I’d like to introduce what I hope will be a recurring series of posts, in which I review my favorite things to happen in the previous month.
I give you The Best of January, 2017
1. Chuck Schumer crying. When Trump’s perfectly justifiable but badly handled executive order temporarily banning foreigners from terrorism-riddled countries rolled out, Chuckie actually cried about it. In public. I was raised in the Midwest a hundred years ago, where there was a code about grown men crying. A few tears were acceptable if your spouse died in childbirth, or your son died in battle, or you lost a limb in a farm accident. If my sister or I had ever seen my dad in tears and ran to tell mom, I can predict her response: “Oh lord! Which arm is it, and can we pull it out of the thresher so the doctors can re-attach it?!”
You know what she would NOT have asked in a million years? “Good God, how many foreigners have been momentarily inconvenienced at an airport?!”
2.Barack’s new rental. Shortly before the inauguration, media reported that the Obamas were going to be renting a big house in DC for a year or so while his youngest daughter finishes high school. News reports mentioned that a team of workers would be adding an architectural feature to the former president’s new rental. I assumed that it would be a bridge, which would obviously give the common people greater access to make their way right up to Obama’s front window, where they could press their filthy faces against the window like Dickensian orphans, hoping to catch a glimpse of the great man, muttering into his New York Times as he read about Trump dismantling his legacy.
Imagine my shock when I found out that it was – wait for it – a wall!
That’s right, the things that are despicable, and don’t work, and are Not Who We Are. Yet somehow, when it comes to his own family’s security, Obama is building not a bridge but a wall.
What’s next? Will we find out that the secret service team assigned to protect him for the rest of his life will be doing so not with sweet reason and strongly worded letters to the editor, but with filthy, horrible firearms? (And if so, can we say that he is going to be bitterly clinging to his guns, from behind his wall, the big racist xenophobe?)
3.Chelsea Handler insults Melania. When someone was inexplicably interviewing human train wreck Chelsea Handler, and asked whether she’d ever have Melania Trump on the show that she apparently has for some reason, Handler’s response was the ne plus ultra of unearned leftist condescension: “Melania? To talk about what? She can barely speak English!” Just for the record: Melania speaks five languages, while Chandler speaks almost one. Almost two, if you count “slurring” as a language.
4. How will the new CIA Director deal with global warming? When questioning the CIA head honcho nominee, brilliant Dem senators rose to the occasion by getting right to the question of the age: “What are you as our nation’s spymaster going to do about global warming?” I’m not making this up. The CIA Director. Asked about the weather.
Because you know how often you turn on the news and hear about the troposphere screaming “Allahu Akbar” before blowing itself to bits on a crowded street, or an occluded front blasting away inside an Orlando gay nightclub, or an extra degree of ocean temperature over a century blowing up the Boston marathon.
5. Inauguration day. And not primarily because of Trump. It was an amazingly great inauguration solely because the hand on the Bible was NOT Hillary Clinton’s. If you pushed me, I’d have to say that I’d rank the best inaugurations in our history as follows: 1. George Washington’s.
2. Abraham Lincoln’s.
3. Anybody’s who was not Hillary Clinton’s. (And yes, that includes William Henry Harrison’s, whose speech might still be going on right now had not a merciful God struck him dead 30 days into his inaugural oration.)
6. The Atlantic article about ultrasounds. Moira Weigel wrote an article in The Atlantic about how creepy right wingers have used ultrasounds as cruel political tools. The thrust of the article is that by showing more clearly and accurately the fetus in the womb, ultrasounds give the impression that the entity in the pregnant woman’s womb is a baby.
In other breaking news that is sure to shock the savants at The Atlantic: Telescopes give the impression that the sky is full of stars. And taste buds give the impression that ice cream is delicious. Also, functioning human eyes give the impression that Melania Trump is attractive.
Like many leftist attempts at persuasive argument, the article unintentionally insults its target audience, casting women as gullible dopes, susceptible to falling for deceptions at the hands of their wily, so-called “doctors.” (See also: “Of course African Americans can’t possibly be expected to attain photo id so that they can vote. Who do you think they are, sentient adults who can tell time and respond to verbal requests and find a DMV all by themselves?!”)
The best part of the article is the corrections list at the end. There are 5 corrections to this short article, and they’re not counting the part about saying that a baby is not a baby as an error. In the original presentation, each error was listed separately, with “We regret the error,” following it. But someone at the Atlantic must have seen how much that repetition hurt, so they re-formatted them – now all of the errors are listed in a long paragraph, with one, “We regret the errors,” at the end.
If political philosophies had mottos, you couldn’t do better than that: “Leftism – We Regret the Errors.”
Except that they don’t appear to actually regret the errors, I mean. (You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs, etc.)
7. “Lunatics, start your engines…” In preparation for the announcement of Trump’s Supreme Court nomination, some leftists had pre-printed signs made up, with a red band across the top with the word “Oppose,” and a blank white band below. The idea was that the perpetually aggrieved lefties could just write the nominees’ name in as soon as it was announced, and thereby not lose any precious pre-protest time to wasteful, unnecessary processes like informing themselves about the nominee, or thoughtfully considering his or her judicial record.
8. More women’s march signs. Speaking of brilliance expressed on a poster, here is my personal favorite sign spotted at our local women’s march the day after inauguration: “Don’t like abortions? Don’t have one.”
Move over Aristotle, because that is one philosophically unassailable bit of magic marker on a piece of cardboard right there.
Cut to me, using the time machine that I definitely do have (take that, leftist fact checkers!) to transport myself back to 1861, where the local Democrat great-great-grandmothers of the anti-Trump marchers are also marching, with pieces of slate on sticks, onto which they’ve written their brilliant thoughts:
“Don’t like Slavery? Don’t own a slave.”
“My chattel, my choice.”
“Get your rosaries off my n-words.”
The only way to make those marchers’ messages more convincing? You guessed it: vaginal bonnets.
Martin Simpson 