Raging Moderate, by Will Durst

I’m itching like a like a volleyball-playing nudist in a field of poison oak to inflate the first four-story tall balloon and kick-start the national parade of giving thanks down Main Street, because Turkey Holocaust Day couldn’t come soon enough as far as I’m concerned.

Be honest, doesn’t a little comforting tryptophan poisoning amongst family and friends sound pretty good right about now? Especially what with the fragile state of the economy, and the realization that this particular holiday isn’t about greasing the wheels of capitalism with the fire hose of consumer debt like that other holiday just down the road. This one is about gluttony. Pure and simple. And the only attendant religion involves football and praying that the Cowboys bite big, beige banana slugs on national TV.

So allow me to express my gratitude for the fourth Thursday of November, it being one of the little things that make life worth living. Right up until midnight when all hell breaks loose. Nevertheless, here’s a few more examples of what causes a middle-aged, round-headed political comic to get down on his knees and thank the maker.

Sarah Palin. Because to those of us going cold turkey on Bush, she’s like a double dose of Methadone.

Barack Obama. Persevering in the face of apoplectic rednecks who can’t get used to the fact that the country is being run by a black guy living in public housing.

Dick Cheney. Hurt his back on Inaugural Eve moving boxes. Unh hunh. Apparently even though they were empty, Pandora needed them back.

Joe Biden. Shoots himself in the foot so often, his nickname should be “Stumpy.”

Norm Coleman. Loses Minnesota senator’s race to Al Franken. Was also felled by Jesse Ventura in Minnesota governor’s race. Lost to a comic and a wrestler. Probably won’t run ever again for fear of having to debate a rodeo clown.

AIG Executives. Fourth-quarter losses in 2008 were $61.7 billion, but they still used bailout money for executive bonuses. Like giving a dog a treat for peeing on your shoes.

Bill Clinton. Flies to North Korea on an empty plane and comes home with two hot Asian journalists chicks. This guy is still good. I hear he’s going back for more.

Hamid Karzai. Afghani president admits voter fraud but says election still deserves praise. Okay. “Hey Hamid, nice voter fraud.”

Levi Johnston. For just being him.

The State of Illinois. If Rod Blagojevich is found guilty in civil court, he will be their second former governor imprisoned at the same time. That means Illinois will have three governors working for them: two in Joliet and one in Springfield.

Katie Couric. Don’t know why, but every time she says “stimulus package,” I giggle.

The GOP. Waging an internal war for their very soul. GOP soul. As oxymoronic as a Democratic leadership fight. Joaquin Phoenix Talk Show Guest Handbook.

Secretary of Treasury Tim Geithner. Though now in charge of the IRS, forgot to pay his taxes. Yeah. Me, too.

Hillary Clinton. Secretary of State responds to Somali pirates by talking tough: “Thems that dies is the lucky ones.”

And finally, George W. Bush. Announced his intention to open a think tank. Let me repeat that. The George W. Bush Think Tank. You can’t make stuff up like this.

See, life is good.

Will Durst is a San Francisco-based political comic who writes sometimes. This is one of them.

Catch him at Castagnola’s Comedy Club on Fisherman’s Wharf on Friday and Saturday November 20, 21. 286 Jefferson St., San Francisco, 94133. 415.776.5015. castagnolas.com. And then back in Wisconsin for the annual turkey trot on Friday the 27th at the Railroad Station. 200 S. Railroad St. Saukville, Wisconsin. 262.268.7880. Saturday the 28th at Paolo’s Pizza. 5121 W Howard St. Milwaukee. Wisconsin. 414.727.9332 and Sunday the 29th, Kiko’s @ Monreals. 9155 West Bluemound, Milwaukee Wisconsin 53226. 414.476.1130.

Copyright ©2009, Will Durst, distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc. syndicate. Call Cari Dawson-Bartley at 800-696-7561 or e-mail cari@cagle.com. Will Durst is a political comedian who has performed around the world. He is a familiar pundit on television and radio. E-mail Will at durst@caglecartoons.com. Check out willandwillie.com for the latest podcast. Will Durst’s book, “The All American Sport of Bipartisan Bashing,” is available from Amazon and better bookstores all over this great land of ours. Don’t forget to check out his rooftop comedy minutes at: http://www.rooftopcomedy.com/shows/BurstOfDurst.

Copyright ©2009 Will Durst, distributed by the Cagle Cartoons Inc., newspaper syndicate.

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Change is Changing

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

A funny thing happened on his way to the White House: that old, left-wing community organizer Barack Obama has suddenly veered toward the center, and his incoming administration is looking more and more like the Daley Machine in Chicago than Hugo Chavez’s administration down in Venezuela.

It seems that reality has set in, instructing the soon-to-be president-elect (he won’t be that until the presidential electors gather and vote for him next month) that it’s easier to promise change then it is to change the way things are traditionally done in a democracy.

Watching him announce key appointments to cabinet and sub-cabinet posts makes one think that this is Bill Clinton redux. Mr. Obama has dug deep into the 1990s and resurrected much of the Clinton cast of characters, even to naming Hillary Clinton to be secretary of state.

That appointment, some have suggested, is Obama’s way of emulating Lyndon Johnson. When LBJ named an old foe to a post in his administration, he explained that it was better to have the camel inside the tent urinating out, than outside the tent urinating in.

None of this satisfies the radical left that went bonkers trying to elect the man they thought would turn the White House into a new Kremlin and name all of them commissars of the new Socialist Republic of America.

Barack Obama, ardent disciple of the late Saul Alinsky, seems to have forgotten the iron-clad left-wing dictate — “no enemies to the left.” With every Clintonite or Wall Streeter appointment he makes a new enemy on the left.

What the Alinsky/Ayers crowd doesn’t seem to understand is that Barack Obama’s only acquaintanceship with government in action was his close relationship with Chicago’s Daley machine, where its hallmark — aside from its rampant corruption — was devotion to pragmatism. If it works, do it; if it doesn’t, don’t.

Everything Mr. Obama has done in recent weeks since winning the election has been an exercise in pragmatism — gone is all the heated rhetoric about change and reform. Everything is now measured by only one standard — it must above all be practical.

What his disappointed leftist allies don’t grasp is that many of those who voted for him thought he had a conservative message for them. Now with his appointments such as keeping Robert Gates at the Defense Department and naming Paul Volcker as a top economic advisor, he’s delivering on what the voters saw as his conservative promises.

Unlike Bill Clinton, he’s moving to the center before he takes office, and not two years afterwards as Clinton did. During the campaign I prayed he was lying when he unveiled his platform and promises of what he’d do as president.

I was hoping he lied about taxes. I was hoping he lied about ending the war in Iraq in 16 months. I was hoping he lied about all of those nutty left-wing programs he was promising.

It looks as if my prayers were answered.

I expect that he’ll try to mollify his now-dejected left-wing supporters by tossing them a few bones. He’ll push for the horrendous “Freedom of Choice” bill that would enshrine abortion as the supreme law of the land, overturning all restrictions on the grisly procedure previously enacted by the states; and trying to gag conservative talk radio hosts, for example.

I’m sure he knows that those attempts might be empty gestures if his party falls short of the 60 votes in the Senate they need to shut off debate on such measures, thereby allowing the Republican minority to use the filibusters to kill such measures so dear to the hearts of the so-called progressives.

What’s happening is Obama’s discovery that there is a big difference between running for president and being president. He is now up to date, up to speed, and getting all the information George Bush is getting — and he having to make decisions based on that information.

As a result he and George Bush are now on the same wavelength. It’s amazing what a little dose of reality will do to a man who dreamt dreams before he encountered the inescapable facts of life.

Welcome to Washington, Barack Obama.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan and chairman of www.reaganaction.com, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted” and other info at www.Reagan.com. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

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Pinning the Tail on the Donkey

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

When I was a little boy we used to play a game where we wore a blindfold and tried to put a slip of paper on a drawing of a donkey we couldn’t see. I thought of that as I watched the chattering class, blindfolded and frantically trying to pin the blame for the Wall Street debacle on everything but the real donkey, the Democrats, whose symbol is. guess what?

Right, a donkey, and that’s where the blame lies, on Barack Obama’s Democratic Party.

To find the donkey you need to go back to the Clinton administration, which decided that everybody and his kid brother was entitled to a mortgage even when they didn’t begin to qualify for a home loan.

In saner days, banks designated certain areas as no-loan zones - depressed neighborhoods where lending money to potential home buyers was not just a risky investment, but a certain future foreclosure. Critics of the practice called it “redlining” and President Clinton and his chums on Capitol Hill decided that banks should no longer act like banks and lend money only to home buyers who could afford to handle the monthly payments. Now all bets would be off and people not the least bit creditworthy — and speculators — would be entitled by law to obtain mortgages even when it was obvious they couldn’t afford to handle them.

Enter those now infamous quasi-government banking instruments known as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which poured fresh money into the banking system by buying mortgages from banks. Over the long haul they managed to load up their portfolios with billions upon billions of dollars of risky mortgage paper that banks had been forced to offer and then dumped on them.

The scandal of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac dwarfs the Enron debacle. In Enron, people went to jail. With the Fannies, some just walked away with millions.

The collapse of Lehman Brothers can be blamed on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two big mortgage banks that the Feds recently bailed out with big bucks. As Fox News has pointed out, they used huge lobbying budgets and political contributions to keep regulators off their backs.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the top three U.S. Senators getting big Fannie and Freddie political bucks were Democrats, and No. 2 was Sen. Barack Obama, who as Fox noted had only been in the Senate four years but still managed to grab that No. 2 spot ahead of longtime colleagues John Kerry and Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee.

According to Fox, Fannie and Freddie were where big-time Washington Democrats went to work and pocketed millions. Franklin Raines, Clinton’s White House Budget Director, ran Fannie and collected $50 million.

Jamie Gorelick, an official in Clinton’s Justice Department — the woman who built the “wall” that prevented the FBI from targeting terrorists before 9/11 — worked for Fannie Mae and took home $26 million. Big-time Democrat Jim Johnson, who headed Obama’s VP search committee, also hauled in millions from running Fannie Mae.

Obama brazenly blames John McCain and the GOP for the current Wall Street mess when it’s clear none of it was due to Republican policies. The truth of the matter is that it was McCain and three GOP colleagues who sought to reform the government’s lending policies three long years ago after the Bush administration had failed two years earlier. On May 25, 2006, McCain spoke on behalf of the Federal Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act of 2005, and warned against the debacle we are now facing if it failed to pass.

He told the Senate that a report by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight charged that “Fannie Mae employees deliberately and intentionally manipulated financial reports to hit earnings targets in order to trigger bonuses for senior executives.”

McCain warned, “If Congress does not act, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system, and the economy as a whole.”

McCain predicted the entire collapse we now are suffering through. He stressed the falsification of financial records to benefit executives, including Obama advisers Franklin Raines and Jim Johnson.

Now Obama has the nerve to try to pin the blame on McCain and the GOP when the facts show that the blame must be pinned on the Democratic donkey.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted” and other info at www.Reagan.com. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

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A Gathering of Clowns, Acrobats, and Con Men

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

You’d never know it from the media’s Obama worshipers covering it, but this week’s Democratic National Convention was a three-ring circus complete with an assortment of sword swallowers, clowns and magicians.

It was the magicians who took the center ring and proceeded to convert their publicly expressed doubts about Barack Obama into ringing endorsements of his alleged fitness to be this nation’s chief executive and commander in chief.

That’s an amazing feat of legerdemain, especially if the woman in the wizard’s cap is Hillary Rodham Clinton, who up to now has solemnly assured us that Barack Obama is not even remotely equipped to be president.

Targeting his failure to vote on key abortion measures she quipped, “A president can’t vote ‘present.’ A president can’t pick and choose which challenges he or she will face.”

Now, with a wave of her magic wand, Obama’s unfitness to occupy the White House (which she and her husband are still convinced is theirs) is suddenly transformed. He is now uniquely qualified for a presidency she had warned us he was utterly unfit to occupy.

Too bad. She was right the first time, but that was before she joined the circus in Denver.

Then, with a blare of trumpets, Joe Biden enters the center ring and waves his magic wand. The man he railed against as unqualified to be president is now, he tells us, the very man for the job. The same man, he recently insisted, has no business running for president.

Said Joe before he became a magician (and Barack’s running mate): “I think he can be ready,but right now I don’t believe he is. The presidency is not something that lends itself to on-the-job training.”

Obviously, Joe wants us to believe Obama has taken a crash course in presidential fitness and passed with flying colors.

Next comes Bill Clinton the sword swallower, who wants us to swallow the whopper of his belief in Obama’s presidential fitness, as he all but worships at the altar of Obamamessiah — the same Obama about whom just a day or two earlier Bill Clinton had suggested was not the man for the job, the same Obama he regularly pilloried while campaigning for his wife.

In a stem-winding speech he pulled out all the stops in trying to convince us that Obama is fit to take the office of president and solve all problems great and small. He pledged he’d go all-out to help Obama, but he never quite got around to saying that he’d vote for him in November.

And of course they sent in the clowns. What circus would be complete without them? There was the parade of sad-faced clowns — the losers, featuring John Kerry and Jimmy Carter, and even Mike Dukakis. Al Gore couldn’t make it — he was too busy waving his magic wand to save the planet from a non-existent threat.

Among the happy-faced clowns were Nancy Pelosi and her Senate counterpart Harry Reid, taking time out from the sideshow on Capitol Hill where they have presided over that comic skit called the 110th Congress, which came into the Capitol tent waving promises that were never kept.

Watching this spectacle may have been fun, as long as nobody took it seriously. Now they’re taking the show on the road. We’ll see how it plays in Peoria.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted” and other info at www.Reagan.com. E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

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Congressional Democrats: The Other Insurgents

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

There must have been times when Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker thought they were back in embattled Sadr City when they faced Democrats on Capitol Hill this week — no Iraqi insurgents or al Sadr militiamen could have been more hostile.

No wonder. The goals of the Democrats and both al Qaeda and al Sadr insurgents are the same: the defeat of the United States in the war in Iraq.

From the opening statement by Sen. Carl Levin — a vitriolic tirade against the war — to the less vehement but equally unfriendly statements by the Clinton woman and her rival for their party’s presidential nomination, Sen. Barack Obama, the Democrats made no secret of their burning desire to see the United States humiliated by a defeat in Iraq.

Clinton derided the obvious fact that a hasty withdrawal from Iraq would be dangerously irresponsible, and refused to admit that the surge is working: “I think it could be fair to say that it might well be irresponsible to continue the policy that has not produced the results that have been promised time and time again at such tremendous cost,” she told Petraeus, blithely ignoring the continuing successes of his strategy.

Let’s just get out and to hell with the consequences was the gist of what she said.

Obama defined success in Iraq as when “there’s still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it’s not a threat to its neighbors and it’s not an al-Qaeda base,” while failing to recognize that the near-immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces would create a nightmare situation in the entire region.

As Jacob Laksin wrote in FrontPageMagazine.com on April 10 (Petraeus vs. The Party of Defeat): “In the end, neither Democratic candidate gave any indication that they understand the stakes in Iraq. Nor was there any evidence that they — or anyone else in their party — would be willing to make the necessary if unpopular decisions needed for success.”

Laksin noted that Independent Sen. Joe Lieberman had described the Democrats’ attitude this week as “hear no progress in Iraq, see no progress in Iraq, and most of all, speak of no progress in Iraq.”

He could have added that his former party had reversed Gen. Douglas McArthur’s declaration that there is no substitute for victory to read, “There is no substitute for your country’s defeat when you want to win elections.”

Although targeted from the outset, both Petraeus and Crocker managed manfully to withstand the often nasty implications inherent in the Democrats’ questioning. Petraeus even treated Mrs. Clinton as if she were a lady, despite the fact that the last time he came to the Hill to talk about the situation in Iraq she all but called him a liar before his appearance.

Frankly, I don’t know how he sat there being so respectful of these people, when they are doing everything in their power to undermine what he’s doing. They are also giving hope, not to our troops, but to the enemy which is trying to kill them.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller helped to set the tone for his Democratic colleagues before the hearings when he accused his colleague, war hero Sen. John McCain, of what amounts to a war crime saying, “McCain was a fighter pilot who dropped laser-guided missiles from 35,000 feet. He was long gone when they hit. What happened when they [the missiles] get to the ground? He doesn’t know. You have to care about the lives of people. McCain never gets into those issues.”

Sen. Rockefeller was forced to apologize to McCain. He didn’t explain how he, as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, did not know that when John McCain was flying missions over North Vietnam there were no such things as laser guided missiles.

If we had listened to the defeatist Democrats there wouldn’t be 175,000 trained Iraqi soldiers, 379,000 trained Iraqi police, 90,000 trained Sons of Iraq, and you wouldn’t have Maliki, a Shia leader, sending his military into Basra to fight Shia militias.

Instead, al Sadr would be running Iraq with the help of Iran, and bin Laden would be using Iraq as a training base for al Qaeda.

Mike Reagan, the elder son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted.” E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

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Pandermania On The Left

Making Sense, by Michael Reagan

There’s a little bit of the “gimmie” mentality in all of us, and it’s that unattractive part of our psyche that demagogic politicians take aim at when trying to win our support.

The Democratic left wing (is there any other wing of that party nowadays?) is out in full hue and cry, hoping to evoke in the masses a deep yearning for whatever goodies the government can shell out. They think we all have our hands out and they strive to pledge to fill them with new and better government giveaways.

It’s an interesting spectacle to watch as the various Democratic presidential wannabes try to move further left than any of their rivals in an effort to out-promise each other. Last week when Obama pitched his socialized medicine program, Hillary slipped around his left side with her Marxist solutions for every imaginable problem known to humankind (oops, I almost said the M word - mankind).

As the battle rages we can expect to see the candidates break new ground as the travel farther and father left into territory even no Marxist has ever before trod. By the time the primaries roll around they’ll make Joe Stalin look like a right-wing conservative - and Santa Claus look like Ebenezer Scrooge.

It’s something-for-everyone time on the Democrat campaign trail, and no longer being content with the old party lines about “saving” Social Security from the robber baron Republicans who allegedly want to strip Grandma of her monthly Social Security check and throw her to the wolves, they are hot on the trail to locate new and better ways to buy the voters’ votes with their own tax dollars.

Having already whetted the voters’ appetites with every kind of giveaway program they could dream up, they now find themselves forced to outdo each other in the grandiosity of their proposals. And there are lots of opportunities to devise new and exciting handouts available in that vast period between cradle and grave through which we all pass.

This pandermania epidemic is the result of the growing perception among a large segment of younger Americans that they are somehow entitled to all sorts of privileges, including the largesse of the federal treasury. And the Democrats are only too eager to oblige their cupidity.

Take little miss Lindsay Lohan as the extreme archetype of the Me generation. Like hordes of Hollywood brats she has shown herself to be utterly convinced that the laws and restrictions and customs to which most adult Americans are subject do not apply to her. Like Jerry Seinfeld, she is the master of her own domain, which appears to include everything and everybody in the whole wide world.

She and Paris Hilton, among other celebrated alcohol- and drug-sodden doxies, are of course extreme examples. But they are members of a generation which believes it is entitled to whatever their little hearts desire, including exemption from serving their country in wartime, government paid college tuition, and a form of without-consequence sexual license which would shame even the worst libertines of ancient Rome.

Enter stage left one Hillary Clinton, this era’s most accomplished snake oil salesperson. To her the whole world is a village and she wants to be the mayor, ever anxious to see to it that the citizens of her global town are supplied with everything they could possibly desire, including round-the-clock child care - children being the responsibility of the mob, not their parents.

On the heels of Sen. Obama’s pandering on the subject of health care, earlier this week for all intents and purposes Hillary endorsed socialism. She doesn’t call it that, of course. But if it waddles like Karl Marx and it quacks like Karl Marx, it is Karl Marx.

And as Al Jolson used to say, “We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” By the time the primaries roll around there won’t be a single freebee left that hasn’t been pledged by the Democratic candidates for their party’s presidential nomination.

After that the winner will spend the rest of the presidential campaign saying he or she didn’t really mean all that stuff they spoke about to win the hearts and minds and votes of the party’s dominant - and crazed - left wing which nominates candidates. (Just ask Joe Lieberman.)

Mike Reagan, the eldest son of the late President Ronald Reagan, is heard on more than 200 talk radio stations nationally as part of the Radio America Network. Look for Mike’s newest book, “Twice Adopted.” E-mail comments to Reagan@caglecartoons.com.

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