Satire turns serious

In a recent public event, 65 year-old Barack Obama stated "80 percent of the world's problems involve [congressional] old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won't let go." 

66 year-old Former Chicago mayor and White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel endorses mandatory retirement age at 75 for members of Congress, presidents, cabinet officials, and federal judges. 

The bigotry articulated by those influential Democrats is harbored by a mestastisizing woke bloc. But it falls to pieces when subjected to evaluation.

Contentions advanced from that quarter are that 'old' men necessarily hold passe ideas, and their intellectual capacities to comprehend, reason, and exercise sound judgement are uniformly of dubious status.

That's obviously a generalization. Elon Musk hardly deserves the same negative ranking with Joe Biden in the smarts department.

Individuals should be graded on their own merits - not uncritically dismissed wholesale as guilty, based on immutable-characteristic group membership. That's a standard no more applicable to age than to sex, skin color, nationality, or (to point up the foolishness of the proposition) height or hair color.

The next logical step would be banning 'old' men from voting - participating in decisions as to who is elected to office. If the aged are ruled universally inadequate to devise laws, it would follow that they are identically unfit to choose lawmakers.

The 1968 satiric movie Wild in the Streets depicted song "Fourteen or Fight" and the callow, revolutionary crusade it inspired. Voters above 30 were derided as "stiffs" ("stiff with age").

Later, the singer whose song had rallied subversive youth campaigned for president. He cited the group most dangerous to America's national interest.

"Who, after all then, has caused all our troubles? Those who are stiff, baby! Not with love, but with age!"

Decades later, the satire has become serious.

Iowa's DC Larson is the author of That a Man Can Again Stand Up and Ideas Afoot. He counts among freelance credits Daily Caller, The Iowa Standard, American Thinker, and numerous heartland newspapers. His political blog is American Scene Magazine.

The Soros secret                                          

Hollywood's John Cusack, producer Larry David, and Harvard Law Professor emeritus Lawrence Tribe are only the latest leftists to deceitfully smear President Donald Trump as comparable to megalomanial National Socialist Adolf Hitler. 

Despite its groundlessness, the Nazi slur is a rhetorical gimcrack favored by loosely wrapped shriekers; they wield it to defame and intimidate ideological adversaries.

This writer submits there is a whale of a difference between the common-sense president and the 1930s genocidal madman Hitler - a vile monster with whose shadow the contemporary Left is tickled to align itself.

Multibillionaire George Soros is a gilded patron of hideous interests like Planned Parenthood, abolition of national borders and sovereignty, and the racial discord urged by scowling separatists. Too, he contributes mightily to Democrat candidates, and is alleged to be among major bankrollers of protests that target President Trump and Elon Musk, and that demand Israel's elimination and champion Hamas terrorists.

A dessicated Mr. Toad, Soros is said to manipulate the world's peoples and international permutations like a reptilian-blooded chess player. His amoral machinations are calculated in a mostly obscured shadowland in which he is safeguarded 24/7 by a kept mercenary army.

Left-wing activists who avail themselves of his largesse are connected, wittingly or not, to actual Nazis of the Third Reich era.

As a 14 year-old during that deplorable interval, Soros pretended to be Christian and accompanied Nazi death-camp guards as they confiscated doomed Jewish prisoners' valuables. Even decades after that shameful, loathsome reality, Soros expressed no compunction.

60 Minutes host Steve Kroft interviewed him for a December 29, 1998 profile.

KROFT: "My understanding is that you went out with this protector of yours who swore that you were his adopted grandson. Went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews."

SOROS: "Yes. That's right. Yes."

KROFT: "I mean, that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?"

SOROS: "No. Not at all, not at all. Maybe as a child, you don't see the connection. But it was - created no problem, at all."

KROFT: "No feeling of guilt?"

SOROS: "No."

KROFT: "For example, 'I'm Jewish and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be there. I should be there.' None of that?"

SOROS: "Well, of course, I could be on the other side, or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that was - well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets. That if I wasn't there - of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would be taking it away, anyhow. 

"And it was the - whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator. The property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking that property. So I had no guilt."

Today, unsurprisingly, the left-wing magnate's Open Societies webpage makes no mention of this despicable truth. Instead, it hails Soros' surviving that horrendous time and burbles about his subsequent determination to better world conditions.

No one can condemn a callow 14 year-old for acting out of self-interest when in a terrifying circumstance. But Soros was of greatly advanced age when speaking to 60 Minutes, and he still evidenced zero conscience.

Because he has long aimed a gushing dollar-hose into subversive Left pockets, though, progressive pretenders at moral scrupulousness never shrink from him.

When next you hear of office-ensconced politicos, entertainment industry quislings, media charlatans, or violent Democrat street-rioters falsely labeling President Trump, Elon Musk, or the millions of MAGA stalwarts as "Nazis," remember with whom those same morally fetid liars disgustingly choose to share bedspace.