Burt’s Eye View: New Year’s Resolutions

by Burt Prelutsky

This is the time of year when most people are busy resolving to do better in the future. Some people vow to go on diets or exercise more, some promise to give up smoking or booze. But, year in and year out, I vow to cut liberals more slack and give them the benefit of the doubt. Unfortunately, just as with other people’s good intentions, my own rarely last until nightfall. The difference is that the reason mine die on the vine, as it were, has nothing to do with my own lack of character, but everything to do with the failings of liberals.

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For one thing, liberals are hypocritical. They have agendas when they’d be better off having principles. They praise whistle-blowers and investigative reporters, but only when Republicans, conservatives and/or the U.S. military suffer the consequences. So it was that they lionized Daniel Ellsberg for turning the Pentagon Papers over to the NY Times and heralded Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for their Watergate expose, but demanded that James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles be prosecuted for their ACORN videos and wanted the computer hackers who uncovered the East Anglia emails, the ones proving global warming to be a major hoax, to be tarred and feathered.

I even remember when Time magazine put a group of highly publicized corporate whistle-blowers on their cover, hailing their courage and patriotism. Long before Time Magazine decided its cover boy would be Ben Bernanke, I was willing to wager that O’Keefe and Giles wouldn’t be Time’s 2009’s People of the Year.

When George W. Bush convinced a mere 42 countries to join us in the invasion of Iraq, liberals insisted he had gone off half-cocked. However, when Obama couldn’t convince any country to take the Guantanamo prisoners off our hands and could only get 40 nations to commit to joining us in Afghanistan, those on the left insisted he was a master of diplomacy.

The liberals keep telling us that, thanks to Obama’s policy of speaking endlessly and carrying a very small stick, America has gained renewed respect around the world. But, as usual, they don’t specify which countries respect us more these days now that they have good reason to fear us less. We know pretty darn well they’re not referring to Russia, Iran, Somalia, North Korea, Syria or China. They’re not even able to point to such erstwhile allies as Poland, Israel and the Czech Republic, all of whom are staggering around these days with American-made switchblades in their back.

Liberals, as well as a great many conservatives, were upset with George W. Bush for his massive spending. But these days, when Obama is quadrupling the deficit, the Left is cheering him on. Can you imagine what liberals would be saying if a Republican president announced something as nutty as Obama’s promise to spend his way to solvency?

For that matter, what would a typical liberal say if, after he broke the news that they were on the brink of bankruptcy, his wife’s response was to head out the front door, and when he asked her where she was going, she replied, “I’ll be back in a minute, honey, I’m just running out to pick up a few things at Tiffany’s”? Is there a jury in America that would find him guilty if he busted a chair over her head? But when it’s Obama going out the door to drop a few trillion on cap and trade and ObamaCare, the liberals just shake their heads like besotted newlyweds and say, “Isn’t he just cute as a button?”

The worst thing about liberalism isn’t even the lying and the double standards, but the fact that it’s contagious. For example, not too long ago, I heard Bill O’Reilly state that it was good for America that Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize. He said with a reasonably straight face that he liked the fact that the world saw us as a peaceful nation. I thought I could avoid such things by avoiding MSNBC. I was wrong. Instead, I thought my head would explode.

Barack Obama got the Prize for the very same reason that Jimmy Carter got it. They got it because they weren’t George W. Bush. The wooly-headed leftists in Norway keep making stupid decisions, handing out these medallions to the likes of Le Duc Tho, Kofi Anan, Desmond Tutu and Yasser Arafat, and clucks like Carter and Obama keep jetting over to Oslo to be clucked over.

If I were President Prelutsky and they tried to demean my reputation that way, I would not only reject the award, I would point out that the U.S. military has done more for the cause of world peace than all the diplomats and pacifists put together. Then I’d have someone teach me a little Norwegian so that I could tell them in their own language where they could put their damn Peace Prize.


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Posted Dec 31st 2009 at 3:12 pm in Politics | 95 Comments