Free Republic

It is hard to write an obit for a good friend of many years. Burt Prelutsky, a conservative columnist nested in the Hollywood area, first caught my eye by reading his materials in the old Federalist Digest. He combined intelligence, wit, conservatism and scalding characterizations of our republic's enemies in his columns. A lot of people in the Arts business didn't like him, but Burt knew who the real conservatives were. Sadly, on the 17th of this month, I received a text from a relative that Burt had died that morning. He had a sudden drop in blood pressure, so...

I don’t think there is any way to overestimate the importance of the mid-term elections. Although I wish I could view the world through nonpartisan eyes, Barack Obama and Harry Reid have conspired to make that impossible. I’m just hoping that a sufficient number of Americans come out of their collective coma before the fat lady has a chance to warble “Nearer My God to Thee” at this nation’s funeral. The trouble is that we have a president who seems to lie awake nights trying to come up with new ways to destroy America. For openers, he is terrified –...

IN ONE OF THE FEW HOLLYWOOD EPICS that wasn’t entirely wretched, there was a stirring moment in “Spartacus” when the Roman general stands before the slaves huddled on the ground and demands that Spartacus, the leader of the revolt, stand and identify himself. As Spartacus (Kirk Douglas) begins to get up in order that his fellow prisoners not be tortured on his behalf, the others rise, each of them insisting “I am Spartacus.” I think that when Obama and his thugs demand that an order of nuns or anyone else who holds sincere religious beliefs caves to the power of...

Predictably, Nancy Pelosi applauded Rep. Bobby Rush when he donned a hoodie on the floor of the House to show his solidarity with the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the Black Panthers, in their calls for George Zimmerman’s head on a platter. Meanwhile, back in Chicago’s 1st congressional district, home to Mr. Rush, during one recent Thursday night, 13 people were shot, two of them fatally. I understand that the shooters all wore hoodies. I trust that Mrs. Pelosi can provide Bobby Rush with an alibi. In the meantime, in the NCAA basketball tournament, the Final Four consisted...

Monday, December 19, 2011 WHY ISN’T THERE MORE ANTI-SEMITISM IN AMERICA? by BurtPrelutsky Recently, I had an exchange with my friend Alan Caruba, a fellow Jew who had written a piece in which he pointed out that in hard economic times anti-Semites have a greater tendency to crawl out from under their favorite rocks. After acknowledging that he was right, I went on to state that as an American Jew, I was frankly surprised that there wasn’t more hatred of Jews than there is. And for once, I was being totally serious. If I weren’t Jewish, I could see...

There are certain topics about which I write that inevitably trigger predictable responses. If I write, say, a defense of Israel, I know I will be called one of three or four obscenities by anti-Semites. If I write a piece bemoaning the fact that 80 percent of Jewish Americans invariably vote for left-wingers, I can expect to be vilified, not as a conservative, but as a self-hating Jew. If I write disparagingly about Obama, a certain number of readers, taking their lead from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, will condemn me as a racist, and if I write anything in opposition...

Even though the next presidential election is still more than 500 days away, it's never too soon to be prepared. After all, Obama hasn't stopped campaigning since Election Day, 2008. To begin with, and let me be very clear about this: No third-party candidate, no matter how sincere or how well-funded – whether the party calls itself Libertarian, Constitution, Tea Party, Bull Moose or Whig – is ever going to win a national election. All a third-party candidate will do is ensure that a liberal will be able to win with just 40-45 percent of the vote. Also, anyone who...

Pulitzer-winning commentator Charles Krauthammer, now a Fox News analyst, says he started out as a Democrat, but then realized the "Great Society" actually hurt the nation. Now his most admired president is Ronald Reagan and he calls himself a psychiatrist in remission. The comments come in Krauthammer's interview with author Burt Prelutsky for Prelutsky's new book, "Portraits of Success: Candid Conversations with 60 Over-Achievers."

I love America, but honesty compels me to admit I used to love it even more. I loved it more when people could admit they were patriots without being called xenophobes. I loved it more when a person could say that nobody should be allowed to sneak into the country without being labeled a racist...

“Frankly, I don’t know what it is about California, but we seem to have a strange urge to elect really obnoxious women to high office. I’m not bragging, you understand, but no other state, including Maine, even comes close. When it comes to sending left-wing dingbats to Washington, we’re number one. There’s no getting around the fact that the last time anyone saw the likes of Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, and Nancy Pelosi, they were stirring a cauldron when the curtain went up on ‘Macbeth’. The three of them are like jackasses who happen to possess the gift of blab....

Many people were offended to see Barack Obama once again bowing to a foreign dignitary, the Emperor of Japan. For my part, I was actually relieved that at least this latest breech of protocol didn’t involve his kowtowing to one of America’s sworn enemies. As most people are well aware, I have nothing but loathing for Obama’s policies, but even I am amazed by his reluctance to handle what I regard as the easy part of his job; namely, carrying off his responsibilities to be a figurehead, to be the proud symbol of this great and generous nation.

I suspect that because George Bush and Condoleezza Rice were so respectful of Muslims, constantly telling us that theirs is a religion of peace, some otherwise sensible Americans actually began to believe it. Now we have a president who not only kowtows to a Saudi prince, but carries on as if Israeli homes are more threatening than Iranian nukes. What is wrong with our leaders? Are they worried that they won’t be invited to those cool Ramadan parties? The Islamists have been actively at war with us for 30 years and generally at war with western civilization for well over...

During last year’s presidential campaign, Joe Wurzelbacher raised a lot of hackles in liberal circles when he got Barack Obama to admit he was in favor of the federal government redistributing America’s wealth. It was a landmark moment. For one thing, it led Helen Jones-Kelley, Director of Ohio’s Department of Job and Family Services, to doing her utmost to make the poor guy’s life miserable, thus conveying the message to Obama’s critics to keep their yaps shut if they knew what was good for them. At the same time, it taught Obama to keep his radical agenda as vague and...

Then there’s the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, which started out in life at a thousand pages, and then had a 300-page amendment tacked on to it in the dead of night. It was as if Dr. Frankenstein, after carefully inspecting his nightmarish creation, decided that what the monster really needed was a second head and a hunchback. Again, nobody had time to read the bill, but that didn’t prevent 219 congressmen, including eight Republicans who scurried out from under a rock just long enough to make certain that Christmas, or perhaps I mean Ramadan, would come early for the...

Being a conservative, I naturally spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to psychoanalyze left-wingers, trying to figure out what makes them tick. God knows I’m not bragging. It is, after all, time I could otherwise devote to alphabetizing my canned goods or trying to make contact with Harry Houdini, but I know from the large number of emails I receive that I’m not alone. The lunacy on the left is enough to turn a lot of us into little Sigmund Freuds. For instance, why is it that lefties are so puzzled or pretend to be so puzzled that conservatives...

The other day I received an e-mail from a lady who let me know she was in the habit of forwarding my articles to her daughter who is away at college. Apparently she felt I could provide the young woman with an antidote to her left-wing professors. I wished her luck, but I didn’t hold out much hope. After all, by this time the young coed has been immersed in public education for 13 or 14 years. Let a child be raised by wolves and you shouldn’t be too surprised if, upon being rescued, his table manners leave something to...

On more than one occasion, I have asked myself how it is that in a country where twice as many people call themselves conservatives, liberals are able to control the media, the schools, the courts and are able to put a radical leftist like Barack Obama in the White House. I have come up with two possibilities. The first is that most of the 38% who identified themselves as moderates and independents in a recent poll are big fat liars; in fact, they are actually left-wingers, but dislike being pigeonholed even if they wouldn’t be caught dead voting for a...

Back in 2008, New York Times correspondent David S. Rohde, along with Afghan reporter Taki Luden, were abducted in Pakistan by the Taliban. Because they felt it might adversely affect hostage rescue efforts, the Times requested a news black-out. The Associated Press and other news agencies respected the request and only broke the story recently, after Rohde and Luden had scaled a wall and made their escape. It would be nothing other than a story with a happy ending, except that the Times has time and again ignored the government’s requests that it not report the specific ways in which...

I often find myself thinking that if liberals didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all. Consider the uproar from the left when Don Imus opened his silly yap about the black women on the Rutgers basketball team. Now compare that to their response when David Letterman made his smarmy cracks about Sarah Palin and the governor’s 14-year-old daughter. The liberals immediately sprang to his defense, pointing out that Letterman is nothing more than a TV personality and is therefore free to make offensive jokes without fear of censure. So what do they think Don Imus is?...

A while back, I heard Obama bragging about his first few months in the White House. When he claimed he had done as much in that period as any president in history, my initial thought was that for the first time in his life he was being modest. Frankly, I think he’s done more, much more, and I only wish that some of it had been good for America. He’s taken over car companies, banks and lending institutions. He’s printed so much currency that he’s the envy of counterfeiters and con men everywhere. He’s buried the nation in so much...