Pages

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

A PLEA FOR INTOLERANCE

Burt Prelutsky

Lately, you have probably noticed that Mayor Michael Bloomberg has taken to lecturing the rest of us on tolerance. I call it presumptuous, as well as ill-timed. It’s presumptuous because he believes that he, alone, is in a position to tell Americans how we should feel about a massive mosque being built next to Ground Zero, as if being wealthy and an elected official somehow provided him with a moral superiority that we mere mortals could never hope to match.

I call it ill-timed because I, and I suspect millions of others, have gotten sick and tired of being told it’s our duty to be tolerant of the foolish, the greedy and, ironically, those most committed to intolerance.

Over the past decade or so, we have had homosexuals demand same-sex marriages, self-righteously comparing themselves to blacks during the bad days of slavery and Jim Crow; we’ve had illegal aliens claim they’re entitled to everything that goes with citizenship, including education, medical care and even voting rights; we’ve had Muslims insist that they’ve every right to be taxi drivers even though they refuse to pick up blind people if they’re accompanied by seeing eye dogs and entitled to work in supermarkets even though they refuse to sell alcohol or pork products; and, lest you forget, we have enemy combatants who have never worn a uniform or fought under a national flag insisting they’re protected by the Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Constitution.

Mayor Bloomberg, being a liberal, naturally has sawdust for brains and chutzpah to burn. Left-wingers are convinced that if you make nice with your sworn enemies, they’ll see the error of their ways. They’re the same folks who discipline their young by giving them time-outs. That consists of the spoiled tots being sent off to their rooms, rooms that quite often resemble a Toys R Us warehouse. The predictable results of this approach to parenting are all those noisy little brats running wild, with impunity, in shops, schools and restaurants.

In other news, the American taxpayer spent $50 billion bailing out G.M., ensuring that Obama could continue to count on a constant flow of UAW contributions to the DNC. Obama, you may recall, even went so far as firing the company’s CEO and replacing him with a government bureaucrat who could barely tell the difference between a carburetor and a carbuncle. Now, GM has announced its plan to invest $50 million in its Ramos Arizpe plant, in northern Mexico, in order to produce a new line of engines. It will lead, the company claims, to the creation of 390 jobs. Unfortunately, those jobs will be in the state of Coahuila, not Michigan.

Recently, while watching the Bill O’Reilly show, I heard substitute host Laura Ingraham, one of my favorite conservative pundits, mention her children. That led me to wonder who her husband was, so I paid a visit to the Internet. It seems the lady has never been married, and that the children were adopted, the girl from Guatemala, the boy from Russia.

Although Ms. Ingraham has never walked down the aisle, she has twice been engaged -- first to conservative writer Dinesh D’Souza and then to businessman James Reyes. But as I read on, I discovered that she had had meaningful relationships with the former Democratic senator from New Jersey, Robert Torricelli and with -- hold on to your hat! -- MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann.

At first, I, too, was shocked. But perhaps it was those very relationships that made her the staunch conservative she is today. Frankly, I think spending even just an hour with Olbermann would be enough to make Howard Dean rush out and change his party registration.

Maybe because I’m lucky enough to be married to someone who shares all of my political beliefs, I can’t imagine being connected to someone who shares none of them. I could never even grasp how Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey could be great friends, unless all they ever talked about was baseball. And for the life of me, I can’t begin to think of Mary Matalin and James Carville except in terms of a TV sitcom. I mean, how is it possible that professional operatives for opposing political parties can get through a single day with neither one taking an axe to the other?

It is to Ms. Ingraham’s everlasting credit that Olbermann has called her the Worst Person in the World nearly as often as he has labeled Carl Rove, Dick Cheney and George Bush as such. It is, interestingly enough, an insult he has bestowed on Mahmud Ahmadinejad only twice, and one of those times I believe it was for committing the fashion faux pas of wearing a windbreaker to the U.N.

But you would think that even a knucklehead like Olbermann would understand that there can only be one worst person in the world, just as there can only be one tallest person, one oldest person and, yes, even one biggest knucklehead.

Finally, I want to know how Bradley Manning, a mere PFC, managed to access all the thousands of pages of classified documents that Wikileaks has posted on its traitorous site.

The only scenario I have been able to come up with is that one morning, the top sergeant entered the barracks and announced, “I need a dozen of you on latrine duty, seven of you for K


...