Who’s Putin’s Puppet Boy Now?

Posted on Sun 05/30/2021 by PA Pundits - International

By Burt Prelutsky ~

Biden lifted Trump’s sanctions of Russia, allowing them to complete their oil pipeline to Germany.

Ever since Donald Trump came on the political scene in 2015, the Democrats have tried to convince us that there are strings connected to him that go all the way over to the Kremlin. If you put any credence in the outrageous lies of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell and Jerry Nadler, you would have thought that Stormy Daniels was simply camouflage for Trump’s sexual relationship with Vladimir Putin.

The Democrats got so carried away, they began insisting that in a world in which China exists it was Russia that presented the greatest existential danger to the United States.

Which is why it came as such a shock when Joe Biden lifted Trump’s sanctions of Russia, allowing them to complete their oil pipeline to Germany.

Therefore, it is my honor to announce that the annual irony competition is concluded. We have a winner. After slandering Donald Trump for the past five years, the Biden administration is playing footsies with Putin. And after cutting off funds for our own Keystone XL pipeline, Biden gives the greenlight to Putin’s Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

The argument I’ve heard presented in favor of this outrage is that we are trying to get back into the good graces of Angela Merkel, although why we’d want to is beyond me.

There is one good thing that should come of this, though. If Germany trusts Russia enough to put its energy dependence in Putin’s hands, why is there still a need for NATO, whose singular mission has been to ward off invasion from the big bad grizzly bear?

If this provides us with an escape hatch from our financial obligation to defend Europe, it could wind up being a good thing. But I wouldn’t count on it. Alliances, like government bureaucracies, rarely if ever disappear.

Domestically, Biden is pushing electric cars on a public that doesn’t care for them, partly because they don’t subscribe to the insanity of climate change and partly because they are inconvenient and lack the get-up-and-go that Americans have come to expect of their cars.

In fact, it seems that one of every five people who fall for the sales pitch and buy an electric vehicle suffer buyer’s remorse and switch back to gas-powered cars.

I keep hearing blacks demanding reparations, often using the fact that Japanese-Americans received them after World War II as their rationale.

What they choose to ignore is that slavery was never the official policy of the United States. The individual states determined whether they would or wouldn’t allow slavery.

The closest they came was in 1857 when the Supreme Court ruled in the Dred Scott case that a black man couldn’t be a citizen and that Scott could therefore be sent back from a free state to a slave state. But that decision was reversed in 1868 with the passage of the 14th Amendment, which granted citizenship to any person born in the United States.

Of course that eventually led to the absurdity of anchor babies, which holds that geography trumps the nationality of the baby’s parents, and that so long as people break the law by sneaking across the border, their offspring will have all the privileges of citizenship, disproving the axiom that people can not derive benefit from the commission of a crime.

In the case of Americans of Japanese descent, it was the official policy of both President Franklin Roosevelt’s federal government and California Governor Earl Warren’s state government to confiscate the property of American citizens and inter them in concentration camps.

It’s not often that the death of someone I’ve never even met touches me. But I was saddened to hear of the passing of Charles Grodin, dead at 86.

I was not only a fan of his acting (his performances in “The Heartbreak Kid” and “Midnight Run” are two of my all-time favorites), but of his books and even his TV talk show. I understand he was hilarious on the Johnny Carson Show, but I had stopped watching before he became a regular guest.

Although it’s been many years since I read his first book, “It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here: My Journey Through Show Business,” I still recall thinking I could have written it, his own observations about the business so closely aligned with my own.

I also recall that he wrote something that I would have wagered nobody, but I, would have agreed about. He said that in whatever city he finds himself, if he discovers a restaurant he likes, he won’t go to another.

As he pointed out, why would he want to risk having a bad food experience when he knows he can count on having a good one?

That seemed to make such perfect sense, I thought it should be in a textbook devoted to critical thinking.

R.I.P., Charles Grodin, my brother from a different mother.

I was wondering if anyone else heard the precocious 10-year-old John Provenzano on Tucker Carlson’s show explaining why he confronted his teacher over the stupid mask mandate, and immediately thought of the super-articulate Sheldon Cooper on “Young Sheldon.”

I think I may have been unintentionally misleading recently when I denied being stubborn. I was thinking of that in terms of being unreasonably mulish. That I am not. But if I am convinced I’m right, it can be difficult to budge me. Make that impossible.

That is if it’s a matter of opinion. However, if it’s a matter of fact, I am always willing to give way, as you know since I am regularly running corrections.

When it comes to my opinions, unlike Liberals, I am only too happy to defend them.

And, personally, I prefer people with strong opinions because they’re so much more interesting than those who are wishy-washy and spend their lives parroting whatever talking point they heard last.

Speaking of which, I have come to suspect that, based on the number of cliches they manage to cram into a 10-minute address, the folks who write speeches for politicians must serve their apprenticeship writing filler material for fortune cookies.

John F. McManus, writing in The New American, pointed out the difference between a republic and a democracy. The former, for all its failings, gives us a representative form of government. A democracy favors the mob. The one thing you know about mobs, whether they turned up in the wake of the French Revolution, in 1917 Russia or post-World War One Germany, is that, as surely as the sun rises in the east, a tyrant will quickly assume control.

It is terribly easy to create a mob. All you need to do is promise them they will have, through no effort of their own, everything that other people have worked to accumulate.

It is easy, as we’ve seen in our own country, because all you have to do is appeal to their greed and convince them that others have only succeeded because they cheated the members of the mob out of what is rightfully theirs.

As Mr. McManus wrote: “The socialist revolution has been under way in America for generations. In January 1964, President Lyndon Johnson boasted in a White House address: ‘We are going to try to take all the money that we think is unnecessarily being spent and take it from the haves and give it to the have nots that need it so much.’

“What he advocated, of course, was a Marxist, not an American, precept.”

Penny Alfonso, who has an eye for such things, passed along a meme that read: “After seeing what Biden has done in the last few months, I want to thank him for not doing anything in the previous 47 years.”

Burt Prelutsky is a columnist at The Patriot Post, and is a former humor columnist for the LA Times.

Read more excellent articles at The Patriot Post https://patriotpost.us/