I promised to let everyone know when President Obama does something right (IMHO). So far I can remember two times when I had to keep that promise. The first was last year, when the press was bothering him during a breakfast and he said, “Just let me eat my waffle.” The second was three months ago, when he correctly picked which college basketball team would win the NCAA finals. Now here is the third: He swatted a fly during an interview, and did it so skillfully that some are calling it a “ninja swat.” Here it is, in living color:
What made this so good is that it offended People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), those environmentalist wackos that can never be offended enough. You probably remember them trying to scare away fish from a fishing contest, by beating the water with bamboo poles; encouraging seafood lovers to become vegetarians by calling fish “sea kittens”; and crashing a nice game of cow patty bingo in Lakeland, FL, because they think the cows are offended by it. Yeah, like the cows would rather wait until nobody’s looking to take a dump. </sarc>
Anyway, PETA is calling the fly-swatting incident an “executive insect execution,” and said it would have been better to trap the bug and release it outside. Sure, and is that what most PETA activists do when a fly, ant or cockroach gets into the kitchen at home? Down in Florida we did not have time for niceties like that; we might catch & release a frog or lizard that got in, but with insects it was always an uphill struggle, which the bugs might win in the end. And when ants invaded my Kentucky house last year, I thought it was a good time to quote what Gerard Butler said in “The 300”: “SPARTANS! This is where we fight! This is where they die!” Obviously PETA does not know the difference between a pet and a pest. I suppose they also would have approved of one of the strangest incidents in the first century B.C., Virgil’s funeral for a fly.
In other news, PETA has just recruited Lydia Guevara, the grandaughter of Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara, to pose semi-nude for their latest vegetarian ad campaign. Remember those pro-PETA actresses saying, “I’d rather go naked than wear fur?” Same idea here, only the younger Guevara is wearing a bandolier of carrots, and the caption for the ad is, “Join the Vegetarian Revolution.”
Not bad, but I think the T-shirt below is a more accurate way to remember Che’s legacy. I’ve noted elsewhere that he was one of the biggest losers of the twentieth century, and the less people know about him, the more likely they are to think that his shirts and posters look cool.
Finally, yesterday I heard a commentary from Earl Pitts, where he complained about taking his dog to a place called Pet Suites, before going on vacation. I called their kennel in Lexington, before I went to Florida last year, but alas, they only take dogs and cats; no parrots allowed there. Earl thought a hotel was too good for a dog, when all you have to do is put them in a fenced backyard and make sure they get food and water every day. I have learned not to take Earl Pitts seriously; earlier in the week he suggested that he could make the Guantanamo detainees tell us anything we wanted, without waterboarding or any other “enhanced interrogation” techniques, if we get them drunk enough first. Obviously he doesn’t know that a devout Moslem will not drink. Still, he has a point; how many other cultures would let you pamper your pets while you’re out of town?
This ties in with what I wrote nearly two years ago, when Michael Vick was in the news (see my July 26, 2007 entry). One of the differences between successful cultures and unsuccessful ones is the way they treat their animals; cruelty to animals is far more common if the culture is dysfunctional. Along that line, I think both PETA and the terrorists showed what they really think in 2003, when the Palestinians blew up a donkey laden with explosives in Bethlehem, using a cell phone to detonate the charge from a distance. PETA heard about it, and their chairperson, Ingrid Newkirk, sent an angry letter to Yasser Arafat that in effect said, “We don’t care how many Jews you kill, but leave the animals out of it!” Later in the same year, Iraqi terrorists used donkeys to carry rockets, and Jay Leno called that a “weapon of ass destruction.”
By contrast, Judeo-Christian ethics encourages kindness to animals, especially livestock. So where’s the best place in the world for domesticated animals? Right here, in the most advanced countries of the West.
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