Posts
September 12, 2010
Michael Mayo
The Sun-Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Blvd
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: Could this be a Damascus moment? – Some comments on your column on the unfairness of being fair as it relates to Broward County real estate taxes.
Mr. Mayo,
A Damascus moment is not to be found in the holy, sacred, and as of dawn today, unburnt Koran.
My favorite old time rabbi was Saul of Tarsus. [That he changed his name to Paul for business reasons doesn’t make him a bad guy. Think Jack Benny and George Burns] He was knocked from his horse on the way to Damascus. When he got up he had gone from being very “anti” to being very “pro”. The rest, as is oft times said, is History.
Your Damascus moment may have come in your column this AM when you announce that 5.5% of all condos in Broward County pay zero – as in none – property taxes. This is not to say that the taxes due on these properties aren’t paid; the remaining 94.5% now pay 100% of all the taxes.
It is well to note that falling real estate values plus legislatively mandated tax exemptions have created a new entitlement class. That the beneficiaries of this serendipity will fight ferociously to continue this is a given. The Emergency Rent Control Act that was passed in 1942 in New York City is renewed every year. Having defeated the Germans, the Japanese, and the Italians in 4 years the New York City Council has been unable to defeat an entrenched entitlement class, AKA “renters”. The law has expanded to include rent stabilization. All that has been “controlled” and “stabilized” are the laws governing gravity. It’s easier to say, a la Reverend Wright, “God Damn the landlords”. Would I be ill thought of if I were to point out that there are far more tenants than there are landlords? 80 tenants to each landlord becomes a no-brainer on Election Day. Wasn’t it Red Smith who said “rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for U.S. Steel”? Landlords should consider themselves lucky that they haven’t been sent to Abu Ghraib or Camp Gitmo.
Doctor Johnson, the first great blogger, said that “any public policy that involves robbing Peter to pay Paul will always have Paul’s support”. We just can’t get away from Paul, can we?
The one great mantra of modern American Liberalism is equality and the never ending quest for it. Next up is fairness. That both mimic the horizon and Utopia in that one is never to be gotten to and the other literally means nowhere is no impediment to true believers. Sometimes they run into the Constitution. Equal protection under the law is a keystone of our traditions. The problem comes when some people are more equal than others.
When one citizen is able to jump the line and get first dibs on the perpetually lactating public teat it means someone else is going to have to do with less. The unintended consequence of it is that those denied their “fair share” use whatever means are necessary to protect what is on their side of the table. Patrick Kennedy is listed as the next trustee of a trust created in 1936 to benefit his father. His grandfather, Joe the Corsair, may have been a Hitler loving anti-Semite but that didn’t mean he was stupid when it came to taking care of his own. Thank god this lout is without issue or it would have gone to the 4th generation. Modern American Liberals are in love with the “death tax” save for when it reaches out and touches one of their own.
The lesson to be learned here is that tweaking the tax system, any tax system, in such a way that favors a class whose lamentations of impending doom should it not result in special treatment, ends in chaos, confusion, and resentment.
It is possible both to have our cake and eat it. We cannot eat our cake and have it.
I was never prouder to be a citizen of Florida then when we gave Constitutional protection to pregnant pigs. I don’t imagine that the Tea Party will soon be supporting manatee suffrage. The lesson here is that taxes reflect what we spend.
The component parts of the recently received tax bill are intentionally obfuscatory. It is as if the politicians, after doing what they were instructed to do by a caring, sensitive, environmentally conscious, culturally diverse out-reaching electorate, are somewhat embarrassed by the cost.
Alex Sink announces that she will cut all wasteful spending.
I have yet to hear back from her as to which of the existing programs she labels as “wasteful”. I am not sure what “cut” means from someone who was at the heart of the mortgage meltdown. That her boss was Hootie Johnson, the misogynistic mastermind of the Masters, is one of those little gems of public life that should be looked at by someone with a loupe and a scalpel.
The lesson is obvious. If you want to cut taxes you must cut spending.
What could be fairer?
It’s easy for a modern American Liberal to confuse the horse’s head with the horse’s ass. When you mount Dobbin its head should be in front of you.
Kevin Smith
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Commissioner Scott Newton, City Manager Joseph Gallegos
September 11, 2010
Commissioner Scott Newton
City Manager Joseph Gallegos
2020 Wilton Drive
Wilton Manors, FL 33305
RE: Is it a “slippery slope” or a “chilling effect”? – Some comments on the article in today’s Sun-Sentinel about “racist” E-mails.
Mr. Newton & Mr. Gallegos,
Commissioner Newton’s uncle Isaac only had to be hit once in the head by a falling apple to grasp the gravitas of gravity. The Commissioner apparently chains himself to the old apple tree trying to earn consideration for the next edition of the Guinness Book. His desired goal is to be known as a
HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK
[POLITICIAN CUM LITERARY CRITIC]
“Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”
We can stipulate that the E-mails were sent from computers owned by the City of Wilton Manors. Further, there was no realistic expectation of privacy.
One E-mail that was deemed racist and offensive was published in its entirety in today’s Sun-Sentinel. What Wilton Manors finds offensive the Sun-Sentinel doesn’t. Perhaps it is an example of “de gustibus…” Perhaps not.
Commissioner Newton says “there will be consequences”. He then adds that “the City Manager will do what is appropriate”.
City Manager Gallegos says “there will be consequences”.
The obvious question is who writes their material
Is Mr. Gallegos the official censor of Wilton Manors? If he is what special qualifications does he have for the task?
Does he know Lysistrata? Juvenal? Dante? Cervantes? Swift? Moliere? Toole?
I ask that, and this is going to shock you, because the First Amendment is in force even in Wilton Manors. The First Amendment begins with the majestic words “Congress shall make no law…”
What if I were to go the library on 26th Street in Wilton Manors and ask for a copy of Dick Gregory’s excellent autobiography? Would I be allowed to ask for it by its name? Its name is the “dreaded ‘N’ word”, the word that no White man dares use. [The only exception to this was Senator Byrd but since he just died we’ll forget about it] Would the librarian also be in trouble? Would there be “consequences”? Maybe you could double the sales tax on books with “offensive” or “racist” words in them. That way you could fund an obligatory class – like after you get a speeding ticket – to sensitize the insensitive. We keep raising the tax on tobacco. How about taxing the bejeezus out of “racist” or “offensive” speech.
Do we really need Mark Twain?
Hamlet, after seducing, ravaging, and then abandoning Ophelia, says to her, “Get thee to a nunnery”. In Shakespeare’s time “nunnery” meant whorehouse, like the one that Barney Frank ran in his cellar, remember? Will the City Manager take a stand against Shakespeare? I’ve always felt that King Lear was a bit over the top. Henry the Fifth’s speech at Harfleur is not exactly family friendly. The problem with Othello is that medieval miscegenation leads to murder. The first two, featuring violence, are offensive”,
The last one is “racist”.
Are those lessons lesson we want a post racial society to learn?
Will Gallegos become the new Will Hays?
There was a Chinese agrarian reformer who said “Let a thousand flowers bloom”.
Will Wilton Manors become the Grim Reaper of cutting edge thought?
I guess the modern day Catos would frown on a combination flag, bible, and a Holy Sacred Koran burning.
I don’t care if the “slippery slope” was a “shovel ready” project. It is starting to get mighty “chilling” out there.
Kevin Smith
PS – Since it all depends on whose Gore is being oxed is there any chance of avoiding “consequences” if we have a Koran burning if front of the library to protest Islamic homophobia?
Commissioner Scott Newton
City Manager Joseph Gallegos
2020 Wilton Drive
Wilton Manors, FL 33305
RE: Is it a “slippery slope” or a “chilling effect”? – Some comments on the article in today’s Sun-Sentinel about “racist” E-mails.
Mr. Newton & Mr. Gallegos,
Commissioner Newton’s uncle Isaac only had to be hit once in the head by a falling apple to grasp the gravitas of gravity. The Commissioner apparently chains himself to the old apple tree trying to earn consideration for the next edition of the Guinness Book. His desired goal is to be known as a
HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK
[POLITICIAN CUM LITERARY CRITIC]
“Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”
We can stipulate that the E-mails were sent from computers owned by the City of Wilton Manors. Further, there was no realistic expectation of privacy.
One E-mail that was deemed racist and offensive was published in its entirety in today’s Sun-Sentinel. What Wilton Manors finds offensive the Sun-Sentinel doesn’t. Perhaps it is an example of “de gustibus…” Perhaps not.
Commissioner Newton says “there will be consequences”. He then adds that “the City Manager will do what is appropriate”.
City Manager Gallegos says “there will be consequences”.
The obvious question is who writes their material
Is Mr. Gallegos the official censor of Wilton Manors? If he is what special qualifications does he have for the task?
Does he know Lysistrata? Juvenal? Dante? Cervantes? Swift? Moliere? Toole?
I ask that, and this is going to shock you, because the First Amendment is in force even in Wilton Manors. The First Amendment begins with the majestic words “Congress shall make no law…”
What if I were to go the library on 26th Street in Wilton Manors and ask for a copy of Dick Gregory’s excellent autobiography? Would I be allowed to ask for it by its name? Its name is the “dreaded ‘N’ word”, the word that no White man dares use. [The only exception to this was Senator Byrd but since he just died we’ll forget about it] Would the librarian also be in trouble? Would there be “consequences”? Maybe you could double the sales tax on books with “offensive” or “racist” words in them. That way you could fund an obligatory class – like after you get a speeding ticket – to sensitize the insensitive. We keep raising the tax on tobacco. How about taxing the bejeezus out of “racist” or “offensive” speech.
Do we really need Mark Twain?
Hamlet, after seducing, ravaging, and then abandoning Ophelia, says to her, “Get thee to a nunnery”. In Shakespeare’s time “nunnery” meant whorehouse, like the one that Barney Frank ran in his cellar, remember? Will the City Manager take a stand against Shakespeare? I’ve always felt that King Lear was a bit over the top. Henry the Fifth’s speech at Harfleur is not exactly family friendly. The problem with Othello is that medieval miscegenation leads to murder. The first two, featuring violence, are offensive”,
The last one is “racist”.
Are those lessons lesson we want a post racial society to learn?
Will Gallegos become the new Will Hays?
There was a Chinese agrarian reformer who said “Let a thousand flowers bloom”.
Will Wilton Manors become the Grim Reaper of cutting edge thought?
I guess the modern day Catos would frown on a combination flag, bible, and a Holy Sacred Koran burning.
I don’t care if the “slippery slope” was a “shovel ready” project. It is starting to get mighty “chilling” out there.
Kevin Smith
PS – Since it all depends on whose Gore is being oxed is there any chance of avoiding “consequences” if we have a Koran burning if front of the library to protest Islamic homophobia?
Monday, September 13, 2010
Jaweel Kaleem The Miami Herald
September 8, 2010
Jaweel Kaleem
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: There’s holy and then there’s holy – Some comments on your Page 1 story about literary recycling in Gainesville.
Mr/Ms Kaleem,
I still don’t know what gender you are. I do know that if you are female but it will pose no official impediment to your advancement in your profession here. If you are you can use it for rapid advancement. By the way, are there any female reporters with Page 1 stories in the Mecca Herald? Are there any female reporters anywhere in, let’s start with, Saudi Arabia. The Miami Herald had a reporter who wrote articles about the homosexual community in South Florida. His readers knew his sexual orientation. Are there any homosexual reporters, non-gender specific, in any country ruled by Muslims? Do you know whether La Cage aux Folles will be staged in Medina?
Should a Muslim homosexual couple living in Florida seek to adopt a child would they be fatwaed? Theo van Gogh was neither Muslim nor was he homosexual and he was cut up like a snitch from The Sopranos.
Fraud can be committed two ways. Commission is the most common way but omission, particularly of a material fact, makes you just as guilty. If you are a Muslim I think it is a material fact and should be disclosed.
Bernardo Oliveros was a native born Algerian. He was a Cistercian of Strict Observance, a Roman Catholic monastic order. They are also known as Trappists. Thomas Merton was the best known American Trappist. The Order can trace its roots back to Saint Benedict. You may not know it but Saint Benedict did all his work 100 years before the founding of Islam.
6 Muslim thugs hacked to him to death as he prayed in his chapel. They yelled “Allah Akbar” as the cut off his head, his arms, and his legs.
In a world saturated with something called moral relativism why is the murder of one presumptively holy man in a sacred place deemed less important than the destruction of one book? The Christian World did not rise up and kill Muslims in the streets because of this murder most foul. 12,000 miles away, in Indonesia, several thousand fanatical Muslims burned property belonging to Americans. And that was before any books were burned. What do they do for an encore? We know what they did to a Catholic priest in his chapel. Is what’s past prologue?
Would it be acceptable to burn a Christian bible in a country ruled under the precepts of Sharia Law?
I am told that there is an Islamic theological debate about what size rocks can be used when stoning an adulteress to death. If they are too big, or so I read, the harlot dies too quickly. If they are too small it takes to long for her to die. Do American Muslims have a position on this? If they have can you tell us what it is?
America sees Islam as a religion that permits no internal criticism. It reacts to external criticism with a feral ferocity that beggars description. A Dutch film maker is knifed to death on a city street. An American reporter has his head hacked off on TV. Where is the outrage at those evil deeds? When did the Imams condemn those acts?
Did Islam become a religion of peace after Tours? After Lepanto? After Vienna? After Omdurman?
There is a bit of humor to be found in this contretemps.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that everybody condemns the burning of the sacred, holy Koran. “Even”, she said, “Jewish Rabbis.” I didn’t think there was any other kind but, what the Hell, this is a big, noisy country with room enough for everybody, right? I can’t find any Buddhist or Shinto Rabbis. Are there any Muslim Rabbis? Should one appear would he [or she] be Sunni or Shia?
As a curmudgeonly White American Christian male I wish, “on the whole”, that T.E. Lawrence had stayed in Tunbridge Wells with Dryden.
Kevin Smith
PS - Speaking of “holy” and “sacred” why is Qom, a mud hut village in Iran, always called either “holy” or “sacred”? If Qom, a city that appears to be without the benefits either of indoor plumbing or modern dentistry is “holy” or “sacred”, where would Rome be on the “holy” or “sacred” scale? I mention Rome because since St. Peter’s Basilica was built Muslims have always said that they would stable their horses there.
Jaweel Kaleem
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: There’s holy and then there’s holy – Some comments on your Page 1 story about literary recycling in Gainesville.
Mr/Ms Kaleem,
I still don’t know what gender you are. I do know that if you are female but it will pose no official impediment to your advancement in your profession here. If you are you can use it for rapid advancement. By the way, are there any female reporters with Page 1 stories in the Mecca Herald? Are there any female reporters anywhere in, let’s start with, Saudi Arabia. The Miami Herald had a reporter who wrote articles about the homosexual community in South Florida. His readers knew his sexual orientation. Are there any homosexual reporters, non-gender specific, in any country ruled by Muslims? Do you know whether La Cage aux Folles will be staged in Medina?
Should a Muslim homosexual couple living in Florida seek to adopt a child would they be fatwaed? Theo van Gogh was neither Muslim nor was he homosexual and he was cut up like a snitch from The Sopranos.
Fraud can be committed two ways. Commission is the most common way but omission, particularly of a material fact, makes you just as guilty. If you are a Muslim I think it is a material fact and should be disclosed.
Bernardo Oliveros was a native born Algerian. He was a Cistercian of Strict Observance, a Roman Catholic monastic order. They are also known as Trappists. Thomas Merton was the best known American Trappist. The Order can trace its roots back to Saint Benedict. You may not know it but Saint Benedict did all his work 100 years before the founding of Islam.
6 Muslim thugs hacked to him to death as he prayed in his chapel. They yelled “Allah Akbar” as the cut off his head, his arms, and his legs.
In a world saturated with something called moral relativism why is the murder of one presumptively holy man in a sacred place deemed less important than the destruction of one book? The Christian World did not rise up and kill Muslims in the streets because of this murder most foul. 12,000 miles away, in Indonesia, several thousand fanatical Muslims burned property belonging to Americans. And that was before any books were burned. What do they do for an encore? We know what they did to a Catholic priest in his chapel. Is what’s past prologue?
Would it be acceptable to burn a Christian bible in a country ruled under the precepts of Sharia Law?
I am told that there is an Islamic theological debate about what size rocks can be used when stoning an adulteress to death. If they are too big, or so I read, the harlot dies too quickly. If they are too small it takes to long for her to die. Do American Muslims have a position on this? If they have can you tell us what it is?
America sees Islam as a religion that permits no internal criticism. It reacts to external criticism with a feral ferocity that beggars description. A Dutch film maker is knifed to death on a city street. An American reporter has his head hacked off on TV. Where is the outrage at those evil deeds? When did the Imams condemn those acts?
Did Islam become a religion of peace after Tours? After Lepanto? After Vienna? After Omdurman?
There is a bit of humor to be found in this contretemps.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that everybody condemns the burning of the sacred, holy Koran. “Even”, she said, “Jewish Rabbis.” I didn’t think there was any other kind but, what the Hell, this is a big, noisy country with room enough for everybody, right? I can’t find any Buddhist or Shinto Rabbis. Are there any Muslim Rabbis? Should one appear would he [or she] be Sunni or Shia?
As a curmudgeonly White American Christian male I wish, “on the whole”, that T.E. Lawrence had stayed in Tunbridge Wells with Dryden.
Kevin Smith
PS - Speaking of “holy” and “sacred” why is Qom, a mud hut village in Iran, always called either “holy” or “sacred”? If Qom, a city that appears to be without the benefits either of indoor plumbing or modern dentistry is “holy” or “sacred”, where would Rome be on the “holy” or “sacred” scale? I mention Rome because since St. Peter’s Basilica was built Muslims have always said that they would stable their horses there.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Amy Sherman The Miami Herald
September 6, 2010
Amy Sherman
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: “Sticks and stones may break my bones…” – Is there a benefit to being thin skinned in a time when people line up to say that they want to kill us? Some comments of your Historical naïveté as shown in your article in the Miami Herald this morning.
Ms. Sherman,
Historians have said that the battle of Shiloh was like a “fist fight with guns”. The hero of Shiloh, the man who changed the Civil War, the man who ended the Civil War 18 months quicker than anyone thought was possible, was named Sherman. Any chance you are related to him?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Would you be so kind as to pass this along to Congressman Klein?
I say “pass it along” because even though I am a constituent of his he has stopped responding to my letters.
I trust you will see that my letter is clear and that it pays proper respect to grammar, style, and syntax.
You quote Congressman Klein thus:
“Some in Congress talk about taking money out of Social Security
and paying down the deficit or the war in Afghanistan,” said Klein.
I find it astonishing that Congressman Klein does not know that the Federal government has been doing that since 1964.
Each and every dollar taken from American employees and American employers since 1964 has gone directly into the general account of the United States government. Once a year the Treasury figures out how much it has taken and issues a chit, a marker, an IOU to the trustees of the Social Security system. The note says that it is payable on demand. It then goes into the legendary “lock box”. That’s the one that is stored safely on Mars. Some years it is sent to Uranus. Far up Uranus.
If the Miami Herald has a pension plan ask the Human Resources director what would happen if your employer did that?
I can tell you that the people who run the Herald would be frog marched out of the building in shackles.
By saying that “some in Congress want to take money out of Social Security” when Congress has been doing that for 46 years makes Congressman Klein a mountebank and a charlatan who is the political equivalent of a Bernie Madoff or a Scott Rothstein. The only other possibility is that he is a HORSE’S ASS of incalculable dimensions. Since he managed to be both a Florida legislator AND a registered lobbyist of the legislature of which he was a member I would put him in the Ponzi cheerleader class.
How about the Herald having a candidate’s night before the election? All the candidates could gather around a symbolic lock box on October 31st and say, a capella, “Anything for Halloween”. Perhaps you could have a distinguished Herald alumnus open the box. He would have to be in good shape because a bunch of clever Chinamen clutching T-Bills will come charging out yelling “Show me the money”.
As to the campaign being “more about insults than ideas” I find it astonishing that political reporters are so lacking in knowledge on the tome and tenor of political campaigns in this country.
In 218 years of national campaigns we have had exactly 2 that were absent [mostly] insults. They were when George Washington, AKA “The Father of his Country” ran.
The election of 1800 still holds the record for dirty campaigns. And to think that they did it before e-mails and twitters. In fact they did it when you needed Ben Franklin’s kite to get electricity. It is well to note that two giants of American History – Adams and Jefferson – went at each other like 2 cats in a bag.
Abraham Lincoln was routinely and regularly called a “baboon”. This may shock you but the Democratic Party and the New York Times acquiesced in this.
1876 was like afternoon TV when it cost $12 and took 45 days to get a letter from New York to San Francisco.
In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt told the German-American Mayor of Milwaukee that there was lamp post with his name on it.
1916 was the most bigoted campaign ever. If we are to believe Justice Marshall Woodrow Wilson lived up to and surpassed his hard won title as the most racist President in the 20th century.
The facts, post election, would support the conclusion that three times in the 20th century – 1916, 1940, and 1964 – the Democratic candidates for President, the winning Democratic candidates for President, lied to the American people about future involvement in foreign wars. You can look it up.
I disagree with Colonel West calling Congressman Klein, a hero of modern American Liberalism, a “momma’s boy”. In Florida there is only one candidate who deserves that title. Congressman Kendrick Meek inherited his seat from his mother. A serendipitous uptick for him and her was that he avoided the death tax by inheriting it while she was living.
Mud slinging is as American as apple pie.
Kevin Smith
Amy Sherman
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: “Sticks and stones may break my bones…” – Is there a benefit to being thin skinned in a time when people line up to say that they want to kill us? Some comments of your Historical naïveté as shown in your article in the Miami Herald this morning.
Ms. Sherman,
Historians have said that the battle of Shiloh was like a “fist fight with guns”. The hero of Shiloh, the man who changed the Civil War, the man who ended the Civil War 18 months quicker than anyone thought was possible, was named Sherman. Any chance you are related to him?
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Would you be so kind as to pass this along to Congressman Klein?
I say “pass it along” because even though I am a constituent of his he has stopped responding to my letters.
I trust you will see that my letter is clear and that it pays proper respect to grammar, style, and syntax.
You quote Congressman Klein thus:
“Some in Congress talk about taking money out of Social Security
and paying down the deficit or the war in Afghanistan,” said Klein.
I find it astonishing that Congressman Klein does not know that the Federal government has been doing that since 1964.
Each and every dollar taken from American employees and American employers since 1964 has gone directly into the general account of the United States government. Once a year the Treasury figures out how much it has taken and issues a chit, a marker, an IOU to the trustees of the Social Security system. The note says that it is payable on demand. It then goes into the legendary “lock box”. That’s the one that is stored safely on Mars. Some years it is sent to Uranus. Far up Uranus.
If the Miami Herald has a pension plan ask the Human Resources director what would happen if your employer did that?
I can tell you that the people who run the Herald would be frog marched out of the building in shackles.
By saying that “some in Congress want to take money out of Social Security” when Congress has been doing that for 46 years makes Congressman Klein a mountebank and a charlatan who is the political equivalent of a Bernie Madoff or a Scott Rothstein. The only other possibility is that he is a HORSE’S ASS of incalculable dimensions. Since he managed to be both a Florida legislator AND a registered lobbyist of the legislature of which he was a member I would put him in the Ponzi cheerleader class.
How about the Herald having a candidate’s night before the election? All the candidates could gather around a symbolic lock box on October 31st and say, a capella, “Anything for Halloween”. Perhaps you could have a distinguished Herald alumnus open the box. He would have to be in good shape because a bunch of clever Chinamen clutching T-Bills will come charging out yelling “Show me the money”.
As to the campaign being “more about insults than ideas” I find it astonishing that political reporters are so lacking in knowledge on the tome and tenor of political campaigns in this country.
In 218 years of national campaigns we have had exactly 2 that were absent [mostly] insults. They were when George Washington, AKA “The Father of his Country” ran.
The election of 1800 still holds the record for dirty campaigns. And to think that they did it before e-mails and twitters. In fact they did it when you needed Ben Franklin’s kite to get electricity. It is well to note that two giants of American History – Adams and Jefferson – went at each other like 2 cats in a bag.
Abraham Lincoln was routinely and regularly called a “baboon”. This may shock you but the Democratic Party and the New York Times acquiesced in this.
1876 was like afternoon TV when it cost $12 and took 45 days to get a letter from New York to San Francisco.
In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt told the German-American Mayor of Milwaukee that there was lamp post with his name on it.
1916 was the most bigoted campaign ever. If we are to believe Justice Marshall Woodrow Wilson lived up to and surpassed his hard won title as the most racist President in the 20th century.
The facts, post election, would support the conclusion that three times in the 20th century – 1916, 1940, and 1964 – the Democratic candidates for President, the winning Democratic candidates for President, lied to the American people about future involvement in foreign wars. You can look it up.
I disagree with Colonel West calling Congressman Klein, a hero of modern American Liberalism, a “momma’s boy”. In Florida there is only one candidate who deserves that title. Congressman Kendrick Meek inherited his seat from his mother. A serendipitous uptick for him and her was that he avoided the death tax by inheriting it while she was living.
Mud slinging is as American as apple pie.
Kevin Smith
E.J. Dionne The Washington Post
September 6, 2010
E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20017
RE: “I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill” and why your almost lachrymose column about the never existed Wonder World of unions in today’s Miami Herald was straight from Central Casting.
Mr. Dionne,
Other than raising the minimum wage as a way to increase employment and why the Davis-Bacon Act is, despite the fact that it was the most racist law ever passed by Congress in the 20th century, still good for the “working man” you hit all the major notes of Workers of the World Unite.
Whenever I read a modern American Liberal talking about the glory days of the Wobblies and other similar banal tripe it is a chalk bet [“chalk bet”? – Send a SASE] that he doesn’t which end of the shovel is the business end. Further, it is a lock that he never paid union dues to anything but SAG, AFTRA, the Writers’ Guild, or Local 12 of the Amalgamated Tree Huggers and Manatee Suffrage Supporters.
Let the record show that I paid dues to two unions – Retail Clerks and the Teamsters – and that I negotiated with another – the UMW – for several years. [On several occasions I paid my Teamster dues to the Local President, Anthony Provenzano, AKA “Tony Pro”, but that’s a story for a different time.]
You say, in a way that only mush brained modern American Liberals can ???, that the “extraordinary prosperity” of post World War 2 America was due “significantly” to “union contracts…that spread the wealth around”.
I’ll say this for you.
You’ve got your shibboleth wrapped head so far up your ass that you could give yourself a pneumonectomy.
I’ll focus on one.
Before wealth can be “spread around” it must first be “created”.
Since there is no record anywhere or anytime of any country taxing itself into prosperity when Lord Barack the Beneficent told Joe the Plumber, an authentic American Blue Collar hero, that that’s what he was going to do he was/is as much an economic tomnoddy as you. It will be of no use passing a new stimulus bill without passing a law that repeals all the rules governing gravity. The key part of that law is where it says that “rocks are hard…and objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center…”
His concern with cutting the economic pie more “fairly” forgets, in typical modern American Liberal fashion, that you must first bake a bigger “pie”.
Speaking of unions….
Detroit was the paradigmatic template of union towns.
What the Hell happened?
Kevin Smith
PS – My lunch used to be at 1:00 AM at the Tunnel Diner in Jersey City, NJ. The way to get an extra slice of meat loaf on my plate was to be particularly sweaty and dirty. Since you grew up in a “union town” where was your Tunnel Diner? Just one more question. I’ve written to Michael Moore and Oliver Stone about it. Alas, neither has answered. If you know would you please tell me? Did Hugo Chavez, the noted Venezuelan Labor leader and resident thug, have an uncle, the late lamented Labor leader and lover of California lettuce, named Cesar Chavez?
E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20017
RE: “I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill” and why your almost lachrymose column about the never existed Wonder World of unions in today’s Miami Herald was straight from Central Casting.
Mr. Dionne,
Other than raising the minimum wage as a way to increase employment and why the Davis-Bacon Act is, despite the fact that it was the most racist law ever passed by Congress in the 20th century, still good for the “working man” you hit all the major notes of Workers of the World Unite.
Whenever I read a modern American Liberal talking about the glory days of the Wobblies and other similar banal tripe it is a chalk bet [“chalk bet”? – Send a SASE] that he doesn’t which end of the shovel is the business end. Further, it is a lock that he never paid union dues to anything but SAG, AFTRA, the Writers’ Guild, or Local 12 of the Amalgamated Tree Huggers and Manatee Suffrage Supporters.
Let the record show that I paid dues to two unions – Retail Clerks and the Teamsters – and that I negotiated with another – the UMW – for several years. [On several occasions I paid my Teamster dues to the Local President, Anthony Provenzano, AKA “Tony Pro”, but that’s a story for a different time.]
You say, in a way that only mush brained modern American Liberals can ???, that the “extraordinary prosperity” of post World War 2 America was due “significantly” to “union contracts…that spread the wealth around”.
I’ll say this for you.
You’ve got your shibboleth wrapped head so far up your ass that you could give yourself a pneumonectomy.
I’ll focus on one.
Before wealth can be “spread around” it must first be “created”.
Since there is no record anywhere or anytime of any country taxing itself into prosperity when Lord Barack the Beneficent told Joe the Plumber, an authentic American Blue Collar hero, that that’s what he was going to do he was/is as much an economic tomnoddy as you. It will be of no use passing a new stimulus bill without passing a law that repeals all the rules governing gravity. The key part of that law is where it says that “rocks are hard…and objects unsupported fall towards the earth’s center…”
His concern with cutting the economic pie more “fairly” forgets, in typical modern American Liberal fashion, that you must first bake a bigger “pie”.
Speaking of unions….
Detroit was the paradigmatic template of union towns.
What the Hell happened?
Kevin Smith
PS – My lunch used to be at 1:00 AM at the Tunnel Diner in Jersey City, NJ. The way to get an extra slice of meat loaf on my plate was to be particularly sweaty and dirty. Since you grew up in a “union town” where was your Tunnel Diner? Just one more question. I’ve written to Michael Moore and Oliver Stone about it. Alas, neither has answered. If you know would you please tell me? Did Hugo Chavez, the noted Venezuelan Labor leader and resident thug, have an uncle, the late lamented Labor leader and lover of California lettuce, named Cesar Chavez?
Saturday, September 4, 2010
Margaret Carlson Bloomberg News
September 3, 2010
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg News
1399 New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005
RE: Addenda – never errata - on candidates with “slim credentials”
Ms. Carlson,
In my haste to keelhaul Congressman Patrick “Little Shit” Kennedy, an endeavor which Christian charity demands that I place a limit on myself – How many baby seals can I harvest before “wretched excess” sets in? – I left out two things.
#1 – It pains me to say it but he does have a legacy. He has left footprints for others to follow. I have long pondered what the benchmarks, the paradigmatic templates, the “God but I want to be just like him” were for two of our mast revered youth. The two I am thinking of were able to overcome the rocky road of a privileged upbringing. It doesn’t take long to get used to someone cutting the crust off your toast or straining your orange juice lest you encounter some feral pits. That they have made a model for other similarly situated youths to follow is a tribute to the Prince of Pinheads, Congressman Patrick, the Perpetual Putz, Kennedy.
PARIS HILTON & LINDSAY LOHAN
COME ON DOWN!
#2 – Was there ever a more “slim credentialed” candidate than his father? Lard Kennedy raised the bar so high it could only be topped by someone as good as himself. Since acorns never fall far from the tree it was only fitting and proper that his son reclaimed the ancient Golden Fleece. I feel uncomfortable implying anything Herculean when speaking of those two poltroons. Let me amend that. Herculean would apply to their appetites; never to their achievements.
Let’s take a look at Dad
Fatso Teddy spent the end of the Korean War as a GI not in Korea but in Paris. A little bird is whispering in my ear that Poppa Joe, the World Famous Corsair, had something to do with that.
He got tossed out of two schools for cheating. The only serious contender for that laurel was when Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., he of “unreleased shakra” and “sex crazed poodle” fame, flunked out of two graduate schools in one semester. Now that’s a record worthy of Guinness consideration!
Edward Moore Slojanowski? Edward Moore Goldstein? Edward Moore Obama?
Put any of those names on the Massachusetts ballot in 1962. Even the dead wouldn’t have voted for him. The loutish bastard probably wouldn’t have voted for himself.
The only way he would have gotten to the United States Senate would have been as Exhibit A for raising the drinking age to 46 or as a probationary John mopper.
He killed someone. Since he was already in the Senate when she was killed it wouldn’t be fair to mention her so I won’t
Little Patsy, Young Turd to his fans, had two uncles who did positive things before they were elected.
His Uncle John “saw the elephant” He led men in combat.
His Uncle Bobby worked for Senator McCarthy – That’s Joe of Wisconsin, not Gene of Minnesota – before turning to procreating full time. His second job as a lawyer was being named Attorney General of the United States. His most notable achievement was wire tapping Martin Luther King. His record for superior achievement was not topped until Janet Reno began her illustrious career by charbroiling some 7 dozen of her fellow citizens at Waco.
And you say Ben Quayle has “slim credentials”?
“I’ll retire to Bedlam.”
Kevin Smith
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg News
1399 New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005
RE: Addenda – never errata - on candidates with “slim credentials”
Ms. Carlson,
In my haste to keelhaul Congressman Patrick “Little Shit” Kennedy, an endeavor which Christian charity demands that I place a limit on myself – How many baby seals can I harvest before “wretched excess” sets in? – I left out two things.
#1 – It pains me to say it but he does have a legacy. He has left footprints for others to follow. I have long pondered what the benchmarks, the paradigmatic templates, the “God but I want to be just like him” were for two of our mast revered youth. The two I am thinking of were able to overcome the rocky road of a privileged upbringing. It doesn’t take long to get used to someone cutting the crust off your toast or straining your orange juice lest you encounter some feral pits. That they have made a model for other similarly situated youths to follow is a tribute to the Prince of Pinheads, Congressman Patrick, the Perpetual Putz, Kennedy.
PARIS HILTON & LINDSAY LOHAN
COME ON DOWN!
#2 – Was there ever a more “slim credentialed” candidate than his father? Lard Kennedy raised the bar so high it could only be topped by someone as good as himself. Since acorns never fall far from the tree it was only fitting and proper that his son reclaimed the ancient Golden Fleece. I feel uncomfortable implying anything Herculean when speaking of those two poltroons. Let me amend that. Herculean would apply to their appetites; never to their achievements.
Let’s take a look at Dad
Fatso Teddy spent the end of the Korean War as a GI not in Korea but in Paris. A little bird is whispering in my ear that Poppa Joe, the World Famous Corsair, had something to do with that.
He got tossed out of two schools for cheating. The only serious contender for that laurel was when Albert Arnold Gore, Jr., he of “unreleased shakra” and “sex crazed poodle” fame, flunked out of two graduate schools in one semester. Now that’s a record worthy of Guinness consideration!
Edward Moore Slojanowski? Edward Moore Goldstein? Edward Moore Obama?
Put any of those names on the Massachusetts ballot in 1962. Even the dead wouldn’t have voted for him. The loutish bastard probably wouldn’t have voted for himself.
The only way he would have gotten to the United States Senate would have been as Exhibit A for raising the drinking age to 46 or as a probationary John mopper.
He killed someone. Since he was already in the Senate when she was killed it wouldn’t be fair to mention her so I won’t
Little Patsy, Young Turd to his fans, had two uncles who did positive things before they were elected.
His Uncle John “saw the elephant” He led men in combat.
His Uncle Bobby worked for Senator McCarthy – That’s Joe of Wisconsin, not Gene of Minnesota – before turning to procreating full time. His second job as a lawyer was being named Attorney General of the United States. His most notable achievement was wire tapping Martin Luther King. His record for superior achievement was not topped until Janet Reno began her illustrious career by charbroiling some 7 dozen of her fellow citizens at Waco.
And you say Ben Quayle has “slim credentials”?
“I’ll retire to Bedlam.”
Kevin Smith
Margaret Carlson Bloomberg News
September 2, 2010
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg News
1399 New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005
RE: “slim credentialed” candidates and what are we do about them. Some comments on your column of August 30
Ms. Carlson,
Lest you think me a stalker I usually limit myself to but once a week poleaxing of modern American Liberal ink stained wenches. It’s almost like spiking baby seals. Then I read your column about candidates with “slim credentials”. I know it’s dark and dangerous work but when you dress up like a piñata it becomes my duty to get out my Louisville slugger and eschew the blindfold. Your “slim credentialed” candidate was Ben Quayle. You say his most notable accomplishment is being the son of a “poor speller”.
“Slim credentials” pose no impediment to success in American politics.
What exactly did Barack Obama do before he became President?
He has a law degree from a prestigious university. Did he ever handle a real estate closing, a closing where an elderly relative – usually female – shows up at 4:00 on Friday with a sack filled with cash so her nephew could buy his first house? Did he ever try any felony cases? Did he ever win in Appellate Court? Was he General Counsel to a Fortune 500 company, a company that had to deal with a perpetual bête noire, the United States Government?
How successful was his time as a street organizer in Chicago? Since no one seemed to mind when Bush was compared to Hitler, the 20th century’s most notable street organizer, would it be totally out of line to say that Barack learned from Adolph? Did he toss the Mayor out? Did he change the way Chicago was governed? Did the Cook County Courthouse boys send him to Springfield because he was too good? If he did such a great job there why would he move 200 miles away? Chicago has a murder rate on par with Monterey and Kabul. How good could he have been?
He set a record in the Illinois legislature for not voting. Ever time there was vote the clerk automatically entered “present”. I’ll give him this. At least he wasn’t indicted. In Cook County that’s half way to sainthood.
He was in the United States Senate long enough for his wife to “feel proud”. Has anyone ever asked what or who she did to get a $4,000 a week raise? Her annual salary was increased by $200,000. Then he became President. Would you believe that her job, whatever it was, has been vacant since she moved to Washington?
Like I said, “slim credentials” are no impediment to success in America.
Before I enter the firing coordinates on the above target I must tell you that your comment on Ben Quayle being the son of a “poor speller” prompted an internet search.
His father, a man whose “shakra” quotient is unknown, a man who does not meet the breed standards of a “love crazed poodle”, won a gold medal in grammar school for geography. Memorizing 50 state capitols was hard enough. 57 or was it 58 would have been impossible especially since they don’t exist.
Since I can’t disprove it – a form of Logic that propels modern American Liberals to their imbecilely asinine conclusions - I believe that Ben’s father was a runner up in a foreign language contest in high school. One of the questions, a trick question to be sure, concerned the languages spoken in Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland. He nailed it. He even knew which part of Belgium spoke Walloon.
There is no record of his father standing in front of TV cameras for 30 minutes repeating, repeating, repeating, “There is no controlling legal authority”. There is also no record of his father raising $300,000 from discalced mendicant Buddhist nuns. The good sisters paid, if memory serves, by credit card. A sin, but only a venial one by modern American Liberal standards.
But wait. There’s more.
When speaking of “slim credentials” we must go the modern American Liberal paradigmatic template. Congressman Patrick Kennedy, AKA “Pea Brain” and/or “Pinhead”, and the Grand Emperor Emeritus, the President for Life of the Lucky Sperm Club is so God Damn “slim credentialed” that a chest x-ray shows nothing.
Bad enough that he is universally known as a little shit he compounds it exponentially by being a hypocritical little shit.
How does someone baptized by the Pope, a person who was graduated from a Catholic college, someone whose family wears not only its Catholic heart on its sleeve but has its Catholic Sacred Heart tattooed onto its family crest get a 100 grade from the National Abortion Rights League? Providence College, his alma mater, has Thomas Aquinas as one its intellectual forebears. One of his models said, “Something cannot be that which it is not”. I can’t speak to the condition of his soul but it is impossible to be a practicing Roman Catholic and be in the NARAL Hall of Fame. You are in one or you are in the other. You can’t be in both. Think of it this way: You can have your cake and eat it but you can’t eat your cake and have it. Maybe that’s why he is a big fan of adult pharmaceuticals.
At least his father set some records for hedonism in the Congress that should stand for a long time. “Patches” was elected to the Rhode Island legislature when he was still in college. It speaks ill of his classmates that would do anything, including inflicting him on the good people of Rhode Island, to get him out of the dormitory. On the other hand how many verses of Kumbaya could you stand in one day before you contemplated defenestration?
He would need lessons in how to mess up a two car funeral or how to ruin a wet dream.
His most notable accomplishment has been adhering to a save the world, save the rain forest, save drowning polar bears, save the manatees, save Tibet, save the ozone layer, save whoever needs saving by remaining childless.
I know it can’t be the Last of the Kennedys but one root gone dry and barren in the fertile soil of “slim credentialed” candidates is a good start, right?
Kevin Smith
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg News
1399 New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005
RE: “slim credentialed” candidates and what are we do about them. Some comments on your column of August 30
Ms. Carlson,
Lest you think me a stalker I usually limit myself to but once a week poleaxing of modern American Liberal ink stained wenches. It’s almost like spiking baby seals. Then I read your column about candidates with “slim credentials”. I know it’s dark and dangerous work but when you dress up like a piñata it becomes my duty to get out my Louisville slugger and eschew the blindfold. Your “slim credentialed” candidate was Ben Quayle. You say his most notable accomplishment is being the son of a “poor speller”.
“Slim credentials” pose no impediment to success in American politics.
What exactly did Barack Obama do before he became President?
He has a law degree from a prestigious university. Did he ever handle a real estate closing, a closing where an elderly relative – usually female – shows up at 4:00 on Friday with a sack filled with cash so her nephew could buy his first house? Did he ever try any felony cases? Did he ever win in Appellate Court? Was he General Counsel to a Fortune 500 company, a company that had to deal with a perpetual bête noire, the United States Government?
How successful was his time as a street organizer in Chicago? Since no one seemed to mind when Bush was compared to Hitler, the 20th century’s most notable street organizer, would it be totally out of line to say that Barack learned from Adolph? Did he toss the Mayor out? Did he change the way Chicago was governed? Did the Cook County Courthouse boys send him to Springfield because he was too good? If he did such a great job there why would he move 200 miles away? Chicago has a murder rate on par with Monterey and Kabul. How good could he have been?
He set a record in the Illinois legislature for not voting. Ever time there was vote the clerk automatically entered “present”. I’ll give him this. At least he wasn’t indicted. In Cook County that’s half way to sainthood.
He was in the United States Senate long enough for his wife to “feel proud”. Has anyone ever asked what or who she did to get a $4,000 a week raise? Her annual salary was increased by $200,000. Then he became President. Would you believe that her job, whatever it was, has been vacant since she moved to Washington?
Like I said, “slim credentials” are no impediment to success in America.
Before I enter the firing coordinates on the above target I must tell you that your comment on Ben Quayle being the son of a “poor speller” prompted an internet search.
His father, a man whose “shakra” quotient is unknown, a man who does not meet the breed standards of a “love crazed poodle”, won a gold medal in grammar school for geography. Memorizing 50 state capitols was hard enough. 57 or was it 58 would have been impossible especially since they don’t exist.
Since I can’t disprove it – a form of Logic that propels modern American Liberals to their imbecilely asinine conclusions - I believe that Ben’s father was a runner up in a foreign language contest in high school. One of the questions, a trick question to be sure, concerned the languages spoken in Belgium, Austria, and Switzerland. He nailed it. He even knew which part of Belgium spoke Walloon.
There is no record of his father standing in front of TV cameras for 30 minutes repeating, repeating, repeating, “There is no controlling legal authority”. There is also no record of his father raising $300,000 from discalced mendicant Buddhist nuns. The good sisters paid, if memory serves, by credit card. A sin, but only a venial one by modern American Liberal standards.
But wait. There’s more.
When speaking of “slim credentials” we must go the modern American Liberal paradigmatic template. Congressman Patrick Kennedy, AKA “Pea Brain” and/or “Pinhead”, and the Grand Emperor Emeritus, the President for Life of the Lucky Sperm Club is so God Damn “slim credentialed” that a chest x-ray shows nothing.
Bad enough that he is universally known as a little shit he compounds it exponentially by being a hypocritical little shit.
How does someone baptized by the Pope, a person who was graduated from a Catholic college, someone whose family wears not only its Catholic heart on its sleeve but has its Catholic Sacred Heart tattooed onto its family crest get a 100 grade from the National Abortion Rights League? Providence College, his alma mater, has Thomas Aquinas as one its intellectual forebears. One of his models said, “Something cannot be that which it is not”. I can’t speak to the condition of his soul but it is impossible to be a practicing Roman Catholic and be in the NARAL Hall of Fame. You are in one or you are in the other. You can’t be in both. Think of it this way: You can have your cake and eat it but you can’t eat your cake and have it. Maybe that’s why he is a big fan of adult pharmaceuticals.
At least his father set some records for hedonism in the Congress that should stand for a long time. “Patches” was elected to the Rhode Island legislature when he was still in college. It speaks ill of his classmates that would do anything, including inflicting him on the good people of Rhode Island, to get him out of the dormitory. On the other hand how many verses of Kumbaya could you stand in one day before you contemplated defenestration?
He would need lessons in how to mess up a two car funeral or how to ruin a wet dream.
His most notable accomplishment has been adhering to a save the world, save the rain forest, save drowning polar bears, save the manatees, save Tibet, save the ozone layer, save whoever needs saving by remaining childless.
I know it can’t be the Last of the Kennedys but one root gone dry and barren in the fertile soil of “slim credentialed” candidates is a good start, right?
Kevin Smith
Stephen L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel
August 29, 2010
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: “God is not for man to scan; the proper study of mankind is man” – I love quoting Pope, Alexander, not The. Some comments on candidates and education all of which were caused by your delightful column this morning.
My dear Professor;
“The rest of us mortals need to ask God to save
us from what Jeb and Mario are about to do
to students and schools in
her
name.”
The Sun-Sentinel
Today
You
The italics are mine. Jeb is the sainted former Governor Jeb Bush. Mario is Mario Rubio, the next Senator.
First, a style point, and then a multicultural observation.
Like the unemployed teacher who can’t find a job anywhere answered when asked by a prospective employer whether the world was flat or round, “I’m not sure but I’m prepared to teach it either way”, the raging question of God’s gender is not clear. The style point is that if God, whatever the shape or form, is divine your her should be Her.
The other point, the one with the multicultural “I love diversity and why can’t we all get along” mantra, is that I don’t think our Muslim brethren, including peace loving moderates, are quite ready for Allah to be, you know what I’m saying, a Cosmo Girl. These people are having a serious theological debate as to the size of stones to be used when stoning [to death]”a woman taken in adultery”. The suggestion that Allah will be entering the next Miss Universe contest in preparation for Her campaign to be the next Playmate of the Year is one I don’t you should be making or even implying, particularly in the holy month of Ramadan. I wouldn’t want someone to fly a plane into the Sun-Sentinel building to try to reason with you.
As to education…if moneys spent per pupil became the sole criterion that determined the quality of an education why are the schools in the District of Columbia not turning out 3 or 4 Nobel Prize winners a year? Every year.
Alas, this is not the case.
I have one solution... Quien sabe? It may work. If it doesn’t at least we tried.
Will you join me in mandating that all children living in public housing in the District of Columbia must – no exceptions, none – attend pubic schools? The first ones on the yellow bus will be the Obama girls. That’s something you can get behind, hopefully no too far behind, isn’t it?
Did you know that Congressman Kendrick Meek’s children attend private school in the District of Columbia?
Did you know that Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s children attend private school in Broward County?
I’ll say this about modern American Liberals, and certainly those 2 must be considered in the top 10, they never let you down.
One of the most dangerous places in South Florida – no, not Liberty City or Overtown – is to be between Congressgal Debbie, Debbie and a semi thug from any teachers’ union in election season. As soon as that red light went on she is praising the underpaid, overworked teachers. All in time for the 6:00 news.
Mama’s Boy Meek raises an interesting point.
If we are to believe his press releases his children attend private schools close to the Potomac River. That’s the one between Maryland and Viriginia.
Congressman Toad Wexler [D-FL&MD] lived a double life for ten years. He represented a district in Palm Beach County while he lived and his children attended school in Maryland. Anonymous sources say that he resigned a step ahead of the Grand Jury having him in for a chat about violating election laws.
Has anyone ever seen Congressman Meek’s Florida license?
If he and his wife filed a joint tax return has anyone ever seen the address on it?
Meanwhile, in an example of why we should have ongoing “bag tests” for both candidates and elected officials, both of these churls continue to champion the causes of borrowing still more money from the Chinese to pay for salaries at schools that they would rather have hot needles stuck in their eyes or get a blood transfusion from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin than have their children attend.
It is always good to quote James Madison. Doubly so since we are near to Constitution Day.
When asked what was the most important quality to look for in a
candidate for any public office his reply is still valid 2 centuries later.
“Character. Character is all.”
Would not their public stand versus their private choice on schools indicate that they are sadly lacking in character? Since their behavior is typical of modern American Liberals perhaps they should be held up as templates for the breed. Let the breed standards read
“Nothing lost save honor”
Kevin Smith
PS – In 1992 President George Bush’s apparent unfamiliarity with supermarket checkout price scanners was looked on as a disqualifying factor in the election. Am I the only one to comment on Congressman Meek’s trip to the Jewish deli in Miami with President Barack the Beneficent? Corned beef on rye with mayo? Isn’t that about a half step from supporting the mosque at Ground Zero? Meanwhile see if you can get some of those Mohammed cartoons, the ones with a feminine touch, like the one of him shagging a nanny goat.
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: “God is not for man to scan; the proper study of mankind is man” – I love quoting Pope, Alexander, not The. Some comments on candidates and education all of which were caused by your delightful column this morning.
My dear Professor;
“The rest of us mortals need to ask God to save
us from what Jeb and Mario are about to do
to students and schools in
her
name.”
The Sun-Sentinel
Today
You
The italics are mine. Jeb is the sainted former Governor Jeb Bush. Mario is Mario Rubio, the next Senator.
First, a style point, and then a multicultural observation.
Like the unemployed teacher who can’t find a job anywhere answered when asked by a prospective employer whether the world was flat or round, “I’m not sure but I’m prepared to teach it either way”, the raging question of God’s gender is not clear. The style point is that if God, whatever the shape or form, is divine your her should be Her.
The other point, the one with the multicultural “I love diversity and why can’t we all get along” mantra, is that I don’t think our Muslim brethren, including peace loving moderates, are quite ready for Allah to be, you know what I’m saying, a Cosmo Girl. These people are having a serious theological debate as to the size of stones to be used when stoning [to death]”a woman taken in adultery”. The suggestion that Allah will be entering the next Miss Universe contest in preparation for Her campaign to be the next Playmate of the Year is one I don’t you should be making or even implying, particularly in the holy month of Ramadan. I wouldn’t want someone to fly a plane into the Sun-Sentinel building to try to reason with you.
As to education…if moneys spent per pupil became the sole criterion that determined the quality of an education why are the schools in the District of Columbia not turning out 3 or 4 Nobel Prize winners a year? Every year.
Alas, this is not the case.
I have one solution... Quien sabe? It may work. If it doesn’t at least we tried.
Will you join me in mandating that all children living in public housing in the District of Columbia must – no exceptions, none – attend pubic schools? The first ones on the yellow bus will be the Obama girls. That’s something you can get behind, hopefully no too far behind, isn’t it?
Did you know that Congressman Kendrick Meek’s children attend private school in the District of Columbia?
Did you know that Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s children attend private school in Broward County?
I’ll say this about modern American Liberals, and certainly those 2 must be considered in the top 10, they never let you down.
One of the most dangerous places in South Florida – no, not Liberty City or Overtown – is to be between Congressgal Debbie, Debbie and a semi thug from any teachers’ union in election season. As soon as that red light went on she is praising the underpaid, overworked teachers. All in time for the 6:00 news.
Mama’s Boy Meek raises an interesting point.
If we are to believe his press releases his children attend private schools close to the Potomac River. That’s the one between Maryland and Viriginia.
Congressman Toad Wexler [D-FL&MD] lived a double life for ten years. He represented a district in Palm Beach County while he lived and his children attended school in Maryland. Anonymous sources say that he resigned a step ahead of the Grand Jury having him in for a chat about violating election laws.
Has anyone ever seen Congressman Meek’s Florida license?
If he and his wife filed a joint tax return has anyone ever seen the address on it?
Meanwhile, in an example of why we should have ongoing “bag tests” for both candidates and elected officials, both of these churls continue to champion the causes of borrowing still more money from the Chinese to pay for salaries at schools that they would rather have hot needles stuck in their eyes or get a blood transfusion from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin than have their children attend.
It is always good to quote James Madison. Doubly so since we are near to Constitution Day.
When asked what was the most important quality to look for in a
candidate for any public office his reply is still valid 2 centuries later.
“Character. Character is all.”
Would not their public stand versus their private choice on schools indicate that they are sadly lacking in character? Since their behavior is typical of modern American Liberals perhaps they should be held up as templates for the breed. Let the breed standards read
“Nothing lost save honor”
Kevin Smith
PS – In 1992 President George Bush’s apparent unfamiliarity with supermarket checkout price scanners was looked on as a disqualifying factor in the election. Am I the only one to comment on Congressman Meek’s trip to the Jewish deli in Miami with President Barack the Beneficent? Corned beef on rye with mayo? Isn’t that about a half step from supporting the mosque at Ground Zero? Meanwhile see if you can get some of those Mohammed cartoons, the ones with a feminine touch, like the one of him shagging a nanny goat.
Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer The Sun-Sentinel
August 29, 2010
Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: “Fearmongering” – Is it as American as apple pie? Some comments on your column about the reality of being perpetually outraged in America or so you say this morning.
Mr. Lyons,
This morning’s tutorial will consist of two separate but somehow related themes. I will draw them together with an astronomical codicil.
#1 – It is true that not all Muslims are 21st century anti-American terrorists. It is also true that all 21st century anti-American terrorists have been Muslim. There is a hint of traditional Logic there that all senior editorial writers should know.
Jesse Jackson once said that if see some young men walking towards him on a dark street at night he hopes that they are White. Since he said that in the “pre post-racial society” he gets a pass, right?
If I am in line at an airport ticket counter and I see five young men with an air of Whirling Dervish about them wearing the unisex version of a burqa using cash to buy one way tickets to the same place I am bound for am I allowed to gulp and ask myself if I really have to go to Chicago today? Would that make me a profiler? Worse, would it make me a stereotypical American profiler? If we meet at the airport answer me before I get my boarding pass, OK?
Let me add, for the record, that I am a White man.
#2 – “Will no one rid me of that troublesome recidivist Black jailbird?” with apologies to any offended Plantagenet but how is Willie Horton doing these days? Is he still in jail? Have any of his convictions been overturned? “Did the constable err” on any of his arrests? Why didn’t an earlier version of Johnny Cochrane show up in his hour of need? Can we stipulate that at one point Willie Horton gave feral Black youth a bad name?
All of this is prelude to the fact, a hard edged fact as real as your boot, an inconvenient truth of a fact, that it was Senator Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. [D-TN] who introduced the sad tale of Willie Horton to the American public. He did this before he became Vice President Alpha Gump, before he became an Academy Award & Nobel Prize winner, before he became a “sex crazed poodle” whose “shakra”, while in a state of perpetual priapristic tumescence, was trained over the years to leave no carbon footprint when it suffered a sudden release.
He did it New York in March and April of the 1988 Presidential primary. He did it repeatedly. He did it while street campaigning and on TV. He used it to stereotype Massachusetts Governor Wee Mikey Dukakis as being soft on crime.
That this fact has gone down the modern American Liberal memory hole is because Progressive columnists, ink stained dudes like you, put it on the slippery slope of collective forgetfulness.
Let me know if Willie Boy has become Barack Hussein Horton or if he still is taking the Reverend Wright prison lecture course.
Now that would be a stereotypical American fearmongering profile, wouldn’t it?
Kevin Smith
PS – What time do you go to work in the morning? I saw the Moon/Mars show early this AM. The Moon with Mars looming large at its side during this holy season of Ramadan makes me want to fly a plane into a building. Almost. That’s it for now; It’s time for the Glenn Beck rally.
Douglas C. Lyons – Senior Editorial Writer
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: “Fearmongering” – Is it as American as apple pie? Some comments on your column about the reality of being perpetually outraged in America or so you say this morning.
Mr. Lyons,
This morning’s tutorial will consist of two separate but somehow related themes. I will draw them together with an astronomical codicil.
#1 – It is true that not all Muslims are 21st century anti-American terrorists. It is also true that all 21st century anti-American terrorists have been Muslim. There is a hint of traditional Logic there that all senior editorial writers should know.
Jesse Jackson once said that if see some young men walking towards him on a dark street at night he hopes that they are White. Since he said that in the “pre post-racial society” he gets a pass, right?
If I am in line at an airport ticket counter and I see five young men with an air of Whirling Dervish about them wearing the unisex version of a burqa using cash to buy one way tickets to the same place I am bound for am I allowed to gulp and ask myself if I really have to go to Chicago today? Would that make me a profiler? Worse, would it make me a stereotypical American profiler? If we meet at the airport answer me before I get my boarding pass, OK?
Let me add, for the record, that I am a White man.
#2 – “Will no one rid me of that troublesome recidivist Black jailbird?” with apologies to any offended Plantagenet but how is Willie Horton doing these days? Is he still in jail? Have any of his convictions been overturned? “Did the constable err” on any of his arrests? Why didn’t an earlier version of Johnny Cochrane show up in his hour of need? Can we stipulate that at one point Willie Horton gave feral Black youth a bad name?
All of this is prelude to the fact, a hard edged fact as real as your boot, an inconvenient truth of a fact, that it was Senator Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. [D-TN] who introduced the sad tale of Willie Horton to the American public. He did this before he became Vice President Alpha Gump, before he became an Academy Award & Nobel Prize winner, before he became a “sex crazed poodle” whose “shakra”, while in a state of perpetual priapristic tumescence, was trained over the years to leave no carbon footprint when it suffered a sudden release.
He did it New York in March and April of the 1988 Presidential primary. He did it repeatedly. He did it while street campaigning and on TV. He used it to stereotype Massachusetts Governor Wee Mikey Dukakis as being soft on crime.
That this fact has gone down the modern American Liberal memory hole is because Progressive columnists, ink stained dudes like you, put it on the slippery slope of collective forgetfulness.
Let me know if Willie Boy has become Barack Hussein Horton or if he still is taking the Reverend Wright prison lecture course.
Now that would be a stereotypical American fearmongering profile, wouldn’t it?
Kevin Smith
PS – What time do you go to work in the morning? I saw the Moon/Mars show early this AM. The Moon with Mars looming large at its side during this holy season of Ramadan makes me want to fly a plane into a building. Almost. That’s it for now; It’s time for the Glenn Beck rally.
Bill Wyman The Tucson Citizen
August 31, 2010
Bill Wyman
The Tucson Citizen
4850 S. Park Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85714
RE: “What does Ben Quayle’s wife do”? – Judge Crater, call your office. Jimmy Hoffa wants to see you. Where’s my lockbox?
Mr. Wyman,
I don’t know what she does. It sounds like she soared past the glass ceiling shattered by trailblazers such as Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama.
You may recall that whip smart Hillary was hired by the largest law firm in Arkansas – Is that akin to being the 3rd tallest building in Bentonville? – when her husband became Attorney General. That she became a partner after he was elected Governor is just one of life’s unexplained mysteries. Sort of like the Ozark version of the Bermuda Triangle, don’t you think?
I hope you won’t think me a cad if I point out that Michelle Obama got a $4,000 a week raise – repeat - $4,000 a week raise when her husband was elected to the United States Senate. That’s $200,000 a year. There’s no sense just getting your nose in the trough. Cannonballing off the 10 meter board straight into the slop is the Chicago way to do it. I guess she’d rather be hung for 3 sheep than one goat. Her husband made it OK because he got a $1,000,000 earmark for her employer, the University of Chicago Hospital. That way it could be said that the people of Arkansas helped Michelle to begin to be proud of her country. That we borrowed the money from the Chinese to do it is the subject of a different story. Since WAL*MART is the American satrap of the clever Chinese it is easy to see the Illinois/Arkansas connection.
I guess that’s the way the global economy works.
Try to find out if Ben’s wife is a player.
Get back to me, OK?
Kevin Smith
Bill Wyman
The Tucson Citizen
4850 S. Park Ave.
Tucson, AZ 85714
RE: “What does Ben Quayle’s wife do”? – Judge Crater, call your office. Jimmy Hoffa wants to see you. Where’s my lockbox?
Mr. Wyman,
I don’t know what she does. It sounds like she soared past the glass ceiling shattered by trailblazers such as Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama.
You may recall that whip smart Hillary was hired by the largest law firm in Arkansas – Is that akin to being the 3rd tallest building in Bentonville? – when her husband became Attorney General. That she became a partner after he was elected Governor is just one of life’s unexplained mysteries. Sort of like the Ozark version of the Bermuda Triangle, don’t you think?
I hope you won’t think me a cad if I point out that Michelle Obama got a $4,000 a week raise – repeat - $4,000 a week raise when her husband was elected to the United States Senate. That’s $200,000 a year. There’s no sense just getting your nose in the trough. Cannonballing off the 10 meter board straight into the slop is the Chicago way to do it. I guess she’d rather be hung for 3 sheep than one goat. Her husband made it OK because he got a $1,000,000 earmark for her employer, the University of Chicago Hospital. That way it could be said that the people of Arkansas helped Michelle to begin to be proud of her country. That we borrowed the money from the Chinese to do it is the subject of a different story. Since WAL*MART is the American satrap of the clever Chinese it is easy to see the Illinois/Arkansas connection.
I guess that’s the way the global economy works.
Try to find out if Ben’s wife is a player.
Get back to me, OK?
Kevin Smith
James D. Davis The Sun-Sentinel
August 27, 2010
James D. Davis
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: Mecca delenda est? - Some questions and comments on your Page 1 article on the travails of Muslims in America.
Mr. Davis,
For 6 years I have been writing to Muslims in South Florida looking for some answers., My letters were neither threatening nor were they obscene. They were also never answered.
Perhaps you could forward this.
In your article you quote Imam Shaikh Shafayat Mohammed as saying “Muslims wait to be interviewed after hate crimes happen”. Since he mentioned “hate crimes” would the good Imam stipulate that the murders of 9/11 were “hate crimes”? A yes or no answer is preferred.
The Imam may not be familiar with “Piss Christ”. It is a work of art partly subsidized by American taxpayers. It is a crucifix suspended in a see through plastic cylinder. The cylinder is filled, as the name implies, with piss. An astonishingly large number of people believes that Christ is divine.
There is a play, “Corpus Cristi”, partly subsidized by American taxpayers, that says Christ was crucified because of a lovers’ quarrel. It says the Christ and Judas were homosexual lovers. Judas, in a fit of pique, dropped a dime on Christ. He was crucified. An astonishingly large number of people believes that Christ is divine.
There is a painting, partly subsidized by American taxpayers, that shows Mary, AKA “The Mother of God”, covered with animal dung. There is an astonishingly large number of people, people who think that Christ is divine, who think that Mary is the Mother of God.
While bible burning is not as popular as flag burning rest assured that it will take but a one page opinion from a Federal Judge saying that it too is protected speech. A bible, a torah, a Koran. If there is difference perhaps the good Imam could explain it to me. Perhaps the good Imam can tell me if he favors fatwas.
Let’s include the cartoons about Mohammed. Those are the ones that people were murdered over.
Can you see where I am going here?
Why should American Muslims in general, and the Pembroke Pines Imam in particular, be insulated from the excesses that occur in a democratic Republic? The saying “Free men speak with free tongues” is still valid after 25 centuries.
This is the country they have chosen to live in.
If I chose to live in Saudi Arabia I would be barred from publicly professing my faith. I don’t know if that is a stoning offense but why risk it?
I’ll stay home.
Kevin Smith
James D. Davis
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: Mecca delenda est? - Some questions and comments on your Page 1 article on the travails of Muslims in America.
Mr. Davis,
For 6 years I have been writing to Muslims in South Florida looking for some answers., My letters were neither threatening nor were they obscene. They were also never answered.
Perhaps you could forward this.
In your article you quote Imam Shaikh Shafayat Mohammed as saying “Muslims wait to be interviewed after hate crimes happen”. Since he mentioned “hate crimes” would the good Imam stipulate that the murders of 9/11 were “hate crimes”? A yes or no answer is preferred.
The Imam may not be familiar with “Piss Christ”. It is a work of art partly subsidized by American taxpayers. It is a crucifix suspended in a see through plastic cylinder. The cylinder is filled, as the name implies, with piss. An astonishingly large number of people believes that Christ is divine.
There is a play, “Corpus Cristi”, partly subsidized by American taxpayers, that says Christ was crucified because of a lovers’ quarrel. It says the Christ and Judas were homosexual lovers. Judas, in a fit of pique, dropped a dime on Christ. He was crucified. An astonishingly large number of people believes that Christ is divine.
There is a painting, partly subsidized by American taxpayers, that shows Mary, AKA “The Mother of God”, covered with animal dung. There is an astonishingly large number of people, people who think that Christ is divine, who think that Mary is the Mother of God.
While bible burning is not as popular as flag burning rest assured that it will take but a one page opinion from a Federal Judge saying that it too is protected speech. A bible, a torah, a Koran. If there is difference perhaps the good Imam could explain it to me. Perhaps the good Imam can tell me if he favors fatwas.
Let’s include the cartoons about Mohammed. Those are the ones that people were murdered over.
Can you see where I am going here?
Why should American Muslims in general, and the Pembroke Pines Imam in particular, be insulated from the excesses that occur in a democratic Republic? The saying “Free men speak with free tongues” is still valid after 25 centuries.
This is the country they have chosen to live in.
If I chose to live in Saudi Arabia I would be barred from publicly professing my faith. I don’t know if that is a stoning offense but why risk it?
I’ll stay home.
Kevin Smith
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Stephen L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel
August 29, 2010
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: “God is not for man to scan; the proper study of mankind is man” – I love quoting Pope, Alexander, not The. Some comments on candidates and education all of which were caused by your delightful column this morning.
My dear Professor;
“The rest of us mortals need to ask God to save
us from what Jeb and Mario are about to do
to students and schools in
her
name.”
The Sun-Sentinel
Today
You
The italics are mine. Jeb is the sainted former Governor Jeb Bush. Mario is Mario Rubio, the next Senator.
First, a style point, and then a multicultural observation.
Like the unemployed teacher who can’t find a job anywhere answered when asked by a prospective employer whether the world was flat or round, “I’m not sure but I’m prepared to teach it either way”, the raging question of God’s gender is not clear. The style point is that if God, whatever the shape or form, is divine your her should be Her.
The other point, the one with the multicultural “I love diversity and why can’t we all get along” mantra, is that I don’t think our Muslim brethren, including peace loving moderates, are quite ready for Allah to be, you know what I’m saying, a Cosmo Girl. These people are having a serious theological debate as to the size of stones to be used when stoning [to death]”a woman taken in adultery”. The suggestion that Allah will be entering the next Miss Universe contest in preparation for Her campaign to be the next Playmate of the Year is one I don’t you should be making or even implying, particularly in the holy month of Ramadan. I wouldn’t want someone to fly a plane into the Sun-Sentinel building to try to reason with you.
As to education…if moneys spent per pupil became the sole criterion that determined the quality of an education why are the schools in the District of Columbia not turning out 3 or 4 Nobel Prize winners a year? Every year.
Alas, this is not the case.
I have one solution... Quien sabe? It may work. If it doesn’t at least we tried.
Will you join me in mandating that all children living in public housing in the District of Columbia must – no exceptions, none – attend pubic schools? The first ones on the yellow bus will be the Obama girls. That’s something you can get behind, hopefully no too far behind, isn’t it?
Did you know that Congressman Kendrick Meek’s children attend private school in the District of Columbia?
Did you know that Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s children attend private school in Broward County?
I’ll say this about modern American Liberals, and certainly those 2 must be considered in the top 10, they never let you down.
One of the most dangerous places in South Florida – no, not Liberty City or Overtown – is to be between Congressgal Debbie, Debbie and a semi thug from any teachers’ union in election season. As soon as that red light went on she is praising the underpaid, overworked teachers. All in time for the 6:00 news.
Mama’s Boy Meek raises an interesting point.
If we are to believe his press releases his children attend private schools close to the Potomac River. That’s the one between Maryland and Viriginia.
Congressman Toad Wexler [D-FL&MD] lived a double life for ten years. He represented a district in Palm Beach County while he lived and his children attended school in Maryland. Anonymous sources say that he resigned a step ahead of the Grand Jury having him in for a chat about violating election laws.
Has anyone ever seen Congressman Meek’s Florida license?
If he and his wife filed a joint tax return has anyone ever seen the address on it?
Meanwhile, in an example of why we should have ongoing “bag tests” for both candidates and elected officials, both of these churls continue to champion the causes of borrowing still more money from the Chinese to pay for salaries at schools that they would rather have hot needles stuck in their eyes or get a blood transfusion from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin than have their children attend.
It is always good to quote James Madison. Doubly so since we are near to Constitution Day.
When asked what was the most important quality to look for in a
candidate for any public office his reply is still valid 2 centuries later.
“Character. Character is all.”
Would not their public stand versus their private choice on schools indicate that they are sadly lacking in character? Since their behavior is typical of modern American Liberals perhaps they should be held up as templates for the breed. Let the breed standards read
“Nothing lost save honor”
Kevin Smith
PS – In 1992 President George Bush’s apparent unfamiliarity with supermarket checkout price scanners was looked on as a disqualifying factor in the election. Am I the only one to comment on Congressman Meek’s trip to the Jewish deli in Miami with President Barack the Beneficent? Corned beef on rye with mayo? Isn’t that about a half step from supporting the mosque at Ground Zero? Meanwhile see if you can get some of those Mohammed cartoons, the ones with a feminine touch, like the one of him shagging a nanny goat.
Stephen L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 E. Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33301
RE: “God is not for man to scan; the proper study of mankind is man” – I love quoting Pope, Alexander, not The. Some comments on candidates and education all of which were caused by your delightful column this morning.
My dear Professor;
“The rest of us mortals need to ask God to save
us from what Jeb and Mario are about to do
to students and schools in
her
name.”
The Sun-Sentinel
Today
You
The italics are mine. Jeb is the sainted former Governor Jeb Bush. Mario is Mario Rubio, the next Senator.
First, a style point, and then a multicultural observation.
Like the unemployed teacher who can’t find a job anywhere answered when asked by a prospective employer whether the world was flat or round, “I’m not sure but I’m prepared to teach it either way”, the raging question of God’s gender is not clear. The style point is that if God, whatever the shape or form, is divine your her should be Her.
The other point, the one with the multicultural “I love diversity and why can’t we all get along” mantra, is that I don’t think our Muslim brethren, including peace loving moderates, are quite ready for Allah to be, you know what I’m saying, a Cosmo Girl. These people are having a serious theological debate as to the size of stones to be used when stoning [to death]”a woman taken in adultery”. The suggestion that Allah will be entering the next Miss Universe contest in preparation for Her campaign to be the next Playmate of the Year is one I don’t you should be making or even implying, particularly in the holy month of Ramadan. I wouldn’t want someone to fly a plane into the Sun-Sentinel building to try to reason with you.
As to education…if moneys spent per pupil became the sole criterion that determined the quality of an education why are the schools in the District of Columbia not turning out 3 or 4 Nobel Prize winners a year? Every year.
Alas, this is not the case.
I have one solution... Quien sabe? It may work. If it doesn’t at least we tried.
Will you join me in mandating that all children living in public housing in the District of Columbia must – no exceptions, none – attend pubic schools? The first ones on the yellow bus will be the Obama girls. That’s something you can get behind, hopefully no too far behind, isn’t it?
Did you know that Congressman Kendrick Meek’s children attend private school in the District of Columbia?
Did you know that Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s children attend private school in Broward County?
I’ll say this about modern American Liberals, and certainly those 2 must be considered in the top 10, they never let you down.
One of the most dangerous places in South Florida – no, not Liberty City or Overtown – is to be between Congressgal Debbie, Debbie and a semi thug from any teachers’ union in election season. As soon as that red light went on she is praising the underpaid, overworked teachers. All in time for the 6:00 news.
Mama’s Boy Meek raises an interesting point.
If we are to believe his press releases his children attend private schools close to the Potomac River. That’s the one between Maryland and Viriginia.
Congressman Toad Wexler [D-FL&MD] lived a double life for ten years. He represented a district in Palm Beach County while he lived and his children attended school in Maryland. Anonymous sources say that he resigned a step ahead of the Grand Jury having him in for a chat about violating election laws.
Has anyone ever seen Congressman Meek’s Florida license?
If he and his wife filed a joint tax return has anyone ever seen the address on it?
Meanwhile, in an example of why we should have ongoing “bag tests” for both candidates and elected officials, both of these churls continue to champion the causes of borrowing still more money from the Chinese to pay for salaries at schools that they would rather have hot needles stuck in their eyes or get a blood transfusion from Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin than have their children attend.
It is always good to quote James Madison. Doubly so since we are near to Constitution Day.
When asked what was the most important quality to look for in a
candidate for any public office his reply is still valid 2 centuries later.
“Character. Character is all.”
Would not their public stand versus their private choice on schools indicate that they are sadly lacking in character? Since their behavior is typical of modern American Liberals perhaps they should be held up as templates for the breed. Let the breed standards read
“Nothing lost save honor”
Kevin Smith
PS – In 1992 President George Bush’s apparent unfamiliarity with supermarket checkout price scanners was looked on as a disqualifying factor in the election. Am I the only one to comment on Congressman Meek’s trip to the Jewish deli in Miami with President Barack the Beneficent? Corned beef on rye with mayo? Isn’t that about a half step from supporting the mosque at Ground Zero? Meanwhile see if you can get some of those Mohammed cartoons, the ones with a feminine touch, like the one of him shagging a nanny goat.
Ellen Goodman The Washington Post Writers Group
August 26, 2010
Ellen Goodman
The Washington Post Writers Group
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20017
RE: “Reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated” – Some comments on your triumphal return to the Miami Herald today. Thanks for telling us how bad we are.
Ellie!
Sweetheart!
Where have you been?
I thought you had a one way ticket to the undiscovered country, the one filled with pretty pink palaces where perpetually outraged modern American Liberal ink stained chicks go when their brain enters full blown intellectual climacteric.
Was money the reason you came back?
Did you put a big stack of Benjamins on the last Massachusetts Senate race? Did you follow the advice of Congressman Patrick “Pea Brain” Kennedy and put it all on Marsha Coakley’s beak?
Quien sabe?
The good news is that you’re back.
The bad news is that you still don’t know bupkis.
Your awards, given annually to testosterone overloaded males – Did I just repeat myself? – who have “bare foot and pregnant” tattooed south of their navels, are missing one thing.
I know it’s tough being a broad in America.
The stalling of the drive to outlaw stand up urinals, the fight to outlaw girls being told that they “throw like girls”, the absence of NFL Kamikaze wedgebusters named Portia, the drive for gender equity at Arlington Cemetery, the Constitutional Amendment banning Ladies Night at saloons, the boycott of Victoria’s Secret until they feature size 18 Buddha-like tubbies on the cover of their catalogues, the lack of Black female suicide bombers – God’s Holy Trousers but I don’t why you didn’t go off the bridge long ago. [The great Reagan’s second inaugural would have been a symbolic time to end it]
I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Perhaps you have been relying too long on the ca-ca from the Boston Globe. There are some villains out there who think with other than their one-eyed trouser snakes. You have been on the testicle free island of hapless hecates too long.
Stop the presses!
There are people out there who hate us and mean us harm.
The WOGs who blew up the WTC sometimes use the bottom of a glass bottle to slice the prepubescent clitorises off of 10 year old girls. Is that in Obamacare?
At least 5 Muslim dominated countries countenance slavery within their borders.
There is a serious Muslim theological debate about the size of the rocks used when stoning a woman “taken in adultery”.
If they are too big the sinning chick dies too quickly.
If they are too small she dies too slowly.
Thus the Muslim world is consumed by the quest for the perfect sized stoning stone.
You have spent your entire professional life being outraged when the ability of a woman to control her body is threatened. Your outrage when some troglodyte weenie who fails to fling himself on the altar of Chicks Rule is noted.
Why aren’t you at Ground Zero screaming for all the defenseless Fatimas? Why aren’t you at the Mosque site throwing bacon fat at the door?
I imagine the lack of a Logical construct in re modern American Liberalism precludes that.
That’s a shame. I am voting you back to the island.
Kevin Smith
Ellen Goodman
The Washington Post Writers Group
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20017
RE: “Reports of your death have been greatly exaggerated” – Some comments on your triumphal return to the Miami Herald today. Thanks for telling us how bad we are.
Ellie!
Sweetheart!
Where have you been?
I thought you had a one way ticket to the undiscovered country, the one filled with pretty pink palaces where perpetually outraged modern American Liberal ink stained chicks go when their brain enters full blown intellectual climacteric.
Was money the reason you came back?
Did you put a big stack of Benjamins on the last Massachusetts Senate race? Did you follow the advice of Congressman Patrick “Pea Brain” Kennedy and put it all on Marsha Coakley’s beak?
Quien sabe?
The good news is that you’re back.
The bad news is that you still don’t know bupkis.
Your awards, given annually to testosterone overloaded males – Did I just repeat myself? – who have “bare foot and pregnant” tattooed south of their navels, are missing one thing.
I know it’s tough being a broad in America.
The stalling of the drive to outlaw stand up urinals, the fight to outlaw girls being told that they “throw like girls”, the absence of NFL Kamikaze wedgebusters named Portia, the drive for gender equity at Arlington Cemetery, the Constitutional Amendment banning Ladies Night at saloons, the boycott of Victoria’s Secret until they feature size 18 Buddha-like tubbies on the cover of their catalogues, the lack of Black female suicide bombers – God’s Holy Trousers but I don’t why you didn’t go off the bridge long ago. [The great Reagan’s second inaugural would have been a symbolic time to end it]
I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Perhaps you have been relying too long on the ca-ca from the Boston Globe. There are some villains out there who think with other than their one-eyed trouser snakes. You have been on the testicle free island of hapless hecates too long.
Stop the presses!
There are people out there who hate us and mean us harm.
The WOGs who blew up the WTC sometimes use the bottom of a glass bottle to slice the prepubescent clitorises off of 10 year old girls. Is that in Obamacare?
At least 5 Muslim dominated countries countenance slavery within their borders.
There is a serious Muslim theological debate about the size of the rocks used when stoning a woman “taken in adultery”.
If they are too big the sinning chick dies too quickly.
If they are too small she dies too slowly.
Thus the Muslim world is consumed by the quest for the perfect sized stoning stone.
You have spent your entire professional life being outraged when the ability of a woman to control her body is threatened. Your outrage when some troglodyte weenie who fails to fling himself on the altar of Chicks Rule is noted.
Why aren’t you at Ground Zero screaming for all the defenseless Fatimas? Why aren’t you at the Mosque site throwing bacon fat at the door?
I imagine the lack of a Logical construct in re modern American Liberalism precludes that.
That’s a shame. I am voting you back to the island.
Kevin Smith
Margaret Carlson Bloomberg News
August 27, 2010
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg News
1399 New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005
RE: That little voice that says there is no statute of limitations on saying horrible things is back…again.
Maggie! Peg! Whatever,
Time flies when you are really enjoying yourself, doesn’t it? Who can believe that it’s been 10 years since I asked you a la Jay Leno & Hugh Grant “What were you thinking”?
Leno’s question was about Grant getting a hummer from a self employed street lady. Since Big Bill Clinton, the King of the One-Eyed Trouser Snakes [until Tiger] had already told us that “Eating ain’t cheating” I never understood what all the fuss was about.
My question was why you said American military personnel serving overseas were, to quote you, “tax dodgers”. If memory serves there were some people, all of whom were in the employ of Vice President Alpha Gump, who said that GIs serving “in harm’s way” shouldn’t have their votes counted.
I am from Bayonne, NJ. My wife has family in Chicago, Illinois. We could tell you stories about voting that Rod Serling would have had trouble putting into a 30 minute format. They were not the exception but, rather, the rule. The common denominator is the Democratic Party. Whodathunk?
Anyway, the point of this love note is to tell you “that while the light is left to burn the vilest sinner may yet return”. You have a chance to redeem your honor.
A number of states have applied for an exemption to the Federal law that says, “Gosh, GI votes should be counted”.
Why don’t you use your bully pulpit as a partisan preacher to demand “one man – one vote” even if the man is dodging IEDs while carrying an M-16?
This week you s said that Lord Barack the Beneficent is smarter than the average bear. In fact, you said he was smarter than all the bears. That’s why I am confident that we will find those 7 or was it 8 missing states that nobody else knows bupkis about.
Maybe the soon to be discovered Austrian/English dictionary will tell us where they are. My vote goes to fly over country. North Iowa, South Kansas, Oz, West North Dakota, East South Dakota, Middle Arkansas – Hey! We’re almost there, if you know what I’m saying.
As soon as I see you demanding in a most public and persuasive manner that wearing camos does not take away your right to vote I will grant you a retroactive plenary indulgence. It will cover all the temporal punishment due to your updating of “Tommy Atkins”.
“Honor is a gift we give ourselves”
If I tell you it’s time to “man up” will that make me a misogynist?
Kevin Smith
PS – Do you still do your reading on the D-4?
Margaret Carlson
Bloomberg News
1399 New York Avenue
Washington, DC 20005
RE: That little voice that says there is no statute of limitations on saying horrible things is back…again.
Maggie! Peg! Whatever,
Time flies when you are really enjoying yourself, doesn’t it? Who can believe that it’s been 10 years since I asked you a la Jay Leno & Hugh Grant “What were you thinking”?
Leno’s question was about Grant getting a hummer from a self employed street lady. Since Big Bill Clinton, the King of the One-Eyed Trouser Snakes [until Tiger] had already told us that “Eating ain’t cheating” I never understood what all the fuss was about.
My question was why you said American military personnel serving overseas were, to quote you, “tax dodgers”. If memory serves there were some people, all of whom were in the employ of Vice President Alpha Gump, who said that GIs serving “in harm’s way” shouldn’t have their votes counted.
I am from Bayonne, NJ. My wife has family in Chicago, Illinois. We could tell you stories about voting that Rod Serling would have had trouble putting into a 30 minute format. They were not the exception but, rather, the rule. The common denominator is the Democratic Party. Whodathunk?
Anyway, the point of this love note is to tell you “that while the light is left to burn the vilest sinner may yet return”. You have a chance to redeem your honor.
A number of states have applied for an exemption to the Federal law that says, “Gosh, GI votes should be counted”.
Why don’t you use your bully pulpit as a partisan preacher to demand “one man – one vote” even if the man is dodging IEDs while carrying an M-16?
This week you s said that Lord Barack the Beneficent is smarter than the average bear. In fact, you said he was smarter than all the bears. That’s why I am confident that we will find those 7 or was it 8 missing states that nobody else knows bupkis about.
Maybe the soon to be discovered Austrian/English dictionary will tell us where they are. My vote goes to fly over country. North Iowa, South Kansas, Oz, West North Dakota, East South Dakota, Middle Arkansas – Hey! We’re almost there, if you know what I’m saying.
As soon as I see you demanding in a most public and persuasive manner that wearing camos does not take away your right to vote I will grant you a retroactive plenary indulgence. It will cover all the temporal punishment due to your updating of “Tommy Atkins”.
“Honor is a gift we give ourselves”
If I tell you it’s time to “man up” will that make me a misogynist?
Kevin Smith
PS – Do you still do your reading on the D-4?
Vice President Joey Biden The White House
August 25, 2010
Vice President Joey Biden
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Curly,
I have it on “Deep Throat” background, from sources that must remain confidential, from fellow Auks, that your nickname at Archmere Academy was “cheese dick”. They say it was a sobriquet that you more than lived up to. Your efforts to re-earn it are the stuff of legend.
After reading the transcript of your remarks at the National Institute of Health I would include “cheese head”, as in your head is filled with Cheese Whiz. I say that because you were telling us why it was so smart to borrow money from the Chinese to pay for a study of the “social milieu” of male hookers in Ho Chi Minh City. I suggest that you wrap your head in Duct Tape lest we have a tsunami of cheese exiting your ears and eyes. The carbon footprint would be ginormous. It will top anything that Vice President Dick Cheney ever did.
I call you “Curly” in honor of the smartest Stooge.
Congressman Boehner – shall we call him Speaker Presumptive? – saying that it is time to fire all the dimwitted economists, none of whom ever signed the front of a paycheck, is too kind. Is it too late to bring back the bastinado and the strapado? Maybe the Muslims are on to something when it comes to stoning. You don’t see any of them studying Vietnamese fudge packers, do you?
There is a cardinal rule, Rule #1, observed world wide, about ditch digging. If you are digging on the wrong side of the road stop digging. Digging deeper will not help.
In your case we have Rule #2. Keep your mouth shut. If you stuff a sock in your gob and cover it with tape leftover from swaddling your head people will only suspect you of being a HORSE’S ASS. Every time you open it you remove all doubt.
Kevin Smith
PS - Please tell me that you don’t believe that Austrian is spoken in Austria. Also, the American Flag has 50 stars, one for each state. You knew that, didn’t you?
Vice President Joey Biden
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20500
Dear Curly,
I have it on “Deep Throat” background, from sources that must remain confidential, from fellow Auks, that your nickname at Archmere Academy was “cheese dick”. They say it was a sobriquet that you more than lived up to. Your efforts to re-earn it are the stuff of legend.
After reading the transcript of your remarks at the National Institute of Health I would include “cheese head”, as in your head is filled with Cheese Whiz. I say that because you were telling us why it was so smart to borrow money from the Chinese to pay for a study of the “social milieu” of male hookers in Ho Chi Minh City. I suggest that you wrap your head in Duct Tape lest we have a tsunami of cheese exiting your ears and eyes. The carbon footprint would be ginormous. It will top anything that Vice President Dick Cheney ever did.
I call you “Curly” in honor of the smartest Stooge.
Congressman Boehner – shall we call him Speaker Presumptive? – saying that it is time to fire all the dimwitted economists, none of whom ever signed the front of a paycheck, is too kind. Is it too late to bring back the bastinado and the strapado? Maybe the Muslims are on to something when it comes to stoning. You don’t see any of them studying Vietnamese fudge packers, do you?
There is a cardinal rule, Rule #1, observed world wide, about ditch digging. If you are digging on the wrong side of the road stop digging. Digging deeper will not help.
In your case we have Rule #2. Keep your mouth shut. If you stuff a sock in your gob and cover it with tape leftover from swaddling your head people will only suspect you of being a HORSE’S ASS. Every time you open it you remove all doubt.
Kevin Smith
PS - Please tell me that you don’t believe that Austrian is spoken in Austria. Also, the American Flag has 50 stars, one for each state. You knew that, didn’t you?
Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald
August 25, 2010
Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: “This is who ‘we’ really is, Glenn” – Some comments on your column on the audacity of Glenn Beck to hope that his rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial would be thought of as something good. I can’t believe that your bitch slapping of grammar signals that you want to be appointed head Ebonics instructor at the DEA.
Mr. Pitts,
My father’s father had 2 uncles who came from Ireland to fight in the Civil War. Both fought at Gettysburg. One of them is still there “wrapped in faded coat of Blue”.
One hundred and one years later, standing on the steps in front of the Essex County Courthouse, I was hit upside the head by a Newark policeman. I suppose we were both doing our duty. Mine was to “speak freely”; his was to keep a sort of peace.
Should there be some sort of slave reparations bill I hope to use former as a carry forward tax credit to apply to my share of the bill. I use the latter to remind myself that the “content of one’s character” is judged in many ways.
You could say the above is extremely self serving. If you did you would be right. Then again “some things are owed to the ledger”.
You say that “social conservatives opposed the freedom movement of the 20th century”.
If we are to believe Mr. Justice Marshall the most racist, the most bigoted of the 20th century’s “social conservatives” was Woodrow Wilson. Can I add without being painted with the scarlet “R” that Thurgood Marshall was the best trial lawyer and worst Justice to serve on the Supreme Court in the 20th century?
An exception to the rule of “de morituis nihil nisi bonum” must be made in the case of the recently deceased Exalted Kleagle Senator Robert Byrd [D-WV]
Using your criteria those two, Wilson and Byrd, would be proud members of the “social conservative” cabal of which you speak so intensely. They were something else too. Both men sought to use the power of the Federal government to advance their causes. Wilson’s was One World. Byrd’s was One White World. Some would describe the Palmer Raids as an example of tyranny wearing the cloak of the law. The cloak of the law is what modern American Liberals love to wear, particularly when they lack the support of the people in a scheme predicated on defying gravity.
Beck’s “right”, the same as Marian Anderson’s “right”, comes from what “social conservatives” call Natural Law. Those rights are ours “from beyond the stars”. That concept is both alien and anathema to modern American Liberals. It is one that is embraced by people who know that “socialism, communism, and tyranny” are synonymous.
Margaret Thatcher said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. T.S. Eliot, a Nobel Prize winner back when it meant something, said that the trouble with socialism is that it is a futile attempt to design a system so perfect that no one will have to be good.
Glenn Beck will try to attract people to the Lincoln Memorial “to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances”. Prime among the many grievances is a government intent on “sending forth swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance”. He says the answer lies not in a court system subject to the whims of the majority party but rather in the hearts of man.
I rather imagine that Saul Alinsky and his acolytes would have a hard time trying to digest that.
Kevin Smith
PS – You say that Beck’s using the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop for his rally is
“worse than nonsensical, worse than mendacious, worse than shameless”. It is “obscene”.
Would not Logic dictate that Pitts’ Rules would put you in the forefront of the fight against the mosque at Ground Zero, the WTC? Alas, it is deuced difficult for modern American Liberals, a group that marches under a banner that is plaid, a group famous for their “eclectic indignation”, to grasp the obvious.
Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: “This is who ‘we’ really is, Glenn” – Some comments on your column on the audacity of Glenn Beck to hope that his rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial would be thought of as something good. I can’t believe that your bitch slapping of grammar signals that you want to be appointed head Ebonics instructor at the DEA.
Mr. Pitts,
My father’s father had 2 uncles who came from Ireland to fight in the Civil War. Both fought at Gettysburg. One of them is still there “wrapped in faded coat of Blue”.
One hundred and one years later, standing on the steps in front of the Essex County Courthouse, I was hit upside the head by a Newark policeman. I suppose we were both doing our duty. Mine was to “speak freely”; his was to keep a sort of peace.
Should there be some sort of slave reparations bill I hope to use former as a carry forward tax credit to apply to my share of the bill. I use the latter to remind myself that the “content of one’s character” is judged in many ways.
You could say the above is extremely self serving. If you did you would be right. Then again “some things are owed to the ledger”.
You say that “social conservatives opposed the freedom movement of the 20th century”.
If we are to believe Mr. Justice Marshall the most racist, the most bigoted of the 20th century’s “social conservatives” was Woodrow Wilson. Can I add without being painted with the scarlet “R” that Thurgood Marshall was the best trial lawyer and worst Justice to serve on the Supreme Court in the 20th century?
An exception to the rule of “de morituis nihil nisi bonum” must be made in the case of the recently deceased Exalted Kleagle Senator Robert Byrd [D-WV]
Using your criteria those two, Wilson and Byrd, would be proud members of the “social conservative” cabal of which you speak so intensely. They were something else too. Both men sought to use the power of the Federal government to advance their causes. Wilson’s was One World. Byrd’s was One White World. Some would describe the Palmer Raids as an example of tyranny wearing the cloak of the law. The cloak of the law is what modern American Liberals love to wear, particularly when they lack the support of the people in a scheme predicated on defying gravity.
Beck’s “right”, the same as Marian Anderson’s “right”, comes from what “social conservatives” call Natural Law. Those rights are ours “from beyond the stars”. That concept is both alien and anathema to modern American Liberals. It is one that is embraced by people who know that “socialism, communism, and tyranny” are synonymous.
Margaret Thatcher said that the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. T.S. Eliot, a Nobel Prize winner back when it meant something, said that the trouble with socialism is that it is a futile attempt to design a system so perfect that no one will have to be good.
Glenn Beck will try to attract people to the Lincoln Memorial “to assemble and petition the government for a redress of grievances”. Prime among the many grievances is a government intent on “sending forth swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance”. He says the answer lies not in a court system subject to the whims of the majority party but rather in the hearts of man.
I rather imagine that Saul Alinsky and his acolytes would have a hard time trying to digest that.
Kevin Smith
PS – You say that Beck’s using the Lincoln Memorial as a backdrop for his rally is
“worse than nonsensical, worse than mendacious, worse than shameless”. It is “obscene”.
Would not Logic dictate that Pitts’ Rules would put you in the forefront of the fight against the mosque at Ground Zero, the WTC? Alas, it is deuced difficult for modern American Liberals, a group that marches under a banner that is plaid, a group famous for their “eclectic indignation”, to grasp the obvious.
E. J. Dionne The Washington Post
August 23, 2010
E. J. Dionne
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20017
RE: “The Politics of No” - Maybe
Mr. Dionne,
The one common denominator, the one thing that is always present when modern American Liberals use – other than never letting facts interfere with their argument, particularly when an inconvenient truth is involved – is that Conservatives either are snake handlers or knuckle draggers.
“The principled case that must be made is that the brand of conservatism
seeking power is irresponsible, incoherent and untrue to the
best of its own traditions.”
Today
You
When a “Trousered Ape” tells me I am not true to my “traditions” I reach up from where I type and touch some books written by Edmund Burke. Sitting next to them are some works by Russell Kirk. Nearby I can find some Buckley, T.S. Eliot, Weaver, Friedman, Newman, Tolkien, Lewis, Chambers – and that’s before breakfast.
Alas, my collection of modern American Liberal traditionalists is a bit limited.
I have the obligatory Rousseau. Whatever else he has done it is easy to know why Frogs and modern American Liberal Jeremiahs are always fighting for Dante’s uncompleted 10th circle.
I could mention Saul Alinsky but that would be like striking out the pitcher. It counts but not really.
John Rawls is my favorite default modern American Liberal pseudo-intellectual. When I first read “A Theory of Justice” I thought it was “Confederacy of Dunces” set in Utopia, the holy city of New England. That book is a hoot. Honest. It got even better when I realized that not only wasn’t his tongue planted firmly in his cheek but he believed every word. Too bad the laws governing gravity are still in force.
You say that Congressman Gohmert [R-TX] wants an investigation into the danger of “terror babies”. You say that he has “absolutely no proof”.
Who knows what “proof” is?
O.J. beat the first rap, didn’t he?
Perhaps the Congressman is acting in the best traditions of the House, the markers for Congressional investigations being laid down by former Speaker Tom Foley [D-WA].
An author named Gary Sick – Honest! – came up with a marvelous idea.
He said that in October, 1980 then VP candidate George H. W. Bush flew in a SR-71, AKA the Black Bird, to Paris where he met with some of the Ayatollah’s henchmen. There he put the election fix in, a la Hudson County or Cook County. That Carter, the worst President of the 20th century deserved to have his mean spirited ass booted out of the White House, there can never be any doubt. Nobody had to fly to Paree at Mach 3+ to know that he was history.
Modern American Liberals take care of their own. Speaker Foley gave the author a boost by announcing an investigation into the October Surprise because “there was no evidence”.
Foley says there is no evidence; O.J. gets off because there is too much evidence. Do they cancel each other out? Is that what modern American Liberals call a zero-sun game?
“Where are the responsible conservatives who should
be denouncing such crockpottery”?
Today
You
I don’t know where they are.
Perhaps they are taking their daily IV of the Trivium to overcome the obfuscatory persiflage coming from the White House.
Perhaps they are preparing for Speaker Pelosi’s investigation into the funding of those opposed to the Ground Zero mosque. Would it be OK for witnesses to take the Fifth? Could we have a Hollywood 10 moment?
Perhaps they are in search of the elusive, rarely seen, Austrian/English dictionary.
Perhaps they are trying to find the map of the United States that shows the 57 or 58 states that are in the Union.
Perhaps they are trying to figure out if deficits under President Bush were so bad why are they so good if they are multiplied by four under President Obama.
“…more than a third of conservative Republicans declare
that our Christian president is a Muslim…”
Today
You
As to believing that President Obama is a Muslim – Does it make a difference if he is Sunni or Shia? – I must say that I am in total agreement with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
When asked the same question during the campaign of 2008 she answered that he wasn’t a Muslim…“as far as I know”. Call her what you will but somehow “conservative Republican” doesn’t quite fit.
Speaking of “crockpottery” am I the only adult who finds it at the outer edges of credulity to believe that our “Christian president” could listen to the Gandhi like utterances of Reverend Wright for 20 years and hear nothing negative?
Another Conservative traditionalist, the great Doctor Johnson, covered that possibility.
“Such stupidity, sir, is not found in nature.”
Kevin Smith
E. J. Dionne
The Washington Post
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20017
RE: “The Politics of No” - Maybe
Mr. Dionne,
The one common denominator, the one thing that is always present when modern American Liberals use – other than never letting facts interfere with their argument, particularly when an inconvenient truth is involved – is that Conservatives either are snake handlers or knuckle draggers.
“The principled case that must be made is that the brand of conservatism
seeking power is irresponsible, incoherent and untrue to the
best of its own traditions.”
Today
You
When a “Trousered Ape” tells me I am not true to my “traditions” I reach up from where I type and touch some books written by Edmund Burke. Sitting next to them are some works by Russell Kirk. Nearby I can find some Buckley, T.S. Eliot, Weaver, Friedman, Newman, Tolkien, Lewis, Chambers – and that’s before breakfast.
Alas, my collection of modern American Liberal traditionalists is a bit limited.
I have the obligatory Rousseau. Whatever else he has done it is easy to know why Frogs and modern American Liberal Jeremiahs are always fighting for Dante’s uncompleted 10th circle.
I could mention Saul Alinsky but that would be like striking out the pitcher. It counts but not really.
John Rawls is my favorite default modern American Liberal pseudo-intellectual. When I first read “A Theory of Justice” I thought it was “Confederacy of Dunces” set in Utopia, the holy city of New England. That book is a hoot. Honest. It got even better when I realized that not only wasn’t his tongue planted firmly in his cheek but he believed every word. Too bad the laws governing gravity are still in force.
You say that Congressman Gohmert [R-TX] wants an investigation into the danger of “terror babies”. You say that he has “absolutely no proof”.
Who knows what “proof” is?
O.J. beat the first rap, didn’t he?
Perhaps the Congressman is acting in the best traditions of the House, the markers for Congressional investigations being laid down by former Speaker Tom Foley [D-WA].
An author named Gary Sick – Honest! – came up with a marvelous idea.
He said that in October, 1980 then VP candidate George H. W. Bush flew in a SR-71, AKA the Black Bird, to Paris where he met with some of the Ayatollah’s henchmen. There he put the election fix in, a la Hudson County or Cook County. That Carter, the worst President of the 20th century deserved to have his mean spirited ass booted out of the White House, there can never be any doubt. Nobody had to fly to Paree at Mach 3+ to know that he was history.
Modern American Liberals take care of their own. Speaker Foley gave the author a boost by announcing an investigation into the October Surprise because “there was no evidence”.
Foley says there is no evidence; O.J. gets off because there is too much evidence. Do they cancel each other out? Is that what modern American Liberals call a zero-sun game?
“Where are the responsible conservatives who should
be denouncing such crockpottery”?
Today
You
I don’t know where they are.
Perhaps they are taking their daily IV of the Trivium to overcome the obfuscatory persiflage coming from the White House.
Perhaps they are preparing for Speaker Pelosi’s investigation into the funding of those opposed to the Ground Zero mosque. Would it be OK for witnesses to take the Fifth? Could we have a Hollywood 10 moment?
Perhaps they are in search of the elusive, rarely seen, Austrian/English dictionary.
Perhaps they are trying to find the map of the United States that shows the 57 or 58 states that are in the Union.
Perhaps they are trying to figure out if deficits under President Bush were so bad why are they so good if they are multiplied by four under President Obama.
“…more than a third of conservative Republicans declare
that our Christian president is a Muslim…”
Today
You
As to believing that President Obama is a Muslim – Does it make a difference if he is Sunni or Shia? – I must say that I am in total agreement with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
When asked the same question during the campaign of 2008 she answered that he wasn’t a Muslim…“as far as I know”. Call her what you will but somehow “conservative Republican” doesn’t quite fit.
Speaking of “crockpottery” am I the only adult who finds it at the outer edges of credulity to believe that our “Christian president” could listen to the Gandhi like utterances of Reverend Wright for 20 years and hear nothing negative?
Another Conservative traditionalist, the great Doctor Johnson, covered that possibility.
“Such stupidity, sir, is not found in nature.”
Kevin Smith
Leonard Pitts The Miami Herald
August 18, 2010
Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: “Dr. Laura’s Ignorance on Display” – some comments and questions on your column on Laura Schlesinger, PhD, AKA “The Ignorant White Slut”, in today’s Miami Herald.
Mr. Pitts,
If, as you say, you are from “Planet Negro” can I ask if it is going to replace Planet Pluto? Also, did it come from the Colored Asteroid Belt?
Dr. Laura dared to use the “dreaded ‘N’ word”, the word that White folk dare not use. Well, almost all White folk. There was an exception carved out for any Democratic Senators from West Virginia who were recruiters for, can you believe it, the friggin’ Ku Klux Klan, and answered to the name Exalted Kleagle. I don’t know what the requirements were to earn that merit badge but I am positive that burning some crosses was one of them. You’ll probably find this hard to believe. Type Robert Byrd into Google and see what comes up.
You mention “non-sequitur”. Then you say that there is “a big hole in Dr. Laura’s reasoning”. I mention that because my second paragraph is an example of “tu quoque”. It is fallacious Logic but excellent Rhetoric. As a proud legatee of the DWEM [DWEM? Send a SASE] tradition it makes me want to stand up and shout “Say it loud, I’m White and I’m Proud”. Does that put me in the same canoe as Dr. Laura?
You show a disdain for comedians and the effect they have on language. I hesitate to use the word “ignorant” lest you think I might share the racial attitudes of such famous Americans as Senator Sam Ervin and Senator J. William Fulbright.
See if you can follow this reverse time line.
I’ll write slowly.
George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley, Totie Fields, Lenny Bruce, Samuel Beckett, H.L. Mencken, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, Miguel Cervantes, Dante, Juvenal, Aristophanes.
I still think Fred Sandford saying that there is “nothing uglier than an ugly old white woman” was one of the funniest lines ever on TV. Archie Bunker had a few good ones too, didn’t he?
One thing that all the members on this list have in common is that they, to cite
Tom Wolfe, pushed the edge of the envelope out. That envelope was the one marked “language”. They affected society by saying and writing things that while important were not necessarily welcome.
If I go to the African/American Library in Fort Lauderdale and ask for Dick Gregory’s autobiography by its name would I be set upon by outraged Black youth turned ferally ferocious by my use of the language he uses? If I went to the desk and asked where I could find a copy of “dreaded ‘N’ word” by Dick Gregory would that be acceptable?
If the “noxious epithet [is] loathed by the vast majority against whom it is routinely hurled” is so evil why are there so many exceptions to it?
It is either malum per se or it is malum prohibitum. Either the word is evil on its face or it is not.
You say that there is a “problem for Conservatives in general who seek to contribute to a constructive racial dialogue”. I still like to describe myself as an old fashioned Liberal but only when I am in the shower. I guess that makes me a Conservative but one who is not necessarily looking for a “racial dialogue”.
The President’s wife told us that she has never been “proud” of her “mean” country. The Attorney General told us that we were all “cowards”. What part of “racial dialogue” would cover those examples?
Speaking of “racial dialogue” what would have happened if a Pat Buchanan or a Glenn Beck had said that the “only thing that Obama had ever run was his mouth”? What if either of them then said, like Jesse Jackson did, that they wanted to “cut his nuts off”? When Jesse Jackson had delivered one of his sotto voce anti-Semitic rants – It was “Hymietown”, wasn’t it? – he said his “joy bell” was out of tune that day. A “mean” country let him get away with it. Would such Christian Charity be forthcoming to any Conservative? Dumb question, right?
With regards to Blacks voting for other Blacks “without giving it much thought” I suggest that you take a peek at some of the voting districts in Florida. Elbridge Gerry would have been proud. Should O.J. Simpson or Willie Horton or H. Rap Brown present themselves to the voters they would be elected by numbers not seen outside of Chicago.
I guess the Red Queen was right. “Those words mean exactly what I want them to mean.”
Red Queen? Does that make me a McCarthyite homophobe?
Kevin Smith
Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693
RE: “Dr. Laura’s Ignorance on Display” – some comments and questions on your column on Laura Schlesinger, PhD, AKA “The Ignorant White Slut”, in today’s Miami Herald.
Mr. Pitts,
If, as you say, you are from “Planet Negro” can I ask if it is going to replace Planet Pluto? Also, did it come from the Colored Asteroid Belt?
Dr. Laura dared to use the “dreaded ‘N’ word”, the word that White folk dare not use. Well, almost all White folk. There was an exception carved out for any Democratic Senators from West Virginia who were recruiters for, can you believe it, the friggin’ Ku Klux Klan, and answered to the name Exalted Kleagle. I don’t know what the requirements were to earn that merit badge but I am positive that burning some crosses was one of them. You’ll probably find this hard to believe. Type Robert Byrd into Google and see what comes up.
You mention “non-sequitur”. Then you say that there is “a big hole in Dr. Laura’s reasoning”. I mention that because my second paragraph is an example of “tu quoque”. It is fallacious Logic but excellent Rhetoric. As a proud legatee of the DWEM [DWEM? Send a SASE] tradition it makes me want to stand up and shout “Say it loud, I’m White and I’m Proud”. Does that put me in the same canoe as Dr. Laura?
You show a disdain for comedians and the effect they have on language. I hesitate to use the word “ignorant” lest you think I might share the racial attitudes of such famous Americans as Senator Sam Ervin and Senator J. William Fulbright.
See if you can follow this reverse time line.
I’ll write slowly.
George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Moms Mabley, Totie Fields, Lenny Bruce, Samuel Beckett, H.L. Mencken, James Joyce, Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift, Miguel Cervantes, Dante, Juvenal, Aristophanes.
I still think Fred Sandford saying that there is “nothing uglier than an ugly old white woman” was one of the funniest lines ever on TV. Archie Bunker had a few good ones too, didn’t he?
One thing that all the members on this list have in common is that they, to cite
Tom Wolfe, pushed the edge of the envelope out. That envelope was the one marked “language”. They affected society by saying and writing things that while important were not necessarily welcome.
If I go to the African/American Library in Fort Lauderdale and ask for Dick Gregory’s autobiography by its name would I be set upon by outraged Black youth turned ferally ferocious by my use of the language he uses? If I went to the desk and asked where I could find a copy of “dreaded ‘N’ word” by Dick Gregory would that be acceptable?
If the “noxious epithet [is] loathed by the vast majority against whom it is routinely hurled” is so evil why are there so many exceptions to it?
It is either malum per se or it is malum prohibitum. Either the word is evil on its face or it is not.
You say that there is a “problem for Conservatives in general who seek to contribute to a constructive racial dialogue”. I still like to describe myself as an old fashioned Liberal but only when I am in the shower. I guess that makes me a Conservative but one who is not necessarily looking for a “racial dialogue”.
The President’s wife told us that she has never been “proud” of her “mean” country. The Attorney General told us that we were all “cowards”. What part of “racial dialogue” would cover those examples?
Speaking of “racial dialogue” what would have happened if a Pat Buchanan or a Glenn Beck had said that the “only thing that Obama had ever run was his mouth”? What if either of them then said, like Jesse Jackson did, that they wanted to “cut his nuts off”? When Jesse Jackson had delivered one of his sotto voce anti-Semitic rants – It was “Hymietown”, wasn’t it? – he said his “joy bell” was out of tune that day. A “mean” country let him get away with it. Would such Christian Charity be forthcoming to any Conservative? Dumb question, right?
With regards to Blacks voting for other Blacks “without giving it much thought” I suggest that you take a peek at some of the voting districts in Florida. Elbridge Gerry would have been proud. Should O.J. Simpson or Willie Horton or H. Rap Brown present themselves to the voters they would be elected by numbers not seen outside of Chicago.
I guess the Red Queen was right. “Those words mean exactly what I want them to mean.”
Red Queen? Does that make me a McCarthyite homophobe?
Kevin Smith
Monday, August 16, 2010
New Business Department Omdurman National Bank
August 16, 2010
New Business Department
Omdurman National Bank
El Kasr Street
P.O. Box 11522
Khartoum, Sudan
Dear Director,
I am interested in expanding my export market.
I represent a cross section of small American manufacturers. They produce a variety of products including, but not limited to, hobin pins, aisle stretchers, thigamajigs, frammises [including the left handed version], steam buckets, mung multipliers, electric nails, cocked hats, organically raised hackles, inter alia.
I also represent some processed food manufacturers, the biggest one being the producer of chicarrones. I don’t know what the market for that is in your country but I am ready to provide you with some samples.
If I am able to generate new business in your country I would need the services of a local bank with juice and connections to the international capital markets.
Please send me your latest financial statements. Also, tell me if you have experience with letters of credit and international wire remittances.
I have dealt with many banks and will gladly provide you with references.
Hoping to hear from you soon I remain
Sincerely,
Kevin Smith
New Business Department
Omdurman National Bank
El Kasr Street
P.O. Box 11522
Khartoum, Sudan
Dear Director,
I am interested in expanding my export market.
I represent a cross section of small American manufacturers. They produce a variety of products including, but not limited to, hobin pins, aisle stretchers, thigamajigs, frammises [including the left handed version], steam buckets, mung multipliers, electric nails, cocked hats, organically raised hackles, inter alia.
I also represent some processed food manufacturers, the biggest one being the producer of chicarrones. I don’t know what the market for that is in your country but I am ready to provide you with some samples.
If I am able to generate new business in your country I would need the services of a local bank with juice and connections to the international capital markets.
Please send me your latest financial statements. Also, tell me if you have experience with letters of credit and international wire remittances.
I have dealt with many banks and will gladly provide you with references.
Hoping to hear from you soon I remain
Sincerely,
Kevin Smith
August 16, 2010
Two nights ago I observed Mars lining up so close to the Moon that it seemed like they were neighbors. Since it was Ramadamadingdon my thoughts turned to the crescent and star flag that Saladin and the Mahdi fought under. I thought also of jet planes being flown into buildings, of women having their genitals sliced, of whistling and balloons being outlawed, of serious sober people saying that they are going to kill us.
Then I read of 19 men given 30 lashes each for dressing like Ru Paul.
Their was great joy in Provincetown when a Federal Judge in California said it was OK for invitations to be addressed to Mr. & Mr. or Ms. & Ms.
Are there parallel universes?
Who says you can’t jump to conclusions?
Not me.
“A Sudanese court had 19 Muslim youths
flogged in public for dressing like women.”
And we worry what the world thinks of us because the arugula salad didn’t have imported balsamic vinegar Tuesday last at Gitmo?
The head WOG in Iran, bless him, told a rapt audience at Columbia University in 2008 that there were no homosexuals in the Muslim world. Obviously, the 19 Chorus Line wanabees were a Zionist plant. The evil diamond merchants – Thanks, Al! – found a stranded traveling cast of La Cage aux Folles and recruited them. Look for them to be starring on Broadway or Fire Island shortly. Like Henry the Fifth they will show their scars proudly. At least 7 of them thanked their floggers. 2 of them promised to stay in touch. If any of them are familiar with how a mortgage binds you they can work for Barney Frank. “I am what I am and what I am is a floggee.”
As to the Mosque at the WTC…Will the flogging post be just for Muslims? Will Christians be able to use it on Good Friday? Will the Village People be able to use it before, during, and after their shows? Will it be available for community outreach programs? Will the whips be made from organic material that leave welts but no carbon footprints? Will there be an AARP discount? Will those to be stoned be whipped first? Will Yusuf Bligh be the head flogger?
Since we have allowed our leaders to take us down the path of forgetfulness of the mindset that made it necessary for these feral predators to lash out at their betters, it is time to listen yet again to Hillaire Belloc.
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches
of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic
inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh.
But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond;
and on these faces there is no smile”
One of the forgotten lessons of the 20th is that when dealing with murdering thugs the first markdown is always the cheapest. Stalin and Hitler caused 70,000,000 to 80,000,000 deaths. If we add the butcher’s bill from China the number has no end. A wolf showing us his teeth doesn’t mean he is smiling.
Imagine if the Israelis had not taken out the reactor at Osiris in 1981. Imagine Operation Desert Storm with Hussein having nuclear weapons. He had already used poison gas on his own people. Why wouldn’t he have used a couple of A-bombs? Our first Pearl Harbor was 12/7/41. Our second was 9/11/01. Why wait for a 3rd?
CARTAGO DELENDA EST?
MECCA DELENDA EST!
Kevin Smith
Two nights ago I observed Mars lining up so close to the Moon that it seemed like they were neighbors. Since it was Ramadamadingdon my thoughts turned to the crescent and star flag that Saladin and the Mahdi fought under. I thought also of jet planes being flown into buildings, of women having their genitals sliced, of whistling and balloons being outlawed, of serious sober people saying that they are going to kill us.
Then I read of 19 men given 30 lashes each for dressing like Ru Paul.
Their was great joy in Provincetown when a Federal Judge in California said it was OK for invitations to be addressed to Mr. & Mr. or Ms. & Ms.
Are there parallel universes?
Who says you can’t jump to conclusions?
Not me.
“A Sudanese court had 19 Muslim youths
flogged in public for dressing like women.”
And we worry what the world thinks of us because the arugula salad didn’t have imported balsamic vinegar Tuesday last at Gitmo?
The head WOG in Iran, bless him, told a rapt audience at Columbia University in 2008 that there were no homosexuals in the Muslim world. Obviously, the 19 Chorus Line wanabees were a Zionist plant. The evil diamond merchants – Thanks, Al! – found a stranded traveling cast of La Cage aux Folles and recruited them. Look for them to be starring on Broadway or Fire Island shortly. Like Henry the Fifth they will show their scars proudly. At least 7 of them thanked their floggers. 2 of them promised to stay in touch. If any of them are familiar with how a mortgage binds you they can work for Barney Frank. “I am what I am and what I am is a floggee.”
As to the Mosque at the WTC…Will the flogging post be just for Muslims? Will Christians be able to use it on Good Friday? Will the Village People be able to use it before, during, and after their shows? Will it be available for community outreach programs? Will the whips be made from organic material that leave welts but no carbon footprints? Will there be an AARP discount? Will those to be stoned be whipped first? Will Yusuf Bligh be the head flogger?
Since we have allowed our leaders to take us down the path of forgetfulness of the mindset that made it necessary for these feral predators to lash out at their betters, it is time to listen yet again to Hillaire Belloc.
“We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches
of peace we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic
inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us; we laugh.
But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond;
and on these faces there is no smile”
One of the forgotten lessons of the 20th is that when dealing with murdering thugs the first markdown is always the cheapest. Stalin and Hitler caused 70,000,000 to 80,000,000 deaths. If we add the butcher’s bill from China the number has no end. A wolf showing us his teeth doesn’t mean he is smiling.
Imagine if the Israelis had not taken out the reactor at Osiris in 1981. Imagine Operation Desert Storm with Hussein having nuclear weapons. He had already used poison gas on his own people. Why wouldn’t he have used a couple of A-bombs? Our first Pearl Harbor was 12/7/41. Our second was 9/11/01. Why wait for a 3rd?
CARTAGO DELENDA EST?
MECCA DELENDA EST!
Kevin Smith
Steven L. Goldstein The Sun-Sentinel
August 14, 2010
Steven L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33316
RE: Tonight’s History lesson
My dear Professor,
“Anticipation [being] the greater joy”, I was counting the hours ‘til I could read your Sunday Jeremiad about how bad things are, how bad things will be, and why those things are so bad.
Bush is the reason for teenage obesity, the increase of pythons in the swamp West of Sawgrass Mall, and the failure of manatees to secure full suffrage. Truth be known it was Reagan who put us on the slippery slope to terminal chilling effects. A closer examination will tell us that it was Nixon who fell victim to the Tri-Lateralists and the Bilderbergs when he went to China. OSHA and the EPA were just covers to deflect a young Goldstein from the true course of mammon driven Republicans, that course being to make life miserable for the more sensitive among us. If we were to dig deeply enough we would find that the Republicans started the War of Jenkin’s Ear plus the Black Death.
Karl Rove is responsible for Guy Fawkes. There are rumors that the Republicans encouraged Hannibal and then whacked Caesar, Pompey, and Cicero. Halliburton’s predecessor caused the flood made famous by Noah, the Old Testament PETA shill. True believers know that Othello was done in be Lee Atwater as part of an expanded Southern strategy. That you were able to discover all this and not throw yourself from a lofty tor wailing in despair is a testament to “the triumph of hope over experience”.
I tell you this because regardless of what you will say on Sunday. I feel duty bound to report on the President’s radio address today.
Let me begin by saying that he is the best President we have.
His speech mentioned Social Security and how the Republicans want to bankrupt it so the Chinese can take over. There’s a WAL*MART angle in there but I haven’t quite figured it our yet.
I feel duty bound to tell you that are only two of us left in Broward County who understand the flim, the flam, the flummery, and the flummoxing of Social Security. Actuarial considerations aside, the main even happened in 1964. By telling you what happened I increase the number of people in the know by 50%. You will become a member of the original Truthers.
That was the year that the United States government, the guys who work for us, the guys who do what we tell them, cooked the books. All money coming into the Treasury heretofore earmarked for Social Security was diverted into the general fund of the Treasury. The Social Security administration took back an IOU, a chit, a marker, that said it could be cashed in at some future date.
“Book cooking” was raised to an art form in the late ‘90s by HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Congressman Barfey Frank. They forced a very eager Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae to accommodate the creation of mortgage pools filled with toxic wastes that would make Chernobyl seem like Martha’s Vineyard. They then filled both sewers with refugees from the Clinton administration. The one common business experience these grifters and poltroons had was their ability to swallow their pride when asking for help when they stole hot stoves.
That’s one Hell of a lock box.
Since you work for a company – The Tribune Company – that is in bankruptcy you should be aware that the Trustee did a very thorough investigation of where your pension money was. If he thought it was commingled with corporate funds, if he thought it had been used to buy securities of the parent, people would have been led out in chains. That is the law of the land. It applies to everybody. Almost. Too bad it didn’t apply to the United States government.
Now we have more money going out than we have coming in.
If we cash in the markers being held by the Social Security trustees they will have to get approval from our friends the Chinese before they pay them.
We dug ourselves into the hole we are in. The first thing we have to do is stop digging.
August 15, 2010
Sunday morning at last!
There are two things that can always, always be said of proud, loud, card carrying modern American Liberals. THEY NEVER LET YOU DOWN. The other thing is that they all suffer from Stage X of “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”.
Your wailing screed about the state sales tax holiday is both interesting and new. Alas, that which is interesting is not new while that which is new is not interesting.
You say, and may I add “rightfully so”, that the exemptions from the Florida sales tax are both confusing and offensive to Logic. You point out that they are typically idiotic in a manner that only a government cabal of mind numbing bureaucrats – Did I just repeat myself? – can assemble. Behind the curtain is a wanabee Professor Irwin Corey beside himself in ecstasy at what two or three sentences can do to make sense into nonsense. I risk being thought of as a cad if I point out that only people who favor government control of every nitpicking thing we do, people like you, can say such bosh and twaddle and keep control of their bladders. I think. Maybe. It depends.
There are two teachable moments here.
#1 – “Lest we forget”, as Kipling, the first great multi-cultural poet said, all those imbecilic exemptions, all those contradictions didn’t break in one night and slip into the state tax code like MERSA. They did not spring fully grown from Zeus’s forehead into black and white fiats. Line by line, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word they are in there because someone wanted them in there.
Before you get your tighty whities in a blue lipped snick over lobbyists bribing legislators with dollars, grog, recreational pharmaceuticals, lithe lads or lassies, think about the First Amendment. I don’t have to have a “wise Latina” tell me what the words “Congress shall make no law…abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” mean.
They codified a natural right, a right that was ours at birth, “a right from beyond the stars”. Can we gild a lily?
If you have knowledge of a specific act, of a pattern of criminality you are duty bound to “drop a dime”, to report it the nearest competent authority. Failure to do so will consign you to one of Dante’s lower circles.
#2 – The Declaration of Independence, another document more quoted than read, addresses your vexatious bugbear specifically.
“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither
swarms of officers, to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
As Professor Emeritus of the Harriet Van Horne Chair of “Another lash on the backs of the Poor” and as a most visible supporter of women and minorities particularly single moms who are women of color with children in need of a good Ritalin program who don’t have the benefits of Midnight Basketball how can you say that they shouldn’t have the cash benefit of sales tax free weekend?
Maybe they could use the savings to super size Sunday dinner.
Kevin Smith
Steven L. Goldstein
The Sun-Sentinel
200 East Las Olas Blvd.
Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33316
RE: Tonight’s History lesson
My dear Professor,
“Anticipation [being] the greater joy”, I was counting the hours ‘til I could read your Sunday Jeremiad about how bad things are, how bad things will be, and why those things are so bad.
Bush is the reason for teenage obesity, the increase of pythons in the swamp West of Sawgrass Mall, and the failure of manatees to secure full suffrage. Truth be known it was Reagan who put us on the slippery slope to terminal chilling effects. A closer examination will tell us that it was Nixon who fell victim to the Tri-Lateralists and the Bilderbergs when he went to China. OSHA and the EPA were just covers to deflect a young Goldstein from the true course of mammon driven Republicans, that course being to make life miserable for the more sensitive among us. If we were to dig deeply enough we would find that the Republicans started the War of Jenkin’s Ear plus the Black Death.
Karl Rove is responsible for Guy Fawkes. There are rumors that the Republicans encouraged Hannibal and then whacked Caesar, Pompey, and Cicero. Halliburton’s predecessor caused the flood made famous by Noah, the Old Testament PETA shill. True believers know that Othello was done in be Lee Atwater as part of an expanded Southern strategy. That you were able to discover all this and not throw yourself from a lofty tor wailing in despair is a testament to “the triumph of hope over experience”.
I tell you this because regardless of what you will say on Sunday. I feel duty bound to report on the President’s radio address today.
Let me begin by saying that he is the best President we have.
His speech mentioned Social Security and how the Republicans want to bankrupt it so the Chinese can take over. There’s a WAL*MART angle in there but I haven’t quite figured it our yet.
I feel duty bound to tell you that are only two of us left in Broward County who understand the flim, the flam, the flummery, and the flummoxing of Social Security. Actuarial considerations aside, the main even happened in 1964. By telling you what happened I increase the number of people in the know by 50%. You will become a member of the original Truthers.
That was the year that the United States government, the guys who work for us, the guys who do what we tell them, cooked the books. All money coming into the Treasury heretofore earmarked for Social Security was diverted into the general fund of the Treasury. The Social Security administration took back an IOU, a chit, a marker, that said it could be cashed in at some future date.
“Book cooking” was raised to an art form in the late ‘90s by HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo and Congressman Barfey Frank. They forced a very eager Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae to accommodate the creation of mortgage pools filled with toxic wastes that would make Chernobyl seem like Martha’s Vineyard. They then filled both sewers with refugees from the Clinton administration. The one common business experience these grifters and poltroons had was their ability to swallow their pride when asking for help when they stole hot stoves.
That’s one Hell of a lock box.
Since you work for a company – The Tribune Company – that is in bankruptcy you should be aware that the Trustee did a very thorough investigation of where your pension money was. If he thought it was commingled with corporate funds, if he thought it had been used to buy securities of the parent, people would have been led out in chains. That is the law of the land. It applies to everybody. Almost. Too bad it didn’t apply to the United States government.
Now we have more money going out than we have coming in.
If we cash in the markers being held by the Social Security trustees they will have to get approval from our friends the Chinese before they pay them.
We dug ourselves into the hole we are in. The first thing we have to do is stop digging.
August 15, 2010
Sunday morning at last!
There are two things that can always, always be said of proud, loud, card carrying modern American Liberals. THEY NEVER LET YOU DOWN. The other thing is that they all suffer from Stage X of “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”.
Your wailing screed about the state sales tax holiday is both interesting and new. Alas, that which is interesting is not new while that which is new is not interesting.
You say, and may I add “rightfully so”, that the exemptions from the Florida sales tax are both confusing and offensive to Logic. You point out that they are typically idiotic in a manner that only a government cabal of mind numbing bureaucrats – Did I just repeat myself? – can assemble. Behind the curtain is a wanabee Professor Irwin Corey beside himself in ecstasy at what two or three sentences can do to make sense into nonsense. I risk being thought of as a cad if I point out that only people who favor government control of every nitpicking thing we do, people like you, can say such bosh and twaddle and keep control of their bladders. I think. Maybe. It depends.
There are two teachable moments here.
#1 – “Lest we forget”, as Kipling, the first great multi-cultural poet said, all those imbecilic exemptions, all those contradictions didn’t break in one night and slip into the state tax code like MERSA. They did not spring fully grown from Zeus’s forehead into black and white fiats. Line by line, sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word they are in there because someone wanted them in there.
Before you get your tighty whities in a blue lipped snick over lobbyists bribing legislators with dollars, grog, recreational pharmaceuticals, lithe lads or lassies, think about the First Amendment. I don’t have to have a “wise Latina” tell me what the words “Congress shall make no law…abridging the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances” mean.
They codified a natural right, a right that was ours at birth, “a right from beyond the stars”. Can we gild a lily?
If you have knowledge of a specific act, of a pattern of criminality you are duty bound to “drop a dime”, to report it the nearest competent authority. Failure to do so will consign you to one of Dante’s lower circles.
#2 – The Declaration of Independence, another document more quoted than read, addresses your vexatious bugbear specifically.
“He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither
swarms of officers, to harass our people and eat out their substance.”
As Professor Emeritus of the Harriet Van Horne Chair of “Another lash on the backs of the Poor” and as a most visible supporter of women and minorities particularly single moms who are women of color with children in need of a good Ritalin program who don’t have the benefits of Midnight Basketball how can you say that they shouldn’t have the cash benefit of sales tax free weekend?
Maybe they could use the savings to super size Sunday dinner.
Kevin Smith
E.J. Dionne The Washington Post Writers Group
August 10, 2010
E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post Writers Group
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20071
RE: In Vino Veritas? – Some comments on your column on Senator Dodd and the “Politics of Joy”.
Mr. Dionne,
Presumably you and Senator Dodd, AKA Chris the Grifter, were sharing a cocktail or four because the truth came dribbling out, so to speak.
“I’ve reached the point where I’d abolish the Senate if I could.”
Today
You
Perhaps not as bad as “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” but then you say “it is more profoundly undemocratic than it was when the Founders created it…”
Two things are owed to the ledger.
#1 – I beseech you to consider that you may be wrong. You won’t. You can’t. The fly in the buttermilk here is that is what the Founders absolutely had in mind. “Your Constitution, sir, is all sail and no anchor.” This may shock and amaze you but the Founders and all serious political thinkers from the agora on put something like the Senate into being because they feared the democracy that you lust after. Honest. You can look it up.
#2 – Should you have a Damascus moment and realize as John Maynard Keynes did in 1944 that both the premises and the conclusions of his intellectual life were wrong you would become anathema to the vast Left Wing conspiracy known as modern American Liberalism. Keynes had the good sense to die shortly after his conversion to the moral and economic canons of Hayek. Thus, he was spared the rail ridden journey to the intellectual Coventry that apostates from statism are forced to endure.
Modern American Liberals like to say that they are for freedom, particularly when it involves political speech. Thus, when we heard for 8 years that Bush and Hitler were synonymous, it was said to be a sign of political maturity, When someone says that Obama has never run anything, “except his mouth” to quote Jesse Jackson, it immediately is looked on as a racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and openly caloric statement.
[In the 1864 election the Democratic Party and its shill, the New York Times, acquiesced in calling Abraham Lincoln a “baboon”. That’s for a different day.]
I would suggest that for the Dog Days of Summer reading that you devote some time for what the Founders actually wrote and said. It is painfully obvious that you have no – no as in zip, zilch, nada – knowledge of what they created.
“What have you given us?” was the question asked of Benjamin Franklin.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
Democracy, at the time of the Constitution, was symbolized by the guillotine. The French, God bless them, have always had a way of bringing certain panache to any dish. That you would have been one of the servy boys begging to help drag the tumbrel there is no doubt. That you would have fetched more yarn for Madame DeFarge would have been the role for which you were destined.
Your only hope is a crash course in Edmund Burke. A Russell Kirk IV may be in order though I doubt the death panel laden Obamacare would pay for it.
As to Senator Dodd…he is leaving about a half step ahead of the Constable. His legacy will be a gazillion dollars worth of wretched mortgages, except the one he got as a “Friend of Angelo” on his house in Ireland, and further proof that Mendel was right. He is indeed his father’s son. Acorns never fall far from the tree.
Who picked up the bar tab?
Kevin Smith
PS – I take back my last sentence. The last time a Congressman, one named Dan Rostenkowksi, picked up a tab he went to prison. Every member since has perfected the art of short arms and long pockets when it’s time to settle up. Either that or they use their ubiquitous Chinese credit card. “Ubiquitous” because it doubles as an entrenching tool in the “shovel ready” brigade.
E.J. Dionne
The Washington Post Writers Group
1150 15th Street, NW
Washington, DC 20071
RE: In Vino Veritas? – Some comments on your column on Senator Dodd and the “Politics of Joy”.
Mr. Dionne,
Presumably you and Senator Dodd, AKA Chris the Grifter, were sharing a cocktail or four because the truth came dribbling out, so to speak.
“I’ve reached the point where I’d abolish the Senate if I could.”
Today
You
Perhaps not as bad as “Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest” but then you say “it is more profoundly undemocratic than it was when the Founders created it…”
Two things are owed to the ledger.
#1 – I beseech you to consider that you may be wrong. You won’t. You can’t. The fly in the buttermilk here is that is what the Founders absolutely had in mind. “Your Constitution, sir, is all sail and no anchor.” This may shock and amaze you but the Founders and all serious political thinkers from the agora on put something like the Senate into being because they feared the democracy that you lust after. Honest. You can look it up.
#2 – Should you have a Damascus moment and realize as John Maynard Keynes did in 1944 that both the premises and the conclusions of his intellectual life were wrong you would become anathema to the vast Left Wing conspiracy known as modern American Liberalism. Keynes had the good sense to die shortly after his conversion to the moral and economic canons of Hayek. Thus, he was spared the rail ridden journey to the intellectual Coventry that apostates from statism are forced to endure.
Modern American Liberals like to say that they are for freedom, particularly when it involves political speech. Thus, when we heard for 8 years that Bush and Hitler were synonymous, it was said to be a sign of political maturity, When someone says that Obama has never run anything, “except his mouth” to quote Jesse Jackson, it immediately is looked on as a racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and openly caloric statement.
[In the 1864 election the Democratic Party and its shill, the New York Times, acquiesced in calling Abraham Lincoln a “baboon”. That’s for a different day.]
I would suggest that for the Dog Days of Summer reading that you devote some time for what the Founders actually wrote and said. It is painfully obvious that you have no – no as in zip, zilch, nada – knowledge of what they created.
“What have you given us?” was the question asked of Benjamin Franklin.
“A republic, if you can keep it.”
Democracy, at the time of the Constitution, was symbolized by the guillotine. The French, God bless them, have always had a way of bringing certain panache to any dish. That you would have been one of the servy boys begging to help drag the tumbrel there is no doubt. That you would have fetched more yarn for Madame DeFarge would have been the role for which you were destined.
Your only hope is a crash course in Edmund Burke. A Russell Kirk IV may be in order though I doubt the death panel laden Obamacare would pay for it.
As to Senator Dodd…he is leaving about a half step ahead of the Constable. His legacy will be a gazillion dollars worth of wretched mortgages, except the one he got as a “Friend of Angelo” on his house in Ireland, and further proof that Mendel was right. He is indeed his father’s son. Acorns never fall far from the tree.
Who picked up the bar tab?
Kevin Smith
PS – I take back my last sentence. The last time a Congressman, one named Dan Rostenkowksi, picked up a tab he went to prison. Every member since has perfected the art of short arms and long pockets when it’s time to settle up. Either that or they use their ubiquitous Chinese credit card. “Ubiquitous” because it doubles as an entrenching tool in the “shovel ready” brigade.
August 4, 2010
B&V,
It is always good to hear from friends in the Mother Country. The immediate good news from Albion is that ½ gallon of Tanqueray is now $3 less than it was. That savings enables me to keep my lime supply really fresh.
Your kind words about my awards
HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK
POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH
SMARMY BASTARD OF THE YEAR
prompted me to reminisce on how they started.
The first winner in 1992, even before my awards were named, was Judge Carole Ferentz.
She was a New Jersey Superior Court Judge, Superior Court being the entry level state court. As I was entering a period of constant “disfavor with fortune and men’s eyes” I was appearing before her pro se. By that time I had appeared in United States District Court, United States Bankruptcy Court, United States Tax Court, United States Appellate Court [5th & 10th Circuit], and had a matter settled by the Supreme Court of the United States the preceding year. Despite zealous representation, despite impassioned pleas, despite histrionics from both sides and the Bench, there was a general feeling of respect between and amongst the participants. It was almost palpable.
My reason for being there that day was to bring a stay notice issued and signed by a New York State Appellate Judge. It involved a civil dispute over an accountant’s bill of $5,000. The trustee of the accounting firm got a default judgment against me in Manhattan. The matter was transferred to New Jersey, my state of residence, for enforcement. Judge Ferentz was the lucky winner of my matter.
In the meantime I found the cancelled $5,000 check. I went to Manhattan with the documents and found a New York State Appellate Judge who agreed with my conclusion.
Someone had blundered at the accounts receivable level. I was in the process of undoing the effects of the mistake. The New York Judge vacated the judgment against me. I brought the documents with me for my next appearance before Judge Ferentz. [I always thought she was nasty, that she became the paradigmatic template for smarminess, because she failed, repeatedly failed, at her entry level job which was to be a perpetual succubus. If she had succeeded she would have become the first steatagynous succubus. Ah yes, the road not taken…]
I wore Gucci loafers that were a brisk walk shy of being officially “down at the heels”. Thank God it didn’t rain that day. I also wore a custom tailored monogrammed shirt figuring that each would cancel out the other.
Before I got to appear before Ma Barker an elderly attorney began to speak. He said that it had been 20 years since he had been in a court room. He never got to say his next sentence because Her Majesty, Judge Snotnose Catshit, tore into him. In a loud, nasty, condescending tone of voice she berated him with remarks such as “I’m not running a refresher course for old lawyers”. After humiliating him she accepted his papers and dismissed him.
Then it was my turn.
She remembered me from my first appearance. I stated the facts of the matter and then was going to hand over the stay from New York. I always like to help people out so I reminded her what the Constitution, the one that came out of that summer in Philadelphia in 1787, said about each state accepting the records of each other state. I was going to give her a simple primer on James Madison when she interrupted me in a rage. One of the highlights of her rather unjudicial temperament was the froth coming down the right side of her mouth as she shouted that she had no choice but to accept the document. She also yelled “what goes around comes around”. I am still not sure what that meant but I figured it was something that Thomas More would never have said. To be fair maybe it was, y’know what I’m sayin’, her special time of the month. Thank God she wasn’t walking the fence line at Gitmo or, heaven forefend, running a nuclear weapons platoon.
Thus was born
SMARMY BASTARD OF THE YEAR
There is a marvelous scene in “The Lion in Winter” where Henry the Second screams at the young French king that “you are not a king because your ass is wrapped in purple”. So it is with Judges. Imagine if every catamount with a gavel whose ass is wrapped in black got to be called Judge. Someone like that deserved to be memorialized. Someone like Judge Ferentz. I’m sorry that I never got to see you on the Bench. One of the benefits of wearing a powdered wig is that you can pull it down over your eyes if the going gets out of hand.
HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK came with the arrival of Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. He was/is/shall be so God Damn dumb he couldn’t find his ass using both his hands in a mirror lined phone booth. He was such an easy target that I named him HORSE’S ASS EMERITUS. By taking him out of the competition I made it easier for others to garner their well justified laurels. The current Vice President, Curly Biden, named Curly in honor of the smartest Stooge, has been in the White House less than two years. Already he is showing tremendous staying power by his perpetual assault on common sense.
Next was the category
POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH
I’ll get to your country presently but in mine there is one man for whom the term was invented. Pompous farts suffer from “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. [If you need a translation send a SASE] Senator Jay Forbes Kerry, the man who ran for President in 2004, will someday be on a stamp as the very model of a modern borborygymous windbag. He is married to Tereza, the madcap Gypsy woman. Using Tess’s checkbook he just had a $7,000,000 yacht built in New Zealand. He lives in Massachusetts, a state with a long and proud shipbuilding tradition. He also tried to beat the state sales tax by registering it in another state. His apology when caught with his hand in the taxpayers’ cookie jar was the typical modern American Liberal canard. “Just a book keeping error besides I always meant to pay the tax.”
The rules for earning my awards, not just for being “mentioned in dispatches”, are hard but flexible. Hard because I don’t believe in cheapening the brand; flexible because I am the judge and the jury and exceptions are made for exigent circumstances. I have committee of one, me, that handles all appeals. No appeal has ever been successful.
As to your country…
I hope QE2 lives forever.
Failing that I hope she gets to bury Prince Chucky. That he is a HORSE’S ASS cannot be denied. “I am here to save the world.” Don’t get this guy a crown. Get him a wire hanger covered in aluminum foil. That he is an undeniable POMPOUS FART there is also no doubt. I say that because he believes it he is going to save the world. Only someone who has never stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles could say such a thing. Yet he does not rise to the level of SMARMY BASTARD because bastards are no longer contenders for the throne and because as soon as he found out that his mom would have to die for him to get his job he earned an indulgence.
Amy and I had dinner in one of the underground restaurants at the Stafford in London. It was called the “Better Hole” as in “if you can find a better ‘ole go to it”. Yet another reminder of the Great War. The inn keeper showed me the guest signature book with the name Wales on one page. “Prince of or Shamu”, I asked. He was not amused. The lamb was spectacular.
As you can see I take my job as seriously as Scaramouche. “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” It’s dark and dangerous work. I feel that if I don’t do it the terrorists win. I don’t curse at people. While I have never been arrested I have been visited by police for things I have written. Incidentally, the dirtiest, most vicious campaign in this country was the Presidential election of 1800. And it was done before electricity. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, ran against President John Adams; one of the most revered of our Founding Fathers. No political campaign – with the possible exception of 1876 – was dirtier.
As to the FBI showing up, Deo Volente, it would make my day.
While our countries may be separated by a common language we share a common legacy. We have rights that are ours at birth, “rights from beyond the stars”, that less than 10 countries in the world have. My First Amendment begins with the majestic words “Congress shall make no law…”
It was your countryman, the great Doctor Johnson, who said “How sad of all the things that man endures how few laws or kings can cause or cure”. As soon as we have a tree that produces 3 crops a year of “rainbow stew” I will stop writing.
I turn as always to the last lines of Ulysses, the one by Tennyson, your countryman not the one by Joyce, mine.
My three granddaughters just went back to Texas. I like to think that what I do I do for them. Until the wheel starts to turn in my favor all I can do is put markers down for them screaming that we are a free people. I want them to start where I leave off. Something about striving, seeking, finding, and never, never yielding.
If you ever wonder why I always use my full name and address at the bottom of my balistas it is because I would want a stranger to know who wrote what he just read.
Kevin Smith
PS – I still haven’t heard from the Admiralty. Do you suppose they’re still mad about John Paul Jones?
B&V,
It is always good to hear from friends in the Mother Country. The immediate good news from Albion is that ½ gallon of Tanqueray is now $3 less than it was. That savings enables me to keep my lime supply really fresh.
Your kind words about my awards
HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK
POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH
SMARMY BASTARD OF THE YEAR
prompted me to reminisce on how they started.
The first winner in 1992, even before my awards were named, was Judge Carole Ferentz.
She was a New Jersey Superior Court Judge, Superior Court being the entry level state court. As I was entering a period of constant “disfavor with fortune and men’s eyes” I was appearing before her pro se. By that time I had appeared in United States District Court, United States Bankruptcy Court, United States Tax Court, United States Appellate Court [5th & 10th Circuit], and had a matter settled by the Supreme Court of the United States the preceding year. Despite zealous representation, despite impassioned pleas, despite histrionics from both sides and the Bench, there was a general feeling of respect between and amongst the participants. It was almost palpable.
My reason for being there that day was to bring a stay notice issued and signed by a New York State Appellate Judge. It involved a civil dispute over an accountant’s bill of $5,000. The trustee of the accounting firm got a default judgment against me in Manhattan. The matter was transferred to New Jersey, my state of residence, for enforcement. Judge Ferentz was the lucky winner of my matter.
In the meantime I found the cancelled $5,000 check. I went to Manhattan with the documents and found a New York State Appellate Judge who agreed with my conclusion.
Someone had blundered at the accounts receivable level. I was in the process of undoing the effects of the mistake. The New York Judge vacated the judgment against me. I brought the documents with me for my next appearance before Judge Ferentz. [I always thought she was nasty, that she became the paradigmatic template for smarminess, because she failed, repeatedly failed, at her entry level job which was to be a perpetual succubus. If she had succeeded she would have become the first steatagynous succubus. Ah yes, the road not taken…]
I wore Gucci loafers that were a brisk walk shy of being officially “down at the heels”. Thank God it didn’t rain that day. I also wore a custom tailored monogrammed shirt figuring that each would cancel out the other.
Before I got to appear before Ma Barker an elderly attorney began to speak. He said that it had been 20 years since he had been in a court room. He never got to say his next sentence because Her Majesty, Judge Snotnose Catshit, tore into him. In a loud, nasty, condescending tone of voice she berated him with remarks such as “I’m not running a refresher course for old lawyers”. After humiliating him she accepted his papers and dismissed him.
Then it was my turn.
She remembered me from my first appearance. I stated the facts of the matter and then was going to hand over the stay from New York. I always like to help people out so I reminded her what the Constitution, the one that came out of that summer in Philadelphia in 1787, said about each state accepting the records of each other state. I was going to give her a simple primer on James Madison when she interrupted me in a rage. One of the highlights of her rather unjudicial temperament was the froth coming down the right side of her mouth as she shouted that she had no choice but to accept the document. She also yelled “what goes around comes around”. I am still not sure what that meant but I figured it was something that Thomas More would never have said. To be fair maybe it was, y’know what I’m sayin’, her special time of the month. Thank God she wasn’t walking the fence line at Gitmo or, heaven forefend, running a nuclear weapons platoon.
Thus was born
SMARMY BASTARD OF THE YEAR
There is a marvelous scene in “The Lion in Winter” where Henry the Second screams at the young French king that “you are not a king because your ass is wrapped in purple”. So it is with Judges. Imagine if every catamount with a gavel whose ass is wrapped in black got to be called Judge. Someone like that deserved to be memorialized. Someone like Judge Ferentz. I’m sorry that I never got to see you on the Bench. One of the benefits of wearing a powdered wig is that you can pull it down over your eyes if the going gets out of hand.
HORSE’S ASS OF THE WEEK came with the arrival of Vice President Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. He was/is/shall be so God Damn dumb he couldn’t find his ass using both his hands in a mirror lined phone booth. He was such an easy target that I named him HORSE’S ASS EMERITUS. By taking him out of the competition I made it easier for others to garner their well justified laurels. The current Vice President, Curly Biden, named Curly in honor of the smartest Stooge, has been in the White House less than two years. Already he is showing tremendous staying power by his perpetual assault on common sense.
Next was the category
POMPOUS FART OF THE MONTH
I’ll get to your country presently but in mine there is one man for whom the term was invented. Pompous farts suffer from “non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. [If you need a translation send a SASE] Senator Jay Forbes Kerry, the man who ran for President in 2004, will someday be on a stamp as the very model of a modern borborygymous windbag. He is married to Tereza, the madcap Gypsy woman. Using Tess’s checkbook he just had a $7,000,000 yacht built in New Zealand. He lives in Massachusetts, a state with a long and proud shipbuilding tradition. He also tried to beat the state sales tax by registering it in another state. His apology when caught with his hand in the taxpayers’ cookie jar was the typical modern American Liberal canard. “Just a book keeping error besides I always meant to pay the tax.”
The rules for earning my awards, not just for being “mentioned in dispatches”, are hard but flexible. Hard because I don’t believe in cheapening the brand; flexible because I am the judge and the jury and exceptions are made for exigent circumstances. I have committee of one, me, that handles all appeals. No appeal has ever been successful.
As to your country…
I hope QE2 lives forever.
Failing that I hope she gets to bury Prince Chucky. That he is a HORSE’S ASS cannot be denied. “I am here to save the world.” Don’t get this guy a crown. Get him a wire hanger covered in aluminum foil. That he is an undeniable POMPOUS FART there is also no doubt. I say that because he believes it he is going to save the world. Only someone who has never stood in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles could say such a thing. Yet he does not rise to the level of SMARMY BASTARD because bastards are no longer contenders for the throne and because as soon as he found out that his mom would have to die for him to get his job he earned an indulgence.
Amy and I had dinner in one of the underground restaurants at the Stafford in London. It was called the “Better Hole” as in “if you can find a better ‘ole go to it”. Yet another reminder of the Great War. The inn keeper showed me the guest signature book with the name Wales on one page. “Prince of or Shamu”, I asked. He was not amused. The lamb was spectacular.
As you can see I take my job as seriously as Scaramouche. “He was born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad.” It’s dark and dangerous work. I feel that if I don’t do it the terrorists win. I don’t curse at people. While I have never been arrested I have been visited by police for things I have written. Incidentally, the dirtiest, most vicious campaign in this country was the Presidential election of 1800. And it was done before electricity. Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, ran against President John Adams; one of the most revered of our Founding Fathers. No political campaign – with the possible exception of 1876 – was dirtier.
As to the FBI showing up, Deo Volente, it would make my day.
While our countries may be separated by a common language we share a common legacy. We have rights that are ours at birth, “rights from beyond the stars”, that less than 10 countries in the world have. My First Amendment begins with the majestic words “Congress shall make no law…”
It was your countryman, the great Doctor Johnson, who said “How sad of all the things that man endures how few laws or kings can cause or cure”. As soon as we have a tree that produces 3 crops a year of “rainbow stew” I will stop writing.
I turn as always to the last lines of Ulysses, the one by Tennyson, your countryman not the one by Joyce, mine.
My three granddaughters just went back to Texas. I like to think that what I do I do for them. Until the wheel starts to turn in my favor all I can do is put markers down for them screaming that we are a free people. I want them to start where I leave off. Something about striving, seeking, finding, and never, never yielding.
If you ever wonder why I always use my full name and address at the bottom of my balistas it is because I would want a stranger to know who wrote what he just read.
Kevin Smith
PS – I still haven’t heard from the Admiralty. Do you suppose they’re still mad about John Paul Jones?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)