Ben Shapiro: Why Can't Barack Obama Be A Great Dad Like Me?

Oh dear god, Benjy Shapiro is thinking about his child again, which inevitably means he will express his tender affection for his tiny child by promising to protect her from the depredations of the Obama Administration. Remember how he welcomed her into the world by sneering at Barack Obama? Welp, he's at it again, in what looks like a seriously belated Father's Day column that ran today. Ben Shapiro is just full of love for his daughter, but like one of those crazy people who write letters to the editor comparing airline disasters to abortion, he cannot think of anything without being reminded of just how badly Barack Obama is ruining America.

Shapiro starts by letting us know that he worries about how having a tiny baby has made him unmanly, because squishy girl emotions:

My baby daughter has ruined me. I'm not typically known for being the most openly emotional person. On the incredibly rare occasions in which I find myself crying -- typically when the last track of "The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh" pipes through the car stereo (why would you leave the Hundred Acre Wood, Christopher Robin, you dolt?!) -- my wife revels in it. The first time it happened, she turned to me, grinning gleefully, and exclaimed, "You do have feelings!"
At least, that's how it was until Leeya was born.

Oh, sure, we could wonder why Shapiro was blubbering in the car at the end of a book that made Dorothy Parker fwow up, BEFORE he had a daughter, but we'll just attribute that to poor editing and move on to Shapiro's real point, which is that having a child changes a man, makes him realize a Very Deep Thing: When you're a parent, you have to think about the Future, man!

Last week, my 4-month-old began crying when we put her down to sleep at night. I put my hand on her chest and began rocking her back and forth. Her crying gradually reduced to cooing, and then finally she dozed off. Maybe she wasn't crying anymore, but I was. I found myself tearing up because I couldn't help but think of a time, decades from now, when she's in pain, and I won't be there to help. I won't be there to rock her to sleep or to put her head on my shoulder or to tell her everything will be all right.

Oh, golly, we bet he is the first person outside of every high school graduation speech to ever realize that. And now we get to the meat of the essay: Facing our own mortality makes us realize that our days upon this earth are limited, and that "what we do matters." And by god, Barack Obama is the worst National Dad ever:

In his weekly Internet address, President Barack Obama tackled Father's Day by repeating a line from his 2013 State of the Union address: "what makes you a man isn't the ability to have a child -- it's the courage to raise one." But, of course, it doesn't take courage to raise your child; it takes common decency. Only reprobates father children and then abandon them. What really makes you man, I've realized, is not merely providing for and defending your wife, or even raising your child -- it's the action that lies in the realization that the future matters, even if you won't be here to see it.

We'll just guess that, with a four-month-old, Ben Shapiro has yet to face any of the parenting moments that really require courage: not just the sleepless nights when that tiny person has a fever and a cough that won't go away, but the terror of having to cross a Lego strewn carpet barefoot in the dark. But since he's thinking future-oriented thoughts, he does want to take the opportunity to scold anyone who might be enjoying themselves, because fun is sinful:

In an era in which immediate gratification and self-discovery are now given moral priority over delayed gratification and moral action, our children show us the barrenness of such a view. The words of Beyonce and Pepsi at the Super Bowl -- "Live for now!" -- ring false when you look at your crying child and understand that decades hence, your life won't have mattered a damn if you didn't live it for her.

Thank you for rescuing us from an advertising slogan, Ben Shapiro. And thank you for being the first person in history to realize that planning for the future is a good thing! And also for recognizing how terrible and shallow a people we are:

Having children truly ends adolescence. We are all either parents or children: responsibility-takers or those who demand from others. Which is why it's such a human tragedy that Western civilization has now prized endless childhood as the ultimate ideal. When the president of the United States characterizes fatherhood as some sort of act of bravery, but the capacity to murder the unborn as a human right, society itself comes unmoored.

Or maybe when women have control of their own reproduction, they are better able to plan for the future, but they are probably just sluts living for today, drinking Pepsi and gyrating to that whore Beyoncé. Also, let us just note that Zippy the Pinhead author Bill Griffith has been mocking "kidult" pop culture since at least the 1980s, which is probably Barack Obama's fault, too.

And so Ben Shapiro has discovered that parenthood involves a whole lot of responsibility, and that "every time we rock our babies in the night, we bring order back to a disordered world." Which is why women don't need equal pay, probably.

Can you imagine anything more wonderful than having Ben Shapiro as a dad?

[ TownHall ]

 Follow Doktor Zoom on Twitter. Ever thoughtful of the future, he has invested much of his son's college fund in My Little Pony collectibles.