Burt Prelutsky

According to my wife, I have a tendency to state my opinion as fact. She suggests that I begin my sentences by saying “It’s only my opinion, but…” and go on from there. It’s my opinion, however, that people already

There’s probably no single piece of writing in this country that’s as controversial or as likely to lead to fist fights as the U.S. Constitution. It’s difficult to decide which portion of the document gets people riled up the most.

I am not a religious man. I’m neither proud of that nor ashamed. I merely state that fact to establish where I’m coming from. I have friends who are believers and friends who are not. Where religion is concerned, I

I’m not of the opinion that a person has to be perfect in order to point out the failings of others, but liberals take it to such an extreme that you have to wonder if they have any self-awareness at

In all of history, so far as I’m aware, there had only been two famous tea parties. At the first one, Samuel Adams and a few of his freedom-loving friends pitched several crates of tea into Boston Harbor. The second

Recently, I was called cranky in an article posted at the Huffington Post. The good news is that it’s one of the few times that anything approaching the truth has been posted there. The part I resented, though, was having

Judging by my e-mail, a great many conservatives are counting down the days until they next get to vote in 2010. They hope and pray that Americans will come to their collective senses and undo some of the horrors unleashed

So many absurd things are taking place around the world on a weekly, daily and even hourly basis that there’s simply no way to stay on top of it all. If one man can barely keep up with the lunacy

A few years ago, I re-connected with a guy I hadn’t seen in about 50 years. We’d been friends in junior high, but once my family moved, Gary and I wound up attending different high schools. Which is pretty much

I never imagined I’d say it, but I’m beginning to identify with Barack Obama. I’m certainly not referring to his politics or his narcissism, but it seems that both of us really suck when it comes to gift giving. First,

I was born in 1940, which means that during my lifetime 13 men have been the president of the United States. For many of those years, I was a Democrat. As was the case with Ronald Reagan, I didn’t feel

Just for the record, I am a non-observant Jew. That means that my mother’s father, Max Lashevsky, who kept kosher and attended an orthodox synagogue twice-a-day every day of his life, would probably have considered me a heathen, while Adolf

Television is often treated like the unloved step-child of the arts. It’s been called a vast wasteland and worse. And vast it certainly is. It’s on all the time and on hundreds of channels, so it’s no surprise that most

I have to hope for the sake of our country’s future that when people voted for Obama they really had no idea what a disaster he would be, even though I kept warning them that he was a left-wing lug

First, let me make it clear that I despise Bernard Madoff and wanted to see him fry. Still, I must confess that when I first heard that they were sending this elderly rat to jail for a hundred years, it

The way that liberal politicians and Hollywood celebrities carry on over the plight of poor people, you might easily get the idea that they actually know some. They don’t. Why would they when they only hang around with each other?

I have always contended that anybody who seeks the presidency is an egomaniac, every bit as certifiably crackers as those poor souls wandering around the grounds of the asylum insisting they’re Napoleon. Still, I’m generally willing to cut people a

Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer,

Most 12-step programs start out by requiring that people understand that they’re powerless over their addiction and that only by turning their lives over to a Power greater than themselves can they be restored to sanity. Far be it for

Recently, I wrote an article in which I listed my favorite 100 movies, broken down by decade. Frankly, I was overwhelmed by the response, both positive and negative. Even though I stated at the outset that it wasn’t my intention

I believe it is long past time to end the War on Drugs. That’s not because I approve of drug use nor have any desire to encourage it. But this particular war has already gone on longer than the ones

When I first thought about writing this piece, I was only going to list my all-time favorite movies, breaking them down by decade. I was going to explain that these weren’t my idea of the greatest or most innovative films

There is probably nothing that people would rather have mentioned in their obituaries than the fact that along the way they had won a Nobel Prize. And it’s not just the money, either, although 1.3 million smackers is nothing to

Down through the years, there have been a great many movies in which school teachers have been portrayed as decent and hard-working, even heroic. Just a handful that come to mind are “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Holland’s Opus,” “This Land is

Once upon a time, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. Catchy, but wrong. We also have all that really scary stuff to worry about. What I find curious about fear is