In Washington, DC, Marion Barry, one of the filthiest politicians alive, is attempting to close down all the Asian restaurants because, so he says, they are dirty, and replace them with black run and owned restaurants. This is just another black power grab, with Asians the target, and all because Asians work hard and prosper, something American blacks like Marion Barry have not as yet leaned to do. And out of envy, guys like Marion Barry want to put them out of business, because their very existence in black neighborhoods reminds everyone that sometimes you have to work and not depend on the government to provide for your every need. It isn’t about dirty food. People ate dirty food for hundreds of thousands of years.

For hundreds of thousands of years then, me boy

We humans ate what lions left

And never a one with their food did they toy

Because the hyenas were deft

At grabbing the carrion right from the hands

Of people who tarried until

They found themselves fighting off wild dogs in bands

Competing for their daily fill

For thousands of years most had little to eat

They feasted on berries and roots

And then someone planted some grasses called wheat

And began dining while wearing suits

Then along came the tables and candles and such

White napkins and forks by the plates

And whipped cream and butter produced by the Dutch

And places where you’d take your dates

To dine on roast beef and a fine prime filet

With veggies and warm fresh baked bread

Washed down with a sparkling white wine or Rose

At outrageous prices a head

So eating bad food’s the historical norm

A mastodon dead in the grass

Or dining on pate and soup cold or warm

It always depends on your class

The Big Tent of the Democratic Party is dead.  The Left had a good long run, seventy years, the number that seems to be the maximum length of time anything can sustain itself, and the reason is that seventy years is the length of time it takes for those who bought into the institution or economic bubble or anything else for that matter, to die, and bring to an end the ideas that brought about the institution or bubble in the first place. And so the Leftist socialist utopia begun under FDR is at an end. Obama is the bookend to Franklin Roosevelt. The Big Socialist Tent’s seventy years are up, because nobody believes in what they’re selling any more.

At the edge of the fairgrounds

All tattered and torn

The mildewed old canvas

Sits sad and forlorn

Where once it stood proudly

The Midway’s grand prize

Fairgoers now see

It was nothing but lies

No longer the big top

No more the trapeze

No longer the clown car

No children to please

The circus is closing

It had a great run

But people stopped coming

It was no longer fun

A new name, The Blue Death, is making the rounds as the cause of the death of socialism. Everywhere in the world socialism has been tried, in its various guises, totalitarian socialism like Nazism or Communism, or seemingly benevolent authoritarian socialism like the current European model, it is now clear that socialism leads to the death of the state that imposes it or has it imposed. And the United States is no exception. Barack Obama, a hard left Marxist community organizer, is driving the train that is taking us off the bridge and into the icy water below. We were a giant once, but soon the tiny people will look at our corpse rotting on the beach and wonder what happened.

The rotting corpse lay silent on the beach

Unmindful of the seething, restless tide

That surged around the stinking fetid flesh

Where worms crawled in and out its putrid side

A giant man, the quiet whispers spoke

Who killed him then, who could have laid him low?

The tiny people gathered ‘round to look

And said that bearded face is one I know

He was one time the leader of us all

He strode the plangent world with giant strides

And then he turned away from who he was

And now he’s lying face down in the tides

Who is he, all the tiny people asked

How did he die, what was the fearful cause?

He died from what is known as the blue death

His end should give the fitful future pause

See here his hat, see here his star sleeved coat

‘Tis Uncle Sam, a giant among men

He turned his back on what had made him great

And we shall never see his like again

How many remember that old Thirties standard, Whispering? Probably not many. But in light of Obama whispering treason in the delicate ear of Medvedev, the Russian president, Verse-afire presents Whispering as sung by Barack Obama

Whispering while you cuddle near me

Whispering so they cannot hear me

Whispering ‘cause they do not fear me

Whispering low

So each foe

May embrace me

I say the world belongs to Putin

I get afraid when they start shootin’

Am I a wuss you know darn tootin’

Yes I’m the guy they love so well

The Left has jumped feet first into the shooting death in Florida of a young black male shot to death by a neighborhood watch volunteer named George Zimmerman, whom the media and people like Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama instantly described as an evil white man. But Zimmerman is half Hispanic, and is as much Hispanic as Obama is Black. And now it turns out there are witnesses who swear the martyred black teen had attacked Zimmerman and was pounding Zimmerman’s head into the street when he was shot. The scene in Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire Of The Vanities, where a shot teenager is transformed from a criminal to a martyred saint, comes to life.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities

Has shown us the insanities

Of race hate mongers screaming what is false

But that was work of fiction

And with Jackson’s benediction

The media dance to his triste valse

And the haters daily rave on

‘Bout the sainted martyred Trayvon

Writing falsehoods by the score on every page

No the facts don’t seem to matter

It’s the narrative, the chatter

That on Twitter drives the haters unto rage

We have been enjoying the whispered open microphone conversation between Barack Obama and Medvedev, the Putin placeholder, in which Obama tells Medvedev that after he is re-elected he will have more flexibility. Many have speculated on what Obama was referring to, and most believe Obama was telling Putin that he was prepared to give the Russians our missile defense system.  Those speculations are correct, as Verse-afire has received a copy of the complete conversation. The following is a verbatim transcript of what Obama said to the Russians.

Right after the election

He said with eyes cast low

I’ll give you a selection

Of things you need to know

Our missile shield defenses

Of course our missile strength

The plans for our offenses

And after that at length

I shall arrange surrender

Whatever be your terms

Just make the terms not tender

Harsh measures kill the germs

That fill the world with sickness

Spread by this hateful land

But act with speed and quickness

We’ll work this hand in hand

I want but for my name to

Be written in the stars

Of course if it all came to

I’ll be one of your Tsars

Dawn, 21 December 2012. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of people gather on mountaintops to await the end of the world, as predicted by the Mayan calendar. Indeed, many are not waiting for the Winter Solstice, but are gathering even now on the slopes of a hill in France, convinced the end is near, and they want to be sure they have a front row seat. They are not deterred by the evidence of history, the evidence that many hills have been climbed to await the end, only to see the appointed day end as usual, and the believers trudging wearily and disappointedly home.

The dawn comes first to those who stand

On mountain tops and serried steeps

Far from the sullied land below

Where Gaia in her sorrow weeps

The land below first sees the dawn

As misty shadows growing gray

And shadow-like the groundlings wake

To find their dreams are turned to day

Yet all is not to be forsaked

Unspoken words of mind and wind

Await arrival of the ship

To gather those who have not sinned

Just about everything lasts seventy years. Economic bubbles take place like clockwork every seventy years, because that’s how long it takes for those who remember the last bubble to die off. Case in point, the Florida real estate bubble of the 1920s and the dot com bubble of the 1990s, just one of many examples throughout history. Everything changes over time, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes dramatically. And so it is with progressive leftism, which gained political ascendance in the 1930s and is now approaching its expiration date. Expiration is not inevitable, of course, but fortunately the Left is incapable of learning anything.

They never learn

And so their turn

At power’s at an end

They said relax

We’ll tax and tax

And then we’ll spend and spend

And so they did

Just as they bid

And when it could not last

They spent some more

Until the store

Got emptied oh so fast

And so we say

You’ve had your day

We bid you fond adieu

Just take your Greens

And Frisco queens

And take Obama too

A scathing review of Obama’s sessions with leaders of friendly countries has surfaced on YouTube, in Danish, with English sub-titles. In it, Obama is seen to repeat the very same words to every allied foreign leader who pays him a visit.  Those words are, “We are fortunate to have as an ally a country like (fill in the name), a country that punches above its weight.” Country after country, Western leader after Western leader, all hear the same thing: their country punches above its weight. You would think his speech writers could come up with something else to put on the teleprompter. Something like the following, but maybe he is averse to telling the truth:

I’ve many allies, many friends

I treat them all the same

I use them to attain my ends

That’s how I play the game

I tell them what they want to hear

I flatter them as well

I love to draw my allies near

Upon my words they dwell

Of course I’m meaning not a word

Those folks are not my kind

I think their countries quite absurd

And difficult to find

But most of all I find that they

No longer have a king

With whom I could spend half a day

And kiss his ass and ring

It develps that the French Muslim who murdered those French soldiers and Jewish children was under surveillance by the French Intelligence Service, and was on a US no-fly list.  In addition, he had been expelled from Afghanistan by the US and had attacked a woman with a sword while screaming “Al Qaeda!” It seemed everybody knew this guy was a time bomb, but nobody did anything about it. The same with the underwear bomber and the guy who killed thirteen unarmed soldiers at Fort Hood. Everybody knows about these people but nobody does anything about them. And the reason? Because they are Muslim, and political correctness dictates that we look the other way, that we not see what we plainly see. And so innocents die. We no longer have a Horatius at the gate, defending us. Instead we have bureaucrats and time servers, who prefer to look away when Muslims prepare to commit murder.

The schoolboy knows

The way it goes

Horatius at the gate

But that was then

And that was when

There wasn’t a big State

To run a staff

To make you laugh

And do things like some dunce

Like let in chaps

Who might perhaps

Kill all of us at once

With leaders who

Would not say boo

To Arabs with a bomb

Stuffed in their pants

Whose screaming rants

Are looked at with aplomb

But they mean well

So what the hell

Let’s sing and dance till dawn

Let them have nukes

And Mamelukes

Horatius is long gone