This past week has been a mixed bag for me.
Personally, I’ve had the unutterably painful experience of watching two loved ones in their 70s receive diagnoses of late stage cancers that resulted in life expectancy of less than four months. Both of them are responding with stoicism and grace, and my wife and I are going to have the privilege of bringing our relative home with us, where she’ll be surrounded by loved ones and supported by hospice during her final months.
I will respect their privacy and not discuss any other details here, except to say that hospice is great and deserves our support, and that smoking is every bit as bad as advertised. Both of them began smoking in their teens, and that has played a key role in their respective diseases.
I know that at this late date, everyone knows what smoking does. But if I can add my voice to the throng of nagging busybodies in your life, please try to quit again. Use whatever gimmick or strategy you can – nicotine gum or patches, prayer, support groups, hypnotism, acupuncture, voodoo, loved ones willing to douse you with a bucket of water when you light up.
Whatever it takes. If you’ll pay my airfare, I’ll personally fly to your house and read excerpts from one of Noam Chomsky’s terrible books when you light up, as a form of aversion therapy that probably violates the Geneva Convention. But please quit!
Thus ends today’s sermon.
And now: things that don’t really matter all that much. Like idiot politician, and the idiotic voters who elect them.
Before yesterday I’d never heard of Frederica Wilson, and my life was better for it. She’s a Democrat African-American congressdope from Florida, and she’s been embroiled in the mini-scandal about what Trump said to the widow of a dead serviceman in a condolence phone call. A call which Wilson listened in on, just in case you thought she might be a classy human with an ounce of decency. Nope and nope. (If you haven’t heard about it, Google it for the painful details.)
The story is a perfect Rorschach test, as many political stories are. It’s a she said/he said tale, but to believe her take on it, you’d have to believe two things: 1. Wilson could tell the truth if her life depended on it. And 2. Trump would call and intentionally insult the wife of a dead serviceman.
I don’t believe either, needless to say. Trump says a lot of crude, insensitive and clumsy things. But this smells like a political hack operating in bad faith to either manufacture or purposefully misinterpret a statement from Trump for her own grubby ends.
General John Kelly – and since Patton is dead, Kelly is neck-and-neck with Mad-Dog Mattis as my most admired general — gave a press conference excoriating Wilson, referring to her as following in the long tradition of “an empty barrel that makes the loudest noise.”
I hadn’t heard that one before, but now I’m going to try to use it every day.
As in, “By the way, did you notice that Hillary in a pantsuit bears an uncanny resemblance to an empty barrel, and she tends to make a lot of annoying noise?”
See? Thank you, John Kelly.
Anyway, how would you guess that a brainiac like Frederica Wilson would respond to that shot across her empty bow? As reported by CNN (I know, but still), “Wilson told CNN’s Alisyn Camerota that Kelly’s “empty barrel” remark was racist, but didn’t explain why.”
Didn’t explain why, you say? I guess I have to be the one to point out the obvious. Barrels often contain oil. And oil, as I’m sure Elijah Muhammad has explained at one time or another, is black.
So, res ipsa loquitur — Frederica Wilson would probably say, if she wasn’t a total dope and knew even one cool Latin phrase – racism. Duh!
I’ve spent the last 15 minutes – which I will never get back – looking through the debris field of Wilson’s political record. And from that I learned two things: 1. She is a far-left loon whose presence in Congress speaks very poorly of the constituents who elected her. And 2. She apparently inherited an extensive hat collection from a wealthy cowboy pimp.
I’m guessing that her parents were really hoping for a boy who would one day drive cattle from Topeka to Dallas. To assuage their disappointment when she was born, they nailed her with the name “Frederica,” stuck a ridiculous baby cowboy hat on her empty head, and foisted her upon the voters of Florida’s beleaguered 24th District.
Seriously, look at her hat pictures. In fact, pull up a split screen of a few lovely ladies in the reproductive organ headgear from January’s march, alongside one of Wilson’s garish hats. If you could look up the phrase “opposite of a thinking cap” in the dictionary, those are the pictures you would see.
If there is no such cliché as “a two-pint brain in a 10-gallon hat,” I would like to invent that now, and apply it to Wilson.
But not satisfied with eavesdropping on a condolence call and then trying to score political points off of it, she steered into the stupid skid, releasing this tweet: “ I still stand by my account of the call b/t @realDonaldTrump and Myesha Johnson. That is her name, Mr. Trump. Not “the woman” or “the wife.”
Hilariously enough, the mother’s name is actually “Myeshia” Johnson.
I am not making that up. In a snotty, three-sentence tweet meant to excoriate Trump for not using the grieving widow’s proper name, Hopalong Bonehead GOT THE GRIEVING WIDOW’S NAME WRONG.
Ugh. To complete the empty barrel trifecta, Wilson gave an interview afterwards, an excerpt of which appeared on Bret Baier’s show. Wilson said, “Let me tell you what my mother told me when I was little. She said, ‘The dog can bark at the moon all night long. But it doesn’t become an issue until the moon barks back.’”
Cut back to Bret, wearing the same confused expression that my Aussie shepherd gets when I try to explain to her that Frederica Wilson is in congress.
By the way, I would bet my life that Cassie ‘the Wonder Dog’ Simpson would make a much better representative than Wilson. She doesn’t have much foreign policy experience, but she is a strict constructionist on Supreme Court nominees, and she is very tough on crime, having protected our house from burglars for over three years now.
Plus she’s up to date on all of her shots – which, judging from that little barking moon story, I’m guessing that Frederica Wilson is not.
If it didn’t mean moving to the 24th district, I would create an exploratory committee tomorrow. The first ad would feature my beautiful girl at attention – her one brown eye and one blue eye staring soulfully into the camera — behind a chewed-up, bedazzled cowboy hat, with the slogan, “Cassie Simpson – Who’s a good girl? Not Frederica Wilson!” Tagline: “My name is Cassie Simpson, and I approve this—WOOF!”
Martin Simpson 