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Such People Actually ExistI don’t have a bucket list. Unlike other, perhaps more normal people, I don’t long to see Paris, the Pyramids, or the Great Wall of China before I die. The way it works for me is that if I’ve seen it in a movie, I know I’ll be disappointed by the reality. That’s because in real life, the scene won’t be improved by a musical background provided by George Gershwin or Elmer Bernstein, and I won’t be strolling hand in hand with Audrey Hepburn or dancing with Ginger Rogers or even strolling and dancing with my late...

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...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Burt Prelutsky. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Burt Prelutsky got his start in journalism by skewering movie reviews throughout the sixties. His scathing, one-line reviews were hated by the media industries, but loved by his readers. Since then, he's been a prominent conservative columnist and blogger. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle:...

As many of you know, I spent a good part of 2012 trying to get the Mitt Romney campaign to give me a shot at writing, co-writing or re-writing his speeches. Alas, I never managed to scale the castle wall. So it wasn’t my fault that the only things he said that anyone ever remembered were that 47% of the people would never vote for him and that 20 million illegal immigrants should self-deport. Over the past 12 or 13 years, I have written over 1,300 articles and six books from a conservative perspective, but every time I turn around,...

[snip]...Furthermore, in the interests of full disclosure, I should confess that for a long time I was a Democrat. But, in my own defense, I was never a liberal. For those of a tender age, I should hasten to mention that there was a time when it was possible to be one without being the other. So, for instance, I could be a registered Democrat while simultaneously opposing unilateral disarmament. I could be a Democrat and still believe that Whitaker Chambers was telling the truth and that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were lying when they denied being Soviet spies....

Who was the dunderhead who came up with the primary system? I'm not referring to the primary elections themselves, but to the order in which they must be conducted. There are ancient religious rituals that aren't held to be this sacred.

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...

Over the last few years, I have lost friends and become estranged from relatives because of politics... If you’re convinced, as I am, that Barack Obama is the greatest menace America has ever faced -- a far graver danger than Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Islamic fascism, simply because they all lacked the ability or determination to destroy our Constitution -- losing a few friends and relatives is no big deal...

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...

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...

The way that liberal politicians and Hollywood celebrities carry on over the plight of poor people, you might easily get the idea that they actually know some. They don’t. Why would they when they only hang around with each other? Those two groups are made up entirely of narcissists. Who else would want or need to exist entirely in the spotlight? They’re like moths. The irony is that, physically, the two groups couldn’t be more different and, yet, on a per capita basis, they probably spend the same amount on Botox, collagen and plastic surgery. When it comes to nips,...

I have always contended that anybody who seeks the presidency is an egomaniac, every bit as certifiably crackers as those poor souls wandering around the grounds of the asylum insisting they’re Napoleon... I, on the other hand, a mature and seasoned individual who has never set foot in a law school, would make an ideal leader. However, I’m put off by politics. Rather than presidential material, I see myself in the role of a benevolent dictator...

...Having sat through Oscar shows hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and David Letterman, I naturally assumed these things couldn’t get any worse. I was mistaken...

Members of the Mafia have to take a vow of silence, and if they break it, they face the very real possibility of winding up dead. Liberals have their own version of the vow. However, instead of having to keep quiet about murder, drug deals and extortion, they must promise not to ridicule their own kind. The price of breaking the code isn’t death, it’s something far more serious; namely, exile from their social circle. Dare to make fun of Joe Biden’s statement that in 1929, President Roosevelt went on TV to reassure his fellow Americans about the Depression, and...

When I was very young, people were accustomed to saying that the only two certainties were death and taxes. Over the years, there’s a third item that could be added to the list: Every American president will try and fail to bring peace to the Middle East. Obama is merely the latest to put it at the top of his to-do list. My guess is that four or eight years down the road, long after he has managed to cure the leper and raise the dead, it will still be at the top of his list. I hate to be...

Recently, I received an e-mail from a young associate pastor in Maryland. He introduced himself as an avid fan of "MASH." He said that one of his favorite episodes had been one I wrote, "Quo Vadis, Captain Chandler?" and that he was considering using the show as an inspiration for an upcoming sermon. He wanted to know how I had come up with the idea. He also wanted to know how my own faith and understanding of God or Christ had informed my writing.

In her new book, “Guilty,” Ann Coulter committed the major heresy of suggesting that children should ideally be raised by a mother and a father, not by two men or two women or even by one woman. She created a firestorm, as she usually does when she’s releasing a new book, with crowds of single women coming after her with torches and pitchforks and other crowds lining up at Borders and Barnes & Noble.