I wasn’t surprised that Rep. Joe Wilson felt compelled to apologize to President Obama for calling him a liar.  I also wasn’t surprised to hear that within 24 hours, thousands of liberals had sent in over $200,000 in contributions to Wilson’s opponent in next year’s election even though they knew nothing about him except that he was running against Wilson.  I was heartened to hear that once the word got out, Wilson received a million bucks.  But, frankly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the other 434 members of the House had censured, expelled or ridden Rep. Wilson out of Washington, D.C., on a rail.  I mean, where the heck does this guy get off speaking the truth in the hallowed halls of Congress? 

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.  (more…)

I have come clean in the past about having been friends with Rep. Henry Waxman.  We had met in the late 1950s at UCLA and wound up spending a lot of time over the following decade playing cards.  In fact, once, some years later, I received a phone call from a guy profiling Waxman for the Washington Post.  He wanted my impression of the young, pre-Congressional fellow.  I told him that Henry was a terrible poker player, but was very astute at hearts.  I said it made perfect sense because poker is a cut-throat game, every man for himself, whereas hearts is a game that involves constantly changing alliances.  I regarded it as a perfect metaphor for a career in politics.

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.  (more…)

I wasn’t surprised that Rep. Joe Wilson felt compelled to apologize to President Obama for calling him a liar.  I also wasn’t surprised to hear that within 24 hours, thousands of liberals had sent in over $200,000 in contributions to Wilson’s opponent in next year’s election even though they knew nothing about him except that he was running against Wilson.  Frankly, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the other 434 members of the House had censured, expelled or ridden Rep. Wilson out of Washington, D.C., on a rail.  I mean, where the heck does this guy get off speaking the truth in the hallowed halls of Congress? 

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.  (more…)

Recently, I had a very odd experience.  No, I didn’t wake up 30 years younger and with a full head of hair.  That would have been odd but nice, whereas the experience I actually had was merely bizarre.

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. (more…)

It was a little over 30 years ago that I first laid eyes on the remarkable Larry Gelbart.  The occasion was our high school’s 50th anniversary.  I had been selected to host the celebration in the auditorium.  It was also my duty to talk about what Fairfax High had been like when I was there during the 1950s.  It was Larry’s job to report on the 1940s.  As I recall, producer Mike Frankovich handled the 30s and singer Martha Tilton recalled the 1920s. Although I got to introduce Gelbart to the audience, we didn’t actually meet.

Several months later, in a weekly column I was then writing for the L.A. Times, I took exception to the constant trashing of TV.  For all its obvious faults, I pointed out that over the years TV, not Broadway, books or the movies, was the place to find the best comedy in America.  I went on to mention ten or twelve of the anonymous men most responsible for writing the funniest lines.  Naturally, Larry Gelbart was one of the names on my list. (more…)

There are certain dates that are indelibly etched in our minds because they were drummed into us in school, such as the 1066 Battle of Hastings; some because they commemorate joyous events such as July 4th, December 25th or the births of our children; and some because they remind us to never forget how quickly everyday life can be turned into something horrific. 

The first of three such dates for Americans is 12/7/41.  That was, as FDR put it, a day of infamy.  It was a Sunday between Thanksgiving and Christmas when, without warning, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, killing 2,335 servicemen and 68 civilians.

The second of the nightmarish dates was 9/11/01 when 19 Islamics hijacked four airliners and murdered 2,998 human beings, most of whom were Americans. (more…)

For the longest time, I’ve insisted that liberalism is the religion of choice for atheists, agnostics and run-of-the-mill secularists.  After all, be they Christians, Jews, Moslems or Buddhists, the truly devout accept the tenets of their religion on faith.  They can try to have logical debates with the likes of a Christopher Hitchens, but in the end it all comes down to a couple of people getting red in the face, hollering “Is so” and “Is not” at each other. 

But, of late, I’ve decided that referring to liberalism as a religion for non-believers is showing it too much respect.  It far more resembles a cult.  Even the expression about leftists drinking the Kool-Aid refers to an actual cult, the one created by the certifiable loony, Jim Jones.  Having led his flock of deranged sheep from San Francisco to Guyana, one day in 1978, he ordered more than 900 of his followers to drink Kool-Aid laced with cyanide.  (more…)

Before last year’s election, I heard a lot of people claim they didn’t feel they knew who Obama really was.  For my part, I felt I knew him all too well.  Which was why I didn’t like him and wouldn’t have voted for him even if he’d run unopposed, which, now that I think about McCain’s campaign, was pretty much the way it was.

Boneheads would have you believe my opposition to Obama is based on racism.  I, on the other hand, would insist that when a presidential candidate announces that once his energy plan is in place, our energy costs will soar; that he will bury you if you have the temerity to own a coal company; and that he believes, as he told Joe the Plumber, that it is government’s job to re-distribute wealth, what does race have to do with it?  I hated all that stuff back when it was being promoted by such white con artists as Karl Marx, Josef Stalin and Saul Alinsky.

Furthermore, the way that blacks and other liberals label everyone they’re against as racists, I think conservatives should start suing these punks for slander.  Make them either prove it in court or pay through the nose. (more…)

Sometimes, I must confess, I find myself feeling like one of those cursed individuals like Job and Sisyphus.  In my case, the curse takes the form of trying to be rational in a mad world.  My particular albatross is trying to make sense of the liberal mind.  No sooner do I try to delve into it than I pop out on the other side.  It’s as shallow as a midget’s footbath. 

For instance, I understand why liberals opposed invading Iraq.  It was because George W. Bush instigated it.  They voiced no objections when Bill Clinton took us into Somalia and Kosovo, and now that Obama has expanded the war in Afghanistan, you don’t hear them whining that it’s a quagmire, that the Afghanis had nothing to do with 9/11 or demanding that Obama spell out his exit strategy and specify the date of withdrawal.  But, given all that, I would have thought that at least the tree-huggers would have campaigned for regime change in Iraq, based not on Saddam Hussein’s gassing of the Kurds and his history of torture and rape, God forbid, but for having set fire to the oil fields of Kuwait in 1991, probably the worst man-made ecological disaster in history.  (more…)

Unlike most conservatives, when I first heard about cash for clunkers, I got very excited.  But then I found out that it involved people turning in their used cars.  I had jumped to the conclusion that we were all going to get money if we delivered politicians to some collection center.  Just imagine getting $4,500 for dropping off, say, Henry Waxman at a junkyard where, together with fellow California jalopies like Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein, they could be crushed and shipped off to China.  You would have to agree that would be a pretty good deal even if no money changed hands. 

–

One of my liberal readers sent me an e-mail stating that the health care system in America is in terrible shape and needs a huge overhaul, which is why he was supporting Obama’s plan.  I wrote back to say that I agreed that the system needed fine-tuning, but, like Charles Krauthammer, I felt that the work consisted mainly of separating health insurance from employment and bringing about radical tort reform so that doctors didn’t have to spend more time worrying about being sued than they did about the health of their patients.  I went on to add that if I was wrong, things could always be changed, but if he and Obama were wrong, a huge federal bureaucracy would be created and you can’t kill one of those even with a silver bullet or a wooden stake through its heart. (more…)

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 a thousand years, and still we pay lip service to these people in a way we never did with Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan or the Soviet Union.  Is it because the Muslims commit sadism and murder in the name of religion and not country?  If anything, I would think that would make their evil acts all the more contemptible. (more…)

If I had to explain Americans to a Martian, I would be hard-pressed. It would be especially difficult when it came to liberals. But, there are even conservatives who confound me.  For instance, why would any Republican belong to AARP? They might just as well skip the middleman and send their money directly to Howard Dean and the DNC. 

Judging by the organization’s enthusiastic support of ObamaCare, which should really be called ObamaDoesn’tCare, it’s obvious that the only old people AARP gives a hoot about are Robert Byrd, Arlen Specter, Ted Kennedy and Harry Reid. 

Speaking of senators, I have on occasion tried to send e-mails on important issues to senators aside from California’s Boxer and Feinstein, and discovered that it can’t be done. These weasels have set it up so that they only hear from their own constituents.  That being the case, I don’t want any of these human slugs introducing or voting on legislation that affects the entire nation. If they don’t want to hear from me, I sure as heck don’t want to hear from them. 

Getting back to AARP, the first time I was aware of their disinterest in the elderly came some years ago when I pitched their monthly magazine, Modern Maturity, a piece about the legendary composer of movie scores, Elmer Bernstein. Because the man was still going strong in his 80s, I assumed they would jump at the opportunity. The editor’s candid response was they weren’t interested because he was too old and that they were seeking a younger audience!  (more…)

By this time, I’m sure we’ve all heard more than we care to about Professor Henry Gates.  Still, I can’t let it go without tossing in my two cents.  Admitting he didn’t know the facts of the case didn’t prevent President Obama, allegedly our first post-racial chief executive, from siding with the black professor and admonishing a white Cambridge policeman.  Nothing too surprising about that, inasmuch as he appears to be far more concerned with the health and comfort of the Islamic terrorists down in Gitmo than he is with America’s elderly citizens. 

I also have a bone to pick with the media’s portrayal of Prof. Gates.  The way they kept describing him, you might have thought the guy had cured cancer or invented the microchip.  His field happens to be black studies.  Even at Harvard, that’s tantamount in academic terms to basket weaving. 

My own field of study is liberals.  As I see it, the major difference between Prof. Gates and me is that he gets paid a lot of money, gets to eat in the faculty dining room and when he acts like an egotistical jerk and swears at a cop doing his duty, he’s the one who not only gets the apology, but gets the President of the United States to defend his boorish behavior.  (more…)

I have received a number of e-mails over the years from disgruntled parents griping about the left-wing indoctrination their kids are forced to undergo at colleges and universities all over America.  One minute, it seems, the kids are sane, or at least as sane as one can expect of 18-year-olds, and the next thing you know they’re parroting the likes of Ward Churchill, William Ayers and Noam Chomsky, bad-mouthing America and yodeling the praises of such left-wing troglodytes as Hugo Chavez, the Castro brothers and Barack Obama. I feel their frustration.  Even if the little nincompoops can’t do long division or write a coherent sentence, parents feel like child abusers if they don’t pony up the dough to send their kids off for what is laughingly referred to as higher education. 

If I were running things, most high school grads would enter trade schools.  America will always need nurses, plumbers, carpenters, glaziers and mechanics.  What nobody needs is some 21-year-old schnook who’s wasted four years and most of his inheritance majoring in black, Hispanic or lesbian, studies.  And, then, to make matters worse, because like the Scarecrow of Oz, they have a sheepskin, they’re actually convinced they’re smarter than their parents. 

One of my readers, Penny Alfonso, of Glendale, California, shared a conversation she had with her daughter.  “I told her I won’t pay the tuition for any classes that end in the word “studies”.  I have also told her that while I have no right to tell her how to think, if she comes home hating America and spewing the lies of the leftists, I will tell her I love her, and that she has the right to believe whatever she wants to believe, but I don’t have to pay for it.  In the 20 years of her life, if she’s learned nothing else, she has learned that I am completely serious about this.”  (more…)

Nobody has to tell me things are going from bad to worse in America.  The question that preys on my mind is when it was that we began our descent.  Some would say it started when Jimmy Carter turned his back on the Shah of Iran, thus providing an impetus for latter-day Islamic terrorism.  Others might say it was the first time Bill Clinton dropped his pants in the Oval Office, while still others might contend it began when the Supreme Court determined that the Pursuit of Happiness was a rationale for 80 million abortions on demand.  

For all I know, things might have begun sliding the very first time some slack-jawed teenager struck a pose and struck a chord on an imaginary guitar.  There was a time, after all, when most American kids were actually given music lessons and learned how to play an actual instrument, and even saved up their allowance to buy sheet music. 

Whenever the slide began, in the months since Obama was crowned, we’ve slid faster and further than I would have dreamed possible.  Obama keeps huffing and puffing and the federal government just keeps expanding like a gigantic balloon.  It’s only a matter of time until it blows up in all our faces.  (more…)

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’s 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 be desired. 

I’m not engaging in hyperbole when I say that I’d sooner send a youngster to Florida during hurricane season than to most colleges.  As I see it, he or she has a very good chance of surviving the hurricanes.  Their hair might get mussed, but at least their brains wouldn’t be scrambled.

Frankly, I’m surprised that there are any young conservatives left in America.  They deserve to be on the list of endangered species.  Considering the amount of pressure they face from peers and professors, I am in awe of those with the gumption to stand their ground.  If the nation’s Founding Fathers came back to life, I believe they’d recognize them as the progeny of those Americans they last saw hurling tea into Boston Harbor, fighting at Lexington and freezing at Valley Forge.  (more…)

Frankly, I’m beginning to feel a lot like Howard Beale, the character portrayed by Peter Finch in the 1976 release, “Network.”  He insisted that people get up right now and go to the window, open it, stick their heads out and yell, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” 

I’ve always heard that misery loves company.  If true, misery in America has more company these days than it knows what do with. 

I realize that conservatives have felt this way ever since the Democrats nominated the Chicago crony of Bill Ayers, Jeremiah Wright, Tony Rezko, Rod Blagojevich and the assorted felons at ACORN, to be our president, but why aren’t millions of honest, decent, hard-working Democrats up in arms?  I can guarantee that if a Republican president had done half the things that Obama has pulled off in his first half year, most of us on the right would be calling for his head.  At the very least, none of us would be kissing his heinie.  (more…)

I often find myself thinking that if liberals didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any standards at all. 

For instance, 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?  The secretary of state? 

Or consider how choleric those on the left become any time that Dick Cheney defends the former administration.  Well, if Obama and his cronies didn’t constantly attack Bush and Cheney and their policies, the chances are the ex-vice president wouldn’t feel compelled to set the record straight. Furthermore, Jimmy Carter never stopped bashing George Bush during the eight years he was the president, and yet nobody on the left ever suggested he shut up.  On the contrary, he was hailed at the 2004 Democratic convention, and even had the honor of being seated next to the patron saint of left-wingers, Michael Moore.  Speaking of Carter, how is it that he, who is always volunteering to monitor elections anywhere on earth, including the Westminster Dog Show, wasn’t in Iran, making sure that Ahmadinejad got 110% of the vote?  (more…)

Last year, an acquaintance named Dave, a television writer who had fallen on hard times, decided to make an economy move to South Carolina.  An indicator of his sour mood is that he now includes “The Swamp” in his e-mail address.  I have every reason to believe that this Hollywood transplant isn’t referring to the physical landscape, but to the folks who live there.  Over the past several months, he has made it perfectly clear that he feels as if he has awakened to find himself dwelling in Dogpatch. 

As we all know, a certain amount of trauma takes place anytime we pack up.  But that’s especially the case when we set down 3,000 miles away.  No longer do we know where the barbershop is or the dry cleaner or the coffee shop where they remember to drain the tuna before making your sandwich.  If you add to the mix the fact that the man is middle-aged and, thus, regarded as over-the-hill in a business that confuses youth with ability, one can readily understand a certain amount of bitterness.  (more…)

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 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 debt that children born 40 years down the road will be greeted with a slap on the butt and a lien on future earnings.  For good measure, the Community Organizer in Chief has created more czars than the Romanovs. (more…)