Lee Culpepper
Revisiting Rip Van Winkle
May 6, 2009

Remember Washington Irving’s classic in which the title character unwittingly nods off for 20 years? He sleeps through the American Revolution and wakes befuddled by the radical changes that have taken place in America. Today, thanks to President Obama’s first 100 days in office, I feel like Rip Van Winkle.

In Irving’s story, Rip falls into a liquor-induced coma after encountering a gang of reveling little urchins one day on a mountain. Like poor old Rip, I feel as if I am dealing with an awfully bad hangover myself these days. For the past four months, the president has been pouring his socialist tonic down America’s throat, and now I am ready to vomit.

Since the inauguration, time has passed as if I were fading in and out of consciousness. I have not written much as I get too depressed whenever I think of where America might be if liberals would spend just a fraction of their time condemning Muslim lunatics instead of devoting all their time to vilifying Sarah Palin. Who knows? Would the terrorists have capitulated already if they believed America was united and unshakable in its commitment to defeat them? An even more miserable thought comes from the high probability that President Obama’s own words have only inspired our enemies not to give up (but I digress).

What really knocked me off course regarding my writing was my wanting to help some high school wrestlers. I had planned to continue writing, but coaching became more than a full-time job. Ultimately, I just had to allow the politically inebriated who voted for Obama to celebrate. Meanwhile, I recuperated and devoted my time to the minority teens that liberal politicians only allege to care about.

Now, however, I am like Rip Van Winkle trying to make sense of an illogical situation. I keep hoping I will wake up and learn that I’ve been having a bad dream. The ubiquitous image of President Obama and the media’s frenzied spewing of royal crap make me wonder if liberals believe we have anointed a new king as opposed to having inaugurated our 44^th president.

Rip could probably relate. He returns from his time away and perplexingly discovers something odd about an old sign that once portrayed King George. Although the leadership resemblance seems familiar, King George has "metamorphosed” into George Washington. Of course, Rip has no idea who General Washington is. When Rip innocently declares his loyalty to the ousted king, a mob is ready to lynch him: "A Tory! a Tory! a spy! a refugee! hustle him! away with him!” they shout. (Now, democrats react just as hysterically whenever they encounter conservatives.)

Today, not everything has changed though. President Obama’s wily rhetoric remains in tact. He continues to speak in an encrypted-socialist language that mainly his ideological comrades recognize. For instance, when he promised to cut the nation’s deficit in half, we see (by translating his words into plain English) that he actually meant half of what he wanted. So far, Obama has only quadrupled the deficit, but I have deciphered that he hopes to octuple it.

He also said that the US would maintain the strongest military on the planet. Again, decoding the transmissions from Obama’s teleprompters, we learn that he meant: "I really despise America’s superiority; therefore, I will emasculate the military to the point that all the world’s militaries are equal—most importantly, our enemies’. Only then will I have delivered world harmony.”

Finally when he promised to close Guantanamo, he also meant that he would shut down the nation’s intelligence community. In Obama’s egalitarian fantasy, even Islamic butchers have a need to know America’s top-secret information. Granted, the asinine reality show "Jackass” offers harsher forms of discomfort and distress than anything terrorists could glean from the CIA’s "torture memos.”

Anyway, back to why I appreciate Rip’s vacant looks of disbelief. He felt misplaced after his 20-year absence, but I am equally lost trying to comprehend how shooting three Islamic-jihad pirates in the head is morally and ethically superior to vigorously bathing three al-Qaeda psychopaths in clean water. Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats want the heads of George Bush and Dick Cheney. According to them, only the diabolical-Bush-Cheney war machine could have fathomed saving thousands of innocent lives without putting a scratch on the wicked al-Qaeda masterminds who plotted looming mass murders.

On the other hand, the Democrats applaud President Obama for supposedly "personally authorizing” the steely-eyed executions of three Somali nautical students. Now, don’t get me wrong--I wish the SEALs had destroyed the fourth pirate, too. But as far as the issue of waterboarding terrorists, I simply would have preferred that Dick Cheney saved the water and just blown away Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri himself. If that had happened, though, he and President Bush would not have saved so many innocent lives.