Harry´s Blog

Herbert Kuhner

David Letterman Evokes Guffaws

I do not ascribe to many of Governor Sarah Palin’s political views, just as I do not ascribe to the views of, Bill O’Reilly, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh and Dick Cheney, to name a few.

No woman, that I agree with or do not agree with, nor any daughter, should be the butt of a crude sexist joke. I believe in staying above-board.

Dave, you have hit rock-bottom!

The Joke

This is about a joke. I heard it my first year in college. I spent my freshman year in a small Methodist college, which was dry. It may have been officially dry, but the fraternities were very wet. There was drinking galore. And lots smoking - something I always hated.

I pledged at a fraternity, and after hazing and much nonsense, I became a brother.

Now, being a brother was the most important thing in the world, and the most important person in the world was a fellow brother. A brother was more important than a girlfriend or a fiancée.

Well, a fraternity brother is fine, and so is friendship, but why try to gradate? You can love a blood brother, and you can love a friend and you should love a female mate. I just don’t know why you should prefer guy who is in your fraternity to that mate.

I’ve never much liked being at a table with a bunch of guys babbling about cars, sports and women.

There were occasional stag banquets at the fraternity. At these occasions, there were cigars, gallons of beer and sadistic jokes about the opposite sex.

Women are invariably joked and sniggered about. I like women to be appealing and I have nothing against them being desirable - and that’s the way I like to have them depicted. I don’t fathom having them presented as lowdown objects to mount.

When members of the faculty, who were fraternity brothers, attended, they made every effort to be brotherly. Anxious to prove they were still “one of the boys,” they attempted to outdo the boys in the realm of the jokes. The subjects or rather victims of these jokes sounded like anything but desirable and the act seemed to be most closely connected to the outhouse,

I haven’t been a saint, but I’ve always kept my distance from the mire. And it was not a hard thing to do.

At one of those fraternity stag banquets, the guest of honor was the Vice President of the college.

He was as proper as can be - a straitlaced Scotsman. I never saw him wear anything but a suit with a vest.

I don’t have to tell you what transpired. You already know it. The highpoint of the evening was an off-color joke.

I’d never heard a joke that vile at the time, nor have I ever heard one since that could match it.

After the punch line came, all the fiends in hell let loose. It almost literally brought the house down.

I started out asking questions at a very early age, and I am still asking. So I ask “why.”  Of course, the Vice President wanted to ingratiate himself. He wanted to show that in spite of being a member of the faculty, he was a fraternity brother and still “one of the boys.”

What do we have against women? No doubt about it, they give us a hard time. They push us into the world, which can often be a very painful place. Then we desire them, and that can lead to all sorts of complications. We marry them, and needless to say, matrimony isn’t always an ideal state. They want to have a household, and when that comes to be, they no longer concentrate their affections on us and they are less willing to be at close quarters. Often, they do not share our interests, and thus we get together with those who do, and they are usually of the same sex as we.

Okay, life is complicated, but I abhor the idea of getting even with the opposite sex by putting it down in the company of men. Should I feel guilty about that? Sorry I do not feel guilty for not indulging in it or not being a receptive member of a male audience.

Here’s an old poem which was inspired by the dinner incident. I dug it out for this occasion.

Stag Banquet

The president rose,
unplugged his cigar
from its socket,
smacked his lips,
demanded our attention,
and kept calling us men,
then got witty about chicks,
concentrating on fornication,
with a dash of defecation,
saying over and over again,
it’s so good to be with
a real bunch of men,
as he breathed in the stench
of beer and  tobacco,
then he told us
about a lady he once knew,
threw rotten fruit at her
and when he was through,
cackled like a hen.

MoveOn Goes Off the Deep End

Here are two quotes by General David Petraeus:

May 10, 2007: “Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy.  That would be wrong.  Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.”

Feb. 5,  2009: “What sets us apart from our enemies in this fight…is how we behave. In everything we do, we must observe the standards and values that dictate that we treat noncombatants and detainees with dignity and respect.”

Bill Clinton to Larry King, Feb. 18, 2009:
“He’s (Barack Obama) got perhaps our smartest general, General Petraeus.”

Sept. 4, 2007, MoveOn.org. published a full-page ad in The New York Times titled:
“General Petraeus or Betray Us.”

MoveOn has every right to criticize anyone in public life. However, by using this rather obvious pun for Petraeus, it catapulted itself out of being a site for serious political views.

General Petraeus is a military man of integrity who by no means deserves such an appellation.

There is no lack of nutcase on the Left and on the Right. However, on the Right many of the “official” pundits are nutcases. Cultivated pundits like William F. Buckley, Jr. and William Rusher are a thing of the past. Today’s pundits go as far as favoring murder as a means. And they are called upon to participate in Republican events and act as official interviewers for leading Republican politicians.

Here are examples:

Bill O’Reilly on the UN:
“I just wish Katrina had only hit the United Nations building,
nothing else, just had flooded them out,
and I wouldn’t have rescued them.”

Bill also has it in for San Francisco:
“If Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up,
we’re not going to do anything about it.
We’re going to say,
look, every other place in America is off-limits to you,
except San Francisco.”

And Coulter expresses specific wishes:
“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is
he did not go to the New York Times Building.”
For those who need a history brush-up,
McVeigh was the perpetrator
of the Oklahoma City bombing of April 19, 1995.

Notable Lefties usually act more responsibly.

Using MoveOn as source to anyone Right-of-Center ensures abrogation by the”Petraeus-Betray-us” pun - and rightly-so!

The only way MoveOn can “unstick” itself from the Betray-Us label is to genuinely apologize for pasting it on.