims. I will also wager that they wouldn’t voice the slightest objection if Kwanzaa were made a national holiday.

In much the same way, if the Tea Party favored liberals, but was otherwise unchanged in word or deed, we all know that Obama and his cronies would never in a million years accuse them of being racists, traitors and terrorists.

On the other hand, if the Occupy Wall Street movement consisted of conservatives, I find it highly unlikely that Nancy Pelosi would find the time or inclination to pay lip service to their spunk and youthful spontaneity.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
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THERE’S WAY TOO MUCH FORGIVING GOING ON

[Starting this week, we’ll publish on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. - ed.]

by BurtPrelutsky

When Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour pardoned a number of murderers on his last day in office, he was acting in the proud tradition of several other political hacks. There was Bill Clinton, who not only pardoned Marc Rich, a major Clinton campaign contributor who had fled America with several million stolen dollars, but Harvey Weinig, a former Manhattan lawyer who had facilitated an extortion-kidnapping scheme and helped launder over $19 million for the Cali cocaine cartel. For good measure, among the 140 pardons he granted on getaway day were 16 members of the FALN, a Puerto Rican terrorist organization that had set off 120 bombs, mainly in Chicago and New York, along with Linda Sue Evans and Susan Rosenberg, who had been loyal members of the Weather Underground.

Compared to that, Governor Michael Dukakis was small potatoes, even though his presidential chances were fortunately scuttled when the world found out that he had allowed a Massachusetts murderer, Willie Horton, who had been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, to be granted a weekend furlough. Predictably, instead of returning to prison as promised, Horton headed south, where, in Maryland, he twice raped a woman after pistol-whipping and stabbing her fiancé.

Governor Mike Huckabee, who also believes fervently in the rehabilitation of violent criminals, has Maurice Clemmons on his conscience. Clemmons, years after being pardoned by Huckabee, killed four police officers in Washington state.

Then there was Illinois Governor George Ryan, who in his last days in Springfield commuted 160 death sentences. But in his case, he may have just been planning ahead, because not too long after, he, himself, was sentenced to 30 years for political corruption, and a guy can’t have too many friends in the pen.

That brings us back to Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, who decided that he wasn’t about to take a back seat to anyone when it came to playing the Good Samaritan. So it was that he decided that just because a bunch of convicted murderers hadn’t killed any of his grandkids when he had them working around the governor’s mansion in Jackson, he would return the favor by pardoning them.

You can almost see the appeal of bestowing forgiveness on the very worst among us. It allows these boneheads to regard themselves as godlike, behaving as they expect Jesus would if only He, too, could win a statewide election.

There are two obvious flaws in this sort of thinking, and the proof of the first is that these guys generally wait until they’re all packed up and ready to leave the key under the mat. That shows that they know there will be blowback from the public, who aren’t concerned with burnishing their holier-than-thou image, but with having to worry about their families with these killers running loose. God knows it’s hard enough to arrest and convict these bastards without then having some knucklehead springing them on a whim.

The second flaw is that even though Christians are supposed to hate the sin, but love the sinner, that doesn’t mean they’re supposed to park their brains and their common sense in the deep freeze.

Back in 1999, Pope John II, while on a visit to America, decided to campaign for the commutation of Darrell Mease’s death sentence. Mease had murdered three people, including a young paraplegic, but the Pope became convinced that he had experienced a religious conversion. It would have been too much to expect Missouri Governor Mel Carnahan to stand up to him, but I had hoped that he would at least have negotiated an agreement whereby Pope John II would have taken the 53-year-old Mease back to the Vatican with him, freeing Missourians of the obligation of housing and feeding this human slug for the next 30 or 40 years.

The irony is that Mease, who was a meth user and dealer, was also a religious bigot who despised Catholics.

In conclusion, I would say that the only people who are ever entitled to forgive a criminal are God, who apparently is in the business of forgiveness, and the criminal’s victims. And in the case of murderers, their victims have been permanently silenced, and it behooves the rest of us, including their parents, friends and siblings, to respect their silence by keeping our own self-righteous yaps shut.

I say the next time some political hack feels called upon to do a good deed, let him donate a kidney.

©2012 Burt Prelutsky.Comments? Write BurtPrelutsky@aol.com! Don’t miss a single article! Subscribe to BurtPrelutsky.com by Email
Get your personally autographed copy of Liberals: America’s Termites or Portraits of Success for just $19.95, postpaid. Get both for just $39.90.