As chowderheaded right wing hacks go, Townhall’s Burt Prelutsky doesn’t get a lot of love. But, if I may be permitted a personal note, ol’ Burt has annoyed me ever since I was a kid, when he was the “humor columnist” at the LA Times, and set a standard of witlessness that stood unchallenged for decades. (Prelutsky’s record was only recently bested by his supremely unfunny successor, Joel Stein, but l’m pretty sure Stein is using steroids, so I’m putting an asterisk next to his crappy jokes.)
This week Burt has come roaring back with a piece entitled Confessions of a Recovering Democrat, taking Michael Savage’s claim that “Liberalism is a mental illness” into the realm of substance abuse, because while insanity is funny, alcoholism is really funny (the kids today, with their Foster Brookses and their Crazy Googenheims…).
I grew up in a home in which Franklin Roosevelt was regarded as a saint. Is it any wonder that it took me so many years before I finally saw the light? As a rule, I don’t approve of people who lay their own shortcomings at the feet of their parents, but when I realize that for no other reason than the way I was raised that I actually voted for Jimmy Carter, it’s awfully tempting to blame my folks.
But whoever is at fault, it is certainly high time to acknowledge how much harm was done to this country during FDR’s administrations, and how much spin left-wing historians have put on his record . For instance, he has often been credited with keeping America from going Communist during the Great Depression. But you might say the same about the leaders of Germany, Italy and Spain.
You might, except Roosevelt also kept America from going Fascist, which seems like a pretty major deal unless you happen to think that Prescott Bush’s efforts to organize a coup against the U.S. government and replace it with a dictatorship modeled on Germany and Italy was as foolishly conceived and incompetently executed as his grandson’s war against Iraq. In which case, okay, you might have a point for once, but I wouldn’t get cocky about it.
The fact is, Roosevelt simply introduced an American form of Communism, one the country was willing to swallow. There were no gulags or show trials…
Just show tunes. Except for The Cradle Will Rock, which the government shut down because it was a little too Communistic, even for those pinkos at the WPA.
…instead, there was an alphabet soup of new federal departments and bureaucracies, whose sole purpose was to diminish the power of the states and its citizens.
At the time, some believed that employing people at a time of 25% unemployment might be a good use of government resources, but Roosevelt was adamant: “We must use the awesome power of our alphabet soup solely to disenfranchise citizens. But we’ll put ‘em to work building a bunch’a dams and roads and high schools at the same time so they won’t get wise.”
FDR tried and pretty much succeeded in turning the federal government into a grotesque, power-crazy, creature that was all mouth and no brain.
Which is why we lost the Second World War, but won the most recent Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest.
Compared to Roosevelt, Dr. Frankenstein was small potatoes.
I don’t know what this means, but I detest dwarf tubers, so I thought it deserved to be included.
Roosevelt can’t even be credited with leading the country out of the Great Depression. If anything, as others, including Amity Shlaes in her terrific book, “The Forgotten Man,” have pointed out, his economic policies undoubtedly prolonged the nation’s agony. In a move that would have delighted such knuckleheads as John Edwards and George Soros, FDR kept increasing taxes during the 1930s. Only an old time lefty or a modern-day Democrat would ever imagine that the solution to a financial malaise would be to increase the tax burden on businesses and individuals. It took World War II, not Roosevelt’s left-wing machinations, to get America back on its feet.
So once again, we have Germany and Italy to thank. I say we send any surviving Fascists a holiday gift basket of Asti Spumanti and assorted smoked meats.
That’s one of the reasons why when Michael Savage contends that liberalism is a mental disorder
The other reasons being: he’s a chinless prick with a morbid fear of lesbians?
A child of eight could figure out that lower taxes allows businesses to expand and to pay higher salaries to more workers, thus leading to more taxes being paid. But, then, most eight-year-olds aren’t liberals.
So conservative ideology is most appealing to those Americans whose testicles haven’t yet dropped? Got it. Thanks Burt.
Another lesson that the Left refuses to learn is that when dealing with fascism, communism or Islamic fanaticism, so-called diplomacy never works.
Which is why we’re all eking out a shabby existence in an oil-deprived, irradiated wasteland after we nuked Mecca and Moscow, and waiting desperately for Mel Gibson to show up to bring us some gasoline and beat the crap out of Christ.
Inevitably, the guys in striped pants have to step aside and let the soldiers do what must be done.
That’s a good line, but I’m pretty sure he stole it from the Völkischer Beobachter.
While I have your attention, will someone please tell me who the ignoramus was who came up with the notion of dual-citizenship?
And what’s the deal with airline food? It’s terrible! And such small portions!
I’m betting that some liberal knucklehead was behind it. How on earth can anyone simultaneously be a citizen of the United States and of some other place? It sure sounds a lot like bigamy.
But it sounds big of me, too. It’ll be big of all of us. Let’s be big for a change.
Finally, I had a bad night recently. I couldn’t get to sleep at all once it occurred to me that liberals could literally get away with murder. All they’d have to do is to plead insanity.
Then I asked my wife, “Where do you want to go for our anniversary?” She said, “Somewhere I’ve never been!” I told her, “How about the kitchen?”
Thank you, good night! I’ll be here all week!
