This is going to be a good news/bad news kind of column, and I always like to get the bad news out of the way first.
Last Friday my mother-in-law passed away, after only two weeks at our house (with support from hospice). We had expected to have around 3 months with her, but she declined very suddenly. We took her to a beautiful hospice facility in our town on Thursday for what we thought would be a temporary pain management issue, and she never regained consciousness after that evening.
On the upside, she had a pain-free last couple of weeks, and she passed very peacefully, surrounded by those who loved her, both at our house and in the hospice. Her last words were to tell my wife that she loved her. She is survived by her two sons and daughter, and she will be very much missed.
In another, much less consequential helping of bad news, Democrats won elections in VA and NJ on Tuesday, in a mostly expected but still sobering result. I think Ben Shapiro’s cautionary take is probably right. He pointed out that Dems did well in down-ballot races in VA, as well as in a couple of nominally red districts in Georgia, and suggested that the GOP brand has not been helped by holding power for a year without getting much done, that Trump is not very popular outside his base, and that without the giant political black hole that is Hillary on the ballot, Dems improved their numbers from the last cycle.
I don’t have any deep or personal stake in any of those elections, but I did hope that Gillespie would unexpectedly win in VA, mostly because of the despicable ad that some leftist group put out against Gillespie. I’m sure you saw it: a faceless white guy in a truck with a Gillespie bumper sticker and a Confederate flag tries to run down a racially diverse group of kids. Very subtle, you racial arsonist creeps!
To top it off, the ad ends with the tag line, “Reject hate.” And the incoming governor’s victory speech included some blather about how the VA voters have rejected bigotry and want to come together.
You people ran an ad smearing a milque-toast, center-right candidate as a homicidal, racist freak. You don’t get to stroke yourselves over how morally superior you are. That would be as absurd as Harvey Weinstein posing as a benefactor of actresses, or Hollywood “feminists” praising Roman Polanski, or Cankles McPantsuit feigning advocacy for the kind of vulnerable women her husband preyed on.
Oh, wait. All of those people did that. Bah!
I do have one last bit of explanation for why Ed Gillespie lost that I have not seen reported in any media source. And that, of course, is the role played by the awesome prognosticating powers of… The Simpson Face Punchability Index™ (SFPI).
For those of you who hadn’t discovered CO before this past summer, you can go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com, and find my archived column from July, in which I unveiled the SFPI.
The short version is that every human face has an inherent punchability rating between 1 (the human equivalent of a virtually unpunchable Cassie the Wonder Dog when she was an adorable puppy) and 10 (Bill Clinton during his finger-waving “I did not have sexual relations with that woman – Miss Lewinski…” speech). In the absence of any hugely significant extenuating circumstances, the candidate with a lower SFPI will defeat the candidate with a higher SFPI.
In the run-up to this Tuesday’s VA election, I entered photos and detailed facial measurements of Gillespie and Northam into the Cray supercomputer that houses the proprietary SFPI algorithms, and the results will probably not surprise you.
Northam is a mixed bag: healthy set of eyebrows, fairly regular features, not too good looking but not ugly. He’s also mixed in the subtler, character-influenced features that only the sophisticated technology behind the SFPI™ could detect. He’s a Democrat, which invariably raises one’s punchability, but he’s also an Army veteran, which invariably lowers it. His SFPI is a 4.
Ed Gillespie, unfortunately, is a sufferer from Acquired McConnell-itis, also known in the medical literature as “Chinless Cartoon Turtle Syndrome.” (You’ve probably seen the telethons. “For the price of a cup of coffee a month, you can help provide the facial reconstruction and chin implant surgery that will bring hope to the life of a needy child who is otherwise doomed to a life of relentless mockery and eventual defeat at the hands of a candidate with a lower SFPI.”) Gillespie’s SFPI is a solid 8, so his loss was a fait accompli.
One last bit of bad news this week is that apparently we no longer hold drum-head court martials or trials and speedy executions of traitors and deserters anymore. So Bowe Bergdahl is now free to roam the earth.
Six good men gave their lives looking for that jerk. Plus a military service dog, Cassie informs me. (Islam teaches that dogs are unclean animals, and disdains them. If Islam had done nothing wrong but screw up Cat Stevens and slander Man’s Best Friend, those two facts alone would rank it at the bottom of world religions in my book. And in Cassie’s, since she is very sensitive to anti-caninism in all its pernicious forms.)
And Barack von Clausewitz called Bergdahl a hero who served with distinction, and traded 5 hardened jihadi terrorists for him. And stood by in the Rose Garden, grinning, while Bergdahl’s weird-beard dad spoke Arabic and praised Allah.
Ugh. I wouldn’t have traded the lone service dog for him. Or a service cat, if there were such a thing. Or a service hamster. Or a civilian skink. Or a Norway ray with an advanced case of rabies and a four-day life expectancy.
I hope Bergdahl has enough moral sense to repent and regret his actions, and feel the moral weight of the good men who lost their lives because of his idiocy.
And I hope that some day, a police K-9 dog who has a cousin service dog in the military recognizes Bergdahl walking the streets of some American town, and takes a chunk out of his arse.
And now, on to some good news.
First, the reprehensible Teen Vogue magazine is shutting down. I know, I hadn’t followed it either. But apparently it had been chock full of mindless leftist agitprop and relentless promotion of the joys of slutdom to vulnerable young girls. Satisfyingly, it closed shortly after running a “Guide to An*l Sex” story aimed at teen girls.
Sadly, they turned down my freelance story pitch, “Guide to An*l Sex for Teen Vogue Editors,” which begins with an angry dad who finds his daughter’s Teen Vogue magazine, goes to their office, forces an editor down over a desk, rolls up a copy of the magazine into the shape of a cylinder… [story continues on page 43].’’
Second, it seems that last Saturday, fascist group Antifa threw a series of well-advertised and hyped rallies in large cities from coast to coast, and not many people showed up.
After taking out full page ads in the NY Times among other papers, and getting tons of publicity, the fascist group Refuse Fascism – whose stated goal was “organizing millions of people to drive out the fascist Trump/Pence regime” – was able to get a decent sized crowd in LA, but not much anywhere else. Seattle (home of hordes of ne’er-do-well lefties who can usually be counted on to turn out for anything that doesn’t involve honest work or coherent thought) produced around 50 attendees, while Boston and Chicago had around the same result. Philly had a little more, but most places had less.
And the dramatic, Gotterdammerung-style pitched battles were not in evidence, either. One woman in NY was arrested for “splashing a drink on a Trump supporter,” though. So … take that, Fascism! (Remember when that Parisian waitress threw a glass of wine in Himmler’s face in 1942, and the Nazis pulled out of France the same day? Me neither.)
Texas was an even more encouraging story. “Around 30 protestors” came out in Austin… and were outnumbered by around 50 police, and 200 Trump Supporters. And that’s in Austin – the San Francisco of Texas! (And I don’t mean that as a compliment.)
Speaking of Texas, although the evil atheist gunman’s attack on the church last Sunday was a tragedy, it’s denouement was anything but.
In true Texas fashion, two bystanders who saw the gunman run out of the church stood by, helplessly wringing their hands while he got away, before they called the police. One of them told a local reporter, “That poor shooter was obviously under the spell of an evil firearm. I only hope that he can get the kind of therapy that he obviously needs.”
HA! I tricked you. What actually happened was that one bystander – an ACLU member wearing a floppy rasta hat — jumped into the other’s Prius (with a “coexist” bumper sticker on the back), and they slow-chased the gunman down, then used a combination of blunt language and sweet reason to appeal to his conscience, whereupon he turned himself in and apologized to the community. Then a Texas jury sentenced him to community service, and the sheriff ordered in kale and a vegan buffet for the jurors.
HA! I am truly an unreliable narrator.
You know what really happened. Former NRA instructor and Hemingway-look-alike Stephen Willeford heard the shooting, grabbed his ammo and rifle and ran barefoot out into the street. As one does.
When the killer came out of the church, Willeford exchanged shots with him, hitting him twice. The killer fled in his truck. Regular citizen Johnnie Langendorff, wearing a cowboy hat and driving a pick-up truck – check and check – was passing by.
Willeford jumped into his truck and said words that have never been said in LA: “”That guy just shot up the Baptist church. We need to stop him.” Langendorff replied with words that have rarely been said in LA: “Okay.”
Those two badasses then chased the gunman — Mr. Majestyk-style — at speeds up to 95 mph until the evil dope crashed, and ended up killing himself. After which – I can only hope – local residents came by and urinated on his body.
There are a lot of things wrong in the world. My mother-in-law is gone, Virginia has voted for a hateful candidate who prides himself on his lack of hate, and our military justice system lets traitors go free.
On the other hand, there’s Texas!
Martin Simpson 