December 23, 2014
Ron Klein, Esq.
Holland & Knight
515 E. Las Olas Blvd. #1200
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE: Why be a half-assed dumb ass when you go for and get the gold? Some comments on your early Christmas present to righteous, literate bitter clingers with your comments in Sunday’s unlinkable Sun Sentinel.

Mr. Klein,

In its entirety…

“Two things:
Reduce debt for recent college graduates
and pay people, from low income to professional
levels, compensation that is reflective
of the value of their jobs.”

Jeezus Haitch Keerist, and in keeping with more joyful moments in the sacred Christmas season, that guarantees your admission to the to-be-published chapter of Homerically Dumb, Dopey Public Bastards in the next Guinness Book of Records.

What you said was understandably expected, indeed anticipated, since you were elected to the state legislature and to the House of Representatives as a modern American Liberal. A case for diminished capacity could be made. You had an irresistible impulse to stick your head so far up your ass that you could fill your own teeth. And you did. I’ll say this for modern American Liberals. They never let you down.

As an elected representative of a rabid electorate that favors 4th and 5th trimester abortions and believes that raising taxes and the minimum wage are sure paths to a booming economy you had to lie to make sure that your electors did not defenestrate and pitchfork you.

“Shovel Ready Jobs”
“Cash for Clunkers”
“Summer of Recovery”
“Attention World – America Sucks!”
“Islam is a religion of peace”
“Chamberlain was almost right”
“9/11? We deserved it”
“You can keep your doctor”

Saying and swearing to things like that are a burden on one’s soul. By cheapening the sacred coin of personal integrity your anima, your alma is abraded. The only up-tick is that since it is done over time there is no one fatal blow.

That is why when a modern American Liberal, leaving the world of perpetually lactating public mammaries, and re-entering the real world, the world where “water is wet and stones are hard”, can sometimes escape the siren’s call of non-thinking, of believing that the down side of gravity can be legislated, regulated, or adjudicated out of existence.

“Half way through my journey I found myself in the dark wood of error”
is the opening line of a poem from 7 centuries ago.

Alas, you are a minute late and a buck short

“Reduce debt for new college graduates” is an unrefreshingly absurd theme whose time is gone.

How did these new college graduates become encumbered by those crushing obligations?

Did a nocturnal predatory lender, either an incubus, a succubus, or something gender neutral in deference to today’s gender confusion, convince them to borrow money, egregious amounts of money, from beleaguered American taxpayers to take courses such as

“The Problems of Cross Dressing Trans-Gendered
Haiku Constructors in a Post-Racial World Doomed by
Capitalism and White Peoples’ Greed”
“Change PI from 3.1416 to 3.0. Who needs Math?”
“Who needs Washington or Lincoln?
We Have Jimmy Carter”
“The Constitution. Fuck it. Who needs it?”
“Killing Cops: An underappreciated cultural purgative”?

I am sorry the economy is not demanding academic disciplines such as the above described. Doubtless it is a legacy of the Bushes, the Koch Brothers, Sarah Palin, and the NRA. And Nixon, Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, and Global Warming and Cooling Deniers must bear their share of the blame.

Why, pray tell, should an inner city single mom, usually a woman of color with children in need of a good Ritalin program who, by lack of public transportation find themselves deprived of the salutary benefits of Midnight Basketball, plus being exploited by the low prices that Walmart offers, have to pay their “fair share” of delinquent student loans?

Have you no heart? Have you no compassion?

Are you a secret acolyte of the Tea Party? Are you in thralldom to Big Oil?

But then I got to the good part. It is worth repeating in its entirety

“…pay people, from low-income to professional levels,
compensation that is reflective of the value of their jobs.”

[As an aside, I swear and affirm that I have played basketball as hard as Lebron James ever has, that I played football as hard as Tom Brady ever has, and that I can play the cello as hard as Yo-Yo Ma ever has. I quickly add that I can’t play any of them as well. Ants and beavers work very hard.]

God’s Holy Trousers but if you believe dreck such as you say you better learn how to get food stamps. Does your wife have any negotiable skills other than keeping your intellectual and ethical balloon inflated enough to keep from crash landing in the jungles of reality.

Your business plan is simple and direct.

“While I am no longer an elected official I have many friends in Broward County, in Palm Beach County, in Tallahassee, in Washington, and in several foreign capitals who are. The old boys club of crony capitalism, the one that reaches across the aisle, is still open for business. Besides, I know where all the bodies are buried. Pay me and I will put the fix in. Then we will both be farting through silk.”

I hope your kids were adopted. Your line of moral relativism and its needed prerequisite antecedents, spawned in the shallow end of the pool of ethics and morality, must not go forward.

Since ObamaCare is rife with exceptions if vasectomies are not covered see if an exception can be gotten. I’ll pick up the co-pay.

As to “the value of their jobs” I am willing to bet that you would not know which end of an ax is the working end.

Your only defense is that you and Jonathan Guber, he of “Americans are stupid. Thank God we are looking out for them”, share mutual great-grandparents.

I tremble when I remember that G-d is just.


Kevin Smith