THE USES OF THE JEWS

I’ve mentioned Benny before in these pages.  He is the maintenance man at the store where I work, and he’s the sort of guy who can fix anything.  Plumbing, electric, ceilings, floors, refrigeration, heating and cooling---you name it.  In addition to his job, he has a side business buying cars, restoring and reselling them.  He could probably fix your pacemaker if you gave him the instruction manual, a sharp knife, and an anatomy book.

The other day, I mentioned to him that I had taken my mother-in-law to the National Jewish Museum down at Fifth and Market in Philadelphia, and that we had enjoyed the trip.  He told me he had been there about a year ago with his daughters (who are eight- and ten-years old), and he agreed the place was well put together and said he was glad they had gone.

(Picturing Benny at the National Jewish Museum is itself amusing.  He is built like a fireplug, with a pointy, satanic beard.  Both arms are covered with tattoos that appear to encase his arms in dark, heavy chains.  He also has several piercings in his eyebrows and a five-inch-long, Frankenstein-type bolt that goes through the back of his neck.  At a glance, he appears to be a one-man Puerto Rican biker gang from hell, and imagining him strolling through the NJM, where the typical visitors are a 65-ish Jewish couple from the Main Line, made me smile.

The image is false, by the way.  I’m sure Benny is street-wise, but he’s a pussycat.  Since he has daughters, I once asked him how many times he had seen “Frozen,” the Disney movie.  “Double-digits,” he said, rolling his eyes.  “I know every fucking song by heart.”)

“So my daughters came home from school last year, and it must have been around Puerto Rican Day or something, and they start telling me about how poor the Puerto Ricans were in the 50’s and 60’s and how they had to leave the island, and how hard it was to find work, and then the Anglos were discriminating against them, and so on and so on and so on.  And you know, I just hate that shit they feed them in school.  I hate that victim shit.  We’re not victims.  I’m not a goddamn victim!  We have a house, we have cars and computers and a flat-screen and there’s food on the table.

“So I took them down to the Jewish Museum, and we walked through the whole place and read all the exhibits, and a few times, I made sure to tell them, ‘Now look at this.  You think Puerto Ricans had it tough?  Well, look what those bastards did to the Jews!!’

 “And that’s the last I heard of that crap about how pitiful the Puerto Ricans are.  Great museum.  Very useful.”

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki

HILLARY? REALLY?

I don’t remember the last time Pennsylvania’s presidential primaries mattered.  They are held so late in the primary season that the races are almost always decided by the time we get to vote.  This year, however, on April 26, Hillary and Bernie and Donald and Ted and John were all over the place.

Here’s what surprised me: the number of apparently normal, even somewhat informed friends and acquaintances who were voting for Hillary as if it were the most natural thing in the world.  Of all the unexpected things that have happened this election season, this is the most puzzling.  The Trump phenomenon is a strange one, to be sure, and I didn’t see it coming, but I have come to understand it.  The matter-of-fact acceptance of Hillary as someone one might vote for, however, remains a mystery.

Now, let’s be clear.  I understand liberals.  I know how they think.  I am surrounded by liberals and I always have been.  I live in Philadelphia, where there has not been a Republican mayor in my lifetime.  I do not know a single person who lives here and is registered Republican.  So when people I know vote for Al Gore or John Kerry or Obama, or our various left-wing Congressmen and City Councilmen and Mayors, it doesn’t surprise me in the least.  I get it.

But Hillary?  Doesn’t she belong in a completely different category?  Is there NO level of depravity and corruption that will make a liberal Democrat pause and think, “Well, wait a minute.  I know she’s the anointed one this cycle and I know she’s a liberal and a Democrat, but I don’t have to vote for her, do I?  I mean, why can’t I vote for O.J. this time?  That way, I wouldn’t feel so dirty.”

If these Hillary voters were kids who don’t know anything, that would be understandable, I guess.  But the kids are voting for Bernie.  The Hillary voters I’m talking about, the ones I know, are older.  They’re my age.  Hillary voters in general are over fifty.  And that’s what I can’t fathom.  The people voting for Hillary are people who know the Clintons.  They’re old enough to remember the Clinton presidency, and Hillary’s role in it, and the Senate election, and the election campaign of 2008, and the Secretary of State years.

And yet, somehow it doesn’t matter.  Really?  It doesn’t matter that they trashed the White House ($20,000 in damages), before they handed it over to the Bushes?  It doesn’t matter that they rented out the Lincoln Bedroom?  It doesn’t matter that they sold presidential pardons?  It doesn’t matter that Bill pardoned Puerto Rican terrorists in order to curry favor for Hillary with New York Puerto Ricans for her Senate campaign?  It doesn’t matter that they stole the freaking White House china when they left office and later had to give it back??

And I’ve barely touched the surface here.  There’s the Rose Law Firm records that were subpoenaed but which she couldn’t find even though they were in her bedroom for two years.  And her miraculous $100K profit on cattle futures.  And the execution of Ricky Ray Rector in Arkansas in 1992.  And the Rwandan genocide that Bill could have stopped with a phone call, but couldn’t be bothered.

I mean, why not vote for one of the million liberals, good Democrats all, who DON’T run a money-laundering operation that spends only 10% of its budget on actual charitable work.  Hey, you tin-pot psychotic dictators---do you want the private cell phone number of the US Secretary of State?  Do you want her to come to your broken-down hellhole of a country and legitimize you, treat you like David Cameron?  Well, all you have to do is book her husband for a million bucks or so in speeches.  Sweep off the tarmac.  Here she comes.

There’s so much of it, and it never ends.  There apparently has never been a time in her life when she was not crooked.  In 1974, even before anybody knew her name, she was fired for dishonesty from her job as an intern on the Watergate Committee.  Yes, that Watergate Committee.  And to the Democratic geezers and baby-boomers voting for her, none of this matters?

If nothing else, how can anyone vote for a person who, at Andrews Air Force Base on September 14, 2012, while standing over the bodies of four Americans murdered at Benghazi, lied to their grieving relatives by blaming the murders on an internet video, a ridiculous story she knew to be false?  How can Democrats vote for a woman who would do such a thing?

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki

BATHROOMS

    The reaction of most people to the transgender bathroom wars (North Carolina, Target, etc.), is “Why?”  After all, it’s not like this was a problem.  Nobody ever told a transgender person to get out of a particular public bathroom, did they?  Because if there had been such a case, we would all know the name of the poor beleaguered soul who had been embarrassed and humiliated by us Christian, Bible-thumping haters when all he or she had ever wanted to do was take a leak.  It would be Rosa (or Roosevelt) Parks all over again.  So why, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, are places like Charlotte passing laws making it a violation of law to question anybody, of any sex, with any sort of sexual organ or organs or secondary sexual characteristics, about their choice of a public restroom?  Why can’t a store manager ask a guy with a full beard, tattoos up both arms, a well-earned reputation as a child molester, and a boner in his pants why he is going into the little-girls’ room?

    There was no need for these laws.  There is no epidemic of anti-transgender bathroom discrimination, is there?  In fact, it hasn’t happened even once.  So why did the radical left start this war?

    The only purpose was to excite a reaction from the state legislature in North Carolina, which promptly restored the status quo by annulling Charlotte’s ordinance.  Recognizing that the subject matter did not need to be addressed in the first place, and that all Charlotte was doing was to encourage frivolous lawsuits, the state shut down the entire issue.

    And this is exactly what the radicals in Charlotte wanted---a war.  Charlotte could now wail that it had been trying to prevent the scourge of anti-transgender discrimination that was sweeping the nation, and to protect the (four? five?) transgender people in Charlotte from the degradation of being questioned about which bathroom they were using, even though they had never been questioned about it before.  It doesn’t matter that there was no underlying problem.  Once the state reacted, the activists could accuse them of bigotry.

    From the French Revolution to the Soviet Union, from Mao’s China to the faculty lounge at Harvard, the people who want the state to rule every aspect of our lives hate two institutions that have been foremost in human hearts and minds since we all emerged from the caves.  Marriage and religion are the two things that drive totalitarians mad because they are the only things that prevent most people from having a primary loyalty to the state.  One of Stalin’s biggest disappointments was his inability to break the emotional bond of marriage that made spouses cherish each other more than they loved the Soviet Union.  And while churches were destroyed and clerics murdered, the Soviets were unable to obliterate their subjects’ love for God.

    In Obama’s America, this battle continues.  The assault on religious freedom (explicitly protected by the 1^st Amendment) is relentless, with Obama repeatedly characterizing the Constitutional right as merely a “freedom to worship” while demanding that his federal government define the actual mission of religious institutions like Notre Dame University and the Little Sisters of the Poor.  And as for the marriage that humans have recognized for millennia, it has now been transformed, warped, its original purpose disguised behind an array of feel-good justifications including a state-mandated recognition of love, self-esteem and self-actualization.  For ten thousand years, marriage provided safety for women and children, and allowed families to flourish.  That original meaning is still there, somewhere, but since the Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell, it is buried under rainbow flags and waves of narcissism.  I gotta be me, you know---that’s the real purpose of marriage, according to Justice Kennedy.  Our children will now be somewhat confused about the meaning of marriage, and its purpose; our children’s children will have no idea what it once meant.  Obama has succeeded in a way Stalin could only dream of.

    So for the radicals, the Charlotte bathroom law is necessary, even though it addresses no existing problem, because it starts a fight over the two beasts the Left forever dreams of slaying.  Issues like this (and LGBT issues in general), are twofers.  They provide a path to attack both religious freedom and the family.  For those that dream of an all-powerful state, they are irresistible.  It’s an opportunity to make their case that all our traditional beliefs about sex and gender and family are hateful and discriminatory.

    And where do our hateful ideas come from?  Where do we get the idea that people with penises are men, and that they are different from women?  And who told us that men and women should marry each other and have children and raise those children?  These most fundamental notions of the sexes and marriage and family come from the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Quran, and other religious traditions from around the world, all of which are in basic agreement on these points.  That is why, once these scriptures are thoroughly discredited, they will have to be suppressed.

Copyright2016MichaelKubacki