Free Republic

[snip]...Furthermore, in the interests of full disclosure, I should confess that for a long time I was a Democrat. But, in my own defense, I was never a liberal. For those of a tender age, I should hasten to mention that there was a time when it was possible to be one without being the other. So, for instance, I could be a registered Democrat while simultaneously opposing unilateral disarmament. I could be a Democrat and still believe that Whitaker Chambers was telling the truth and that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were lying when they denied being Soviet spies....

Who was the dunderhead who came up with the primary system? I'm not referring to the primary elections themselves, but to the order in which they must be conducted. There are ancient religious rituals that aren't held to be this sacred.

There are certain topics about which I write that inevitably trigger predictable responses. If I write, say, a defense of Israel, I know I will be called one of three or four obscenities by anti-Semites. If I write a piece bemoaning the fact that 80 percent of Jewish Americans invariably vote for left-wingers, I can expect to be vilified, not as a conservative, but as a self-hating Jew. If I write disparagingly about Obama, a certain number of readers, taking their lead from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, will condemn me as a racist, and if I write anything in opposition...

Even though the next presidential election is still more than 500 days away, it's never too soon to be prepared. After all, Obama hasn't stopped campaigning since Election Day, 2008. To begin with, and let me be very clear about this: No third-party candidate, no matter how sincere or how well-funded – whether the party calls itself Libertarian, Constitution, Tea Party, Bull Moose or Whig – is ever going to win a national election. All a third-party candidate will do is ensure that a liberal will be able to win with just 40-45 percent of the vote. Also, anyone who...

Pulitzer-winning commentator Charles Krauthammer, now a Fox News analyst, says he started out as a Democrat, but then realized the "Great Society" actually hurt the nation. Now his most admired president is Ronald Reagan and he calls himself a psychiatrist in remission. The comments come in Krauthammer's interview with author Burt Prelutsky for Prelutsky's new book, "Portraits of Success: Candid Conversations with 60 Over-Achievers."

I love America, but honesty compels me to admit I used to love it even more. I loved it more when people could admit they were patriots without being called xenophobes. I loved it more when a person could say that nobody should be allowed to sneak into the country without being labeled a racist...

Over the last few years, I have lost friends and become estranged from relatives because of politics... If you’re convinced, as I am, that Barack Obama is the greatest menace America has ever faced -- a far graver danger than Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or Islamic fascism, simply because they all lacked the ability or determination to destroy our Constitution -- losing a few friends and relatives is no big deal...

Being a conservative, I naturally spend an inordinate amount of time attempting to psychoanalyze left-wingers, trying to figure out what makes them tick. God knows I’m not bragging. It is, after all, time I could otherwise devote to alphabetizing my canned goods or trying to make contact with Harry Houdini, but I know from the large number of emails I receive that I’m not alone. The lunacy on the left is enough to turn a lot of us into little Sigmund Freuds. For instance, why is it that lefties are so puzzled or pretend to be so puzzled that conservatives...

Then there’s the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill, which started out in life at a thousand pages, and then had a 300-page amendment tacked on to it in the dead of night. It was as if Dr. Frankenstein, after carefully inspecting his nightmarish creation, decided that what the monster really needed was a second head and a hunchback. Again, nobody had time to read the bill, but that didn’t prevent 219 congressmen, including eight Republicans who scurried out from under a rock just long enough to make certain that Christmas, or perhaps I mean Ramadan, would come early for the...

The way that liberal politicians and Hollywood celebrities carry on over the plight of poor people, you might easily get the idea that they actually know some. They don’t. Why would they when they only hang around with each other? Those two groups are made up entirely of narcissists. Who else would want or need to exist entirely in the spotlight? They’re like moths. The irony is that, physically, the two groups couldn’t be more different and, yet, on a per capita basis, they probably spend the same amount on Botox, collagen and plastic surgery. When it comes to nips,...

I have always contended that anybody who seeks the presidency is an egomaniac, every bit as certifiably crackers as those poor souls wandering around the grounds of the asylum insisting they’re Napoleon... I, on the other hand, a mature and seasoned individual who has never set foot in a law school, would make an ideal leader. However, I’m put off by politics. Rather than presidential material, I see myself in the role of a benevolent dictator...

...Having sat through Oscar shows hosted by Whoopi Goldberg and David Letterman, I naturally assumed these things couldn’t get any worse. I was mistaken...

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...

When I was very young, people were accustomed to saying that the only two certainties were death and taxes. Over the years, there’s a third item that could be added to the list: Every American president will try and fail to bring peace to the Middle East. Obama is merely the latest to put it at the top of his to-do list. My guess is that four or eight years down the road, long after he has managed to cure the leper and raise the dead, it will still be at the top of his list. I hate to be...

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.

In her new book, “Guilty,” Ann Coulter committed the major heresy of suggesting that children should ideally be raised by a mother and a father, not by two men or two women or even by one woman. She created a firestorm, as she usually does when she’s releasing a new book, with crowds of single women coming after her with torches and pitchforks and other crowds lining up at Borders and Barnes & Noble.

This morning, my hometown newspaper, the L.A. Times, carried the headline “Fixes in Jessica’s Law Are Urged.” The sub-head read: “Tight residency curbs on sex offenders can leave them homeless and propel them to re-offend, a panel says.” For those of you fortunate enough to live someplace where the Times isn’t your local daily, let me assure you that a similar news story runs nearly as regularly as Doonesbury and Dennis the Menace.

Just when you think the folks on the left can't get any goofier, they go and surpass themselves. If silliness were an Olympic event, these lunkheads could be counted on to bring home the gold. The fool's gold, that is. Actually, they could probably excel in the sprints, seeing as how they're not weighed down with a whole lot of common sense. In case you haven't gotten the word, the religious left, as I like to think of them, seeing as how they live their lives by a certain dogma, have now determined that poor people are terribly under-represented on...

Burt Prelutsky reads three selections from his book, Conservatives Are from Mars, Liberals Are from San Francisco Being Guilty Means Never Having To Say You Are SorrySex in AmericaThe Flag and Me

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.

...Why is it that people who should know better -- adults, I’m talking about, not the kids being indoctrinated on college campuses by tenured Communists and former terrorists -- are falling for Obama’s call for class warfare? Why are so many Americans so eager to accept that corporations are the enemy when corporations not only provide employment, but pay dividends to tens of millions of middle-class Americans either directly or through their pension funds? Why are the same folks who are waging war on corporate America so reluctant to utter even an unkind word about Islamic terrorism?...

Seeing how thrilled so many of my fellow Americans are that a black man -- even a half-black man -- is going to be on the presidential ballot in November I can’t help wishing I were one of them. It’s as if there’s a great big party taking place and I’m stuck outside with my nose pressed against a window. But, frankly, I don’t know what the hoop-de-do is all about.

I must confess I got a chuckle out of Barack Obama’s warning us all to lay off his wife. Sorry, pal, but it’s too late in the game for that. If you didn’t want her to be a legitimate target, you should have told her to stay home with the kids and to keep her yap shut...

I often find myself wondering how seemingly normal people ever wind up being criminal defense attorneys. When even Harvard law professor and one-time member of O.J. Simpson’s so-called dream team Alan Dershowitz claims that over 90% of all criminal defendants are guilty, why would any sane person want to devote his life to trying to spring hundreds, maybe even thousands, of felons?

By Burt Prelutsky If I am asked one question by my readers far more frequently than any other, it’s why do so many American Jews insist on aligning themselves with the far left. Believe me, being Jewish myself, it’s the question I most frequently ask myself. It’s certainly not because Jews are stupid, evil, unpatriotic or dependent on government handouts for their survival, four reasons that certainly explain why millions of my fellow Americans will eagerly line up to vote for any political crackpot so long as he or she is running as a Democrat. Having given it a great...

Barack Obama insisted that he was going to be the post-racial presidential candidate, the man who was going to bring us all together and make us forget our racial differences. It’s funny how that worked out. I guess he forgot to mention his master plan to his nearest and dearest. First, let us consider his wife, Michelle. If she is, as they say, his better half, I’d sure hate to see his other half.

Because California, and Hollywood in particular, have been the punch line for so many jokes over the years, I suspect that people who don’t live out here assume we can’t possibly be that wacky. They don’t know the half of it...

What makes liberals so endlessly fascinating isn’t just that they manage with a consistency that verges on the miraculous to be wrong on every important issue, but the latitude they extend to their political leaders to lie, cheat and steal. For instance, has any liberal ever questioned Al Gore’s apocryphal pronouncements about climate change in light of the fact that the man continues to live in a mansion and gad about in private jets? Now, thanks to Mr. Gore, we are having those new, terribly ugly light bulbs shoved down our throats. And if you think dealing with nuclear waste...

When I was very young, I felt that anyone who wasn’t a cynic was a naïve bumpkin. The young, after all, tend to be impatient with their elders, and I was certainly no exception. To the young, it’s a terrible failing to be gullible, and what they inevitably strive to be, or at least appear to be, is sophisticated...

I’ve been in the WGA for nearly 40 years. That means that during the first two decades of my TV writing career, I was on strike just about every three years. But the last time we struck was in 1988. That one lasted almost six months. It hurt the TV networks because they lost viewers they never got back. It hurt writers because most of us aren’t wealthy, and it’s difficult to go that long without earning a living. It even harmed people who aren’t in show business, but whose livelihoods depend on those who are...

Many people, knowing that I’m Jewish, have asked me if I was deeply offended by Ann Coulter’s observation that Jews are unperfected Christians. I could tell that I disappointed them when I said that I wasn’t even slightly upset. For one thing, I am not religious. What people do or don’t believe, theologically speaking, is none of my business, except in the case of Islamics who want the rest of us dead or at least kneeling to Mecca. But how is it my concern what people believe if it gets them through the bad times or it helps them to...

Liberals: A Puzzlement By Burt Prelutsky I'll come right out and admit that I understand Islamic terrorists far better than I do American liberals. After all, once you realize that young Muslims are taught by their religious leaders that our nation is militarily powerful and technologically advanced because we cut a deal with Satan, you can see where they'd be upset with us. But what is the deal with liberals? How to explain their mushy heads? Was it something weird in their baby formula? Were they potty-trained when they were too young or, more likely, too old? Or is it...

Most people would include compassion on the short list of human virtues. At one point, I would have been one of those people. But, no longer is that the case. Like so many other things, it has taken on a far different meaning in recent times. In the past, compassion was extended to the elderly, the abused, the innocent and the infirm. But during the last few decades, it has become an entitlement demanded by members of various voting blocs. In short order, it has been transformed into political currency doled out by political hacks trolling for votes. But as...

Recently, a friend wondered if John Edwards might not be the biggest hypocrite in our nation’s political history. I was taken aback. With so many Democrats vying for the honor, is it possible that the poster boy for the Hair Stylists of America, a man who’s held office for a scant six years, could beat out a bunch of seasoned veterans who’ve been in the public eye for several decades? If so, it could be the biggest upset since Truman bested Dewey back in 1948. For those questioning why I immediately dismissed Republicans from the competition, it’s because when it...

Where politics and politicians are concerned, I believe that cynicism should always be the order of the day. Politics is the world of the possible, not the best possible world. The way I see it, whoever runs against Hillary Clinton deserves to win. So far as I'm concerned, those Republicans who threaten to stay home on Election Day in 2008 if their personal favorite isn't the nominee, just so they can self-righteously claim they didn't violate their principles, are beneath contempt. Cutting off your nose to spite America is not commendable. It's my conviction that anyone who permits this country...

Because I'm convinced that, come November of 2008, Hillary Clinton will be the presidential candidate of the Socialist Party, so I think it's particularly important that the Republicans nominate Rudy Giuliani. I will admit that I have been waiting to see if Fred Thompson was going to toss his hat in the ring, but I finally got sick and tired of waiting. The guy's about 6-foot-5 and probably weighs 280; which doesn't hurt when he's portraying a New York City D.A., but he's simply not cut out to play a coquette. There are other attractive candidates in the GOP, but...

In the old days, it seems to me, people went in far more for predicting the future. Whether it was Da Vinci’s foreseeing flying machines, Jules Verne’s envisioning Imagine if a modern-day Rip Van Winkle suddenly woke up after an extended snooze, and everywhere he turned, he’d be confronted with the frivolous, the inane and the downright goofy. It’s not just the fact that such complete ninnies as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, are serving as role models for young girls or that people as obnoxious and as contemptuous of America as Rosie O’Donnell, Michael Moore and Jimmy...

Some people used to refer to Ronald Reagan as the Teflon President because no matter how much mud his political foes threw at him, nothing stuck. That was because he was so much wiser, more principled, charming and charismatic, than his left-wing detractors. These days, those who seem to come equipped with Teflon are the world’s Islamics. What’s so mystifying about this is that they share none of Reagan’s finer qualities. Theirs is a religion which calls for the domination of all others, and yet the majority of Christians, Jews, atheists and agnostics, continue treating them with the utmost respect...

Monday, July 9, 2007 If he were alive today, John Wayne would have just celebrated his hundredth birthday. Actually, if he hadn’t made the worst movie of his career, “The Conqueror,” he might well have made it to the century mark. In that movie, Wayne appeared as Genghis Khan, joining the likes of Katharine Hepburn, Paul Muni, Mickey Rooney, Louise Rainer, Agnes Moorehead, Walter Huston and Alec Guinness, on the list of movie greats who should have had second thoughts before agreeing to portray Asians. In case you’re wondering how that dreadful 1956 movie shortened the Duke’s life, it was...

Many years ago, there was a popular radio quiz show called "20 Questions." The challenge faced by the panelists was to come up with the identity of a person, place or object. All they were told in advance was whether that something was animal, vegetable or mineral. I have my own list of questions that I suspect would have stumped even the resident experts, Fred Van De Venter, Florence Rinard, Johnnie McPhee and Herb Polesie. To begin with, why do basketball fans go berserk whenever a player dunks a basketball? Considering that the height of the basket has remained 10...

The other day, I had an argument with someone over the out-sourcing of American jobs. It was his contention that anything that promoted capitalism around the globe was a good thing while I contended that even though capitalism was the best economic system ever invented, if only because it didn’t make the fatal error of idealizing human nature, it had its failings. One of its more obvious flaws is that it encourages corporate executives, for the sake of their own stock portfolios, to sacrifice the jobs of decent, hard-working Americans. Where I come from, profits do not trump patriotism...

Those of us on the right side of the political spectrum are so very aware of media bias that we are always shocked when our friends and associates on the left fail to recognize or acknowledge it. Recently, I had an exchange with an L.A. Times editor who insisted that his newspaper set the absolute standard for honest and objective reporting. I asked him how it was, if that were the case, that among my wide circle of acquaintances, I didn’t know a single liberal who thought the Times was conservative and didn’t know a single conservative who wasn’t convinced...

Recently, a friend of mine announced that dogs don't have souls. Inasmuch as I nearly always agree with her, I found it surprising that we were in opposing camps on this particular subject. Because I respect her opinion, I found myself questioning my own belief system somewhat more than usual. Is it possible, I asked myself, to have four legs, a tail, fleas and a soul? While I'm not absolutely certain what souls are, I finally decided that if they are what I think they are, dogs definitely have them...

There are two jobs I often find myself daydreaming about. One of them is being a radio talk-show host. The other is being president of the United States. Between the two, there are far more downsides to being the commander in chief. In fact, the main upside to my being president is that I'm the only person I know with whom I agree on all the major issues. On the negative side of the ledger, there's the weather in Washington, D.C. Living, as I do, in Los Angeles, I'm accustomed to wearing tennis shorts the year round. On top of...

Living in L.A., as I do, I don’t have wonderful choices when it comes to my local newspapers. There’s the parochial Daily News, which focuses its attention on the San Fernando Valley. This is fine, if you happen to be more interested in the war on potholes than the war on Islamic terrorism. The alternative rag is the L.A. Times. They slant the news so far to the left, the words almost slide off the page. A person could easily jump to the conclusion that the entire editorial board cut their teeth on Pravda and the Daily Worker. Instead of...

I never wanted to be the President of the United States. And, quite frankly, I don’t understand why so many other people are anxious to move all their stuff into the White House. For me, the downsides far out-weigh the benefits, and I just wonder if all those folks who’ve tossed their hats into the ring have really given it enough thought. Granted, on the plus side, if fame is what they seek, being president would make them even better-known than being a finalist on “American Idol.” Also, there’s no getting around the fact that presidents don’t have to wait...

The other day, a friend of mine asked me why I thought those on the left hate guns so much. My initial reaction was to acknowledge that I have a tough time getting a handle on anything liberals say or think or do. It all seems wacky to me. What’s more, I have no idea who compiles their playbook, although we are quite aware that they have one. It’s where they get all their talking points. For instance, we know that liberals favor affirmative action, although at the same time we also know they like to say that where race...

I have a friend who could very well be a speechwriter for Barack Obama. Although I consider her a liberal, I'm sure she regards herself as a moderate. To prove it, she makes a point of condemning politicians of both parties as partisan hacks. Actually, with precious few exceptions, I agree with her. However, she likes to say she wishes that those on the Left and those on the Right could put their differences aside and come together for the sake of the country. It sounds so nice and reasonable, just like the bilge coming out of one of Sen....