Welfare, Warfare & Woeful

Burt Prelutsky Com ^ | 9/5/2013 | Burt Prelutsky

[Loud Mime]

During the great depression, when there were even fewer jobs than there are today, there were still a great many men who refused to go on the dole, which was what welfare was called under FDR. That was only 75 or 80 years ago, but today, as you’ve probably noticed, their kids and grandkids can’t wait to start living off the efforts of others.

Whether it’s seniors in Florida signing up for food stamps they don’t need, young people in the inner-city assuming they’re entitled to be supported by others because clowns like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson keep telling them they’re victims of oppression, illegal aliens being fed similar hooey by Democrats or simply run-of-the-mill creeps lying in order to scam their way onto the disability rolls, millions of Americans are proving to be an embarrassment to their ancestors. The land of the free has morphed into the land of the freeloader.

George Bernard Shaw once observed that when you rob Peter to pay Paul, you shouldn’t expect Paul to complain. These days, of course, beneficiary Paul is more likely to be named Pablo or P’qual.

As you’ve no doubt noticed, ever since Obama first started yammering about red lines, we’ve been hearing about green lights. If Assad did this, he would be hearing from us; if Assad did that, he’d never know what hit him. But once he did both this and that, Obama began parsing his language in a way we haven’t seen since Bill Clinton donned his professorial robes and tried to convince us that “is” sometimes meant what we all had previously thought it meant, but at other times, especially when sex was involved, meant “isn’t.”

After coming on like he meant business, Obama first reversed course and said he was only going to fire a shot across Assad’s bow. Then, instead of firing the shot, he decided he needed an okay from Congress, the very group of obstructionists he’d been verbally flaying for the past three years. But as urgent as the need to take action had been on Friday, on Saturday, Obama said it could wait another nine days until the obstructionists returned from vacation. Of course, they would then have to argue the merits of military action for another week or two, not to mention turning in those 500-word essays detailing what they’d done during their summer vacation.

On Sunday, John Kerry, who was a rotten soldier back in the 70s when he wore a uniform, proved to be a good one now that he’s wearing Obama’s collar, told Chris Wallace that he thought there was no danger in delaying action for as long as it takes to unite 535 members of Congress and 315 million Americans. But, Wallace asked, what if Congress doesn’t approve action and all those Americans continue to oppose getting involved in another Middle East mess? Kerry scoffed at the very notion.

I can see his point. After all, it wasn’t that long ago that most people thought ObamaCare was an unmitigated disaster, and look how popular it is now. Okay, bad example.

Wallace did ask Kerry what Obama would do if in the meantime Assad again attacked the rebels with sarin gas. The Secretary of Defense pooh-poohed the possibility. And he was right to pooh-pooh such a silly notion. After all, Obama has already warned Assad four or five times. By now, we have to assume the warning has finally sunk in.

I suppose by this time, nobody should be too surprised that after informing his national security advisors that he had changed his mind about sending that shot across Assad’s bow, Obama and Biden rushed off to play a round of golf. But the good news is that when he yelled “Fore!” Bashar al-Assad, Kim Jong-un and the Iranian mullahs, knew he wasn’t kidding around. He really meant it.

Speaking of chemical warfare, Chris Matthews, who’s a major role model to lispers looking to carve out careers in broadcasting, told his MSNBC audience that even Adolf Hitler never used chemical weapons. That came as belated good news to the millions of Jews who apparently only thought they had been killed by the Nazis through the use of Zyklon B, otherwise known as hydrogen cyanide.

As liberals have long contended, MSNBC isn’t just entertaining, it’s also, thanks to the likes of such deep thinkers as Matthews, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Andrea Mitchell and Al Sharpton, extremely educational.

The fact that hardly anybody ever tunes in is all the evidence liberals need to convince themselves that, just as with the NY Times, green energy and ObamaCare, it takes a special sort of birdbrain to realize just how wonderful it is.