CaliforniaRepublic - A World Gone Mad by Burt Prelutsky

I hope you’ll pardon me if I take a moment to suggest that a great many of my fellow Americans are just plain nuts.

In recent weeks, I have had this notion driven home repeatedly. For instance, it seems almost every time I’ve tuned in ESPN, I have witnessed thousands of San Franciscans give standing ovations to Barry Bonds as he’s strolled up to home plate. As bad as that is, I have had people defend him to me on the grounds that it’s never been established that he’s ever used steroids. Well, even Bonds admits he used products produced in the infamous Balco labs. What he claims is that he had no idea that they could possibly be performance-enhancing drugs. Of course he didn’t. He used them because he wanted to turn his head into a pumpkin, and become the first player in major league history to wear a size-17 baseball cap!

My second inkling that lunacy is rampant in the land took place in the waiting room of my friendly chiropractor. While waiting for Dr. Ross to make my lower back say, “Uncle!” I sat thumbing through an old copy of the New Yorker. Having finally deciphered most of the cartoons, I actually began reading a piece about Sam Alito’s upcoming confirmation hearing. (I told you it was an old copy.) Suddenly, in the middle of the article, I came across one of those lines that seemed so wacky, I figured I had misread it. So I backed up and tried it a second time, only to confirm that the problem wasn’t with me, but with Jeffrey Toobin, who wrote the following: “If Anthony M. Kennedy, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer had forthrightly answered questions about their judicial philosophies, they almost certainly would have been confirmed anyway; all of them belong in the large middle ground of American politics.”

Contributor
Burt
Prelutsky

Scriptwriter Burt Prelutsky has writing credits from some of television’s best known series as well as having been a humor columnist for the L.A. Times and a movie critic for Los Angeles magazine. [go to Prelutsky index]

Conservatives are from Mars
(Liberals are from San Francisco)
by Burt Prelutsky

It is such an outlandish statement that it hardly merits comment except to point out that these are four of the five nincompoops who voted the wrong way in this year’s infamous eminent domain case, and that Mrs. Ginsburg, in her former life, was chief counsel for the ACLU. However, in the rarified atmosphere in which New Yorker writers and readers reside, this is regarded as middle of the road. Believe me, by the time Dr. Ross had me on the table, both my back and my brain were in spasm.

But I was in for even more craziness after I wrote a piece in which I suggested that, for all their faults, Republican politicians were better than Democrats, and that conservatives who stayed home in November or vented their anger by voting for third party candidates ran the very real risk of shooting themselves in the foot.

I heard from hordes of disgruntled right-wingers, many of whom had the effrontery to accuse me of being (naïve) (stupid) (a liberal) (John McCain’s stooge) (all of the above).

As usual, I made it a point to reply to each of my critics, but I have to assume there were others who were simply too lazy to write or were willing to give me the benefit of the doubt. So I will take this opportunity to try to set the record straight.

I share the frustration of my fellow conservatives. I, too, have become increasingly disillusioned, not just with the president, but with his Republican cohorts in the capitol. They have squandered a golden opportunity to use their clout to effect real change in Washington. To many of us, they seem to have spent far more time trying to curry favor with Democrats than to promote a conservative agenda. Instead of behaving like the guys in control of the Oval Office and both houses of Congress, they’ve been mincing around like palace eunuchs frightened to death of offending the resident caliph.

The problem is that, all that being said, the Democrats are even worse. Sending a message to the GOP in 2006 by sitting out the election means putting liberals at the wheel. These lefties are dangerous enough when they’re merely backseat drivers.

A third party would be made up of right-wing dissidents, thus splitting the ranks of the Republicans, and ensuring that Senator Clinton gets to return to the White House, and not just on a visitor’s pass.

Sending a message to the Republican politicians by voting the incumbents out of office will simply result in their having to change careers, thus creating a glut of high- priced lobbyists. Big deal! It’s we, the people, who will have to suffer the dire consequences.

How’s this for a nightmare scenario? The year is 2008. The cast of characters include President Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State Ted Kennedy, Secretary of Defense John Kerry, Attorney General Al Gore, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi, Supreme Court Justice Bill Clinton, and Senate Sergeant-At-Arms Cynthia McKinney.

All you right-wingers who are seriously considering staying home in November or squandering your votes on third party nonentities should stop and consider the possible ramifications of your self-indulgent mischief.

But it’s a matter of principle, you say. We’ve got to do what we’ve got to do, you insist. What have we got to lose? Let’s just try it and see. What’s the worst that could happen?

The last person who said all those things, let me remind you, was Dr. Frankenstein. CRO