I’d also appreciate it if Sean Hannity would wake up to the fact that a lot of us change the channel the second that Bob Beckel shows up on the Great American Panel.

On the other hand, I wish that merely as an experiment a dozen or so liberals could be forced to watch Glenn Beck for an entire week. I would be dying to know how they would react after watching videos of Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn, Andy Stern and John Holdren spouting off when they think nobody outside the room will hear about their plans to transform America.  They would have made Dr. Frankenstein blanch but put a smile on Karl Marx’s ugly mug.

Back in 1990, the police raided Barney Frank’s home because his lover, Steve Gobie, was running a male prostitution ring out of his condo. In 2007, the police raided the home of James Ready and arrested him for possession of marijuana. Ready, who is Barney’s main squeeze these days, didn’t just smoke the weed, Farmer Ready was growing the stuff. The congressman was there at the time of the raid but denied he had any idea that those plants in the backyard weren’t rhododendrons. I believe he told the police that he was perfectly clueless when it came to plant life. I guess, like Clinton, he too never inhaled.

Because I am always prepared to grant a liberal politician the benefit of the doubt, I’m sure it’s only a coincidence that Barney has long led the fight to decriminalize the use and sale of the narcotic.

Finally, I understand why so many folks are eager to impeach the president, but that obviously isn’t going to happen. Unfortunately, being a Red and despising America isn’t an impeachable offense. However, there’s nothing to prevent people from gathering signatures in order to recall their arrogant representatives.

I suggest we begin with every single one of those ACORN-loving crumbs who voted for the stimulus bill, cash for clunkers, and ObamaCare.

If their voting against the best interests of present-day American taxpayers, not to mention future generations, isn’t reason enough to throw the bums out, I can’t imagine what would be.

As with the weather, or at least the way it used to be with the weather prior to Al Gore’s turning it into his personal ATM, everyone complains about incumbents, but nobody does anything about them.

It’s my guess that a majority of those involved with the NEA — even those few who are talented — are always eager to roll over for left-wing politicians.  Partly it’s because they are so hungry for attention and partly because they lack anything resembling a moral compass. 

Allow me to give you a few notable examples of the way that people who earn their living in the areas of art and entertainment can voluntarily blind themselves to those matters that have moral implications.  Just recently, we got to watch a swarm of Hollywood retards climbing all over themselves in a rush to defend Roman Polanski, a piece of Euro-trash who confessed to having sex with a 13-year-old child.  All sorts of big name, small brain, celebrities lined up to sign petitions on his behalf.  By attesting to his character, they merely confirmed that they lacked any themselves. 

Hollywood is the place where the members of the Motion Picture Academy were once so angry at producer Jack Warner for casting Audrey Hepburn, instead of Julie Andrews, in “My Fair Lady,” that they refused to even nominate Ms. Hepburn for her terrific performance as Eliza Doolittle.  However, proving, as usual, that they shouldn’t be allowed to vote even when politics aren’t involved, these lunkheads then gave the 1964 Oscar for Best Picture to “My Fair Lady,” which enabled the very same Jack Warner to stride onstage to thunderous applause. 

Then there was the matter of Cliff Robertson and David Begelman.  When Robertson, an Oscar-winning actor, discovered that Begelman, the head of Columbia Pictures, had forged his signature on a $10,000 check, he blew the whistle.  After a police investigation, it turned out that Begelman had been financing his gambling habit with a lot of other people’s money, including Judy Garland, whom he had blackmailed.  The upshot was that Robertson had his acting career short-circuited, whereas Begelman, who was only sentenced to community service, was then hired to run MGM. 

Shortly after the scandal occurred, I happened to be having lunch with my agent in a restaurant loaded with Hollywood types.  When Begelman entered, there was such a flurry of people competing for his attention, you could have mistaken them for a covey of Cardinals vying to smooch the Pope’s ring. 

It’s not just actors, directors and producers, who act like dopes.  Consider writer Norman Mailer.  Perhaps because he was the fellow who once tried to settle a domestic dispute by stabbing the second of his six wives, Jack Abbott, who was serving time for bank robbery and murder, decided he’d be the ideal pen pal.  Mailer became so enamored of Abbott’s writing, he not only used his considerable influence to get Abbott’s book, “In the Belly of the Beast,” published, but got this career criminal paroled.  In New York, quite naturally, Abbott became the toast of the literati crowd, but only for a little while because six weeks after his release, Abbott stabbed 22-year-old Richard Adan to death. 

Saving the best for last brings us to Leni Riefenstahl.  In Berlin, in the 30s, as in Hollywood at any time, it wasn’t what you knew but who you knew, and Leni was a chum of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda.  Think of him as the head of Germany’s NEA.  It was Herr Goebbels who helped get her the opportunity to make “Triumph of the Will” and “Olympia,” a couple of over-wrought “documentaries” dedicated to hyping the Third Reich. 

After the end of World War II and for the remaining half of her 101 years, American and European cineastes — the same twerps who do cartwheels over Michael Moore’s propaganda flicks — showered her with honors and acclaim.  This in spite of the fact that although she claimed she wasn’t a Nazi and would barely have recognized Hitler if she’d tripped over him, had said, “To me, Hitler is the greatest man who ever lived.  He truly is without fault, so simple and at the same time possessed of masculine strength.”  Sort of sounds like Chris Matthews going on about Obama or Oliver Stone mooning over Hugo Chavez or Fidel Castro, doesn’t it? 

In 1993, Riefenstahl had the gall to deny that she deliberately attempted to create pro-Nazi propaganda.  For good measure, she claimed she was disgusted that “Triumph of the Will” was used in such a way.  It was reminiscent of Captain Renault’s shock upon discovering that gambling was taking place in the backroom at Rick’s, all the while pocketing his winnings. 

Having seen her most famous films, I can assure you that unless you cut the movies up into a million little slivers of celluloid and used them for toothpicks, there was no other conceivable use for them except as Nazi propaganda. 

Moreover, in 1934, Riefenstahl said that “Mein Kampf” had made a tremendous impression on her. “I became a confirmed National Socialist after reading the very first page.  I felt a man who could write such a book should undoubtedly lead Germany.  I felt very happy that such a man had come.” 

She was so impressed with the book that she wrote the author a fan letter.  The letter led to a meeting.  The meeting led to her directing “Victory of Faith,” a movie about the fifth Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg.  So much for her claim that she really only knew Hitler from his photos. 

In fact, for someone who spent so many years churning out propaganda films, she was rather inept when it came to lying.  For instance, on one occasion she claimed that she was totally unaware that concentration camps even existed, while another time she swore that she only worked for the Nazis because Goebbels had threatened to send her to a concentration camp if she didn’t cooperate. 

Frankly, what confounds me is why she wasted even a single second lying about her past.  I mean, even if she had been good at it, why bother?  After all, sensible and moral people never believed her self-serving malarkey; and, as for the celebrity crowd, they simply didn’t care.  They never do.

Some of the things he swore to included keeping lobbyists out of his administration, providing five days for the public to review pending legislation and a bi-partisan approach to problem-solving.  Instead, lobbyists, particularly those representing unions, have freer access to the Oval Office than Michelle and the kids.  Not only is the public not given time to digest major legislation, neither are the legislators.  Early on, you may recall, Congress was given less than 24 hours to vote on an 1100-page, trillion dollar, so-called stimulus bill; more recently, when it came to health care, Obama was telling the sheep on Capitol Hill to vote even before an actual bill was written!

So far, as bi-partisanship is concerned, the Republicans have been banished to Washington’s equivalent of Siberia.  These days, bi-partisanship simply means that  David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel are in agreement.

There is one promise, however, that Obama has kept.  He vowed transparency, and anyone who can’t plainly see what the rock star and his left-wing groupies (Axelrod, Emanuel, Jeff Jones, Valerie Jarrett, Cass Sunstein, Anita Dunn) are up to is simply spending too much time watching “American Idol” and college football.

Consider, if you will, the way that Obama has managed to take the spotlight off his attempt to grab control of one-sixth of the nation’s economy that’s devoted to health care and to put the kibosh on conservative talk radio and free access to the Internet.  All he had to do was declare war on Fox News.  Just like that, the mass media, otherwise known as faux news, turned its attention to the phoniest battle since Gorgeous George and the Super Swedish Angel hung up their wrestling tights.

The way the media carried on, you’d have thought Obama was trying to decide whether to send 40,000 additional troops to fight in Afghanistan or to invade Fox.

On the other hand, it is just possible that Obama’s feud with Fox merely proves that he is as thin-skinned and as vain as some of us have suspected all along, which would fit right in with the narcissism that his constant TV appearances suggests.  Not since FDR have we had a president so in love with the sound of his own voice.  Not since Jimmy Carter have we had a president so convinced of his own saintliness.

Although Obama is a prime example of egomania, liberals generally hold themselves and one another in such preposterously high regard that normal people — in other words, conservatives — can only laugh.

For instance, because liberals are always blathering on about how much they love Mother Nature and how concerned they are about ecology, they are never asked to explain why they are so much better at talking the talk than they are at walking the walk.  It’s not just the obvious phonies, either — elitists such as Al Gore, Arianna Huffington, Michael Moore, Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert Kennedy, Jr., who live in mansions and fly around in private jets, leaving carbon footprints the equivalent of fair-sized communities in their wake — that I have in mind.

I’m also referring to the crowd that showed up in Washington for Obama’s coronation and left our nation’s capitol looking like a pigsty.

I’m thinking of the California Coastal Commission, the folks entrusted with keeping the Golden State’s coastline pristine, but who can always be convinced, for the right price, to come up with a variance.

While on the subject, we shouldn’t overlook the greenies who populate Hollywood and who never once gave George W. Bush a thumbs-up for taking out Saddam Hussein even though his setting fire to the oilfields of Kuwait was the single greatest man-made ecological disaster in history, rivaled only by Adam Sandler’s 30-odd movies.

Finally, we come to nature boy himself, Robert Redford.  Although I am a free market capitalist and believe that Redford should be allowed to build a ski resort, a giant cell phone tower or even have his head carved out of a mountainside, if he chooses to on his own land, I have to question the environmental bona fides of a guy who creates a film festival in the snow-covered hinterlands of Utah.

I mean, every year, upwards of 50,000 people jet in from all over the world for the Sundance Film Festival.  It may be swell for the Utah economy to have all those coke-sniffing, fossil fuel-burning, mugs showing up to watch bad movies and make distribution deals, but if you were really concerned about preserving the environment, wouldn’t it make more sense for these clucks to stay home and watch the movies on their TV sets the way the rest of us do?

In my experience, which consists of watching movies on airplanes, a movie that stinks at sea level reeks just as badly at 30,000 feet.  Otherwise, why settle for Utah?  It would make far more sense to hold a film festival atop Mt. Everest.

A while ago, I wrote a piece titled “Blowing the Whistle on Waxman.”  In case you missed it, I explained that Henry Waxman and I had been friends beginning almost 50 years ago at UCLA.  I also said that we had seen each other infrequently over the intervening years once he went to Sacramento as a state assemblyman and later to Washington as a member of Congress. 

Over the years, I moved politically from left to right, while Henry moved from left to far left to over the edge.  Still, I had a soft spot for him and, as a result, refrained from including his name when I would list the usual suspects, those left-wingers like Pelosi, Reid, Rangel, Boxer and Murtha, who were doing their utmost to destroy America.           

However, once Obama was elected and began pushing his radical agenda, while simultaneously surrounding himself with advisors who should never have been allowed within a mile of the White House, Henry began feeling his oats.  Suddenly, with the Democrats in control of the House, he was no longer a back-bencher.  He even got to have his name on a piece of major legislation, the Waxman-Markey Cap & Trade bill, a singular disaster that would send all of our energy costs soaring while simultaneously providing China and India with a tremendous advantage over what remains of our American industry. 

That was bad enough, but even after those notorious ACORN videos aired on Glenn Beck’s TV show, Waxman and 74 of his left-wing cronies on Capitol Hill voted to continue funding ACORN, and that cut the Gordian knot for me.  At that point, even old school ties weren’t enough to dissuade me, and, in a very sad frame of mind, I wrote the article. 

An hour or so after it was posted, I received an email from Waxman’s office in Washington.  It began: “Dear Burt, I can understand that we have disagreements about politics.  I can see that you have some embarrassment about our past friendship, but you are not responsible for me and I am not (thank G-d) responsible for your views or actions.  But I do resent that whatever I may have said to you in a conversation years ago is now being dredged up (and maybe made up) to make me look bad.  I never thought I had to remember things I may have said to you to be provocative at the time, would be repeated and distorted, as if it were ‘on the record.’” 

(Note:  Just for the record, I made up nothing and I distorted nothing.  What I said he said about the steroid-using baseball players he called before his committee was exactly what he said; namely that he had no idea they were even famous until he saw his fellow congressmen lining up for their autographs; and, in response to a question I posed strictly out of curiosity, replied that he had no idea how long after an athlete stopped using steroids, they would continue to show up in drug tests.  Besides, neither of those statements is particularly provocative.  They merely indicate how unqualified and unaware a congressman can be and still feel himself entitled to sit in judgment of other people.  The other thing I addressed in the article was Henry’s boasting that he and his colleagues were going to investigate Fox for biased news reporting, and my responding that I thought it was a swell idea so long as they then did the same with the NY Times, the three major networks, CNN, MSNBC and the Washington Post.  That time, I even had a totally impartial witness, my wife Yvonne.) 

Responding to his first paragraph, I wrote:  “Dear Henry, I don’t blame you in the least for being angry.  But you can imagine how I felt when I saw your name included with the other 74 Democrats who voted to continue funding an organization as corrupt and vile as ACORN.  For the life of me, I could not think of a single reason why you would wish to align yourself, even for partisan political reasons, with a group that has not only been guilty of election fraud, but, as those now famous videos made clear, have no objection to assisting a pimp to set up a brothel.  And not just any brothel, but one employing abducted 13-year-old girls from Latin America.  Also, I did send you a note some months ago wishing you a speedy recovery when I heard that you had been rushed off to the hospital, so even though you never acknowledged it, it would suggest I’m not entirely heartless.” 

Waxman’s email went on: “As I recall our poker friendship, you used to keep a card with every cent I ever lost to you to be sure you were paid.  When you sent out a letter pleading for your friends to help you out at a difficult financial time in your life, you promised that you would repay every cent.  I sent you $100.  I never asked you for the money, nor have you offered to repay it.  I did not want to embarrass you then or now.  But since you have no hesitation to try to publicly hold me up to scorn, I see no reason not to ask you to repay your debt to me.  I would like to use that money to donate to the ACLU or some other group that will defend your rights, along with everyone else, to free speech and other Constitutional protections.  Sincerely, Henry Waxman.” 

To this, I replied, “The card you mention was not for poker losses.  Those were always minimal because none of us had any money, and were invariably paid off at the end of the game.  The card was to keep track of the money I loaned you, and which you took an extremely long time to repay.  It was to help you continue playing blackjack during one of our occasional trips to Tahoe or Vegas.  I am truly sorry, though, that I did not pay back the $100.  That was an oversight because in moving from one rental to another, as circumstances forced us to do several times once Hollywood ageism made me unemployable, I lost the IOU list.  When, some years later, I was finally able to earn some money, I did pay back those whose names I remembered and those who subsequently reminded me.  I regret that I forgot your generosity.  I will have the check in the mail to you this afternoon.  You are free, of course, to donate it to the ACLU, to ACORN or even to help pay for Nancy Pelosi’s next facelift.  It’s your money, after all, unlike the money that Waxman-Markey will cost American taxpayers and American businesses.  Regards, Burt.”) 

Do I regret that Henry Waxman is one of 250-odd Democrats who are only too happy to rubberstamp every piece of legislative lunacy concocted by Obama, Axelrod, Emanuel, Jarrett, Holdren, Jennings, Sunstein and Jeff Jones?  Of course.  Do I regret that Henry Waxman has so totally lost his moral compass that even when 172 of his fellow liberals  voted to stop funding ACORN, he stood steadfast with the sleazebags?  You bet.           

Worst of all, he probably sees it as being politically courageous.  On the other hand, normal human beings, who haven’t spent most of their adult lives feeding at the public trough, recognize it as aiding and abetting.

First off, I’d like to know why the 535 members of Congress have to congregate in Washington, D.C.  As Dick Morris and Eileen McGann made perfectly clear in “Fleeced,” they don’t do very much in the nation’s capitol that they couldn’t do just as well or just as badly if they stayed home in their bathrobes.  Half the time, the sessions are devoted to naming post offices and other equally earth-shattering events. 

So far as I can tell, the actual motives are to allow senators and representatives to have fiefdoms both in Washington and in their own state or district; to make things more convenient for lobbyists – one-stop shopping, as it were; and to keep our representatives as far away as possible from their constituents. 

I keep hearing commercials for teleconferencing systems and I think they’re worth a try.  With my plan, there is even an advantage for the politicians because they wouldn’t have to waste time and money flying back and forth.  What’s more, they wouldn’t have to spend all that extra dough sending their kids to private schools, thus ensuring that their offspring be spared having to attend public schools in Washington, D.C.  You know, those schools that politicians are always raving about when they’re out seeking campaign contributions from the Teacher’s Union, the ones where liberal candidates pose for photo ops during presidential campaigns. 

My second question is how it was that of the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence, only 24 were lawyers or jurists, but of the current 100 senators, 60 are lawyers?  While it’s true that there are slightly more than a million lawyers in America, that is less than one percent of the adult population.  So how is it that 60% of the U.S. Senate and slightly over 30% of the House members, in addition to their party affiliation, are entitled to put Esq. after their name? 

I believe the problem is two-fold.  One, it’s just too easy and too much fun being a politician; two, it’s just too hard and not enough fun being a lawyer.  If people enjoyed being lawyers more, they wouldn’t be so darn eager to run off to Albany, Sacramento, Springfield, Atlanta or Washington, D.C.  Frankly, I don’t know how to make the practice of law a more exciting career.  So, instead, I think it behooves us to come up with ways to make politics a less attractive option.  The one notion that popped into my head was to take a leaf out of the Aztec playbook and initiate human sacrifices.  Would any of us really have strong objections to Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer, Arlen Spector, Susan Collins, Henry Waxman, Charles Schumer, Olympia Snowe, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank, being offered up to pacify the angry spirits of the Founding Fathers? 

My final question is, why, in 2009 America, are mulattoes invariably identified as blacks?  Surely there is nothing wrong with being a mulatto.  There is no stigma attached, as once there was.  It merely refers to those who have one white parent and one black.  There are many notable individuals who are mulattoes, including Halle Berry, Derek Jeter, Lisa Bonet and Barack Obama.  Tiger Woods, on the other hand, is a true amalgamation, being one-quarter Chinese, one-quarter Thai, one-quarter black, one-eighth Native American and one-eighth Dutch.  And, yet, with the possible exception of the New York Yankee shortstop, we insist on identifying all of them as black. 

It’s as if there is something shameful about their being half or even one-eighth white.  If there is, I’d sure like to know what it is.  If, on the other hand, there isn’t, why do we insist on acting as if there were?

The question of decency runs through my head every time I see or hear a celebrity or a politician these days.  For instance, I keep asking myself if I am more disgusted by what Roman Polanski did some 30-odd years ago or what his legion of defenders are presently saying in his defense.  Just because he directed a couple of good movies and a lot of lousy ones, we have most of Hollywood signing petitions on his behalf.  Whoopi Goldberg, who was apparently paying close attention when Bill Clinton was parsing the word “is,” has gone so far as insisting that what Polanski did to the 13-year-old girl wasn’t really rape.  The problem with calling these Hollywood freaks on the carpet is that the more repulsed that normal human beings are with them, the more convinced they are that they’re as sophisticated, not to mention morally superior, as their press releases claim they are. 

Some time ago, I suggested that when John Huston’s degenerate character, Noah Cross, dragged his young granddaughter off into the night at the end of “Chinatown,”  Roman Polanski was the only person in the world who actually believed he had directed a movie with a happy ending.  Now, thanks to the 150 show-biz celebrities who have signed a petition demanding that the child-rapist go free, I see how terribly naïve I was. 

Or consider Jimmy Carter, who has spent the past three decades cozying up to the likes of Yasser Arafat and working overtime to prove that people who call him America’s biggest anti-Semite aren’t just whistling “Dixie.”           

But, not content with merely condemning Israel’s Jews, he branched out a while ago and condemned Southern Baptists for oppressing their womenfolk, going so far as to turn his back on the church he has belonged to for his entire life.  No word yet whether Mr. Peanut plans to join up with the Sunnis or the Shi’a. 

Then we have an ex-vice president, Al Gore, who has spent the past several years getting rich in a way that would have had Charles Ponzi gnashing his teeth in envy.  First, Gore announced that the earth was heating up and that people in Kansas would soon be up to their knees in the Pacific Ocean.  Then, when Mother Nature pulled a fast one and cooled things down slightly, as is her wont, Gore didn’t miss a beat.  Instead, he said we were undergoing climate change.  People didn’t know what that meant, but Gore, in those ominous tones he has mastered, said it was every bit as bad as global warming and, so, the money just kept rolling in. 

Well, far be it from me to miss out on a good thing.  So it was that I, too, began paying close attention to the weather.  After all, it was obviously a growth industry.  What I found to my horror was that things were far scarier than Mr. Gore, at his spookiest, had suggested.  For instance, even here in Los Angeles, where we generally take weather for granted, I noticed that between January and July, the median temperature rose from 63 to 93, an average increase of five degrees a month.  The increase was so gradual that, like the frog in the pot of boiling water, I’m not sure I would have even noticed if I hadn’t been paying such close attention.  Now, it’s not my wish to panic anyone, but if the trend continues at that rate, by the end of 2010, the average temperature will be close to…180 degrees! 

In order to do further study, I’m hoping to obtain a federal grant so that I can get a really good thermometer and several notebooks and pencils.  I believe I can handle the entire job for about $10 million. 

While we’re on the subject of numbers, and while I’m waiting for my $10 million piece of the stimulus package, I recently checked out the ages at which our 43 presidents were first elected.  (Note:  Even though Barack Obama is the 44th president, he’s only the 43rd individual to hold the office.  The problem is that one man, Grover Cleveland, a born troublemaker, was both the 22nd and the 24th president, having been elected in 1884 and then again in 1892.) 

In any case, as I was saying, I discovered that 26 of our presidents were elected in their 50s, while nine of them were first elected in their 60s.  Some of those 35 men were fine, and included the likes of Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Lincoln; while others, such as Wilson, Harding, Hoover, FDR, LBJ, Nixon and Carter, left a good deal to be desired. 

What I found most telling was that the half dozen men who were initially elected in their 40s (Pierce, Cleveland, Teddy Roosevelt, JFK, Clinton and Obama) don’t make a very impressive case for youth.  On the other hand, the only one who was elected in his 70s was Ronald Reagan.  Now I’m not saying I’m another Reagan, but I will be in my 70s by the time 2012 rolls around and, assuming I’ve completed my weather study by then and have somehow avoided being burned to a crisp, I would consider it an honor and a privilege to run against that young whippersnapper, Barack Obama. 

In addition to my age, two other things I’d have going for me are, one, I didn’t attend an Ivy League school and, perhaps best of all, I’ve never been a lawyer. 

Finally, I fully expect that any day now Robert Gibbs will announce that Rio de Janeiro has been named Chicago’s sister city and, so, thanks to the efforts of Barack, and the sacrifices of Michelle and Oprah, Chicago will, in a sense, be co-hosting the 2016 Olympics. 

And in other totally unrelated news, Gibbs will inform the media that President Obama has declared war on Denmark.

Speaking of Congress, although the research isn’t yet complete, the early indicators are that, rumors to the contrary, you can not get swine flu from exposure to Henry Waxman. 

Scientists at London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine confirmed that 50 years of research found that, aside from price, there was no nutritional difference between conventionally-grown foodstuffs and the ugly, under-sized items you find in the organic section at the supermarket. 

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy made his name explaining how you could tell if you were a redneck.  I trust you understand that fame and fortune such as he achieved aren’t my motivation.  But merely as a public service, I thought I’d point out how to recognize if you’re a racist.  For instance, if you think that Jesse Jackson is an extortionist; that Al Sharpton is a con man; that Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright and Van Jones are three of a kind; and that the Black Congressional Caucus, ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, Eric Holder and Barack Hussein Obama, present a clear and present danger to our Republic, you are what passes for a racist in 2009. 

Frankly, I keep waiting for Obama to doff the mufti and start appearing in some nicely tailored uniform for, clearly, the cult of personality has been introduced successfully for the first time ever in our nation’s history.  If you disagree, what would you call that red, white and blue Obama symbol that has pretty much supplanted the presidential seal in the past year?  And outside of such places as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, have you ever seen so many posters and pictures of a national leader? 

Perhaps because I don’t watch very much TV, I’ve only recently become aware of a TV commercial which could easily have been written and produced by the White House, possibly under the auspices of the NEA.  In the commercial, a black deliveryman for Miller High Life shows up in a private box at the race track and confiscates all the beer from the rich white people and then hands the bottles over to the regular folks at the track, all the time muttering that the people who actually paid for the stuff don’t deserve it because they’re “hoity-toity.” 

I realize it’s only a commercial, but if we have redistribution of wealth and health care, can redistribution of brewskis be far behind on that great-come-and-get-it-day? 

Like everyone else, I noticed that in his address to Congress, Obama, who had been insisting all along that there were about 45 million people in America without health insurance, was suddenly, without explanation, referring to 30 million.  It seems to me that if he can miraculously make 15 million people just disappear, all he has to do is give two more speeches to completely eliminate the problem. 

Finally, I recently saw ObamaCare summed up rather succinctly by a picture of an elderly American set adrift on an ice floe.  Of course, knowing David Axelrod, Rahm and Ezekiel Emmanuel, John Holdren, Cass Sunstein and the AARP, as I have come to know them, I’m sure they’ll find a swell way to sell it to us.  My guess is that they’ll simply call their final solution to the problem of all those pesky old folks wanting medical attention Obama’s Magical Ocean Cruises.

I knew from personal experience that Henry was a fish when it came to poker, but it was some time later that I found out how truly awful he was.  Before being elected to Congress, he had gone to Sacramento as a state assemblyman.  Wherever politicians congregate, you will find two things — poker games and lobbyists.  As you can imagine, lobbyists are not there to win money from those they spend their lives trying to influence.  But it seems that Henry was so inept that, in spite of their best efforts, they kept beating him.  This so embarrassed the lobbyists that they finally banished him from the game. 

Naturally, once Mr. Waxman went to Washington, I saw him less and less frequently.  Periodically, he would return to L.A., but that was in order to spend time  meeting with constituents and holding political fund-raisers.

Over the years, Henry continued to be a liberal.  He continued to think FDR was a combination of Moses and Santa Claus.  I, on the other hand, who had been raised in a similar middle-class Jewish home, spent the intervening years wising up.

So it was that while attending a party a while back, a celebration of Henry’s 30th year in the House, I asked him what he was up to.  When he said that one of his committees was preparing to investigate Fox News for biased reporting, I couldn’t keep my yap shut and maintain my status as a polite guest.  Instead, after telling him that I thought it was a swell idea, I went on to suggest that when he and his colleagues finished investigating Fox, I trusted they would turn their eagle eyes on ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, the Washington Post and our own Pravda wannabe, the L.A. Times.

Henry simply gawked at me.  He looked even more than usual like a fish out of water.  It was as if he thought his old school chum had been replaced during the dead of night by a space pod.

I assume he had heard from mutual acquaintances that I was no longer a Democrat, but he was so obviously unprepared for my transformation into a conservative that I almost felt sorry for him.  There was a moment of shocked silence, almost as if he was hoping I was going to laugh and admit I was just pulling his leg.  Then the moment passed, and he moved off to be among those who thought three decades of Waxman in the U.S. Congress was something worth celebrating.

For old times sake, I have generally left Waxman out of my attacks on liberals in the House.  After all, with the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Charles Rangel, John Murtha, Barbara Lee, Linda Sanchez, Bernard Sanders and Barney Frank, taking up space, I didn’t think it was necessary to focus on my old college buddy.

But things have changed.  First there was the totally irresponsible Waxman-Markey cap & trade bill, which would destroy America’s industrial capacity and send energy costs soaring for every American household, while simultaneously providing our competitors in China and India with every possible advantage.

But, for me, the final straw was Waxman’s voting along with 74 other House Democrats to continue funding ACORN with our tax dollars.  Just as there’s no need to catalogue all of ACORN’s crimes and sins at this time, there’s no reason to bother trying to find a good excuse for Waxman’s defending this gang of creeps and thugs.

At this late date, I am not easily shocked, but I was so shocked and disgusted to find Waxman siding with ACORN that I decided I was going to share a piece of information that should add a measure of embarrassment to his well-deserved shame.

A few years ago, Henry garnered a great deal of publicity when he chaired a committee investigating the use of illegal substances in major league baseball.  I suspect there were a lot of people who had never even heard of Waxman prior to the hearings.  For my part, being a lifelong baseball fan, I was glad to see Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmeiro, sweating on the hot seat.

Those punks had done everything in their power to destroy the national pastime by cheating, thereby erasing such honorable names as Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Roger Maris, from the record book.

Shortly after the hearings, I had lunch with Henry.  He confessed that he knew so little about baseball, he had no real idea who the players were, and that he was amazed to discover they were so famous that members of Congress and their staffs actually crowded into the hallways to collect autographs.

That was bad enough.  But I then asked him, “If a minor leaguer uses steroids or human growth hormones in order to reach the majors, but stops once he gets there, how long will he continue to test positive?”

Henry admitted he had no idea.

So here was a congressman investigating baseball who not only had no idea who its most famous players were, but no pertinent information about the substances they were being condemned for using.

Now, seriously, do you really think that he knows any more about energy than he does about baseball or poker?

Speaking of Congress, although the research isn’t yet complete, the early indicators are that, rumors to the contrary, you can not get swine flu from exposure to Henry Waxman. 

Scientists at London’s School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine confirmed that 50 years of research found that, aside from price, there was no difference between conventionally-grown foodstuffs and the ugly, under-sized items you find in the organic section at the supermarket. 

Comedian Jeff Foxworthy made his name explaining how you could tell if you were a redneck.  I trust you understand that fame and fortune such as he achieved aren’t my motivation.  But merely as a public service, I thought I’d point out how to recognize if you’re a racist.  For instance, if you think that Jesse Jackson is an extortionist; that Al Sharpton is a con man; that Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright and Van Jones are three of a kind; and that the Black Congressional Caucus, ACORN, the SEIU, the Black Panthers, Eric Holder and Barack Hussein Obama, present a clear and present danger to our Republic, you are what passes for a racist in 2009. 

Frankly, I keep waiting for Obama to doff the mufti and start appearing in some nicely tailored uniform, for clearly, the cult of personality has been introduced successfully for the first time ever in our nation’s history.  If you disagree, what would you call that red, white and blue Obama symbol that has pretty much supplanted the presidential seal in the past year?  And outside of such places as the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, have you ever seen so many posters and pictures of a national leader? 

Perhaps because I don’t watch very much TV, I’ve only recently become aware of a TV commercial which could easily have been written and produced by the White House, possibly under the auspices of the NEA.  In the spot I saw, a deliveryman for Miller High Life shows up in a private box at the race track and confiscates all the beer from the rich and then hands the bottles over to the regular folks at the track, all the time muttering that the people who actually paid for the stuff don’t deserve it because they’re “hoity-toity.” 

I realize it’s only a commercial, but if we have redistribution of wealth and health care, can redistribution of brewskis be far behind on that great-come-and-get-it-day? 

Like everyone else, I noticed that in his address to Congress, Obama, who had been insisting all along that there were about 45 million people in America without health insurance, was suddenly, without explanation, referring to 30 million.  It seems to me that if he can miraculously make 15 million people just disappear, all he has to do is give two more speeches to completely eliminate the problem. 

Finally, I recently saw ObamaCare summed up rather succinctly by a picture of an elderly American set adrift on an ice floe.  Of course, knowing David Axelrod, Rahm and Ezekiel Emmanuel, John Holdren, Cass Sunstein and AARP, as I have come to know them, I’m sure they’ll find a swell way to sell it to us.  My guess is that they’ll simply call their final solution to the problem of all those pesky old folks wanting medical attention Obama’s Magical Ocean Cruises.

Like most bloggers, I write for more than one website.  It’s rather like being a syndicated columnist, except that little or no money changes hands.  But, as a writer who hopes to influence public opinion, you want to have as many readers as possible.

The strange event took place on a Tuesday.  It came in the form of an e-mail from Jonathan Garthwaite, who runs Townhall, a website I’ve contributed to for nearly four years.

The message read: “Dear Burt: As everyone is painfully aware, the economy is forcing companies to make difficult decisions.  Townhall.com is no different.  We take our commitment to our readers and our bottom line very seriously.  Similarly, we are constantly reassessing our editorial lineup.  We end up making tough decisions that aren’t always fun.

“I know it won’t please you to know that we’ve decided to discontinue carrying your column.  It was not a decision make (sic) carelessly.  Picking between colleagues, friends and talented writers is never easy.

“Thank you very much for sharing your insights with Townhall.com readers over the years.  Sincerely, Jonathan.”

I must confess I was shocked to receive an electronic pink slip after all this time.  I sent Garthwaite an e-mail asking which other writers were being made to walk the plank, but he said he wasn’t free to share that information.  I did get him to agree to post a notice on the following Friday, lest readers simply assumed that I had died.

The reason I’m sharing this with you isn’t because I regard this as a case of blatant censorship.  This isn’t the federal government silencing me.  Townhall has every right to post or not post any writer for any reason.  I don’t believe I or anyone else has the inalienable right to have his articles disseminated.  There are many more important issues than whether or not a blog decides to cut me loose.  Okay, I exaggerate.  There aren’t many things more important, but there are, I’m almost certain, several that rival it.

That said, I fear that there are dark forces at play.  You see, although there was the reference in Garthwaite’s e-mail to the weak economy and the bottom line, there had been no prior discussion between Townhall and me about money.  At least not for quite a while.  When I first started writing for them back in 2005, Townhall was paying me $35 for an article.  But I was writing faster than they were posting, so they agreed to run two-a-week, and I agreed to lower the price to $20 each.  And so it has remained.

But if they were cutting me loose over money, wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to suggest we revert to one-a-week or even ask me if I would write for less, even for free?  Isn’t that usually how these things work?

Therefore, I think reasonable people can agree that money makes a very questionable motive in all this.  And if I were popular enough with the readers to warrant Townhall’s posting two of my articles each and every week for all this time, lack of popularity wouldn’t appear to be the problem.

Now, understand, I am not the sort of person who readily subscribes to conspiracies.  If anything, I tend to pooh-pooh them because I don’t believe two people can keep a secret, and I’m dead certain that three or more can’t.  However, something about the timing couldn’t fail to grab my attention in much the same way that a mackerel lying under your pillow will certainly grab yours.

The piece that Townhall had posted on Monday of that week was an attack on our sworn enemies, which I had titled “The Straight Poop on Islam,” but which Townhall, in a fit of political correctness verging on insanity, had re-named “The Straight Talk on Islam.”

Perhaps it was sheer coincidence that the very next day, I was let go.  Maybe the one thing had absolutely nothing to do with the other.  Perhaps somewhere along the line, Cause and Effect had gone to Reno for a divorce and I just hadn’t heard about it.

But at least now you understand why I can’t help wondering if the folks at Townhall got an offer they couldn’t refuse — perhaps a call from someone threatening to send them a ticking CAIR package.