Month: June 2018

As Father’s Day is upon us, I’d like to wish everyone in the CO nation a happy holiday.

Last June I wrote a tribute to my own dad whom I lost a few years ago, and I won’t repeat any of that here.  But if you’d like to read that column – and hear the last joke he told me from his death bed, for example — you can find that in the archives from June 2017 in the column to your right.

I’ve been thinking about dad a lot lately, partly because our move to a new old house has given me the chance to set up an organized workshop.  Dad was always very organized, but I’ve been storing tools haphazardly for years, and I know that he would be so pleased to see me setting up such an orderly work space.  The first step was to put doors on the old garage, and with the help of a guy who built two steel frames, and a carpenter who let me help him put wood over those frames, I now have some functioning garage doors.  (I’ve put a pic of those doors on my website, too.)(I know…that’s what the public wants to see: hot carpentry project action!)

As I was moving one of the toolboxes I inherited from him into my new space, I looked inside, and found a wood plane.  The plane still held some wood shavings in it, and it suddenly hit me: the last time this was used, dad drove it across something that he was working on, and then replaced it on his tool bench.  Those shavings suddenly seemed almost like a part of dad himself, and it felt like he was right there with me again.  It’s funny what can catch you by surprise and choke you up when you’ve lost a loved one.

Okay, so writing about pop always constitutes “things I love.”  But as is always the case, there are plenty of “things I hate” to deal with in our public life, too.  Things such as the MSM, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton, for example.

It’s still too soon to tell what may come of Trump’s meeting with North Korea’s Kim, but if it has done nothing else, it has given the lefty, Trump-hating MSM another chance to beclown itself.  They are so transparently biased that they’ve flipped positions half a dozen times in a perverse game of “heads Kim wins, tails Trump loses.”

Remember when Trump spoke rudely of Kim, calling him little Rocket Man, and noting that he was fat?  I thought that his words weren’t wise, but the MSM acted like it was Armageddon:  “You can’t talk about world leaders like that!  Trump should be diplomatic, and temperate, and stick to the niceties of etiquette.  His idiotically insulting language is going to start WWIII!”

Then Trump spoke positively about Kim (he’s talented, he’s a tough leader).  And the MSM lost it again:  “You can’t talk about dictators like that! This is no time to be diplomatic, and temperate, and stick to the niceties of etiquette!   To compliment a dictator is as bad as being a dictator.  Trump’s cuddling up to Kim is going to start WWIII!”

When Trump originally announced the summit, the left dismissed it: “You don’ t just schedule something like this so casually!  It takes months of working through diplomatic channels, and an intricate series of negotiations.  This thrown-together set-up will never amount to anything!”

Then Kim gets aggressive, and Trump cancels the summit.  “HA!  This summit could have accomplished so much, and now Trump has blown it!  Presidents work for years to arrange for diplomatic breakthroughs like this, and now a precious opportunity has been squandered!”

Then Kim reverses course, Trump declares the summit back on, and the MSM spins so fast they get motion sickness: “This meeting won’t accomplish anything.  Nothing to see here.”

Don’t misunderstand: I don’t have high hopes that a totalitarian regime like Kim’s is going to give up its nukes and become a responsible citizen on the world stage.   But it’s worth a try.  And it’s not like Trump is going to upset some marvelous status quo:   NK is a nightmarish moonscape of oppression and starvation and dysfunction, and decades of diplomatic efforts on the parts of a half-dozen presidents have done nothing to prevent or change that.

Bill Clinton said all the right platitudes and tried a combination of scary talk and diplo-speak and bribes to prevent NK from getting nukes.  And they got nukes.  Bush talked tough, and Obama talked smoothly, and neither of them made a bit of difference.  The traditional approach has gotten us to here; how bad could an unconventional approach by Trump be?

Regardless, the MSM have once again demonstrated their bad faith.  If Trump is nice to Kim, he’s being played and tacitly approving evil; if Trump plays rough with Kim, he’s needlessly rude, and provoking Kim.  If the meeting happens, it will mean nothing, but if the meeting gets called off, it’s a golden opportunity lost.

We hate you, MSM.  We really, really hate you.

Speaking of things we hate, Lizzie Warren was talking to cute little guy Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, and she admitted that she’s “filled with terror” about the possibility of the GOP hanging on to the Senate and House in November: “If Donald Trump remains in control of the House and the Senate, and the Republicans won’t stop him, I don’t know what happens in the next two years.”

Don’t get your headdress feathers ruffled, Liz.  If the past year is any guide, what happens might turn out to be continuing economic growth, lower unemployment than King Hussein ever achieved, and maybe even an end to the Korean war.  Sure, there will be a downside for you: more judges who try to follow the constitution will be appointed, we’ll likely get more regulation reform, and ordinary people will get to keep and spend more of their own money.  But you’ve got to take the good with the bad.

On the other hand, you are also up for election in November, and the dopey voters in MA have not shown any inclination to toss out the cranky old papoose with the bathwater.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  So you’ve got that going for you.

Finally, it’s been fun to watch the incipient fallout from the IG report, which appears to be every bit the broadside fired into lefty Washington that we thought it would be.  It turns out that Peter Stroke and Comey and McCabe WERE dishonest and unprofessional, and Obama DID lie about not knowing about Hillary’s private server, and that Hillary WAS treated with kid gloves instead of competently questioned and exposed.

It’s been very frustrating for those of us on the right to see another Clinton apparently getting away with terrible behavior again.  Yes, she lost the election.  (giggle)  And yes, her behavior since losing has revealed just how awful she is (chuckle), and what a nightmare of a president she would have been (snort).  But it feels like she still hasn’t been called to account, and forced to answer for her actions.  In any fair system, she should be facing prosecution.

On the other hand, I’m Mr. Glass-half-full.  An inveterate optimist.  I like to stay on the sunny side of life.

So I’ve been thinking hard, trying to come up with some silver linings on the dark cloud that is Hlllary’s eluding prosecution for her intentional, reckless mis-handling of classified materials.  And I’ve come up with two.

First, if she was standing trial and on her way to jail, she would not be free to stay in the spotlight, and go on a terrible book tour and give terrible speeches and CAW CAW CAW her way through one television appearance after another, and thus remind the American people of exactly how terrible she and her party are.

Second, if she were charged, she would have to post bail, and then be released on some kind of modified house arrest while she awaited trial.  And you know what that means: (cue scary organ sting) an ankle monitor.

That’s right.  Some poor, unlucky member of the law enforcement community would draw the short straw, and would end up with the job of trying to get an ankle monitor onto one of those fetlocks of hers.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is more than we can — in clean conscience — ask of any man or woman.

Happy Father’s Day!

 

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Christian baker who refused to bake a wedding cake for a gay wedding, and while I’m not a lawyer (which is only part of the reason that I am such a boon to society), I have a few thoughts.

First, this is the worst possible case for the “let’s force businesses to agree with our positions” advocates.  The gay couple in question seemed to have gone out of their way to find a baker who would turn down their request, and come across as obnoxious activists looking for a legal fight.  That doesn’t make their argument wrong, but it also doesn’t make them look good.

The baker, on the other hand, comes across as a decent person who was just trying to follow his religious beliefs.  He’s not an angry homophobe, screaming at the gays to get out of his business and burn in hell! He had apparently made cakes for gay people before, and did his best not to offend anyone, while at the same time sticking to his religious beliefs.

The Colorado commission who initially ruled against the baker were angry, condescending leftist hacks right out of central casting.  They made no effort to hide their disdain for the baker’s Christian beliefs, comparing his thinking to the kind of worldview that led to the Holocaust.  In fact, the reason that 2 of the leftists on the SC joined the opinion of the 5 intermittently sane SC justices was that even they couldn’t overlook the transparently prejudiced ruling of the Colorado commission.  (Which begs the question: What would a far-left lower court have to do to get Methuselah Ginsberg and Kid Latina Sotomayor to rule against them?  The smart money is on “not possible, under any circumstances.”)

While I’m a Christian, I’m pretty libertarian in my politics, and I’d like nothing more than for the government to back way off on almost every front.  In fact, I think a lot of our current problems stem from the fact that there’s one aspect of English Common Law – maybe it was in the Magna Carta?  (did I mention that I’m not a lawyer?) – that we have tragically lost in recent decades.  I’m referring, of course, to the bedrock principle of “Mind Your Own Business, You Totalitarian Jerks.”  (MYOBYTJ, as it appears in Black’s Law Dictionary.)

“How would MYOBYTJ apply to this situation, Dr. Simpson?” you may ask.  “Also, how it is pronounced?”

It’s pronounced just like it’s spelled, of course.  And here is how it would be applied in the case of “Angry Gay Activists v. Baker Who’s Never Hurt Anyone:”

Two Christophobe gay guys walk into a bakery.  (I know – sounds like the start of a good joke, though sadly, it is not.) (Also, yes, I called them “Christophobes.”  Because “homophobe” is a linguistic pet peeve of mine.  “Phobe” comes from “phobia,” which is a fear, and makes no sense in this context.  People who aren’t thrilled with gay people don’t fear them.  No one has ever heard two suspiciously well-groomed males discussing musicals and suddenly shrieked and passed out like a tarantula just descended from the ceiling and landed in their lobster bisque.  On the other hand, plenty of lefty activists have come across a 10 commandments plaque or a Nativity scene and immediately pulled their unisex dresses over their gender-binary heads, and ran around shrieking and hyperventilating and fumbling in their transgender wallet/purse/biodegradable bag to find their cell so they could speed dial the ACLU number to make the scary Christian inanimate objects stop torturing them.) (So yeah.  “Christophobes.”)

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.

Two gay guys with nothing better to do go into a bakery and ask the baker to make a fabulous cake for their gay wedding.  He respectfully declines, stating that doing so would violate his religious convictions.  The two hair-trigger Christophobes become outraged, and call the local Sheriff, their Congressman and Senators, the Governor, and the Colorado Commission on Very Important Issues.  They explain the situation to each of them in turn.

And each time, the official on the other end of the phone should have said something to the effect of, “So why don’t you just find a more gay-friendly baker to make your cake?  Or maybe boycott that baker, and tell your gay friends not to use him for their weddings or Oscar parties or gay-mitzvahs or whatever.”

And when the busybodies reply, “Don’t you understand?  This baker thinks differently than we do!  He should be forced to run his business in a way that doesn’t offend us!”  each and every official should respond, “Mind your own business, you totalitarian jerks!”

I’m serious about this.  I’d like to see business owners free to operate how they’d like, and let the market and a free society handle that.  And not just about issues that I have a rooting interest in:

• If a Jewish deli doesn’t want to serve pork, anybody insisting on a pork chop wrapped in bacon should be told MYOBYTJ!
• If a Muslim baker doesn’t want to bake Christmas cookies and some boneheads object? MYOBYTJ!

And I wouldn’t just apply it to religion, either.   For example, I dislike smoking; it’s expensive, and makes your clothes stink, and it caused the deaths of my mother-in-law and a favorite aunt in the last 6 months.  If someone wanted to open a bar or restaurant in my town that allowed smoking, I wouldn’t go there.

But you know what else I’d do?  I’d mind my own freaking business!  If a smallish town has 6 bars, why couldn’t one of them allow smoking?  No one who objected would have to work there, or eat there, or drink there, and most people wouldn’t.  If enough people voted with their dollars and stayed away, the bar would close.  But not because some crybullies forced them out of business.

I know that smoking is not good for you, but that’s not the point.

You know what else isn’t good for you?  Ice cream.  Riding a motorcycle.  Women half your age.  Many other women.  Many men, too.  Playing the lottery.  Cocaine.  Red meat.  Electing delusional white ladies to the Senate from Massachusetts. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  Really loud music.  Stepping in to defend a weak person against a bully who’s much larger and stronger than you are.

Half the juice in life is negotiating your way around and through those things.  For example, I once had a good meal at a steakhouse with a woman who wasn’t good for me (despite a cuteness of almost Nikki Haley-esque proportions), and then took her back to her apartment on my motorcycle, where she fed me some ice cream.

But just when I was about to do some things that would have left me with terrible regret (and possibly some soft-tissue injury) she pulled out some cocaine and said, “Let’s snort this, and then buy a lottery ticket and vote for Elizabeth Warren.”

Of course, I jumped up in righteous outrage and tossed some clothes at her and said, “Put your clothes on and get out of my apartment!”

And she said, “Those are your clothes, and this is my apartment!”

To which I wittily replied, “Oh, yeah.”  The next thing you know, I’m making a dignified (if pantsless) retreat, while she is screaming from the second floor landing like a crazy person, “Elizabeth Warren is a Native American role model!”

And I’m screaming back at her, “She’s as Indian as Ingemar Johanssen!”

“Who is that?”

“Google him!” I yelled.

“You better stop mocking Elizabeth Warren, and I mean it!”

“NEVER!” I screamed, as I roared away into the night, having learned a valuable lesson.

 

Where was I?  Oh, yeah.  Minding my own business.

I think most rap music sounds like racist and misogynistic cats mating inside a metal garbage can in a concrete parking garage.  I think vegan food tastes like a cruel experiment concocted by misanthropes with defective taste buds.  I think that leftist policies are destructive to all I hold dear.

But if someone wants to open a socialist vegan restaurant that features rap music all day, God bless them.  Not my cup of tea, and I would not think highly of anyone patronizing that establishment.  But I would not in a million years walk in there in a MAGA hat, and insist that they play some Hank Williams while making me a hamburger.

Because I know how to mind my own business.

Of course, there is a political element to this.  While all of us are fallen and imperfect and prone to want to impose our wills on others, the vast majority of totalitarian bullying today comes from the left.  Who is imposing speech codes and shouting down speakers they disagree with?  Who knows better than I do what kind of lightbulb I should be able to buy, and how many gallons of water my toilet should hold, and how big of a soft drink I should be able to buy?  Not the political right.

(And to anticipate one mistaken to objection from the left, we don’t want to dictate what any women do with their bodies.  That’s why you’ve never heard of any conservative legislative pushes to ban piercing, or tattooing, or appendectomies, or surgeries that make you look like a duck-billed platypus with cartoonishly large breasts. When we try to prevent abortion, it’s not because we want to control women’s bodies.  It’s because we took biology in school, and recognize that something that has different brain waves, and a separate heartbeat and DNA is not, technically speaking, “part of your body.”)

In conclusion, the Supreme Court got it right this time.  Don’t force an African-American baker to make a stars-and-bars cake to celebrate Jefferson Davis’ birthday.  Don’t force a white baker to make a Malcolm X “Kill Whitey” cake.  Don’t force a socialist baker to bake a “Trump 2020” cake.  Don’t force a sane baker to make a “Hillary 2020” cake.

Mind your own business, you totalitarian jerks!

So it’s June, and you know what that means: another month of leftists behaving badly.

Let’s start with Samantha Bee.  And before you say, “WHO?”  I’ll point out that she has an alleged comedy show watched by many of her relatives and a few poor souls being held against their will by sadistic kidnappers who have duct-taped them to chairs with those crazy Clockwork Orange eyelid-clamped-open-things on.  She’s currently in a neck-and-neck competition with Noah Trevor, Jimmy ”Waaah!” Kimmel and Stephen Colbert – or as you may know them, “Who?” and “He was a little funny when he hung out with Carolla,” and, “Ugh.” – for the “Least Funny and Lowest Rated Human on TV.”

A week ago, Ivanka Trump put out a picture of her and her adorable two-year-old son.  So naturally the leftist twittersphere went into a spittle-flecked rant about it.

I know what you’re thinking.  She must have given the sweet pic some sort of inflammatory caption, right?  Like, “Don’t forget, his grandpa is going to be president for 6 more years!” or “Look how beautiful and white he is!”  or “So glad I didn’t abort this little guy! #no-more-infanticide.”

But no.  The pic was sweet, and the caption was sweet:  “My [heart] #Sunday morning.”
And the lefties went NUTS!  A writer named Casey Quackenbush (man, I bet middle school was a picnic with that last name) at Time magazine – which I was shocked to learn still exists – put it this way:  “Ivanka Trump faces a storm of online criticism for tweeting a photo of her embracing her son, with critics denouncing her as “tone deaf” amid emerging reports of immigrant families being separated at the U.S.-Mexico border.”

I am not making that up.  A “storm of online criticism.”  “Tone deaf.”  For a picture with her son.

And it wasn’t just Senora Quackenbush.  (snort) I think Andy Ostroy said it best, by which I mean “stupidest,” (and no, I’ve never heard of him either):  “As screaming children are being ripped from their horrified parents at the border because of daddy’s unconscionable cruelty…@IvankaTrump demonstrates a staggering measure of tone-deafness & insensitivity in her “Sunday morning” snugglefest with her kid.”

Look up “drama queen” in the dictionary, and you’ll find a picture of Nancy Pelosi, beside the quote, “No, this IS the end of the world.  It’s Armageddon!”  But then, in the small print, you’ll find, “See also: Andy Ostroy.”

Anyway, when Samantha Bee and her crack team of writers saw that beatific photo of maternal love, they knew that had to marshal all of their talent to expose this outrage.  So they locked themselves in a room for a week, to focus their attention and their rapier wit on the First Daughter.

You know that old saying that if you put 1000 monkeys in a room with 1000 typewriters for 1000 years, they’d produce the works of Shakespeare?  Well, this was just like that.  Except that when they came out of the room, they were babbling incoherently, and covered in feces, and all they’d come up with was a list of vulgar words for the female anatomy.

So Slanderin’ Sammie went on the air, and called Ivanka a “feckless c-word” and suggested that she use her body to tempt her father into incest in an effort to change his mind about applying US law to people who break it and thereby endanger their own children.

Sidebar: Take it from a guy who is almost too modest to mention that the internet has agreed that he is a #hilariousgenius – that’s not comedy.  Anybody can drop an “F” bomb or a c-word.  I do that every time I drive across town, or accidentally come across a Samantha Bee monologue, respectively.  And I don’t even have a team of writers to help me!

Comedy takes a little more thought than that.  I mean, you try coming up with a humorous reference to Liz Warren for a dozen columns in a row.  It’s not as easy as I make it look.

Sure, I could just call her a feckless squaw, and pour myself a scotch and call it a column.  But no.  I have higher standards than that.  So I pour that scotch first, and I tilt back in my chair, and try to think of the whitest people I know.

I think of that actor from the movie “Powder,” but that’s too obscure.  I remember a disturbing Martin Short albino character from some long-ago tv sketches, but that’s even more obscure.  Scotch, scotch, scotch… Boom.

Edgar Winter and Tilda Swinton had a baby (look them both up).  And that baby was still three shades darker than faux Indian Liz Warren.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

Okay, maybe not my best work.  But still better than Sam Bee and her over-paid menagerie of hacks could come up with.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Incest-implying, c-word deploying Samantha Bee is obviously a feminist heroine.   Which is why she was honored by the Television Academy (I’m not making that group up, even though no one’s ever heard of them before) with an award for “Programming that Advances Social Change.”  If by “advancing social change” you mean “making society much, much worse.”

Meanwhile, crazy loon Roseanne said something equally offensive about truly terrible leftist hack Valerie Jarrett, and now she’ll never be on network tv again.   The end, and nothing to see here, and move along.

 

The two most recent Democrat presidents were also in the news this week, with a couple of schadenfreude-tastic interviews that I’ve been savoring and re-reading.  First up was Barack “Sophocles” Obama, whose philosophical musings in the days after Trump’s election were excerpted from Ben Rhodes’ forthcoming dumpster fire of a book.

In the days after the shocking electoral reversal, Obama had a dark night of the soul, during which he carried out a caustically critical self-inventory.  According to Rhodes, Obama mused, “Maybe we were wrong.  Maybe I shouldn’t have had such faith in my own god-like ability, and such disdain for everyone who disagreed with me.  I mean, did I really say that my election would stop the oceans from rising, and begin the healing of the world?  What was I thinking?  I’ve become a character out of a Greek tragedy, whose hubris finally called down an epic punishment from the gods. I’ve got to repent, and change my ways, and spend the rest of my days trying to undo some of the damage my obviously flawed worldview has caused to the greatest nation on earth!”

HA!  Of course I kid.  What Obama really said was this:  “Maybe we were wrong.  Maybe we pushed too far.  Maybe people just want to fall back into their tribe…. Sometimes I wonder whether I was ten or 20 years too early.”

Translation: “I am so amazingly wonderful.  It’s too bad that Americans are such primitive, tribal ignoramuses that they cannot appreciate the wonderfulness of me.  Maybe in a few decades, they will have caught up to my greatness, and regret electing a cartoon character who is erasing all of my glorious achievements.  But probably not.  Because they suck.”

 

But even more fun was a series of interviews that Bill “Handsy McGroperton™” Clinton found himself entangled in.  He recently pretended to co-write a novel with an author who has lately made a career of getting other writers to write novels that he can pretend to have co-written, and then they went on usually friendly NBC to do an interview promoting that book.

And things went well, for a while.  As long as the interview stuck with questions along the lines of, “Why did you decide to pretend to write this book,” and, “What do you think of your co-author?”  Bill was his old affable, self-deprecating, superficially charming self.

But then things went off the rails.  The interviewer actually started asked some tough questions – after only 20 years, I was as shocked as Bill was! — such as did Bill ever apologize to Monica Lewinsky, and in these days of #MeToo does he see things differently?  And the mask dropped, and Bill revealed his true nature.  He became visibly angry, and pointed his finger, and tried out one lame defense after another:

He denies what everyone knows happened, and what he has admitted in the past:  “I don’t think it would be different today… because people would be using the facts, instead of the imagined facts.”  (i.e. “I did not have sex with that woman.”)

He denies that he was wrong:  “No, I think I did the right thing.  I defended the constitution.”  (Question for any constitutional scholars in the CO nation:  which amendment is it again that protects our God-given right to cavort in the Oval office with gullible girls our daughter’s age?  I think it’s right around the part where we don’t have to quarter British soldiers in the mother-in-law suite anymore, but I couldn’t find it in a quick search.)

He deflects to make his horniness a problem for Trump: “[People are accusing me] partly because they’re frustrated that they’ve got all these serious allegations against the current occupant of the oval office, and his voters don’t seem to care, so you don’t ever talk about that.”

I know.  Re-reading that makes it no clearer.  First, is Bill Clinton seriously claiming that no one ever talks about allegations of sexual misconduct against Donald Trump?!  After Billy Bush was suddenly the most famous Bush in the fall of 2016?  After we’ve spent more than a year on an investigation that originated with Democrats paying a foreign spy to come up with fictional stories of Trump throwing bundles of  cash at troupes of acrobatic Russian hookers to get them to urinate their way through the presidential suite at the Moscow Hilton?

And yes, Bill is self-righteously pontificating on how immoral it was for Trump to have a consensual one-night stand with an adult woman who makes her living having sex with strangers for money.  “Serious allegations” indeed!  Why, do you remember when Trump exposed himself to Kathleen Willey, and Paula Jones, and dozens of others?!  If Harvey Weinstein is awaiting trial, and Bill Cosby is awaiting sentencing, how is it that Donald Trump could have raped Juanita Broaddrick, and has never had to answer for that!  I mean—

Oh, wait.

Bill also played the victim, whining that he left office $16 million dollars in debt.

He even trotted out the faux-feminist version of “some of my best friends are black,” saying how many women he has hired and appointed over the years:  “I had a sexual harassment policy when I was a governor in the 80s.” (Yes, but does, “I am ALL FOR IT!” technically count as a “sexual harassment policy?”) “I had two women chiefs of staff when I was governor.”  (I guess it depends on what the meaning of “had” is, right Bill?) “Women were over-represented in the attorney general’s office in the 70s.”  (And some of them weren’t even C-cups!  I mean, come on!  Give the guy some credit.)  “I’ve had nothing but women leaders in my office since I left.”  (Mr. President, you’re not helping yourself.  Please stop talking.)

Seriously, if you haven’t watched that interview, you must.  Because there are few things more satisfying than watching a self-righteous, hypocritical old reprobate starting to reap what he has spent decades sowing.

Before I get to today’s semi-random meditations, I want to thank CO and the readers of this site.  After a couple of weeks without the internet I posted a column last week, and the response was really gratifying, and it has put a smile on my face for several days running.  In only two weeks I had really missed following the site, and to find that the feeling was mutual felt amazingly good.  So thank you all for your kind words, and the shares, and such a warm welcome back!

Now onto today’s theme, which is how vastly different two humans can be from each other.  Exhibit A is a GOP candidate for congress from Texas, and Exhibit B is a 30-year old who got sued by his parents to get him to move out of their house.

The first guy came to my attention arising from the state primary elections last Tuesday.  The consensus coming out of the primaries seems to be that things are getting even more polarized: more conservative candidates have beaten some moderate ones, and on the left, farther left candidates have beaten more centrist ones.  The prime example of the latter would be the battle of the two Staceys for Georgia governor, in which a farther left African American Stacey defeated a plain vanilla (no offense) white leftist Stacey by a surprising 3-1 margin.

I think this trend favors the GOP in the fall, because the general public is moving more to the right, while the Dems are moving from pretty far left to super far left.   Even though I think we’ve acclimated ourselves to way too much big government control over our lives, the polls seem to be moving rightward, probably starting with resistance to Obama’s hard-left (and uber dishonest) push to take over health care in 2009.  On issues from the Second Amendment to lower taxes to sane border controls to a more pro-American foreign policy, most voters are moving right.  At the same time, most lefties have become so deranged with Trump hatred – and so sure that regular people share their frothing hostility – that they may well be pushing the mushy moderates to either stay home or vote GOP.  Several months ago I was afraid that the historical trend that pointed to a blue wave in a GOP prez’s first midterm was going to hold true, but now I’m becoming more hopeful that 2018 might buck that trend.

My favorite GOP primary winner this time around was a guy you’ve probably never heard of:  Dan Crenshaw, from Houston.   He’s an ex-Navy Seal and a conservative… and he just about had me at ex-Navy Seal.  Did I mention that he wears an eye patch, after having lost an eye in an IED explosion in Afghanistan?  That’s right… an EYE PATCH!

Call me superficial.  (You won’t be the first.)  But I think eye patches make men at least 163% cooler than they would normally be.   And yes, I said “men.”  Call me sexist.  (Again, you won’t be the first.)  But eye patches don’t necessarily work on women.  That woman in Kill Bill had one, and it was just creepy, even before Uma plucked her other eye out.   And if you slapped an eye patch on Liz Warren, she might try to pass it off as an old arrow wound, but it would not work for her.  And she’d still be about as Indian as that translucent woman who dumped Tiger Woods after that unpleasantness with the Waffle House waitress.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But you put an eye patch on a man, and I’d follow that magnificent bastard to the gates of Hell!  A young, impressionable me was always a big John Wayne fan, not least because of his appearance in True Grit as “one-eyed fatman” Rooster Cogburn.   Then Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in “Escape from New York?”  Then, when I was reading a book on military history I came across Claus Von Stauffenberg, the reformed Nazi who tried to kill Hitler – even with Tom Cruise playing him, that guy was an eye-patch-wearing bad ass.

Of course, if you were giving out medals for “Best Use of an Eyepatch,” the gold has got to go to Moshe Dayan.   Little guy, tough as nails, led some tough Israelis in some tougher battles.  He lost his eye when a sniper’s bullet hit the binoculars he was looking through.

You heard that right, puny mortals.  A sniper’s bullet.  In the binoculars.  Which were on his face at the time.

And it just made him mad.  So mad that the next time the jihadis attacked his country, he led the forces that whipped them in six freaking days.

By the way, I always thought that that had to be the coolest name for a war ever.  If you had to be in a  war, is there any doubt which one you’d choose?    Especially considering the alternatives when a recruiter was pitching you:

Recruiter:  “How’d you like to sign up, do your duty for king and country?”

You: “What’s this war called again?

Recruiter (almost under his breath): “The Hundred Years’ War.”

You:  “Yikes!  You mean, with any luck I could die in this one, along with my son, and my grandson, and my great grandson?!”

A few centuries later, and it’s getting close to Halloween, when you come across a recruiter who has a better deal.  “What’s this war called?” you ask.

“The War of 1812.”

“Sweet,” you say.  “New Years Eve is only two months away, and then it’s 1813.  So I’m in.”

But wait.  Say it’s 1967, and a tough little bantam rooster of a guy wearing a wicked eye patch pitches you on a little conflict he calls the Six Day War.

“Well, it’s already Sunday evening,” you think to yourself,  “so if we kick things off at dawn, I’ll be home in time for the Bears’ early game next Sunday.  Done and done.”

As a kid, I flirted with the idea of getting an eye patch.  And there were various ways that I could have ended up with one.  I ran with scissors on occasion.  I rode a bicycle with reckless abandon, and later on I rode a motorcycle without a helmet.  Plus, several friends and cousins and I were raised on the Three Stooges, so you’d expect that at least one of us would end up in a Curly-eye-poke-related incident.

Skip ahead to my adulthood, and I’m not out of the eye-patch-related woods yet.  I have the high honor of writing for the Cautious Optimism website, a job that requires me to scour the internet for tales of leftists behaving badly.  In the course of that, I necessarily (and often unexpectedly) come across photos of Antifa chick mug shots, or pics of Lena Dunham, or Kathy Griffin, or any number of other hideous leftist crones.

At moments like that, one has to manfully resist the almost autonomic reflex to plunge any nearby sharp objects into one’s own eyes to make it stop.   But that is a risk I’ve been willing to take for the CO Nation.  (You’re welcome.  And yes, I do have a tip jar on my web page, thanks for asking.  Because when the inevitable happens, that eye-patch isn’t going to pay for itself, people.)

Where was I?

Oh yeah.   Dan Crenshaw for the House of Representatives.  Hopefully that blue wave will be no match for the one-eyed Seal!

 

On to the other end of the spectrum of humanity – prepare yourself for the whiplash: Exhibit B.  I give you Michael Rotondo, 30 years old, and a resident of New York.  Actually, a resident of mommy and daddy’s house in New York.

You’ve probably heard about the story, and if you haven’t, you can Google it.  But the general outline is that the guy apparently went to college, and – in a testament to the unfathomable generosity of women – somehow fathered a son.  But he’s been staying in his parents’ house for the last 8 years, even after his parents have written him letters and given him eviction notices and offered him cash to leave.

They finally took him to court, where a judge heard the case – and, I’m hoping, face-palmed himself repeatedly – and told the bum to get out of his parents’ house.  Rotondo has since been giving tv interviews in which he explained that he wants to get out, and has been planning to get out, and he’s trying to focus on regaining custody of his son.  Also, he’s a great father, and he no longer wants any relationship with his parents, who have been very mean to him.

I know nothing at all about the kid’s mother, but unless she has heroin for breakfast and meth for lunch and has a huge “I’m with Her” tattoo on her forehead, she better not lose custody of that kid!

Why did I put these two people in one column?  Because I am fascinated by humans.  Half of the time I find myself agreeing with Shakespeare, in his famous lines from Hamlet:

“O what a piece of work is man! how noble in reason!/ how infinite in faculty! in form and moving how/ express and admirable! in action how like an angel!/ in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the/ world! the paragon of animals…”

And then I read about Michael Rotondo, and am moved to compose a few lines myself:  “O what a piece of crap is man!  How feeble in reason!/ How finite in faculty! In form and moving how/ sluglike and repugnant! In action how like a fungus! / in lassitude how like a sloth!/ how did he beguile a female to couple with him?/ even one solitary, misbegotten time?/Seriously, poor Yorick, what gives?”

Okay, I know.  I’m no Shakespeare.  But Michael Rotondo is no Dan Crenshaw.  It’s hard to believe that he’s even in the same phylum!  Nobody could be more different from an eye-patch-wearing Navy Seal than this human walrus.  And yet Rotondo seems oblivious to his true condition, and how he comes across.

Though the analogy is admittedly a stretch, I see a lot of Rotondo in today’s Left.  Obama dangled before pupal-stage Bernie Sanderses like him the chance to stay on mommy’s insurance until 26, and he went one better, staying on mommy’s guest room bed until 30!  He’s entitled, and he’s been enabled right into a pathetic, gelatinous state of complete dependence.  And when he finally couldn’t get his way, he ran crying to the courts to try to avoid the consequences of his (in)actions.

Now if only we could get more GOP pols to emulate Dan “Rooster Cogburn-Plisken-Von Stauffenberg Dayan” Crenshaw, there would be zero chance of a blue wave in November!