OPINION

Being Taken for a Ride

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The other day I received an e-mail from a lady who let me know she was in the habit of forwarding my articles to her daughter who is away at college. Apparently she felt I could provide the young woman with an antidote to her left-wing professors. I wished her luck, but I didn’t hold out much hope. After all, by this time the young coed has been immersed in public education for 13 or 14 years. Let a child be raised by wolves and you shouldn’t be too surprised if, upon being rescued, his table manners leave something to be desired.

I’m not engaging in hyperbole when I say that I’d sooner send a youngster to Florida during hurricane season than to most colleges. As I see it, he or she has a very good chance of surviving the hurricanes. Their hair might get mussed, but at least their brains wouldn’t be scrambled.

Frankly, I’m surprised that there are any young conservatives left in America. They deserve to be on the list of endangered species. Considering the amount of pressure they face from peers and professors, I am in awe of those with the gumption to stand their ground. If the nation’s Founding Fathers came back to life, I believe they’d recognize them as the progeny of those Americans they last saw hurling tea into Boston Harbor, fighting at Lexington and freezing at Valley Forge.

However, I also believe that after taking a good look at America today, they’d shake their heads and wonder how, after such a glorious beginning, we’d wound up in this pitiful condition. How did we go from George Washington to Barack Obama in, historically speaking, the blink of an eye; from the man who refused to be king to the man who would be czar?

Speaking of Obama, the White House is trying to convince us that the recent date night that took him and the missus to New York, along with his usual entourage, cost the taxpayers a mere $24,000. That’s supposed to be the total amount of the roundtrip flight, the two helicopter rides, the limo, dinner and the show. Fat chance. My brother-in-law in Michigan had a heart attack last year. His heart must be working just fine now because it didn’t stop when he got the bill for the 50-mile helicopter ride to the hospital. It was $12,000, and that was one-way, and without a squad of Secret Service agents riding shotgun.

I guess the good news for those of us who had to pay the freight is that Obama’s mother-in-law is still hanging around the White House, so he probably didn’t have to spring for a babysitter. But next time he and Michelle want to step out, I wish he’d just ask for the car keys and 20 bucks for burgers and a couple of cokes.

On a more serious front, I sincerely hope that when the president goes in for his annual check-up, the doctors at Bethesda will do a brain scan. Surely something must be terribly wrong with a man who seems to be far more concerned with a Jew building a house in Israel than with Muslims building a nuclear bomb in Iran.