woody58.com Blog

     We Americans live in a country that has been commandeered by the insane. The inmates are truly running the asylum now. How else would one explain the trajectory on which we find ourselves? What possible explanation could there be for the inexplicable?     We have gone completely ’round the bend in an hysterical (and knee-jerk) effort to “protect the children” as a result of Columbine, Virginia Tech, and other tragic events. The by-product has been the implementation of ridiculous “zero tolerance” policies that have produced some of the most bizarre stories, which are then defended by the bizarre people who made them possible to begin with.

     There have been a few of these stories of late, in the news, that fit to a tee the definition of insanity. Most recently we had the story of the Ohio first-grader, suspended for keeping the plastic knife the cafeteria distributed to him in the first place. This case is a bit of an anomaly since it is laced with a modicum of sanity, in that the parents are threatening to counter-sue the district for distributing dangerous weapons to children if they don’t rescind the suspension. Kudos to them.     Then there is the New Jersey second-grader suspended for drawing a stick figure of someone shooting his friend with a water pistol. Zero tolerance was once again violated in this case, and the kid is in the news. Great.     Right about now, some liberal-minded person is reading this and thinking that these suspensions are a good thing since we can’t have the children growing up in a “violent culture”. That’s all well and good, but I would remind such a reader that our species is, by nature, a violent one, but we have done a remarkable job at suppressing that urge in large measure, save for a handful who never got the memo. Or is it a handful?

     The Associated Press reports that “Textbooks at a private Islamic school in northern Virginia teach students that it is permissible for Muslims to kill adulterers and converts from Islam, according to a federal investigation released Wednesday.”     And an even more troubling excerpt:

     Yes. I have finally decided that I can no longer live with the lie that is the Iraq War and am ready to speak out against that lie. Many people are now feeling the effects of it and are struggling in their day-to-day lives to cope. It’s time to expose this lie and let the people know once and for all that they have been duped.

-Woody

     The big news of the day is the sudden attacks, if you will, by Jeremiah Wright on Barack Obama and the retaliatory remarks by the candidate flung back at the Reverend. The news wires, the blogosphere, the talk shows are all having a field day with this. I must admit, it is quite enticing to have something of this magnitude rocking the democrats’ primary race. But there is much more to this story than a mere spat between pastor and parishioner.

     Newt Gingrich was on Good Morning America this morning. Later he was on The View (something I thought incredibly novel until I heard that Hillary was to appear on The O’Reilly Factor on Wednesday, but that’s for another day), and it was actually Barbara Walters who set the question up. Part of the transcripts from Newsbusters:

WALTERS: Why would he try to hurt if, if he’s trying to- just to get back to that, if he is trying to, to have more rights for black people, why would he deliberately harm the first candidate for a black presidency? Why does he matter?

GINGRICH: A good friend of mine, Vivian Berry Hill, is the spouse of an African-American minister in Mississippi and has organized a nationwide organization of spouses of ministers in the African-American community. She sent me an e-mail this morning and she said, you know- after the show she had watched us on “Good Morning America.” She said, “you know, if you look at Reverend Wright’s hostility to people becoming middle class and the sense that they were selling out the African-American community,” she said “it’s almost as though Senator Obama became more acceptable to white America.” He suddenly began to peel away from being acceptable to Reverend Wright’s version of America. And the Reverend Wright’s investment is in a very, very deeply afro-centric model. And he said this a lot if you look at some of his sermons. I mean, he legitimately believes if you become a Bill Cosby, if you become somebody who’s successful in mainstream America, you have deserted the community.

     There it is in a nutshell. Reverend Wright and his ilk have decided that if Obama is elected president of this country, it will remove some of the ammunition used in the “struggle” and vindicate every black person who has dared to leave the reservation, as it were, to pursue the American Dream, and to join the community of America and throw off the stigma, once and for all, of victimhood.

-Woody

     We may still be the home of the brave, but the land of the free part is slowly slipping away. It’s happening so slowly, as a matter of fact, that it’s barely perceptible. Like grass grows, it is not noticeable until the weekend, when it needs to be mowed.     Our politicians have become much more than drunk with power, they are positively inebriated. We’ve no one to blame but ourselves, of course, for it is we who have been serving up the beverages in the form of fairness and feel-good demands. Who could have envisioned an America in which the Government would wield the power over private businesses to the extent that it does already?

     We now have a politician daring to speak of limiting how much someone can be paid. Barack Obama wants the Government to pass legislation that, in effect, would put a cap on how much a corporate CEO can be paid. In the not so distant past, this would have seemed unimaginable, nay, unthinkable! Now, however, thanks to the fabulous job our politicians have done in dividing and conquering the masses through class warfare, we will have some people applauding like seals over this idea.     We often hear of such things from Venezuela, e.g., and think to ourselves, “Thank God we’re in America”. But if people would receive the message as it should be delivered by a “non-partisan” press, they would be more inclined to oppose it. So here, I will present the message in its true form.

“America’s
federal government seeks to seize corporations.”

     There, that looks more like it. Of course the fertilizer, that is perhaps as much as half of the population, will make the grass grow by not seeing the obvious and will denounce the message as ludicrous. And come the weekend, we’ll be dragging the mower out of the shed.-Woody

     If I were to tell you that it would soon be legal to buy poison for your own personal consumption, as long as you could afford the price, you may think I’d gone ’round the bend. But that’s just what the government is already doing. They are not only allowing it, they’re seeking to make even more money from the practice. The state of New York, for example, is considering doubling the tax on a pack of cigarettes.