By: Nelson Abdullah
Conscience of a Conservative

When are we ever going to learn anything that our grownups taught us? You know, like the wisdom that a stitch in time saves nine. Next time you lose a button you might remember that. How about that insightful piece of wisdom for judging people we once heard about, called the Duck Test. It tells you how to determine the true nature of someone who seems to be masked in the camouflage of an Aesopian language. The Duck Test is a form of inductive reasoning. As Wikipedia explains it, “The test implies that a person can identify an unknown subject by observing that subject’s habitual characteristics. It is sometimes used to counter abstruse arguments that something is not what it appears to be.”

So: If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it must be a duck. Really.

Yes, really. Just because it’s funny doesn’t stop it from being true. Now it really gets interesting when this form of logic is applied to politics in general and politicians in particular. Take for instance the catchy code words that are splashed across our newspaper headlines these days. My favorite today is “Income Inequality”. The Cincinnati Enquirer had a full-page story on this today but of course, like most liberal newspapers they didn’t offer any Duck Test to identify the true origin of the idea. Their story was all about the disturbing fact that the rich have more money than the poor and that isn’t fair and what we must do to rectify the injustice. Shades of income redistribution.

How about thinking for a moment about an older version of this same idea about “Income Inequality”: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”. The new version of Income Inequality is being marketed by Barack Hussein Obama who, as a young man, was mentored for 8 years by Frank Marshal Davis, a card carrying member of the Communist Party. The older version of that saying comes from the father of modern day communism, Karl Marx; and those who espouse it today are called Marxists. So if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it must be a duck. But don’t bother reminding your newspaper editors about this. They probably already know that Obama is a Marxist but they don’t want the public in on the secret.

My name is Nelson Abdullah and I am Oldironsides.