I have been thinking lately about the frog-in-the-pot fable. If you drop a frog into boiling water it will leap out. But if you put a frog into a pot of water and gradually turn up the heat, it will not perceive the danger and will die.
I woke up this morning wishing that yesterday’s news of Rush Limbaugh’s passing was just a bad dream, and I’d tune in as usual and hear his voice. Alas, it is not to be. His death leaves a huge void that will never be filled.
I had not paid much attention to the left’s views on free speech until sometime in the early 90’s when I came across a caricature of Rush Limbaugh with a gag over his mouth and the caption, “Hush Rush.” It didn’t say, “Disagree with Rush” or “Don’t listen to Rush” but urged that he be shut up.
With the Democrats taking total control in Washington, thanks to winning both Senate seats in Georgia run-off elections, Americans may have good reason to fear threats to freedom and capitalism.
The vaccine is a threat to blue state governors continuing their control over every aspect of our lives, a power they will not give up easily. If they come up with an excuse to delay it, it might be along the lines of, “We don’t trust any vaccine developed under Trump and will not subject people in our state to it until we have done our own independent studies.” And even when vaccinations in these states eventually begin, I suspect if someone so much as develops an upset stomach they’ll be halted.
Sometimes political events have immediate impact on all or some of the populace. For example, the day after Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election the stock market went up, positively affecting the IRA and 401-k retirement accounts of millions of Americans. The economy started to improve even before he became president.
Although a registered Republican, I’ve been angry with the GOP since they took back the Senate in the 2014 election under false pretenses. They ran pledging to oppose President Barack Obama’s leftist agenda, including socialized medicine, and then spent the next two years giving him everything he asked for in an historic double cross.
The singular act of a policeman pressing his knee down on the neck of an arrestee resulting in that person’s death, something all reasonable people condemn, may turn out to be one of the most pivotal events in U.S history. The death of George Floyd has been the catalyst for a full-blown opportunistic insurrection by anarchists who want to destroy the president, the government, democracy and the nation itself.
I have finally surrendered to the very real possibility that mandated mask-wearing will be permanent, particularly in California where I live and in other blue states, and ordered a mask of better quality than the hard-to-breathe-in little blue one I’ve been wearing. Some doctors have said that the coronavirus could hang around for years, never being cured but eventually being treatable, like HIV. If the virus stays so do masks.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said President Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a single shot. In another war, America’s socialists have achieved the country they want without a single vote being cast.
As reported in various media outlets, a Swedish scientist has proposed the eating of humans as one way to combat climate change. Swedish? Scientist? Could he by any chance be a socialist?
The first time I heard John Lennon’s “Imagine” in 1971 I hated it, interpreting it as a call for worldwide socialism. What could not have been predicted way back then was that the song could easily be the anthem for the Democrat Party in 2019.
What’s depressing about her “Green New Deal,” is not just that it would result in a Stone Age economy that would make us envy Venezuela, but that supposedly intelligent Democrats with presidential aspirations have signed on to it. Surely Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand and even the overwrought Cory Booker et al know in their heart of hearts that AOC’s plan is madness.
I had the honor of writing for George H.W. Bush starting in October, 1987 when he was still vice president and through his term as president. I was still writing for President Ronald Reagan at the time and the vice president sort of “inherited” me for his upcoming campaign.
In 1970, country singer Roy Clark had a top 10 hit called, “Thank God and Greyhound She’s Gone.” On January 20 we were able to say, thank God and term limits he’s gone.
After many decades of suffering through the NFL playoffs and all 50 Super Bowls, usually on the losing side, here are 15 things I’ve learned about football.
If Hillary Clinton becomes president next January, which seems more likely than not at this point, it will create permanent one party dominance at the presidential level. As much as my fellow Republicans will not like to hear this, and as much as I’d love to be wrong, there will never again be another Republican president.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Having worked in radio, advertising, public relations and as a newspaper columnist, Doug Gamble is best known as a writer of humor and speech material for President Ronald Reagan — including some of Reagan’s most memorable lines in the 1984 re-election campaign — and President George H.W. Bush, and as a writer for comedian Bob Hope.
When Palo Alto, California resident Merrill Newman was held captive in North Korea recently he was coerced into reading an “apology” for his “crimes” during the Korean War, a statement written by his captors. Last night I dreamed I was taken prisoner by the Democratic National Committee and forced to read the following “confession:”
When the space shuttle Endeavour was flown along the California coast on the way to its retirement home at the California Science Center in Los Angeles last September, it passed right over my house in the Monterey area.
All during shootout number two with Boston bombing suspect number two on Friday night, I was hoping he would not be taken alive. But the worst case scenario prevailed, and now that he has been captured the liberal coddling will begin.
Imagine being told by your doctor that you needed a double organ transplant and if it didn’t happen within two weeks or possibly a month you wouldn’t live. That was the fate faced by Bobby Rydell, one of the most talented and popular singers to come out of the “teen idol” era of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
There’s a moment in the classic John Hughes movie “Planes, Trains and Automobiles” when the John Candy character (Del Griffith) asks the Steve Martin character (Neil Page) if he has ever traveled by bus before. When the answer is no Griffith says, “I don’t think your mood is going to improve any.” Republicans assessing future prospects are in the same fix. The outlook is not a mood enhancer.
While some pundits see the November 6 presidential election as shaping up similarly to the President Jimmy Carter – Ronald Reagan matchup in 1980, I think it more closely resembles the election of 1992 between President George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. President Barack Obama is becoming Bush.
The ridiculous “This or That” questions put to the Republican presidential candidates in Monday’s debate were not exactly CNN’s finest hour. If it really wanted to provide a public service it would have used the same format to ask 20 meaningful questions of Barack Obama in 2008.
Actress Jane Seymour now says The Terminator has fathered two more illegitimate children other than the one he has admitted to. The big problem I have with Arnold (Please Tell Me That Bump in Your Tummy is a Tumor) Schwarzenegger is not so much what he did to impregnate various women, although I think it’s despicable, it’s that he did the same thing to California for seven years as governor. Depressingly, only in our celebrity-obsessed culture could someone who had as much business being a governor as you or I be elected as chief executive of the most populous state in the union. Had he, instead of being Arnold Schwarzenegger, actor been Arnold Schwarzenegger, insurance agent, or held any other job, his candidacy would have been a joke. As it turned out, that’s what his time in office was.
If any administration was going to invite to the White House a rapper whose lyrics have supported a cop killer and advocated the killing of President George W. Bush, it would be this one, as demonstrated by its hosting of rapper Common at a “poetry” event. But why should rap “music” be the preserve of thugs who preach violence. How about a conservative rap song, like this:
Added to the certainty of death and taxes is the certainty that the mainstream media will give virtually all the credit for the death of Osama bin Laden to President Barack Obama. As it’s shilling for Obama continues right up to the 2012 presidential election, one would eventually be led to believe it was Obama himself who burst into bin Laden’s compound and shot him. But how differently the MSM would have played it if what happened Sunday had happened during the presidency of George W. Bush. The coverage might look something like this:
Five months after most U.S. voters sided with Tea Party philosophy by rejecting big government and big spending at the polls, Democrats are still charging that their losses were not based on policy but on racism.