Free Republic

There are times, I must confess, when I consider our current culture and conclude that the Muslims are right about us. We are, as they insist, hedonistic, and far too many of us do have the morals of goats. We do rely on sex and violence for our entertainment. Our popular music is swinish. We are, by a wide margin, the world’s largest market for drugs, both of the legal and illegal variety. Our politicians are selfish, ignorant and, more often than not, at odds with the American ideals of the Founding Fathers. Leaders of both major parties are wont...

According to my wife, I have a tendency to state my opinion as fact. She suggests that I begin my sentences by saying “It’s only my opinion, but…” and go on from there. It’s my opinion, however, that people already understand that it’s my opinion and that they share it if they’re smart, or don’t if they’re not. Furthermore, I don’t see my main function as a communicator to convince liberals, who are notoriously as blind as bats, to see the light, but to provide my fellow conservatives with ammunition to use against left-wingers and, whenever possible, to amuse. In...

In all of history, so far as I’m aware, there had only been two famous tea parties. At the first one, Samuel Adams and a few of his freedom-loving friends pitched several crates of tea into Boston Harbor. The second was the one Lewis Carroll wrote about, a madcap affair with the March Hare, the mad Hatter and the narcoleptic Dormouse, ganging up to give Alice a hard time.

During the presidential campaign, we were told that Barack Obama was another Lincoln. At the time, I recall thinking that he might very well be another Lincoln, but certainly not Abe. Then we were told he was another FDR, which was certainly closer to the truth, and not just because they both smoked cigarettes and made Narcissus look like a shrinking violet. But, now that he’s been in office for a while, he mostly reminds me of Wile E. Coyote. He thinks he’s very clever, but he keeps falling off the cliff while holding the anvil he intended to drop...

I never imagined I’d say it, but I’m beginning to identify with Barack Obama. I’m certainly not referring to his politics or his narcissism, but it seems that both of us really suck when it comes to gift giving. First, he gave Prime Minister Gordon Brown some DVDs that were incompatible with English electronics, and then he gave Queen Elizabeth an iPod that contained his speeches. Well, I hate to admit it, but I can empathize. Shopping for a prime minister has got to be hard enough, but trying to shop for a woman who has her own country would...

Recently, I posted a piece at Townhall in which I suggested that Mrs. Obama is not, to put it mildly, my ideal. I stated that so long as the president and the first lady are Democrats, the media can’t stop rhapsodizing about them. So it was that John Kennedy, who had huge jowls, Bill Clinton, who looked like a taller version of W.C. Fields, and Barack Obama, who has Dumbo’s ears, have all been described in terms that would have made Cary Grant blush. Hillary Clinton, so far as the media was concerned, was nothing less than the most brilliant...

If I hear one more person point out that Obama is the president and that it’s our duty to support him, I just might run amok. For one thing, I resent being reminded that he actually won the election and that it’s not all a bad dream from which I’ll awaken as soon as the alarm clock rings. For another, there was a very good reason that I voted for John McCain, and it certainly had nothing to do with my having great expectations of the man, and everything to do with my conviction that Obama was a left-wing ideologue....

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...

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.

When some people questioned how Obama could have sat in that cesspool of a church for a thousand Sundays, Obama said that anyone who would ask such a rude question was obviously a racist, knowing full well that the MSM, aka the amen corner, could be counted on not only to parrot his words, but to clap hands and shout “Hallelujah!” If some of us began to confuse news stories about Obama with his campaign press releases, it’s because they were interchangeable, although the press releases tended to be more restrained and, usually, better written. When Geraldine Ferraro dared to...

This is the time of year when the studios send DVDs of their movies to the members of the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild and, in my case, the Writers Guild. It’s not altruism. They’re hoping to garner our votes for the various awards being handed out in the near-future. In case you haven’t noticed, there is an annual pattern to the release of motion pictures. During the first few months of the year, the studios dump out most of the movies they suspect won’t do very well at the box office and which certainly won’t be competing for...

All those pundits who were forecasting the November election, busily analyzing blue states, red states and those all-important purple swing states, were spinning their wheels. At the risk of sounding even more presumptuous than usual, I contend that they were wasting their time and yours. If you ever want to know who’s going to win an election, all you really need to do is find out how many people have cats living with them and how many have dogs.

The problem with being a logical human being is that every day, sometimes every hour, you get blind-sided like a quarterback cursed with an underachieving offensive line. It’s bad enough when a movie or a mystery novel scores a big fat zero on the logic meter, but when it happens in real life, if you’re anything like me, you find yourself wondering if you have somehow followed Alice down the rabbit hole.

I have no way of knowing whether the Republican party will go the way of the Whigs, the Bull Moose and the dodo bird. But perhaps it should. After all, when they held control of the House, the Senate and the Oval Office, for the first six years of President Bush’s administration, they were inept, lazy and corrupt. In other words, they behaved just like Democrats.

By Burt Prelutsky I don’t know how many of you are old enough to remember “To Tell the Truth,” a TV game show on which three contestants tried to convince a panel that each of them was the one telling the truth about himself when in fact two of them were lying. Lately, the Democrats have been reminding me a lot of those two contestants. Instead of competing for small cash prizes, though, these hack politicians are vying for votes. For instance, Barney Frank, who has always looked and talked like a cartoon character, has begun behaving like one....

Let me state for the record that I do not want to be president. For one thing, I don’t want to move east because I hate cold weather. For another, I make it a point to avoid any event that requires a suit and tie, and, so far as I can tell, the president has to get dressed up to go to the bathroom. Besides, the mere thought of having to spend time with people like Robert Byrd, Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, Barney Frank, Harry Reid and Christopher Dodd, is enough to give me a migraine. However, if...

As you may have noticed, left-wingers really hate to lose. That’s why, even eight years after the fact, they are still wringing their hands over the 2000 presidential election. They still insist that George W. Bush and the Republicans swiped it, even though several objective sources have since confirmed that, chads or no chads, Bush carried Florida, and that Sandra Day O’Connor, otherwise a heroine to leftists, was one of the Supreme Court justices who ruled against Al Gore, the candidate who couldn’t even carry his home state. Which is reason enough all of us should be forever grateful to...

By Burt Prelutsky As you may have guessed, I don’t personally know the Republican candidate for president. I’ve never met him and I expect I never will. I’m sure that if I’d been in a position to fork over $5,000 for dinner at a fund-raiser, it could have been easily arranged. However, I have one unbreakable rule: If I pay $5,000 to have dinner with someone, he’s then going to have to cough up $5,000 pretty darn quick to have dinner with me. And, frankly, he’d get a lot more for his money than I’d get for mine. That’s...

If at times, it is not easy to determine what a liberal is, it’s because during presidential election campaigns, politicians who have been voting like liberals, talking like liberals and boasting about their liberal credentials, suddenly insist that they’re really centrists as they go about trying to garner the votes of gullible Republicans and Independents. It’s rather like Michelle Obama trying to convince us that she’s just another stay-at-home mom who loves America and her kids, and in exactly that order. Most of us on the right can spot a liberal a mile away, just as easily as experienced bird...

By Burt Prelutsky Frankly, I’m amazed that the Democratic party is anything more than a cult. How in the world do they garner more votes than the Libertarians or the Greens? They are beholden to trial lawyers, teachers unions, and the ecological crazies. So, why is it that upwards of 55 million Americans are ready, even anxious, to vote for Barack Obama in November? It’s a scary thought. But not half as scary as the notion of “Hail to the Chief” becoming Senator Obama’s theme song. Democrats insist that we shouldn’t drill off the Pacific coast or in Alaska...