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!
Martin Simpson 