Mayor Gary Resnick

April 15, 2018

Mayor Gary Resnick

2020 Wilton Drive

Wilton Manors, FL 33305

RE: Hate crimes as bemoaned by you in your mini Op-Ed in today’s Sun Sentinel.

Mayor Resnick,

Is your intolerance, I daresay hatred, of “ignorance, hatred, and bigotry” fine- tuned only when said evils are aimed at gays?

What if I were to be walking in your fine city, a place known for its “inclusivity”, when I stumbled on a left-handed lisping Lithuanian lumberjack upon whom I used my unlicensed assault cudgels – as if there were any other kind – about his head and shoulders in a most felonious manner. If I were to call him a predatory Sodomite – a la the great Lord Keynes until he was almost 30 and that’s a horse of a different color – who had been exiled from Gomorrah because of his fondness for Café Curtains and his devotion to the manly smell of Brut? Would my felony be made worse?

I don’t know your academic background but your condemnation of people using the word “Queen” – with the obvious exception, I hope, I hope, of talking about Victoria or either of the Elizabeths – suggests that Alice saying “those words mean exactly what I want them to mean” is, for you, from terra incognita.

Is Spencer’s “Faerie Queene” banned from the library in “inclusive” Wilton Manors?

Two hate crime words in the same sentence. Why not take a peek at what Shakespeare meant when Hamlet told Ophelia “to get thee to a nunnery”? Your police will be busy, busy.

“The best law will not stop people from attacking fill in the blanks”.

Perhaps T.S. Eliot’s take on evil might help. Send a SASE for the exact reference Which brings us back to the original Dr. J.

“How sad of all the things that men endure

 how few laws or kings can cause or cure

Kevin Smith

Marcia Heroux Pounds The Sun Sentinel

April 11, 2018

Marcia Heroux Pounds

The Sun Sentinel

RE: “Florida women earn 13 percent less than men.

        Yearly wage gap totals about $5,474”

Ms. Pounds,

At least that’s what the Sun Sentinel article, the one with your name on it, said today. Before I ask the obvious question, the one unanswered question lingering like a fart in church, I must state the obvious. I quickly add that stating the obvious was/is the key to Trollope’s success.

Since the data you use to posit your theory that in 2017 women earn 13% less than men, with the main reason being that women are not comfortable peeing standing up, can we stipulate that Trump had nothing to do with this? His immediate predecessor blamed his predecessor for crossed red lines, missed “gimmee” putts, his daughters’ chipped teeth, and his failure to discover the elusive Holy Grail-like Austrian-English dictionary-cum-thesaurus, for 87 of his 96-month reign. Let the record show that, in reverse chronological order, it was Obama, whose daughters went to an unbelievably expensive, snooty and snotty public school, a haven for the 1%ers while Bush’s daughters went to a public school. 

The obvious question is really obvious. It is Orwell obvious.

Let’s assume that the day you were hired by the Sun Sentinel a male with the same academic credentials and work/life experiences was also hired. Were you paid 13% less than he was? The obvious follow-up question why are there any men working, if, as you state, women are paid 13% less than men? Wouldn’t a bankrupt company be better off, salary-wise, if they only hired women?

An intriguing thought has just appeared. If the KGB had not convinced, whatshername, Hillary to not campaign in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, and she had won, would she have been paid 13% less than her predecessor?

Do you know of any public employee – local, county, state, federal – who is paid 13% less than her male counterparts?

Here’s a plan for gender equity on the big stage. How about a game between the winners of the NCAA basketball tournaments?

I will be seeing a female surgeon Wednesday next. Does she earn 13% less than any of her testosterone enhanced contemporaries? Should I ask her? If she is, should I increase her co-pay?

My daughter has 2 degrees and 2 professional licenses. She also has 3 daughters. When she works I ask you to accept on faith that she is not paid 13% less than any of her contemporaries, regardless of their gender or even of their sexual orientation She has no peers.

If you put her into the category labeled “females, working part time” she makes more than 13% less than “females, working full time”. Her pay per unit is the same as any other similarly licensed professional. To suggest otherwise is, as we recently learned of a new euphemism, “a lack of candor”.

Do you remember when the USA and the USSR had dual track meets? In one of them the United States, AKA “the good guys”, [guys also covered gals] shut out the Russkies, regardless of which Socialist Republic they were from. The Russians reported it thus: “In a recent international track meet the glorious athletes of the Mother Russia honored the rodinya by finishing second. The not so swift running dogs of capitalism finished next to last.”

Lies, damn lies, and the last refuge of modern American Liberals trying to prove a point that is, from the “copy-book headings” of Logic unprovable, statistics. 

Go figure.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

        

April 12, 2018 Senator Maria Chappele-Nadal

April 12, 2018

Senator Maria Chappele-Nadal

201 West Capitol Avenue #428

Jefferson City, Missouri, 65101

RE: Reparations and, by krikey, it’s a 2-way street

Senator Chappele-Nadal,

I enclose a quote, purportedly from you, demanding reparations.

“When I’m getting a single mother of three children calling me 

 trying to find a place to live because they don’t have a place to live…”

It goes a long way to explain why the Obamas, even though they lived in public housing, sent their kids to a snotty, snarky, unbelievably expensive private school. A sentence like that can be inoculated against.

Back to specific, personal reparations.

#1 – Your parents – It is empirically self-evident that the spawning season for you was when the gene pool was low, extremely low. I guess the nit-wit, bird brain wing of Planned Parenthood had not yet kicked in.

#1 – Your schools, and why do I just know that you never, absolutely never ever, heard of Trollope who made a good living – indoor work and no heavy lifting – stating the obvious, because “trying to find a place to live because – Jeepers and Creepers – they don’t  have a place to live” is as obvious as Kathy Griffin carrying a severed head of Trump or you saying last year that you wanted to “put a cap in his ass”. To naifish modern American Liberals, people who think “Imagine” is both good music and sound public policy, “putting a cap in his ass” means you want to “shoot the White Mo’Fo”. “Mo’Fo” a word too far? Send a SASE. But I think it means the same there as it means here.

But I digress.

You are constantly carping, in a manner that gives caterwauling a bad name, about reparations for your constituents. Your prototypical constituent is the perpetually unlucky in life’s lottery “single mom, usually a woman of color, with children who need a good Ritalin program in lieu of the salutary effects of Midnight Basketball who are also penalized by the absence of public transit”. 

I guess Thurgood Marshall was right when he gave his racial reason for voting to uphold Roe v Wade. He said Blacks should favor abortion because it meant that they did not have to grow up to face the rigors and disappointments of being Black in America. I think Michele Obama based her senior thesis on that thought.

Here’s some thoughts to ponder while you wait for the results of your MENSA exam.

 Talk about Affirmative Action on steroids! Why do Black women, some 6% of the population, have almost 40% of the abortions in this country? And on a gentler note, why do poor Black people pay the same as rich White people for a stamp? Shouldn’t we subsidize the literate among them to petition their elected officials for more stuff? After all, we are 2 years into a post-racial society, aren’t we?

The price for my support of your Reparations campaign is simple.

My father’s father had 2 uncles who came from Ballyglass in County Galway, in the Province of Connaught. Do I have to tell you the country is Ireland? They joined the New York 69^th Regiment, the Irish Brigade. They came to fight in a war to free the slaves. It is indeed fitting and proper to note that the Irish, my forebears, were the first nation in History to free all the slaves within its borders and to outlaw its practice. They did this 12 centuries before Lincoln did it here. So, my record in this matter is quite clear.

It was a very hot day, particularly late in the afternoon, in the Wheat Field 2 July 1863. It was about 1000 yards from one side to the other. At some point a band played “Garryowen”, a tune now under attack by the music division of the dreaded Word Police. One of my uncles is still there, “wrapped in his faded coat of Blue”. I hope he died quick and clean which a 58-caliber bullet will do if you are shot dead center perfect.

How about some reparations for me? 

He got a $300-dollar bonus when he joined the Union Army.

How about a fungible and transferable tax credit of $300 plus interest from July 2, 1863? What’s fair is fair, right?

I’ll scratch your back and you scratch mine, OK?

Speaking of your back, you better lay off those fat back enemas and the fried chicken IVs. If you step on your cat’s tail you will kill him. I am told that your shadow registers on Richter Scale devices. You owe it to your constituents.

Kevin Smith

PS – Do you like tennis?

  

She has ridden out of the pages of History

April 10, 2018

She has ridden out of the pages of History and into the stuff of legend. She is out there “beyond the Western stars”. Known as “Wide-Bottomed Hillary”, she lived by the motto “Why mess your hair by crashing through the gender-specific [Did I just repeat myself?] glass ceiling when your husband will lie and hump his way through it for you?” Besides, a serendipitous benefit is you get to live, vicariously, alas vicariously, through all his Afternoon Delight horizontal tangos. And, when he gets caught with drawers around his ankles, she can caterwaul about “narcissistic looney-tunes” in a long serpentine line of bimbos.

Thus, after failing the D.C. Bar exam and being fired by the Democratically controlled Watergate impeachment committee for “conduct unbecoming”, she was “hired by the largest law firm in Little Rock – “largest” anything in Little Rock? As compared to the world’s 3^rd smallest cello? – when her satyriasic husband became the Razorback Attorney General. And nobody said Jack Shit. And when she was made Partner in said firm when her husband came up for breath from beneath the sheets to be elected Governor everybody nodded and said “Que sera, sera”.

 Bertie was always told, “the trout finds its way into the milk”, so when she, because of her vast business acumen, was made a board member of TCBY [The Country’s Best Yogurt, for those whose only knowledge of Arkansas is when they fly over it] The next Logical step in her rocket-like career trajectory was Walmart. They may be really rotten, and absolutely deplorable before it was reverse-chic to be so, in Bentonville, Arkansas but they are not stupid. They figured out that even Big Bill Clinton, a horn dog that would have made Huey Long and Jack Kennedy proud, had to come home every now and then to refill his underwear ditty bag. They deducted them, remember?  What’s wrong, said the assembled Waltons, with having a pipe line, so to speak, to the Governor? The question of whether Walmart became “bad” because she was on the Board or after she left is still being debated.

A broker named “Red Bone”, and who needs the pettifoggery of a mortgage when a time-sales contract is what the Gomers who bought Whitewater land were familiar with, one dead, formerly feral, brain damaged Black ex-felon, TravelGate, Craig Livingstone, Ira Magaziner, Vince Foster, HillaryCare, love juice on the blue dress, Ken Starr, perjury,

$25,000 White House coffees – An inspiration to Starbuck’s? – Lincoln Bedroom “hot sheet” time share…and I haven’t even gotten to Bernie from Brooklyn, a big Clinton enabler, and his Loral Corporation selling all our secret GI Joe stuff to the clever Chinese war mongers yet.

And then, just when she thought all the years of sucking hind tit – Anybody from Arkansas knows that that ain’t misogynistic – were going to pay off, she gets bumped off in a “Kind Hearts and Coronets” moment in 2008 by a “clean and articulate” Black community activist from Chicago whose only 2 significant adult achievements were getting his wife a $4,000 – repeat - $4,000 a week raise and, subsequently, making her proud to be an Amurrican. [After years of oppression there is no record of her ever swimming to Cuba.] “Years of oppression”? My ass. Read her Princeton thesis. I have.

Markets have a way of correcting themselves. That’s what markets do. That’s why they are called markets. Any attempt, usually by a government, to correct or to emend them, results in chaos. Said chaos tautologically feeds on itself causing it to grow and prosper. The word “fairness” is always associated with this example of “the triumph of hope over experience”. Do you remember Walter Mondale at the Democratic Convention in 1984, the one that offered a not quite mobbed up goomah for the #2 spot, promising to add $10,000,000,000 – that’s ten billion dollars for the math challenged – to his first budget for the sake of “fairness”? I do. Look it up. It was Mondale’s daughter who used to sha-shay into the White House in a most nuanced way whenever Hillary was out of town or otherwise occupied. This was before Denise Rich took several lessons from Big Bill on his personal saxophone for spontaneous lip placement for those sustained high notes. Those were the ones where the coda is long and lingering. 

 Yet another way to make me proud to be from New Jersey is to note that Rutgers

University paid her $7,500 less for a speech than it paid Snooki, she of Jersey shore fame. Say what you will about Snooki, she got her higher fee the old-fashioned way, she earned it.  Part of Hillary’s fee went to the rental of the IV device, the one that drips pureed crème brulee into one thunder thigh while simultaneously lathering Ben & Jerry’s Chinky Monkey onto her Rubenesque arse. That, plus the nuclear-powered Jaws of Life if her absolutely non-Gluten-free, treacly persiflage backs up on her, makes it expensive to have her speak. Getting her Kevlar bloomers off her ain’t never easy.

Anyhow, the beauty of free speech is that it is like pregnancy or cancer. Either you are or you aren’t. Either you have it or you don’t. I bear several proud scars from one but not from the other.

Try to guess. Send a SASE. Win valuable prizes plus save Soviet Jewry.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – Speaking of “scars”, 2 modern American Liberal lady pols, one now with national acclaim and yes, Kipling was right about the female being the deadlier, sent the police, men with badges and guns, to my house because of something I wrote. Was that a “chilling effect” or a “slippery slope”? Use the same SASE. I love feedback.

PS Plus – Tornado warning here. God Damn Trump. It snowed in Boston in April. The Cubs opener was snowed out. And it all began when he pulled out of the Paris Climate Accord. The bastard. Where is Ned Lud when we really need him?

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

April 8, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33394

RE: “Affordable housing”. The subject of your editorial this morning is yet more proof that God’s ‘sense of mirth’ is divinely inspired. Indeed, it may soon rank as the 6yh proof of God’s existence.

Ms. O,

I’ll say this for modern American Liberals. They never let you down. It makes no difference what their mission is: grievance counseling, polar bear undrowning coalitions, editorial page editors, “fairness” monitors, making quotas and goals antonyms, having a Final Four without keeping score, making quinoa and kale taste like crème brulee, keeners of deplorable Republican mean-spiritedness, convincing Americans of good will why taking down a statue of a defeated Confederate soldier is not the same as the Taliban blowing up a 2,3000 year old Buddha, why a murdering Islamic terrorist would not have become a murdering Islamic terrorist if he had a good job, one with good pay and benefits, how to have a nation without borders, advanced horizon trekking, explaining why NPR is not politically and culturally biased…God’s Holy Trousers but the list is endless.

But when your intellectual forebears lined up on the left side of the tennis court when Robespierre called the role no list is too big or too daunting. One of the reasons Senator Lard Kennedy could end his concession speech in 1980 in Madison Square Garden by saying “the dream never dies” and bring the of “hope triumphing over experience” Democrats to their feet in tears is because results don’t count, only expectations. Because there is no posting of final grades, because there are no final exams, “the dream never dies”. Thus, the never-ending War on Poverty enters its 54^th year of raising the minimum wage as the one sure path to ending poverty. Maybe. Who cares if it works? It’s “fair”, isn’t it?

Speaking of “fairness”, you say

“A better alternative, though, would be to pay teachers

what they’re wo they can live where they want.”

Today 

You 

Pick one. It’s is either the sound of the other shoe whistling past your ear or the gurgling sound the turd in the punch bowl makes when it plops up when someone is offering a toast to the road to Hell being unpaved but soon to be black-topped with skid-proof good intentions. Here is the conundrum your fallacious argument presents us with. [A tip of my DWEM hat to the Trivium is demanded]

If Abdul and Juanita can’t read why will paying their present instructors more money help them read?

 Put differently, a bunch of golfers from all over the world are chasing a little white ball around rural Georgia in a place whose grounds and grass are as well-kept as Arlington Cemetery. Years of dedication and competition will give one of them a highly coveted green jacket and a sack filled with green Benjamins. It’s why, as the legendary Big Mike from Bayonne, noted sportsman, saloonkeeper, and now a dedicated public servant, still says, “you never see anyone swimming to Cuba”.

If the long-held belief that spending more money on education means that students will be better taught why did Obama, Clinton, and Gore send their kids to schools so expensive that I could have bought my first home times 2 for their tuitions? Let the record show that I and my children went to private schools.

If $ spent per student is the one true road to educational success why doesn’t the really fine DC school system graduate 2 or 3 Nobel Prize winners each year?

Speaking of, as you say, “robbing Peter to pay Paul”, a bit of remedial homework is in order. It was the original Doctor J, Samuel Johnson, who said “Any public policy that involves robbing Peter to pay Paul will always have Paul’s support”. Thus, when modern American Liberals are clamoring for open borders, they are not necessarily overflowing with non-denominational charity. They are putting future voters into their perpetually sealed lock-box.

As Orwell said, “It is important to focus what is at the end of one’s nose.”

Is there anyone in your slightly addle-brained aerie of scribes who believes that somebody in Tallahassee can do something that requires half plus one of those present voting in the affirmative that will make housing more “affordable”? Midnight Basketball? Maybe. Abolishing teen-age bullying and the heartbreak of psoriasis? Maybe. Affordable housing? Never. 

The country has been trying since 1936 to make housing affordably accessible. I suggest that the evidence of your own eyes, available at the end of your nose, is, regardless of the reason[s], overwhelming. It is neither.

I spent a big chunk of my other life in the housing business., being an expert witness on Federally secured or guaranteed mortgages on the Federal Court level. I know you don’t know anyone who is a tenant in a Section 8 apartment but see if you can find or hear of anyone who sought out a Section 8 apartment.

The Sadowski Trust Fund is worthy of mention. It is supposed to be an amulet that will provide clean affordable housing for those “unlucky in life’s lottery”. Well intended, and aren’t they all? – vide Dante – it was the cookie jar that rotten Republicans and flummoxed Democrats constantly raided. 

It is owed to the ledger to state the original trust fund raid was led by Lyndon Baines Johnson, AKA “Landslide Lyndon”, in 1964. He was aided and abetted in this by willing Republicans who would get to plop their snouts into this newly discovered public trough. The trust fund was Social Security. The “lock box”, the one so assiduously guarded by Vice President Alpha Gump during the thrill-packed 2000 campaign, would, if found, contain nothing but markers from last year’s Secretary of the Treasury promising to pay this year’s annuitants from next year’s receipts, maybe. Look it up.

The longer it takes you to get to work the cheaper will be your cost of housing. Nothing that can be done in Tallahassee will change that. Honest Injun.

Kevin Smith

CC – MP, DS

Fabiola Santiago Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald

April 2, 2018

Fabiola Santiago

Leonard Pitts

The Miami Herald

RE: You never let me down – Some comments on your so achingly predictable columns in Sunday’s Herald.

Why the both of you?

Simple.

It’s been some time since I reached out to either of you so it was like the short story by Dostoevsky where the pensioner finds an extra almond in her tea cake and she praised the czar. It’s been some time also since I’ve hunted for Easter eggs but the joy of finding a duo quite as dynamic as you and your ideological buddy in yesterday’s paper, competing with each other to gain the moral high ground, that I donned my Easter bonnet today.

Pitts is easy. After 8 years of building a post-racial society, after 8 years of being “the ones we have waited for”, after 8 years of living under the firm but gentle, caring hands of Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, he has reverted to form. And since the only tool he ever had was a hammer everything, and I mean everything, looks like a nail.

It rains too much? Race.

It rains too little? Race.

Flat tire? Race.

Acne? Race.

Tax cuts? Race.

Race? Race.

Watch out for your thumb. Pow!

As to Fabiola, my favorite Latina abuela semi-bruja, a bit more is required.

Her dudgeon – como se dice dudgeon en Espanol? -is raised to danger levels because Trump will do anything to “undermine the growth and vitality of minority communities”. I guess that means he is using Cesar Chavez, he of lettuce and grape boycott fame, as a role model. Chavez wanted armed guards at the border to keep illegals out. Look it up.

He turned out to be a real moon-bat, wing nut, didn’t he?

The re-inclusion of the citizenship Census question, a question that was on every census from 1830 to 2000, would suggest that Clinton, Truman, Roosevelt, and Wilson were racists, right? As a matter of fact, and if we are to believe Justice Thurgood Marshall, Wilson was the most bigoted, racist President of the 20^th century. Did I mention that they were all Democrats? You knew that, didn’t you?

I have to get back to my manatee traps. I was shut out yesterday but I still have many sushi orders to fill for Earth Day celebrations. I can’t tell you how pleased I am that the Slope space station didn’t fall on us. Can I praise Trump for that?

KEVIN SMITH

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

April 5, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd

Ft. Lauderdale, FL

RE: Patton got his first blooding chasing Pancho Villa back into Mexico. Precedent?

Ms. O’Hara,

President Trump, il magnifico, to his multitudinously multiplying myriad admirers, has ordered the National Guard and certain Army units to the borders of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California to repel the possible invasion from Mexico.

In so doing he is fulfilling his sworn duty under the Constitution – vide Article 4, Section 4 which says in a most unequivocal way, in a way undisturbed by adjectival  interference  “….and shall protect each of them [the states] from invasion”. [We’ll deal avec les merdes du Quebec at our convenience.]

He is also following the precedent set by President Bush 43 and President Obama, both of whom sent troops to our southern borders. Lest we forget, President Eisenhower sent the 101^st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles, the Band of Brothers, if you will, to Little Rock in 1956 to enforce a court order issued by a Federal Judge. In addition to re-establishing the primacy of Federal law over state law, it stamped out the Dracula-like renascence of the Theory of Nullification. That theory was thought to have been nullified by the deaths of up to 700,000 Americans in a full and frank discussion that began at Ft. Sumter in 1861 and ended at Appomattox in 1865. Rumor has it that it is coming back yet again. Can you believe that? I can’t either.

An American President, Grover Cleveland, ordered the American Army in 1894 to deliver the mail, said mail being undelivered because of the Pullman Strike. Enforcing a Federal Court order. General Miles broke the strike and caused the mail to be delivered. He wired the White House to tell the President that the mail was being delivered but that some strikers were killed. The President wired back asking him if “he had killed enough”.

I offer this for your editorial consideration.

 Since we are still in the holy charism of the Easter Season it can be considered as an act of Christian Charity. It could be that rarest of God’s creatures, both a spiritual and a corporal work of mercy. And no, I can’t spare my copy of the Baltimore Catechism #2. Get your own.

From a logistical standpoint you wouldn’t have to kill too many. A mile or two of camoed Hum-Vees with a Ma Deuce mounted on each of them – Ma Deuce is GI lingo for the Browning ,50 caliber machine gun. – should do the trick. A few synchronized bursts should hit the spot, so to speak. To keep the Air Force happy, we’ll have a wing of “Warthogs” – A10s to the uninitiated – traversing the border where the incursion is most likely to occur. Using its 30-millimeter Gatling gun, the one firing uranium depleted slugs that shot the shit out of Iraqi armor, it shouldn’t take more than 50 or 60 blown apart braceros to discourage the rest from registering as Democratic voters. The others, being duly encouraged, will hot foot it back to the Panama Canal.

Lord Fisher, Admiral of the Fleet – “Jackie” to his boss, Churchill – said, somewhat ironically, at The Hague Peace Conference in 1899.

“Kick your enemy when he is down.

 Strike him in the belly.

Boil your prisoners in oil.

 Torture and mutilate his women and children.

…. Then people will leave you alone.”

The century-old Pax Britannica still had 15 years to run.

As the noted New York Democratic politician Mario Procacino once said, “It grows on you, like a cancer.”

Kevin Smith

PS – As a deplorably literate curmudgeon I rise in defense of Wide-Bottomed Hillary. If modern American Liberal talking heads could talk about Paula Jones’s less than comely nose I can talk about Hillary’s affection for and imitation of Oliver Hardy’s backside. Please let her keep talking. Encourage her. Give her a platform. She’s like herpes. A gift that keeps on giving. I would hate like Hell to find out that notorious Koch Brothers, with their oceans of “dark money”, unlike the clean swag from George Soros, are funding her. She’s good for my damaged kidney. She makes me want to pee from laughing without using my stent. 

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

April 4, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33394

RE: “The wind and the rain may enter…” – Facebook intrusions and “poking” as described in your signed editorial today.

Ms O’Hara,

To Hell with Facebook! Starbucks scares the Bejeezus out of me.

It’s been years since last I was in one. I learned today that one will open in the local Publix. It may not be enough to drive me to Winn-Dixie but it gives me pause. I made the mistake, common to deplorable homophobic xenophobes, before the enlightened rule of Barack the Beneficent, of asking for a large coffee by name; that is to say “Large coffee to go.” I did not use the pidgin Eye-Tie and the secret handshake coupled with the seasonal color that insiders use to get a friggin’ cup of coffee. The semi-androgynous barista looked at me “like my nose was being eaten by weevils”.

A brief digression is in order. In addition to illuminating things technological you limn things political. You can’t help it. As a practicing modern American Liberal ink-stained wench you have no choice. It’s in the warp and woof of your DNA.

Here comes the other shoe.

You backhandedly bitch slap the Trump for using trayf campaign practices. [I was born and raised in Bayonne, NJ so pardon me if I wet my pants when a mAL hectors about the do’s and the don’ts of campaign ethics.]

The SEC says that omission of a material fact constitutes civil fraud. 1934 Act,10b5. Look it up.

Before it was formalized in 2013, the metrics used to construct the rubric that Cambridge Analytics, used later by Candidate Trump, were used by Candidate Obama. It was a strategy for which he was universally praised. I guess cat skinning and almost truth telling are subjective things. No sense being a half-assed resistor.

It is a trait common to mALs to castigate the 2^nd sinner while stuffing the first wrong-doer down the always convenient memory hole, the one dug by zealots well versed in “eclectic indignation”, the one-character trait without which they would go mad. For example, President Bush 41 was vilified for telling us what Willie Horton, that mad cap, crazy kid was up to in his dash for immortality as a parole violating murdering rapist. Would it make me more deplorable to point out that Willie Boy’s exploits were brought to our attention by Senator Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. He later became known as Vice President Alpha Gump who told  us we would die in 10 years of terminal sun burn, something about the depleting ozone layer which I think was connected to the oil depletion allowance,maybe. Alas, he told us that 27 years ago. Speaking of thanatoptic viewpoints, Candidate Donna Shalala told us we would all die from AIDS in 10 years. Would it make me more of a turd to point out that she issued this warning in 1998? She issued it the same day that President Handsome Billy from Hot Springs, the King of the One-Eyed Oval Office Trouser Snakes, told us that Global Warming was caused by hot days in August which were caused, or so the consensus of science tells us, by Global Warming. Have the dreaded Word Police proscribed tautology? 

You say “a tremendous number of people have been ‘poking’ me”. I’m sure, I think, that you don’t mean it in the Yeatsian sense of poking to “petit mort” because I too have been ‘poked’. I don’t know what it means also.

There is a venerable old saw – I imagine by now that all saws are old and venerable, particularly the old and venerable ones, right? – “pig in a poke”. It is an apt description of “shovel ready jobs”, or “a red line in the sand”, or “they speak Austrian in Vienna”, or “We are the ones we have been waiting for”, and “the Marine Corpse is in all 57 or 58 states”.

The “poke” I thought about was the one in “Lonesome Dove”, remember? Augustus McRae would cut the cards with Lorena Wood. Both the winner and the loser would get a “poke”. Talk about flipping with a two-headed penny! Even when Gus lost he got a “poke”. For the uninitiated, a “Poke” was short hand for a horizontal tango. By the way, just like Row A in Hudson County, Gus never lost.

You say that we “accept the loss of privacy for security”. It was Edmund Burke, still another remarkable Irishman, who said the trade-off in a society is always between freedom and order. You can’t have both.

Kevin Smith

PS – “…. but the King may not enter unless invited.”

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

April 1, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33394

RE: Errata et addendum

Ms. O’Hara,

It being Holy Week, it is indeed fitting and proper that the photo on the editorial page is proof positive that Paul, my favorite rabbi, lives. You husband is proudly proclaiming one of the rabbi’s great truisms; viz, “Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake…and other ailments”. By the by, would it be deplorably homophobic of me to inquire why there was never a picture of any of Professor Stevie Goldstein’s various spouses?

But that’s not why I write.

I am here, like Henry the Second, prostrate on the steps of the world HQ of the Sentinel to accept whatever punishment is deemed fit. Let me first extend a modern American Liberal apology – that’s the kind where you begin by saying I don’t think I said or did anything wrong but if I did and if I offended anyone anywhere in the non-Ptolemeian universe and don’t you love living in the nether world of the subjunctive, I am sorry – to Little Boss Hogg of the Parkland Hoggs. I meant to call him a “smarmy, chinless, little shit”, not just a “little shit”.

I correct the record for 3 reasons:

#1 – He is. And truth is an absolute defense against libel.

#2 - “Free men speak with free tongues.” Thank God for DWEMs!

#3 – “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

#3A – Is it too late to include “meaner than cat shit” in my description of him?

But on to today’s editorial, and how Christian of you on Easter Sunday to canonize NYT columnist Tom Friedman who, by the way, is a Jew. It creates a target-rich environment, AKA the New York Times. It’s a shame we outlawed both strapado and bastinado.

Is this the same New York Times that called Abraham Lincoln a “baboon” in 1864? Is this the same New York Times that pushed for a cease fire in 1864 that would have allowed slavery to continue? Is this the same New York Times that refused to accept the evidence of its own eyes that Walter Duranty, its foreign correspondent stationed in Moscow, and another Pulitzer Prize winner, was bought and paid for agent of the KGB?

Its perfidy in ignoring the 20^th century’s first European holocaust, one that resulted in some 8,000,000 deaths [Kulaks? Jews? Ukraine? Thank God for GOOGLE] and encouraged Hitler, another mass slaughterer, yet still a distant second to Stalin, to plan his own holocaust. That New York Times?

Had their employee, the bureau chief with the bureau being Berlin, another Pulitzer Prize winner in 1934, been found to be in thralldom to the Gestapo rather than the KGB, they would still be apologizing. And apologizing. And apologizing. And apologizing.

How about Herbert L. Matthews, the columnist who helped Castro take over and after 60 years of scientific socialism the only problem that has been solved is teen-age obesity? Do you remember the ad announcing, under a picture of a smiling Castro, with the unspoken caption “I got my job through the New York Times”? I do. 

Is it the same New York Times that employed Anthony Lewis, another Pulitzer Prize winner, who wrote that anyone who tsked-tsked Pol Pot, noted Cambodian agrarian reformer and wanabee community activist, who killed 1/3^rd – repeat – 1/3^rd of his countrymen to get the survivors to think straight, of “cultural arrogance”?

Before I get to the target-rich environment that Tom Friedman, still another NYT Pulitzer Prize winner, a brief History of me and the Times is in order.

My father, the legendary Judge Smith, used to read the two Arthurs – Krock and Daley – to me on Sundays.

 I did my last puzzle, in ink, of course in ink, on October 3, 1999 on an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Fort Lauderdale. I am precise as to the date because it was witnessed by Boss Fiedler, then the head of the Miami Herald. I summarily stopped reading the Times just before the United States went to war in March, 2003. [Let the record show that the war, however it will turn out, had overwhelming Congressional support. 3/4ths of the members voting aye still counts as “overwhelming”, doesn’t it?] The reason was simple: The Times had more Page 1 coverage on the lack of bidets and lady’s tees at Augusta National, the home of The Masters, than it had of this country going to war. “Iron my shirts” was the best protest sign there.

There are several tell-tale signs of modern American Liberalism. Among them is constructing universals from particulars. Couple that with the continuously constantly confusing conflation of correlation and causation and chaos, intellectual, political, and moral, abounds. It leads to “eclectic indignation”, a malady without which hard core, card carrying mALs would surely go mad. A current example of this is Jimmy Carter, surely the worst President of the 20^th century, telling us that Americans demand Presidential spousal fidelity. It is, of course, a rule that did not apply to FDR, JFK, LBJ, and the poster boy of “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it”, subtitled “You better put some ice on that lip”, President Handsome Billy from Hot Springs, the King of the Oval Office One-Eyed Trouser Snakes, WJC. 

When the tank containing “eclectic indignation” runs low, IV top-offs are available. In rare instances; e.g., sensible gun control laws like outlawing bazookas and sensible restrictions on abortion like if the emerging baby gives you the finger so you won’t put the vacuum cleaner into the top of his head must never be discussed together in the same area code, “eclectic indignation” enemas are available. Don’t ask. Obamacare covers it.

Artistic ennui and the task of making the lamb ready for the oven saps and sates my noblesse oblige need to instruct the ”lesser breeds” in the ways of real politick. My devotion to “climate change” is heightened every March 21^st by the sonorous lectures of noted Eye-Tie climatologist, Tony “Red” Vivaldi. Let it be noted that since Harrison Salisbury and Anthony Lewis have gone to a better place, a place where women and minorities don’t suffer disproportionately because of their genetic and racial makeup, a condition that the hive is still working to blame Trump for, Thomas Friedman has assumed the mantle of moral superiority and the cloak of invisibility to the laws governing gravity. He is now the keeper of the seals of the most sacred order of “Non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. “Non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”? Send a SASE.

Suffice to say by paraphrasing Lincoln Steffens, “I have been over to Russia to see the future and it works”, Friedman’s paradigmatic template for perfect governance, akin to Gibbon’s 5 Emperors as the acme of good rulers and advancing civilization, is China. He wants us to be more like China. Thanks, but no thanks.

My father told me that when the Chines/Japanese war broke out he would ask his shirt man spoke about it dispassionately. Weeks of headlines screaming that 500 Chinese were killed while Japanese casualties were less than 30 did not phase him. His reasoning was simple and based on actuarial principles. “Pretty soon no more Japanese.”

I’ll not take lessons from them or from their shill.

Kevin Smith

CC – Michael Putney

PS – On to a somewhat more delicate subject. The picture of you with a calorically challenged Tom Friedman and your husband, a beefed-up evil twin [perhaps] of Michael Caine with you in the middle with a somewhat tumescent glow on your face – a non-starter for fire breathing, card carrying modern American Liberals, people like you, people who believe that Midnight Basketball never got a fair shot, so to speak, suggests that he is grabbing your non-steatyagonous arse with his one free hand. Please tell me I’m right.

How do you get a B.S. in journalism? Were ABs not offered? Ever heard of the Trivium?