May 25, 1945 – May 25, 2015

He died quick and he died clean. It probably was a Japanese Type 98 mortar that took the upper right quadrant  of his torso off. 

They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

Laurence Binyon

I never met him. I was not even 2 when he was killed. I knew his wife for less than 2 years before she died. Inter alia, there was large box that came with some old furniture and some cutlery that I still use. The scroll hangs on my wall.

There was also a scroll signed by the President of the United States and a picture of a simple grave marker.

He stands in the unbroken line of patriots

Who have dared to die that freedom might live, 

And grow, and increase its blessings.

FREEDOM LIVES, AND THROUGH IT HE LIVES-

In a way that humbles the undertakings of most men.

Harry S. Truman

The grave marker reads:

Leonard W. Putnam

New Jersey

CPL US ARMY

World War 11

Nov 12, 1902   May 25, 1945

Raise a glass and offer a prayer to the memory of a 42 year old piano salesman 

“Why us, Sarge? Why us?

Because we’re here lad. Because we’re here.”

KS

May 25, 2015

Letter to the Editors

The Miami Herald

3511 NW 91^stAvenue

Miami, FL 33172

RE: Same sex referenda as proof that “eclectic indignation” still lives and prospers at World HQ of the Miami Herald.

Sirs,

62% of the Irish electorate voted to approve same sex marriage for which modern American Liberals have become positively tumescent.

62% of the Florida electorate voted to oppose same sex marriage for which modern American Liberals becomes positively apoplectic.

Vox populi is a 2-edged sword, isn’t it?

Swift and Joyce are stifling guffaws and Wilde and Behan still don’t approve of marriage, any kind of marriage.

Ireland is still “the land of happy wars and sad love songs”.

Kevin Smith

May 13, 2015

Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga

The Vatican

Rome, Italy

RE: The weather and why Vivaldi is still the gold standard when it comes to climate change

Eminenza,

Mater si. Magistra no.

I thought of using Dante as my guide and begin by saying “Because your ass is wrapped in purple it doesn’t make you a maven”. 

Ignorance, both invincible and its ugly twin, vincible, has plagued Western man long before Ptolemy ruled the world of Astronomy. I daresay that there are more than a few gaps in your otherwise astonishing academic background.

The scientific method and reasoned discourse are more than just old chapters in the History of civilization.

The Trivium is the crown jewel, not just of critical thinking, but of man’s quest to ask where am I from and where am I going. Logic is the capstone of it. Two of its bedrock rules are still both valid and truthful.

One of the first rules of logic is that no matter how many particulars you have you can’t make a universal out of them. If a bearded man who sings in the choir is also a murderer it doesn’t make all hirsute top tenors killers. The other, Hoc Post Ergo, Propter Hoc is the centuries old “trap set by knaves for fools”.

“After this, because of this” is a facile substitute for thinking. It is as if the Devil himself offers Man the forbidden apple of mental sloth. Its hand maiden, tautologies, condemn Man to the circular reasoning that goes nowhere.

My country had a President in 1998 who told a national TV audience that it was very hot in Washington, DC in August. He then said it was hot because of Global Warming. Further, he said with no hint of sarcasm or wit, that Global Warming was caused by hot summer days in Washington, DC. [I have been in DC in August. There are 3 kinds of weather. #1 – Very hot - #2 – Unbelievably unbearably hot - #3 – A heat that Dante would have been intimately familiar with because of his journey when “halfway through his journey he found himself in the dark wood of error”.

How simple it is to substitute feelings for ideas!

Your bosh balderdash on politics and the economy make your gibberish on  science seem majestic.

If I may be so bold as to posit a thought on why you and the Holy Father think, when it comes to our daily bread, that rocks are not hard and water is not wet.

You are both from a culture that has no regard of the Rule of Law and for the acquisition and disposal of real property. Thus it is easy to believe that since the “fix” is always favoring the rich that if good people who care for the poor are in control all will come right in the end. At least Peron gave us some good soccer players

It has never happened. It never will.

More than 50 years after Los Hermanos Castro took over Cuba it still has 3 unsolvable problems: Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. As my friend, the legendary Big Mike form Bayonne, always say, “That’s why you never see anybody swimming TO  Cuba”.

Do you favor the traditional Bulgarian method of economic reform or the gravity defying nonsense of Hugo Chavez? God surely has a sense of mirth in that He has allowed Maduro to succeed him. If you find a bigger buffoonish ohmadahn in charge anywhere else let me know. 

If you swim to get out of Venezuela the first place is Cuba. If the tiburones don’t get you the Castros will. Worse than Hobson’s choice.

“The problem with Capitalism is Capitalists. The problem with Socialism is Socialism.” On a more moral note – if that is still permitted – “The trouble with Socialism is that it is an attempt to make a system so perfect that on one will have to be good”.

The subject of GlobalCoolingGlobalWarmingClimateChangeClimateDestruction requires a passionate preacher for whom truth is the first casualty. It also demands a choir filled with equally passionate willing disbelievers of self-evident fact.

When the Pope prepares his encyclical about the weather please remind him that it took a long time to get over the Galileo fracas. Meantime, Ego te absolvo 

Kevin Smith

St. Mary’s Grammar School – 1957

Marist High School – 1961

Seton Hall University - 1965

May 10, 2015

Mitchell Berger, Esq.

350 E Las Olas Blvd #1000

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301

RE: Mite auxilium!

Mr. Berger,

Here it is, Mother’s Day and things are both askew and awry or, worse, both.

#1 – 6 states have snow on the ground. New England ski slopes are up and running…in May.

#2 – Erupting volcanoes are here, there, and everywhere.

  #3 – Polar bears are still dying leading to a surplus of those cute baby seals.

#4 – Will your wife try to get Cuba to go vegan?

#5 – The head WOG from Saudi Arabia just told President B. O. to bugger off.

#6 – Is this year’s Summer of Recovery on schedule?

#7 – Is Roger Clinton in Gitmo?

#8 – If not showing Muhammad cartoons is a sign of respect for Muslim Sharia fans should we hang homosexuals and stone women as a sign of our good intentions?

#9 – Because of rising sea-levels you have stopped handling water front real estate transactions, haven’t you?

What caused these things to   happen?

A – The Koch Brothers?

B – The Bush family, particularly George the Younger?

C – fracking?

D – Mean spirited people who don’t like manatees and who think Hillary Clinton, with a ass that Oliver Hardy would envy, couldn’t lie straight in bed?

E – Rush Limbaugh and Pam Geller?

F – All of the above?

G – Some of the above?

H – None of the above…just  kidding!

I am enclosing my plans for the 4^th of July. I’d like you to come. Regrets only.

Kevin Smith

May 5, 2015

“FREE MEN SPEAK WITH FREE TONGUES”

The 25 century old breach between Antigone and

Marcel Duchamp has been closed.

Also, a crowd funding plea for a really bang-up

Fourth of July celebration.

King Creon told Antigone that she could not bury her brother. She did. The King killed her.

Marcel Duchamp had an exhibit in Paris 100+ years ago featuring his latest work “Nude Descending a Staircase”. Parisians rioted, not because their sensibilities were outraged by the sight of Frog ta-tas and Gallic yoo-has, but because there weren’t any. Google up the picture to see why they did what they did.

The gap was closed last Sunday in Garland, Texas.

If Allah is so friggin’ Akbar what difference does it make what his main man, his go to guy, Muhammed, looks like?  There were no cameras 14 centuries ago when he was busy eye-balling pre-pubescent teen age girls and/or goats. Maybe he looks like Omar Sharif. Maybe he looks like Yasser Arafat. Maybe he looks like the Elephant Man. Brad Pitt? Ru Paul? Yogi Berra? Al Sharpton?  Bruce Jenner? Bruja Jenner? Dorian Gray? Dr. Jekyll? Mister Hyde? 

Nobody knows.

If I draw a picture of a somewhat Semitic man with a face that would stop a clock and say it is my Uncle Baba Ganoosh a gazillion Muslims would say Oy! or the  Sunni/Shia equivalent. If I say it is MoMo, the mover of mountains and the bane of G-spots, they go from being wanabee feral Muslim thugs to becoming real life feral Muslim thugs who Kill the Infidels, preferably by cutting their heads off or blowing them up. Hijacking a plane and flying it into a skyscraper remains a viable option.

13 centuries after Jesus Christ, and Blessed be His name, The Divine Comedy was published. Dante tore his church apart. He and Petrarch were the first 2 artists in a phenomenon of Western Civilization called the Renaissance. Alas, 10 centuries ago, Islam turned inward. They began to eat their own seed corn. 10 centuries of forbidden DNA transfers has produced a culture where rage rules.

 Crucify Christians. Burn prisoners. Hang homosexuals. Flog women. All done to please Allah and his prophet. 

Somebody sure has some sense of humor.

Does the Medina Symphony feature Mozart or Stravinsky? Has the Dance theatre of Harlem been to Riyadh? Has the Fertile Crescent produced an Islamic Shakespeare? How about a James Joyce? Has a Muslim Samuel Johnson or a burnoosed Edmund Burke been hidden? Where is the Martin Luther of the desert? Any Walt Disneys at the next oasis? Andrew Carnegie? Bill Gates? Clarence Birdseye? Jonas Salk? Abdul Einstein?

You won’t have to take your socks off to count the number of Muslim Nobel Prize winners in the last century.

Speech is either free or it isn’t.

You are either pregnant or you’re not.

The tumor is either malignant or it isn’t.

The killing of those 2 thugs on Sunday proves a few things”

#1 – The express road to 72 virgins begins and ends in Texas.

#2 – If you tell me you want to kill my family do not expect to be welcomed.

#3 – The West, when enraged, will put paid on all those open bills.

#4 - The Southern Poverty Law Center did not approve this message.

#5 – Pam Geller, please come and bring your flame thrower

But wait. There’s more. 

My crowd-fund appeal is simple.

I want to have a demonstration on the steps of the nearest Federal Court House  in Fort Lauderdale, FL at noon on July 4^th, 2015.

I have picked Fort Lauderdale for one obvious reason. Broward County is Ground Zero for the antinomianilistic Nihilists known as modern American Liberals. These vipers are in favor of manatee suffrage, 4^th and  5^th trimester abortion, and banning Rush Limbaugh. Because of his progressive views on abortion Dr. Mengele would any Democratic primary he ran in.

 They also hectored me about “Piss Christ” and why I had to support it. “Piss Christ”, by Andres Serrano, is a clear container in which a crucifix is suspended. It is them filled with, you guessed it. Piss. I was told that the artist’s rights trumped mine and that it was the price we pay for an open society. They also told me that I had to acquiesce in the taxpayer supported “Corpus Crista”. It is a play whose premise is simple: Jesus Christ was crucified because of a lovers’ quarrel with Judas Iscariot. Judas, feeling betrayed, dropped a dime on the late and great JC and the Romans did the rest. 

I was told that nothing can come between the artist and his artistic expression. If I objected I would be consigned to the knuckle dragging Troglodyte dungeon from which no escape was possible

Besides, it was only a play and I should get over it.

Preliminary plans call for the American flag to be burned. No problem there, right? I will wrap a bible in the flag. Still no problem. I will also wrap a Koran in the flag. [As an aside, why is it always the “sacred” Koran? Why can’t the bible be “sacred”? Just asking.]

Further, I will have a gallon of pork piss nearby in case the fire gets out of control.

I need funds for suitable adult libations. No sense risking dehydration while doing the Lord’s work. I need funds for a getaway car. I need funds for bail. I need funds for legal and medical services. Since I am from Bayonne, NJ I will need street money. 

I will be easy to spot

I am a somewhat calorically challenged handsome bearded curmudgeon with a gimpy gait. I may be wearing an eye patch. I keep 2 hats handy. The oldest one, the bearing the title “Right-Wing Conspirator”, was worn by me in front of the white House in 1998. I shook my fist while shouting “Come Out with your hands up, you son of a Bitch. We have the Place Surrounded”.  Alas, he got away. 

The newer one, the one that says “Proud Global Warmer”, is used when I come across people who confuse correlation with causation and believe that tautologies are a really cool way to avoid thinking.

Whichever hat I wear, whichever way I choose to express myself, I will be exercising a right that is mine when I was born. I got it, not from the local magistrate, but “from beyond the stars”. And can someone bring me the latest Arabic translation of “A Modest Proposal”?

Nobody asked me but Hillary’s Ass is now an axe handle and a half wide. She needs a quart of industrial strength of WD40 it get her drawers on and the Jaws of Life to get them off. When she hauls ass it takes two trips with the last one in a wheelbarrow. She switched from Botox to Crème Brule because it is organic and it decreases her carbon footprint. Plus, it’s the only way she can get Handsome Billy to lick her.

FREE MEN STILL SPEAK WITH FREE TONGUES, RIGHT?

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

May 1, 2015

Rick Sanchez

WIOD – 610AM

Miramar, FL 33025

RE: Adios, amigo! A bit too much redolence when “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome” goes unchecked will drive rational people away

Mr. Sanchez,

The lead is in Spanish to show my sensitivity to the need for diversity and for the mandatory genuflection at the shrine of multi-culturalism.

In Spanish or in English this gringo is outta here.

At about 10:10 this morning you were conflating – great new word, huh? – the commentator on CNN and your ACELA Amtrak train ride.

ACELA is the high speed train that runs between Boston and Washington. Regardless of the direction the train must go through Baltimore. You said that the CNN commentator “knew” there would be “trouble’ there because he could see the blighted area when he rode the train.

You had just begun your frumpishly fustian polemic about the upper income, mostly White, commuters, doubtless card carrying members of the privileged 1% mover and shakers cabal, and how their callous indifference fed the flames of the urban thuggery, thugishness or whatever will soon be the politically correct synonym for the activities done by what used to be known as thugs.

Cato-like, I hit the off switch with a speed and ferocity that exceeded my minimum daily allowance for random carbon foot-printing.

I did this for a variety of reasons.

If you ever get involved with Al-Anon you will appreciate the universality of their mantra: You didn’t cause it and you can’t cure it.

Next up is a sum of money somewhere between $12,000,000,000,000 – that’s T, as in trillion – and $17,000,000,000,000, also T, as in  that this country has spent since 1964 on ‘it”. You may remember that Lyndon Johnson fought 2 wars. There is a wall in Washington marking the first one, the one in Vietnam. At least that one ended. The other one, the War on Poverty is now 51 years old. The “inconvenient truths”, the hard statistics, the objective indices, that caused him to give the “over the top” order are worse now than when he gave it. 

Having dug ditches in 3 countries I assure you with 100% metaphysical certitude that when you find out that you are digging a ditch on the wrong side of the road you stop digging.

Skip the good intentions, forget about the efforts of really good people who were/are/will be exceptional avatars of altruism, there are no success stories to be told. The alms givers did OK for themselves. 

Other than erecting “ a multitude of new offices, and send[ing] hither swarms of officers, to harass our people, and eat out their substance”, the only thing of lasting substance is a slough of despond that we have burdened our people with. 

The drought in California, partly caused by a mad scientist using taxpayer money to convince a nit-wit Judge that the inedible Delta Smelt is worthy of more protection than a farmer whose job is to feed people, is governmental lunacy on steroids. 

If a fully grown T-Rex mama were to appear outside Hammond, LA would she be granted protected status as she feasted on the nearest pre-school?

An argumentum ad absurdum writ large, I daresay tattooed, on the body politick. 

 I am not a heartless social Darwinist.  I am an Irish-Catholic, born and raised in Bayonne, NJ. Republicans had to get out of town by sundown. I had an uncle who, despite dying in 1956, voted Row A, the Regular Hudson County Democratic ticket, until he was stopped by a Federal Judge in 1971. 

I assure you my modern American Liberal credentials are in order. I even worked for 2 Democratic congressmen who went to prison.

The Hippocratic Oath demands that the physician “first, do no harm”. By our own hand, in election after election, we authorize yet more gasoline to be delivered to a fire that Mrs. O’Leary’s cow and Nero would have been proud. In fact, they would have been speechless

The sophistry of elected officials and pseudo-shamans who hector us on the virtues of arson, brigandry, and mayhem is contemptible. Worse, the bowel cleansing fear of being called a racist freezes any rational discussion of the rampant jackassery. 

I know that the patient is critical. I don’t know what the prescription should be. I know what it shouldn’t be.

Kevin Smith

PS – The Urban League did a commercial featuring a commuter train going through a riot ravaged Harlem. The White people kept their heads down. Malcolm X and James Baldwin told us of “the fire next time”. That was 50 years and 9 Presidents ago.

 Can I get my money back?

“He arado en el mar?”

1,500,000 years ago the Yellowstone Basin exploded. Life stopped for several centuries, 750,000 years ago the Yellowstone Basin exploded.

Life stopped for several centuries. The bad news is that we are in the window for it to blow up again.

Tip #1 - Borrow as much money as you can. interest only.

Tip #2 - Don't buy any green bananas.

Tip #3 - Aren't you glad the word "bullshit" is still around?

Tip #4 - Manatee sausage forte homeless, An idea whose time has come, no?

1,500,000 years ago the Yellowstone Basin exploded. Life stopped for several centuries, 750,000 years ago the Yellowstone Basin exploded.

Life stopped for several centuries. The bad news is that we are in the window for it to blow up again.

Tip #1 - Borrow as much money as you can. interest only.

Tip #2 - Don't buy any green bananas.

Tip #3 - Aren't you glad the word "bullshit" is still around?

Tip #4 - Manatee sausage forte homeless, An idea whose time has come, no?

April 19, 2015

Fred Grimm

The Miami Herald

RE: Time to say goodbye – Some comments on your unlinkable homage to jackassery in today’s Miami Herald opinion section.

Mr. Reaper,

Enough with the freakin’ manatees!

I single out these useless sea slugs because, if Darwin is right, maybe it’s time for those useless sea slugs to go; to go, as in extinct. The world has, so far, survived the unlamented loss of pterodactyls, assorted T-Rexes, and Neanderthals. Look it up, you boob.

Guilty White people will have to find a new way to recycle their 10 day old arugula and radicchio other than feeding these creatures. There is an unexpected benefit of cutting down our collective carbon footprint by not driving to an overpass and holding up traffic while disposing of unwanted Swiss chard, kale, and tofu.

Your lachrymose description of the tough times faced by panthers, black bears, wood storks, and sea turtles is touching. It is also Homerically dumb because, in its essence, it is anti-rational and anti-human.

The North Star of consistency common in the genetic makeup of modern American Liberals, a disproportionately addled group, is that the wretched excesses of the uber rich are what cause, in addition to putting out hit squads for barely animate flotsam and jetsam, rage in the ghetto, despair in Section 8 housing, long lines in clinics,

overburdened and underfunded public transit, a loss of “fairness”, teenage obesity and bullying, the heartbreak of psoriasis, and may be the underlying cause of why feral Muslim thugs don’t like us. 

It is owed to the ledger to say that the collateral damage caused by the Koch Brothers war on manatees was the loss of Midnight Basketball. “Hands Up” on defense and “Shoot” on offense is still good advice.

Woe betide the vulnerable sea slug if gazillioniares George Soros, Steven Spielberg, and Tom Steyer decide to try to break the sound barrier in their yachts on Biscayne Bay. In addition, we have to endure the 4^th generation of Kennedys, all proud members of the Lucky Sperm Club, flying gas guzzling private jets, to hector us on the evils of capitalism and the dangers of vaccination.

Logical thinkers who read your column have no choice but to believe that if the society that countenances a precious few to be uncommonly “lucky in life’s lottery”, to fill their garages with Bentleys and Maseratis, to get carpal tunnel syndrome from wearing multiple Rolexes, and for regarding farting through silk to be essential, is turned upside down the manatees will thrive, the children will dance, and the voice of the turtle will be heard in the land. 

It is an inconvenient truth but rich people hire poor people for 2 reasons: #1 is to enjoy the pleasures of being rich and #2 is to get richer. Poor people work for rich people for 2 reasons: #1 is to pay their own way and #2 is to get rich themselves.

If we get rid of the rich who will pay to take care of the manatees? 

Somebody has to change the oil in all those Bentleys. The poor in this country tend to smoke and drink beer. The more people who change oil in the Bentleys the more cigarettes and beer they will be able to buy. The more they buy the more taxes they will pay. A carton of smokes and a case of beer a week and we can have manatee pre-school.

But I digress.

Your concern for bears and panthers is touching. Why not alligators? They share on common trait. The want to catch you, kill you, and eat you.

I know that the dramatic increase in the number of undocumented alien pythons must make you tumescent. That’s what happens when you substitute feelings for ideas.

That’s what happens when you believe that Bambi is a great movie.

Accordingly, and by the powers of the office vested in me, I name you

HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK 

[FOREVER]

KEVIN SMITH

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – Manatee suffrage and a 105% top tax rate are sure winners in 2016, don’t you think?

Ronald Reagan? Arthur Laffer? Milton Freidman? The evidence of your own eyes?

A minor te deum should be raised when a fire breathing modern American Liberal comes to his senses.

It today's unklinkable Sun Sentinel Op-ED about "enterprise zones " you say that a tax cut that will disproportionately benefit rich people, mostly White, is OK if it benefits poor people, mostly Black.

[speaking of "tax cuts for the rich" how can you give tax cuts to the poor since by definition they have no income?]

Perhaps a successful Sistrunk revival, a revival caused by reducing several types of taxes, can lead to a park where trees, the ones that money grow on, and where geese, the ones that lay golden eggs, can flourish. Do you think it could lead to a never-ending Summer of Recovery?

If I can find it would you like to borrow my Adam Smith tie?

"The Way the World Works" by Wan niski and "Property and Freedom" by Pipes would be useful as you "come out of the cave and look up and see the stars".

April 6, 2015

S.A. Sullivan 

The Star Ledger

sssullivan@njadvancemedia.com

Mr. Sullivan, 

Your article on the after tax effects of the proposed Exxon/NJ settlement in today’s Star Ledger bespeaks a lack of knowledge of how Orwell spoke of the real world.

“Stones are hard, water is wet.

If that is granted all else follows.”

I am going to assume that while you have signed the back of a pay check you have never signed the front of one. Thus, you would never have to come to grips with the inconvenient truth of the horror, the horror of learning that your salary is deductible to the entity issuing it.

It gets better.

Your underlying premise – corporations are bad, profits are evil, and evil doers must be punished – does not augur well for an early arrival of the much delayed, long anticipated Summer of Revival.

The simple, irrefutable truth is that profit is what makes the dog hunt and the mule plow. Even the great Lord Keynes agreed with that with his repeated call for tax cuts as a way to increase profits which he knew would “create” jobs. [Look it up]

You know – of course you do because you’re writing about business, right? – that corporations don’t pay taxes. Never have; never will. They, like advertising, legal fees, insurance premiums, 3 martini lunches, the aforementioned salaries, and emoluments to the local chapter of the “Undrown the Polar Bear” crusade are expenses borne by the shareholders

Your extra credit assignment is to find out who said the following:

At best, taxes are an enforced exactitude. The taxpayer is under no

 obligation to arrange his affairs in a way that favors the government.

 It is a patriot’s duty to pay the least amount of taxes possible.”

            The answer may surprise you.

        2 more things:

        #1 – Who the hell is PIRG? You cite them several times with no qualifiers. Forget about auditing the Federal Reserve. Has anyone ever seen their tax returns? Do they file tax returns? How about a certified financial statement? Do they get any money from George Soros? The Koch Brothers? Tom Steyer? 

        #2 – My grandfather shoveled coal at the Bayonne, New Jersey Standard plant beginning in 1896. My father was an iron worker there in 1919. I worked at chemical plants on Hook Road where the Exxon plants were located.

       There will be a 5^th Gospel before anyone can find any proof of the existence of wetlands there or anywhere else on the New York harbor side of Bayonne.

       I have GCed the removal of underground fuel tanks. I know what a remediation plan is. It seems to me that the shareholders of Exxon are about to be charged for the restoration of property to a state that never was. 

       I am sure they will be pleased to know that it is tax-deductible.

KEVIN SMITH

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – Soros, the Koch Brothers, and Tom Steyer in the same sentence? They have one thing in common. Every time they write a check the IRS gets less money.

             

March 30, 2015

Rhonda Swan

The Sun Sentinel

rswan@evolutionslifecoaching.com

RE: Do the math – A comment on why modern American Liberals can’t get Florida to support Midnight Basketball as tearfully reported by you in today’s unlinkable Sun Sentinel.

Ms. Swan,

“Florida House members should

Support good Senate bills”

The Sun Sentinel”

Today

You

“Conflate” is the sanctioned word du jour of modern American Liberals, Of course, nothing can replace “gravitas”. Of course, nothing ca surpass “gravitas’, a word that sprung full grown from the furrowed collective brows of up appallingly biased media, to describe Dick Cheney in the election of 2000 but here’s a candidate.

There is a simple way to get the “Florida House members [to] support god Senate bills”. 

“Just win baby”

Al Davis was on to something. In February, 2009 President B. Hussein Obama, America’s most successful community activists and the best President we have, began a hectoring session with Republican Congressmen with the soothing lines of “There was an election. I won. Get over it”.

Doubtless, he learned from one of Saul Alinsky’s favorite mentors, V.I. Lenin, who set it all out in a snappy little book called “What’s To Be Done”. If you control the votes you can pass whatever you want. I offer as an example the Federal law called the Freedom of Religion Act. It is the model for the law that 20 states have now adopted, the last one being Indiana. In1993 it won all but 3 votes out of a possible 535 in Congress. President Clinton, and whatever else he was he was not a homophobe, couldn’t wait to sign it.

Isn’t that the way Democracies are supposed to work?

I’ll repeat this if necessary but you seem to be “clean and articulate” so that probably shan’t be necessary.

Elect more Democrats to the Florida legislature and you’ll be able to pass anything you want. Elect a Democratic Governor and she’ll sign legislation mandating that everyone must fart through silk.

Wait a minute. Wasn’t that how ObamaCare got passed?

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

April 4, 2015

Robert Steinback

The Sun Sentinel

“As I see it, the proper role of religion is as

an aid to introspection, not as a tool for

projecting power and influence over others”

The Sun Sentinel

April 3, 2015

You

If I read this correctly, and if career choices could be changed retroactively, Martin Luther King, Jr. would have succeeded his father as the premier pastor/preacher in Atlanta. Mother Teresa would have been allowed to continue her good works provided she kept quiet about them

It’s Holy Week. Here’s a pop quiz.

Who said “Halfway through my journey I found myself in the dark wood of error”?

Listen carefully. The Hound of Heaven is a dog that will bark.

KS

April 4, 2015

Letter to the Editor

The Sun Sentinel

RE: Job application

Sirs, 

If a transgendered crossdresser asks a Muslim bakery to prepare a cake celebrating the marriage of his/her father to his/her brother/sister, with the cake inscribed with lard saying Allah Ain’t So Akbar, and is refused, who, if anyone, is the victim of a hate crime?

I know the answer

That is why I am applying for the job of deciding which vox populi is “good” and which vox populi is “bad”.

The hectoring headline of today’s editorial

RESPECT WILL OF THE VOTERS ON AMENDMENT1

with regards to the allocation of tax revenues, said revenues coming from the tax on real estate transactions, to land and water conservation, suggests an eclectic indignation that is embedded in the DNA of modern American Liberalism.

If the voice of the people is to respected as if it came “ex cathedra” on Exhibit A – the environment – and not on Exhibit B – same sex marriage – does the decision process mimic the inanimate plight of the thermos? The thermos keeps the hot things hot and it keeps the cold things cold. How does it know the difference?

I, as a gimlet-eyed observer of the passing scene, as a literate curmudgeon who can tell the buttered sided form the dry, can help you make those distinctions.

I will give you #1 & #2 free of charge.

#1 – “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome” -  ??? Send a SASE

#2 – Your favorite color is plaid

I am too old to expect the courtesy of a reply but it is the Easter season and I can hope, can’t I? Who knows what Peter Cottontail has in his basket?

The couple will be registering at Total Wine, Tiffany’s, Victor/Victoria’s Secret[s]  and Big Al’s gun store.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

March 30, 2015

Congresswoman Lois Frankel

2500 N. Military Trail #490

Boca Raton, FL33431

RE: Oy! All this tummell and its Passover too.

Congresswoman Frankel,

Am I too far out of line to say that, unlike previous letters to you, none of which was neither threatening nor obscene but rather well constructed, I will have the courtesy of a response? After all, I am a constituent.

I begin by telling you that I am not a Jew. I quickly add that the man who founded my Church was. That man was Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a blue collar son of Mary and Joseph.

Judaism, the first leg of the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which Western Civilization is hinged, is indelibly stamped in, on, and through my DNA markers.

Thus I join with Norman Podhoretz, Michael Garrett, Ben Stein, David Plotkin, Charles Krauthammer, Mel Katz, and the ghosts of Sam Ginzberg, Imre Rosenthal, Senator Moynihan, Senator Helms, and Max Katz in asking, in the name of Elijah, what the Hell is going on with Obama. Toss in the spineless toads who curry his favor.

In addition to never having had a Yiddishe kup has the Democratic Party lost its soul? Is there anyone left to say Kaddish for a political party?

I suppose his cultural and paternal background – Forget about his “lack of slave blood”. Would going back 5 generations on his father’s side give us an insight into the salve gathering business? – his sitting in a church for 20 years where the preacher was a viper who reeked of anti-Semitism, and the Logical conclusion to the perverse doctrines of modern American Liberalism will cause him to hire lederhosen-clad youth singing the Horst Wessel song at this year’s Easter Egg Roll. I hasten to add that it will be followed by “Imagine”, “Don’t Stop Thinking about Tomorrow”, “Happy Days are Here Again”, and “It’s All About the Children”.

It is, to cite Churchill, “a time of limitless peril”.

When the President of the United States dispatches a surrogate to announce that “50 years of Israeli occupation must end” it can be said without fear of contradiction that “the world is turned upside down”.

Should this year’s Summer of Recovery arrive on time will work begin on a mass transit favorite of an increasing number of Democrats, the 21^st Century Limited. It will not require any local variances or eminent domain proceedings. There will be only one stop, it being Auschwitz.

This year, when “Next year in Jerusalem” is mentioned, it may be the last time it can be said because next year there may not be a Jerusalem.

It is not the Israelis, it is not some itinerant Swedish Lutherans, it is not Moldovian Anabaptists, it is not some Evangelical Christians, it is not some pissed off Tea Party loudmouths who are beheading Coptic Christians and burning Prisoners of War alive. When the other side begins and ends all conversations with “Death to America” and/or “Death to Israel” perhaps they should be taken for their word.

Kevin Smith

March 29, 2015

Gary Stein

The Sun Sentinel

RE A chance to show that you are on the side of the Angels.

Big Stein, 

I was into your George Zimmerman column, the one that says his name is now a four letter word, when I got to the part where you mentioned the “clowns” at Fox news.

Even though I realized that turning on my TV would be proof positive of my uncaring attitude about polar bears drowning and coral reefs disappearing – Electricity comes from burning coal and coal causes polar bears to drown and staghorn coral reefs to die, right? – I said I would risk it.

The first 2 “clowns” that I saw, Juan Williams and Howard Kurtz, were pointing out some of the deficiencies of Senator Cruz. At the bottom of the screen was a news crawl about the rage at the horror, the horror of Indiana passing their version, the 20^th state to do so, of the Freedom of Religion act.

 

[In 1993 Congress passed the law on which all state laws are now based. There were only 3 “NO” votes out of a possible 535. It was signed into law by that old red neck cracker, Bill Clinton]

It is now approaching, like all du jour outrages of modern American Liberalism, a “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” moment.

It’s too late, I think, to pull a Martin Luther King birthday brouhaha, the one that caused the NFL to get out of Arizona. Since I don’t think that enough Hoosier high schools can name Barney Frank and Rosie O’Donnell as the reigning regents of the upcoming proms I suggest an alternative for the Sentinel.

DON’T COVER THE FINAL FOUR

Kentucky is a big tobacco growing state.

Michigan just became a Right to Work state

Wisconsin’s Governor is Scott Walker.

Duke is in North Carolina, a state that had Jesse Helms and Sam Ervin as its Senators. Even though Helms adopted a less than perfect Black child he was, as is well known, a serial racist. Ervin spent his entire public life trying to stop little Black boys from going to school with little White girls.

And they will all be playing in Indiana?

Boycott it. Don’t cover it.

It will make you feel warm all over.

Just like not eating grapes made your elders feel back in the ‘60s.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS - Have Little Stein try to find out about Trollope. One of his characters, Phineas Finn, is acquitted of a murder most foul. The Judge tells him to go home with honor since he is the only man in the Empire found to be not guilty of this crime. Just like George Zimmerman. Just like OJ Simpson. Alas, not like Ricky Ray Rector.

March 28, 2015

Letter to the Editor

The Sun Sentinel

RE: God’s Holy Trousers! Could this be the end of Western Civilization as we know it? Some comments on your unlinkable editorial – one that proclaims proudly that yes you can perform your own colonoscopy – about endangered coral reefs and a 400 year- repeat – 400 year plan to rescue them. I swear that you said that today.

Sirs,

“It will take more than $250 million –

and an astonishing 400 years –

to replenish the coral reefs”

The Sun Sentinel

Today

Youi

All of you

Each and every one of you

Once you accept the fact that George Costanza, he of Seinfeld fame, is the puppet master, the one who makes everyone dance to his tune, the veil is lifted, the fog disappears, and all things become possible.

As I read your editorial about a 400 year plan to save coral reefs I looked around trying to find the hidden camera with Alan Funt in the director’s chair. He is like the horizon. Everyone knows where it is but no one can ever quite find it. To read the editorial and not have your head do a Lind Blair “Exorcist” roundabout requires both an iron will and an iron mask welded to your shoulders with your head Gorilla Glued to it.

I held your editorial up to a full length mirror. I expected to see an orange haired dude in a polka dot costume come crashing through with bags of flaming cat shit ready to be flung as he shouts “Gotcha”.

I shouted “Shazaam” at it several times. Nothing happened. 

I searched for my Rootie Kazootie decoder ring hoping I could use it as a Rosetta 

Stone to figure out what the Hell you were talking about. I put fresh aluminum foil on my “E T phone home antenna” but there was no answer. The Godot-like Summer of Recovery will be twice gone before it will be deciphered.

400 years?

How much gin has to be mainlined before you came to that number?

I can see where multiple sub-dermal hematomas have not impeded your ability to type. To reason? Absolutely. To be bound by the discipline of Logic? Absolutely not.

The total absence of even a trace of a sense of humor to be found in the DNA markers of modern American Liberals has never been more plainly shown.

400 years.

Johnathan Swift would have been impressed. Mel Brooks is. Too bad Professor Irwin Corey is not here to push your plan.

You say that the task of restoring the coral reefs will be “Herculean”. One of the tasks he completed was the cleansing of the Augean Stables. [We should hum a minor te Deum for Google] I don’ think that Hercules in his full power and glory would be up to the task of cleansing the editorial aerie of the Sun Sentinel. It would prove to be one task too far. 

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – I have suggested every year since 1997 that you show us the way, that you set the standard, that you raise the banner to which all environmentally-minded citizens may repair, to decrease our ever growing carbon footprint, to undrown polar bears, and now to save the coral reefs. It’s simple. You’ll kick yourself for not thinking of it sooner. Turn off all you’re A/Cs.  Start with the months of July, August, and September. Not for 400 years. Not for 40 either. Just for 4. Try it. You love yourself for doing it. Those reefs, particularly the fiercely independent staghorns, will remind you of a Lazarus 3Columbus Days hence. 

Who says developmentally disabled adults cannot make their own way in life? Not I. Res ipso loquitur. Plus, we will be in your debt. 

OOOPS! I have to change my pants again.

You people should do an Infomercial on relaxing enlarge prostate glands and for unblocking impacted bowels.

Your Mr. Fleshler told me a week ago that Federal law required him say it would take 400 years to solve the problem. I cannot find any such law. If it is out there it falls into the Mr. Bumbles category. “The law is a fool, the law is a ass”

March 21, 2015

Jenny Staletovich

The Miami Herald

RE: Here comes Big Bird! – Some comments on your delightful but unlinkable Page 1 story on the continuing Man v Progress story about winged carrion eaters and Walmart, the anti-Christ, Typhoid Mary for profit entity from hillbilly Arkansas, the proud home of Whitewater, periling all the good things in America.

Ms Staletovich,

Think back to the glory days of TV Sit-Com when George Costanza had a lynch mob in hot pursuit after he burst the Bubble’s boy bubble.

Who would want to hurt the Bubble Boy?

A developer – Is that a 4 letter word? – is not waiting for the eternally still-born Summer of Recovery to resurrect itself. He wants to build a 250,000 square foot mall, featuring an indoor ski slope. It will “create” 500 construction jobs and as many as 2000 retail positions. Its main tenant will be Walmart.

[One of the complaints shared by every modern American Liberal journalist about the various venalities of Walmart is the beyond dispute claim that when they come to town Mom & Pop businesses are driven into extinction. When the 18 wheelers hit Main Street on the way to the just built mall the 21^st century version of Walton “creative destruction” a la Schumpeter is both in tow and in store. It is owed to the ledger that 2 points be brought up.

#1 – What is wrong with low prices and quality merchandise? Who was harmed when Walmart broke the stranglehold on the prices of prescription drugs? Certainly not inner city single moms, usually women of color, with a potentially feral teenager in need of a good Ritalin and Dilantin regimen.

#2 – If devotion and preference to Mom & Pop businesses is the paramount factor in making personal business decisions how many scribes, silent sufferers of the “non-malodorous fecal matter” syndrome, can raise their hands and swear that they have never bought a book from Amazon? Take your time. You’re under oath. “You hold your soul in your hands as if it were water. You open your fingers at your own peril.”

As to the birds….

I am el jefe of the Broward County chapter of the Ben Franklin School of National Mascots. He wanted the turkey, not the eagle. The eagle was a fierce defender of its territory and its extended family. When its productive days were over it fed its owner’s family. When was the last time you heard of Eagle Tetrazini?

The eagle, despite its avian narcissism, is not a good hunter. It either steals food from its lesser raptor neighbors or it eats carrion.

I will pledge allegiance to the Church of Evolution, a sect whose main tenet is still unproved 150 years after its initial announcement, when the turkey adapts to the life style of Food Stamp devotees, the manatee. If it weren’t for legions of nit-witted, Green loving Friends of Solyndra, throwing week old cabbages to them these sea slugs would starve.

Bubble Boy?

Bald Eagles?

Manatees?

Here comes Walmart!

The first 5 years of low prices are the hardest. 

Meanwhile, lock up your daughters.

What time is the destruction of AA batteries at the Church of Luddites tomorrow?

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – If bald eagles are so protected why can I buy an eagle headdress at any Sioux reservation out West?

March 17, 2015

Ana Veciana-Suarez

The Miami Herald

RE: In which “ad hominem” arguments are restored to their proper place of honor in response to your treacly, sugar-rush article on Chelsea Clinton Mezvinsky in today’s Miami Herald.

Sra. Veciana-Suarez,

First, the good part.

She seems to be, to quote Vice President Curley Biden – named after the smartest stooge – “clean and articulate”

Buckle up. Here comes the good part.

She may have been better served if she had gone to, like all the other residents of public housing in DC, any of the really fine schools there.

Then she may have had a chance.

She didn’t so she is an expensive prep school patina glossed Kardashian.

She, like her mother, has done nothing – zip, nada, zilch, bupkis – for her first 35 years. Her mother was hired by the largest law firm in Little Rock, akin to the world’s smallest violin, when her husband was elected Attorney General. Through hard work, great negotiating skills, and a superb court room manner she was made a partner in said law firm. It was just a coincidence that this happened just after her husband was elected Governor. Honest. Glass ceiling? Fuhgedaboutit!

To be fair she simplified the process of buying land by substituting all the mortgage business with a time-sales contract, just like when you buy a used car from the guy with the electric blue shirt and the patent leather shoes.

Now Mom looks like an aging hooker working 3 card monte scams at truck stops stuffing dollar bills in her exponentially expanding WD-40 larded Lycra knickers. 

But I digress.

Let’s get back to her cojones grandes. Sometimes metaphors have to be mixed.

She spoke to 1,200 women – a bit sexist, no? – about “investing in women and children”. That she did this with nary a hint of mirth nor a soupcon of whimsy is a testament to the strength of her mitochondrial DNA. Truly the Gods of Satire are suffering from terminal enuresis, proof yet again of the value of togas.

Her father, living proof that nothing succeeds like excess, and her mother, America’s most publicly humiliated and abused FLOTUS of the 20^th century – knowledge of FDR and JFK’s extracurricular swordsmanship was revealed post mortem

are now making a living hustling Ayrabs.

It doesn’t take much to figure out that these Islamic thugs want to be fleeced. For tip money they are buying a marker on a future President or even an ex-President.

Lest we forget, these sons of the desert have solved the harrowing hunt for the elusive “G” spot the old fashioned way. Cut it out and the chase is over, at least for the vixen.

The ladies who aren’t stoned – Did you know, did Chelsea know, did Hillary know, did you know, that there is a protocol for stoning women “taken in adultery”? The rocks can’t be too big lest they kill her too quickly. They can’t be too small lest they kill her too slowly. Only the right size will do. That’s why there is always a demand for Key lime sized stones. Honest.

BTB, how is that #BRINGBACK OUR GIRLS working out? I don’t hear about it anymore so I guess it worked out OK. It did, didn’t it?

Has her mother told her how she is going to react, assuming that she becomes President, to her being paid only 78% of what Obama got? That’s been a chick mantra for so long that it has to be true, right? How do you cope with guys making 25% more than you do? It would piss me off too.

Do you think her Mom learned from Nixon? If he had burned the tapes he would have been in office until January, 1976. 

Maybe she was/is in charge of deleting the e-mails.

Say this for her. Her parents taught her well.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – I think I may have been too harsh on the Kardashian kids. Deep down, like most modern American Liberals, they know that they are full of shit. They are out there where the regular buses don’t run. All they have is “a shoe shine and a smile”. They are proud of the fact that they will steal a hot stove. At least they don’t piss on my back and tell me it’s rain. If Bruce Jenner wants to denut himself Chelsea’s father will buy them. Better to have them and not need them to need them and not have them. He never knows when something will come up.

March 19, 2015

David Fleshler

The Sun Sentinel

RE: Will life be worth living once the noble staghorn and the sensitive elkhorn, both endangered coral reefs, are further ravaged? Some comments on your article about these victims of man’s predatory nature plus a plan to save them.

Mr. Fleshler,

 Some days I wonder if it’s worth the trouble to chew through the leather wrist restraints. Not today, thanks to your Page 1 story of the horror, the horror, to be faced should these reefs go walkabout like pterodactyls, carrier pigeons, Tasmanian Devils, and assorted T-Rexes.

The other thing is whenever I see the word “coral” I think of my wife’s father. He was an officer on a United States Naval vessel in the Coral Sea where, despite the Kellogg-Briand Treaty and the Washington Naval Arms Limitation Treaty, the Japanese wanted to sink the ship on which he served as a surgeon. Having dodged that bullet he then spent 2 years on the Atlantic escaping Nazi U-Boats. 

I mention the above because there are some things that are important. Other things, less so.

Who says satire is dead?

THE COST OF SAVING PRECIOUS CORAL

NEW PLAN SAYS

RESTORING 2 SPECIES

WILL TAKE $250 MILLION –

AND 400 YEARS

The Sun Sentinel

Today

Page 1

You

Forgive me. Who am I to say it’s satire? It may or it may not. Either way it is proof that even lilies can be gilded. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. Not a smirk. Not a sly grin. Not even a raised eyebrow. No mirth, nowhere.

“Climate change is beginning to creep up in terms of causes” is attributed to Jennifer Moore, a fisheries service biologist.

Is “climate change” the global cooling that we were told 40 years ago would kill us 15 years ago?

Is “climate change” the global warming that we were told 25 years ago would microwave us to death 10 years ago?

Man began to apply the scientific method, one of the jewels of Western Civilization, as a way to answer the question, “What if?”

The question knocked Ptolemy off his perch as Top Gun in Astronomy. It made electricity respond to our commands. It harnessed the atom. It bitch slapped gravity and went to the moon and came back.

“250 Million and 400 Years” does not prompt a question. It prompts a statement.

SOUNDS LIKE BULLSHIT TO ME

I have 2 ball caps I wear. One says “RIGHT-WING CONSPIRATOR. The other says “PROUD GLOBAL WARMER”.

I will mark the vernal equinox in 2 days be listening to a lecture given by my favorite Italian climatologist, Professor Vivaldi. You could profit from the same exercise.

Speaking of climate change, specifically global warming…I think it gets a bad rap for 2 reasons:

#1 – It got us out of the last Ice Age, remember?

#2 –Temperatures spiked upwards 1100 years ago. More land became more arable. More farm land, more protein.  More protein made people smarter. We wound up with the Renaissance. Do you have a problem with Dante? da Vinci? Michelangelo?

I have been begging the Sun Sentinel since 1997 to show us the way to cut our carbon footprint. It’s so simple. Turn off all your A/Cs. Coal burning produces the electricity that powers our A/Cs. It also fouls the air, poisons our wells, causes catarrh, and, doubtless, kills our underwater friends. 

What is so rare as a day in March when jackassery such as yours is presented to the public? Lummoxes, clods, and nit-wits are wetting their pants in joy.

400 years? We can’t waste a minute. In fact, start it yesterday

I understand that manatee poo, because it is organically bid-degradable and gluten free, is the best healing agents for the wily rough cactus coral and the obdurate lobed star coral. Why not round up a few thousand of these useless sea slugs and put them in a corral over the seed beds? Feed them month old kale, Swiss chard, endives, and arugula laced with Ex-Lax and Metamucil. How about a 501c3 for their benefit? Even Lois Lerner would approve.

Meanwhile, I think I’ll retire to Bedlam. It’s peaceful there. Serenely quiet too. There are benefits when the boobies run the hatch.

Kevin Smith

WARRIORBARDIT@BELLSOUTH.NET

PS – Although the headline says $250 million the story says $254,540,000. I am glad to see that there will be no smoke and mirrors, kick the can down the road budgeting. Let’s get started!