Polls are down, Obamacare is going in the dumpster, and so is Obama. Michelle Obama has fiercely instructed American children to eat their vegetables. Little did she realize it was her husband who was the vegetables.
Obamacare
While not exoccoli
Is within a hair
Of being broccoli
Obama’s poll
Down inch by inach
It takes a toll
He’s now the spinach
“Society will develop a new kind of servitude which covers the surface of society with a network of complicated rules, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate. It does not tyrannise but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Alexis de Tocqueville
The road was long, the way was hard
And free men knew that they must guard
Themselves and wives and children from the State
The free man lived as free men died
Content and filled with country’s pride
But now he’s gone and it is much too late
The bureaucratic rules writ large
Are meant to show just who’s in charge
The rules the mind of man can’t comprehend
By rules our rulers enervate
The public which assumes its fate
Is what the Makers of this world intend
Our rulers have us on our knees
Begging them for public cheese
As freedom and democracy erodes
And when they’re gone they’ll not return
A lesson that we soon will learn
As unfree men walk worn and rocky roads
December 7, 1941. Seventy-two years ago. I was twelve, and vividly remember lying on the living room floor on the following morning, reading the morning paper. I still see the pictures; smoke, basket masts, water lapping at the base of the turrets, small boats tiny among the sunk and burning battleships. There are not many of us left who were alive on that day, not many of us left who remember.
Guts and valor are words not usually associated with inanimate objects, but ships are not inanimate objects. Ships are live, living things. Ships, as well as men, can be tough and resilient. Such were the ships of Battleship Row.
0755 SUNDAY, 7 DECEMBER 1941
A quiet, peacetime Sunday morning. Seven battleships swung gently at their moorings; Maryland, Oklahoma, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arizona, Nevada and California. Pacific Fleet flagship Pennsylvania was in drydock. When the attack came, half their crews were ashore, and most of the officers. None had steam up, for it was Sunday, and all was at peace. Except Nevada. Nevada had steam. Nevada could move. At the height of the attack, with burning and exploding ships all around her, already severely hurt by a torpedo to her port side, Nevada, under Lt. Commander Francis J. Thomas, senior officer aboard, broke out her big battle ensign and stood down the channel, heading for the open sea. Sailors on the burning ships cheered and threw their caps in the air, but Nevada’s gallant sortie was short lived. Five Japanese dive bombers laid her low, beaching her.
The battleships were ultimately raised and rebuilt, those that were salvageable. They rejoined the fleet, but the war had passed them by. It was a carrier war now, and the World War 1 era battleships were too slow, could not keep up with the fast carriers. They were relegated to fire support, and accompanied the Marines in their march across the Pacific, bombarding the beaches, their 14 and 16 inch guns trained on palm trees instead of dreadnoughts, declared unfit to do the job for which they were built. Until Surigao.
SURIGAO STRAIT, 0351 TO 0409, 25 OCTOBER 1944
Vice Admiral Nishimura, with a force of battleships, cruisers and destroyers, came steadily down the strait, headed for the Leyte beaches and the soft-skinned, vulnerable transports, still loaded with troops. Standing across his path was Admiral Oldendorf, and six old fire support battleships, all but Mississippi on Battleship Row that Sunday morning in December. The other five were California, Tennessee, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania. Oldendorf put his weary old battleships in line ahead, a Battle Line, as battleships had fought since the 17th century, and waited for Nishimura. At 0351 the big guns lit the sky. Oldendorf brought his big ships across the Japanese front, crossing the T, the dream of every admiral down the centuries, doing to the Japanese what Togo had done to the Russians at Tsushima nearly forty years earlier. The Japanese fought back, but when Nishimura turned away his battleships were gone, along with most of his heavy cruisers.
Surigao was the last battleship to battleship action of WWII, and very likely the last big gun surface action battleship fight the world is likely to see, and it was fought by ships that had been sunk at Pearl Harbor and returned to life. Ships, like men, can be judged by their deeds, and some, like the ships of Battleship Row, by their sheer stubbornness, their refusal easily to die. Ships, like men, are alive, and though it took the ships of Battleship Row almost three years, they gained their revenge in the only way they knew how. With their guns.
Torn by bombs, wracked by fire
They settled slowly to the harbor floor
Breathing their last, or so some thought
But not they
Rising, they joined their kind
Who scorned them now
As the young scorn the old
The slow
They did their job
Plodding the vastness of the central sea
Island to island
A supporting cast
Gaining no praise
No, that was for the young
The swift
The carriers
Until
Until
That blessed night
When called upon to be themselves
They were
Themselves and more
There are those who say President Obama will do nothing about the soon to be produced Iranian nuclear bomb, and will do nothing when the Iranians nuke Israel. I talked to a woman named Valerie at the White House about this, and she said, “Scoff it you will, but stamping your feet is not exactly doing nothing!” When pressed to explain that, she said:
To those who scoff he will do naught
You don’t know our Barack, sir
He’ll stamp his foot just like he ought
At any nuke attack, sir
Then sit right down and make a call
And follow with a letter
To whom it might concern et al
To make himself feel better
For who needs those Israeli guys
They’re always making trouble
And as for Bibi, quel surprise
What Barack says goes double
The Iranian deal our brilliant president signed with Iran, a deal he trumpeted as a good first step toward Iran forsaking nuclear weapons, seems to be dissolving as we speak. Obama has lifted the economic sanctions, raising cheers in the streets of Teheran, while t he Ayatollahs smile and insist they will keep on enriching uranium. Iran got what it wanted, the sanctions lifted and a full speed ahead signal from Obama to obtaining nuclear weapons, and Obama got what he wanted as well, a short respite from the constant stories about the disaster of Obamacare. Ronald Reagan famously said, ‘Trust but verify!’ Obama says trust me, we don’t need no stinkin’ verify. Obama is not about the United States, Obama is about Obama.
Some say that in Barack we trust
While others say confirm we must
Yet others scoff it’s all a pack of lies
Iran has got just what it wants
They fooled again Barack the dunce
They’ve just advanced the time Israel dies
Well not so fast supporters say
The president has saved the day
The peace that we all seek will be the prize
And all the while Obama preens
He’s master of the ends and means
Believe him and don’t trust your lyin’ eyes
It is now revealed that the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, has a hidden provision called Risk Corridors, where the government, that is the taxpayers, will reimburse the insurance companies for any losses incurred from Obamacare. How nice. Obama cares not for the Constitution or the law, believing the law is what he says it is. It matters not that he has no legal power to change the health care law the Congress passed, he will do it anyway, with no one to oppose him, not the courts, not the Republican Party. Out of chaos will come, all as planned, an obeisant insurance industry, and the coveted Marxist ideological single payer system
Obamacare is now and always meant
To be a step to single payer goal
Risk corridors were just the instrument
And soon we’ll know for whom the bells will toll
Wide corridors expansive and ornate
Extend for miles beyond what sense descries
All filled with smiling servants of the State
Who willingly defend Obama’s lies
Before the smiling servants flee the mass
Down corridors that narrow as they run
So narrow none but single payers pass
And no one ever sees again the sun
The finest healthcare system in the world
The corridors of power now lay bare
Consigned in death to canyons where ‘twas hurled
And murdered by the vile Obamacare
There have been some great trains in the past, The Broadway Limited, The Orange Blossom Special, The City of New Orleans to name but a few, but the clickety clack rickety rack The Obamacare Special that Obama put on the tracks is not one of them. Obama yelled, “ALL ABOARD!” and everybody got off. Or more accurately, Obama hijacked the world’s finest medical train and everybody got thrown off.
It’s coming down the street, run tell yo momma
The Orange Blossom Special it is not
It’s just an old fish cart pushed by Obama
Whose fish at last is seen by all to rot
For five long years we’ve watched this wreck unfolding
And now it’s come to pass the fish is dead
The carcass in his hands Obama’s holding
Is stinking, and like him, rots from the head
Pleased with the beauty of his reflection, but concerned about the dark shapes lurking at the edges, President Obama speaks to his mirror.
I know that I’m the cat’s meow
I know what’s right, and I know how
I’m tempted oft to take a bow
Humilities prevent me
I stride the world disdainfully
And suffer morons painfully
My mirror says most vainfully
‘Twas God that did invent me
I pinch myself that I am me
God in the flesh as all can see
In time when I no longer be
The world will long lament me
And yes the demons dark my soul
My iron will only keeps me whole
I call for fiddler, pipe and bowl
When demons dark dement me