Joy-Ann Reid The Miami Herald RE: “Orwellian mandates” – Some comments on your priceless column in today’s Miami Herald.

February 26, 2012
Joy-Ann Reid
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: “Orwellian mandates” – Some comments on your priceless column in today’s Miami Herald.

Miss Reid,

I probably should preface this with ‘the upturned neck awaits the ax” but I won’t.
Why spoil the fun what with “anticipation being the greater joy”.

While the question of whether or not you are dumber than a box of hammers may yet still be in doubt there is one empirical fact we can all agree to. You seem to be, to cite Curley Biden, the greatest Vice President we have, “a clean, articulate Black person”. If that observation is correct there is a possibility that you can still learn. Given sufficient time and reflection you could learn a lot. Perhaps it is not that you are dumb. It is rather that there is so much that you don’t know.

One of the first steps to wisdom, not knowledge, is to shed the blinders of narcissism. Alas, if the only tool you have is a hammer everything begins to look like a nail.

Since I am “bound and determined” not to be cliché-ridden I marvel at the mantra of “level playing field” monotonously proclaimed by modern American Liberals. My other favorites are “slippery slope” and “chilling effect”.

Exactly which “social promises” did George W. Bush break?

“No Child Left Behind” was co-sponsored by Senator Ted “Tosspot” Kennedy. If you have any contacts in DC could you send someone over to Arlington Cemetery to make sure he is still in his grave.

He so greatly increased funding, forgive me, to “Fight AIDS”, that Bono, leader of the U2 think tank, called him ”the greatest man in the world”.

I know you’re going to say “No way, Jose” but he increased funding for stem cell research by 20 times. Look it up.

He introduced a prescription drug benefit for Medicare patients that Democrats never even dreamed of.

As the Constitution demands, he went to war with the consent and approval of Congress. More than 3/4th of the members voted to do so.

Which promises did he break?

Surely you must know someone in the business section of the Herald. If you think the American people have “earned” a profit on its General Motors involvement you also believe the moon is made of green cheese. Maybe blue cheese. Definitely a fromage that reeks sufficiently to offset the supposedly “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome” that is a universal affliction of modern American Liberals. The American taxpayer is still in the hole for 33 Billion dollars. That’s $33,000,000,000. Look it up.

Maybe the Chinese can help us out. Even though you told us that when Bush borrowed it was immoral it seems that Lord Barack the Beneficent has borrowed as much in 4 years as Bush did in 8 years. Maybe we can get Ming, the Mandarin Moneylender, to take the GM stock owned by the Treasury in a swap for their markers on us. It would be instructive to see how Chinese labor relations differ from ours.

You say that the creation of GM – Government Motors – helped the company “pay its bills”.

Do you think there might be somewhere in East Jabib, Michigan a single mom, doubtless a woman of color, whose Grammy gave her some GM bonds when she died? Perhaps she would have used the interest to buy her child some Lebron sneakers. Now her child must go through life like some discalced mendicant, shunned and outcast, doomed to be a ward of the state, presuming he survives the mean streets of grammar school, because GM stopped “paying its bills”.

Normally I would consign your article to the round file.

That’s the very large bin where I toss articles that sing the praises of “Midnight Basketball”, that swear that the best way to cut urban teen age unemployment is to raise the minimum wage, that swap recipes for “Rainbow Stew”, that pledge fealty to the thought that if enough people sing, sincerely sing, Kumbaya the problem of getting a new lamb to sleep with Simba every night will be solved.

But what set my “high dudgeon” early warning device a quivering was your casual reference to George Orwell.

#1 – I’ll bet a penny to a dollar that you have never read, in its entirety, anything by Eric Wigan. That was Orwell’s birth name but you knew that, didn’t you?

#2 – What did you think of him when he shot an elephant?

#3 – Was he correct in his assessment of the Spanish Civil War? I won’t mention the name of the book he wrote about it. Look it up. Maybe you could even read it. Maybe.

#4 – Is it true that “while all animals are equal some animals are more equal than others”?

#5 – Whatever happened to “The Last Free Man in Europe”?

“The obvious and true have got to be defended. Truisms are true.
Hold on to that. The solid world exists. Laws do not change.
Stones are hard. Water is wet. Objects unsupported fall
Towards the earth’s center…
If that is granted all else follows.”

You go, girl! You don’t have a minute to lose. There will be a test.

Kevin Smith