Monday, December 23, 2013
"Obamacare: Our Very Own Titanic" and "Haunting the White House"
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by Burt Prelutsky
AT THE TIME Nancy Pelosi famously remarked that the Affordable Care Act would have to be passed before we knew what was in it, I didn’t realize that by “we,” she was including Barack Obama.
I should have guessed, though. After all, this guy is as lazy as that kid who always tried to hide out in the eighth grade by sitting in the last seat in the back row, praying never to be called on. It’s only right that it’s referred to as his signature piece of legislation because the only role this goofus played in creating this monster was signing it.
Although everything is still up in the air when it comes to ObamaCare in spite of the White House moving back one deadline after another and attempting to get insurance companies to break as many laws as Obama has, the fact remains that we could end up with 315 million people with health insurance, but with nary a hospital or doctor to treat them.
In one county in Florida, there will be only seven pediatricians for 260,000 children. All I know is that I wouldn’t want to be sitting in one of those seven waiting rooms. You know how cranky a five-year-old can get, especially after sitting there since he was a three-year-old.
At this point, I’m betting even Marcelas Owens, the 11-year-old black kid who was standing at Obama’s elbow when he signed the Affordable Care Act, wishes he’d yanked the pen out of Obama’s hand and stabbed Henry Waxman with it on his way out the door.
The truth is that between the ACA and the tax on medical devices, Obama is turning America into one huge African village. I expect we will soon see witch doctors with painted faces and bones stuck through their noses hanging out their shingles.
Speaking of health care, as some of you know, I was scheduled on Dec. 13th to have an operation on my wrist. But a pre-op EKG turned up a blockage in my main artery. That meant postponing the wrist operation for at least two months, so that they could perform an angiogram and implant a stent on Dec. 18th. As I sit here, that is still four days off.
Everyone is telling me it’s no big deal, which is what I am always ready to tell others who are about to undergo surgery. Actually, the only part of the procedure that I find rather unnerving is that the surgeon gets to the heart via the groin. That, to me, is like going from San Diego to L.A. by way of Baltimore. Besides, he will be going where no man has gone before, and, quite frankly, I was hoping to keep it that way.
Moving on: When you see Ukrainians toppling Lenin’s statue, demonstrating their hatred of their Soviet-era oppressors and of their Russia-loving president, Viktor Yanukovich, you wish you had an American president who would go there and give the equivalent of JFK’s pronouncement, on behalf of all freedom lovers, “Ich bin eine Berliner,” merely substituting Kiev for Berlin. But I would happily settle for a bunch of Ukrainians coming to Washington and toppling Barack Obama.
Have you noticed that the only time people pay the slightest bit of attention to atheists is in December, when they marshal their pathetic resources to attack Christians and their traditions? It’s my guess that the first words these self-righteous pinheads utter as they roll out of bed on December 1st, is: “Thank God for Christmas!”
Recently, when actor Paul Walker died while a passenger in a Porsche, it reminded me that James Dean died nearly 60 years ago while driving a Porsche. It also reminded me of a mystery that has long plagued me. In a country where it is generally illegal to drive over 65 miles an hour even on a freeway, why does anyone ever buy a Porsche? A Porsche, after all, does 65 backing out of the garage. To me, it’s like buying a mansion and then living in the cellar.
The best I’ve been able to come up with is that like a lot of foolish things that very rich people do, the answer is simply that they can. It must fall into the same category as spending $25,000 on a watch that’s going to tell you the same time as one that runs you $50 or spending $35,000 on a seat at an Obama fund-raiser that manages to combine bad food with lousy company.
Finally, Lincoln School in Canon City, CO, suspended six-year-old Hunter Yelton for kissing a little girl on the hand. That is the problem with having four-year-old school principals. Still, I can’t help wondering how the dunces at Lincoln would have handled the matter if the object of Hunter’s affections had been a little boy.
I just have a sneaky hunch they wouldn’t have been so quick to punish little Hunter, lest they risked traumatizing him for expressing his gayness.
As Napoleon, the swinish villain in George Orwell’s “Animal Farm,” put it, “All animals are equal. But some are more equal than others.”
HAUNTING THE WHITE HOUSE
BARACK OBAMA SEEMS LESS and less like a president and more and more like a visitor from the spirit world. He looks real enough, but wouldn’t an actual human being be embarrassed if he had to keep saying that he didn’t know about things that were happening right under his nose? Can you even imagine being the commander-in-chief and claiming to be unaware of Operation Fast and Furious, electioneering at the IRS and what took place at Benghazi, until you read about it in the NY Times?
What compounds the problem is that his disciples claim Obama is the smartest guy in whatever room he happens to be in, and he obviously agrees, as one can tell by the arrogant tilt of his chin and the contempt he openly displays towards anyone who dares to disagree with him.
Ectoplasm is the supposed physical substance that results from psychic intervention, such as when a ghost shows up at a séance. One can’t help thinking that if Obama were ever called forth from the great beyond, the substance would be called egoplasm.
He is such an arrogant shmoe that when I first heard of the word “selfie,” I immediately thought of the lump in the Oval Office. Selfie, as I understand it, describes a new fad in which people snap photos of themselves, occasionally sharing the lens with friends or relatives, but just as likely to include only themselves, and then uploading the shots to Facebook and other social media.
It’s as if we’ve all turned into members of the paparazzi, but instead of shooting celebrities for profit, we’re shooting ourselves for reasons I can’t begin to fathom.
So just when I had concluded that the human race couldn’t possibly become more self-involved and annoying than it had over the past few decades, Obama came along and proved me wrong by setting the worst possible example. It all ties in to the fact that he has begun banishing news photographers from official functions, insisting that news agencies rely entirely on the White House photographer, who can be counted on to show the Obamas in the very best light.
The worst problem with Obama, his personal character flaws aside, isn’t that he stumbles from one crisis of his own making to another, leaving chaos in his wake, but that all Americans share the consequences, and not just the creepy 51% who re-elected this jackass in 2012.
His latest gaffe is the deal he had John Kerry cut with Iran, which gives that evil and backward nation a clear path to a nuclear bomb, plus seven billion dollars to do with as it likes. As I see it, the main difference between this disaster and the deal that Neville Chamberlain made with Adolf Hitler is that England’s prime minister didn’t roll over in order to distract attention from the horrors of ChamberlainCare.
As for Secretary of State Kerry, the only thing that can be said in his favor is that he is the only member of Obama’s administration who reminds anyone of both ends of a horse.
Moving on, whatever happened to the concept of equal rights? Instead, we have different groups referring to women’s rights, minority rights, gay rights, all of which are the antithesis of what many of us, including the Founding Fathers, regarded as equal rights for all Americans.
In the same way, “hate crimes” distinguishes between different classes of victims, thus ripping the blindfold off Lady Justice’s eyes, so that crimes against certain victims are punished more harshly than the very same crimes committed against other people.
In a nutshell, that’s what the left-wing nincompoops refer to as “social justice,” which turns the whole concept of justice on its head.
Finally, speaking of differences, it recently occurred to me that a singular division between the sexes is the way they react to put-downs. If, for instance, a man says something insulting about a specific woman, other women will often take it as a generic insult of all women, and label the guy a misogynist; however, if a specific man is insulted by either a woman or another man, the normal guy’s reaction is to nod and quickly add, “And what’s more, the schmuck cheats at cards.”
