Last week, ex-president Obama crammed a month’s worth of hypocrisy into one speech, this time to the beleaguered people of South Africa. It is true that they cheered his feckless inanity, but in their defense, look what life experience they have to compare it to: the Boer War, vicious oppression under apartheid, and “necklacing” (being wrapped in tires and then lit afire) by Winnie Mandela. Compared to that, how bad can one speech by an entitled, self-satisfied politician be?
That was a rhetorical question.
The rhetorical answer? Pretty bad.
My instinct is to want to give Obama a break, since it’s got to be tough to watch your legacy systematically dismantled by an orange cartoon character whom you thought had no chance of following you into an office that you felt was beneath you but way above him.
But even for Obama, this speech was insufferable. Adopting his bemused, incredulous lecturer rhythms, he condemned – of all things – dishonest politicians. If you haven’t seen it you should watch it, because flat words on a screen don’t do his smarmy delivery justice.
But here are his words: “We see the utter loss of shame among political leaders where (sic) they’re caught in a lie, and they just double down, and they lie some more!”
Can you imagine that? (“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”) A politician so clueless and lacking in honesty, (“If you like your insurance, you can keep your insurance.”) that he lies repeatedly (“There’s not even a smidgen of corruption at the IRS.”), and when he gets caught (“I’m not a king, I can’t just legalize people who come to this country illegally. That is not how our system works.”), he has the gall to lie again (“We’re going to spend this trillion dollars on shovel ready jobs.”)
Why, that’s unprecedented!
Obama also waxed eloquent on that favorite leftist topic, wealth inequality. Quoth the maven: “I’m actually surprised by how much money I got (sic)…. There’s only so much you can eat.” (He said, before a dinner consisting of an expired can of pork and beans and cold ramen washed down with contaminated river water.) “There’s only so big a house you can have.” (He said, thinking about the one-room tar-paper shack where he and the Scowling Wookie™ cook over a dung fire and do just fine without electricity and running water.) “There’s only so many nice trips you can take.” (He said, from his front steps in Chicago, because he can’t afford to travel to the other side of the world and stay in posh hotel suites where he is entertained by colorful local dancers, and takes selfies with an endangered lavender rhinoceros while hammering checks from gullible leftist dopes.)
I can’t tell you how glad I am that that man is no longer president.
Speaking of glad, how about that boffo movie opening for Rob Reiner’s “Shock and Awe,” a conservative-bashing piece of tripe directed by Reiner and starring some big name actors. And also Rob Reiner.
Described as “embarrassing” and a “disappointment,” Meathead’s magnum d’oh-pus (boom!) managed to bring in only $41K in its opening weekend. Its Rotten Tomatoes audience score was 29%. For comparison, here are some audience scores for other movies, none of which I am making up:
Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984): 65%
Ishtar (1987): 37%
Waterworld (1995): 43%
My Aunt Donna’s home movies of her 2002 trip to Branson, Mo (2002) (15 minutes of which featured the floor of her minivan, shot when she thought that the camera was turned off): 30%
Okay, that last one was made up. But once again, a leftist windbag makes an awful propaganda piece and gets smoked at the box office.
Compare that outcome to the one that will greet a documentary that I am currently working on. My subject will be election night 2016, and I’ve got never-before-scenes footage of Hillary and her team as the shocking election results come in.
So be on the lookout for “Shock and CAW,” opening this fall.
In other movie news, Scarlet Johansson was looking forward to playing the lead role in a biopic about the life of Dante “Tex” Gill.
I know what you are thinking: Is that the Tex Gill who brought law and order to the old West as a straight-shooting Texas Ranger in the late 19th century? Or is it Tex Gill, the tough-as-nails blocking back who opened big holes in the interior line for Emmitt Smith during the late 90s Dallas Cowboy’s championship run?
No, it is neither of those people whom I just made up. It is the Tex Gill who was born Lois Jean Gill, but who – through a commitment to gender confusion and a greedy desire to exploit other women – identified as a male and went on to a career in the fast-paced world of pimpdom, eventually becoming a crime boss who ran a prostitution ring in Pittsburgh in the 1970s and 80s.
Because that’s who we make movies about today.
Johansson ran into a storm of criticism, and no, it did not involve why she would want to play a misogynistic, mentally ill pimp in what is sure to be a steaming pile of Pelosi called “Rub and Tug.”
It was about the fact that, according to many lefty believers in identity politics, it is a terrible thing for a woman to play a woman who identified as a man in a film. Because that would be inauthentic, and it would take a role away from one of the hordes of transgendered actors who are currently working at Starbucks because Scarlet Johansson is hogging all of the great transgendered pimp roles out there.
Leaving aside the ridiculous gender politics – and oh how I wish that we could all do that for the rest of my life! – think about what these knuckleheads are objecting to: an actor was going to play a character that was different from what that actor is like in real life.
In other news, it turns out that Russell Crowe, who played a Roman Gladiator in the movie “Gladiator” is neither Roman nor a gladiator! And Charlize Theron, who played unattractive serial killer Aileen Wuornos in the film “Monster” is actually quite attractive, and has not killed even a single person. And guess what else? When Bruce Willis played a dead guy in “The Sixth Sense,” he was – hold onto your hat, because I’ve done my research – ALIVE!
And don’t even get me started on Elizabeth Warren, who has played a Native American while being as white as a Scottish highland dancing competition in Finland during the Winter Solstice. #wemustneverstopmockingher
Anyway, we can all stop rending our gender-nonconforming garments, because Johansson has bowed to pressure from the BCA (Binary Crybullies of America) and pulled out (no offense) of the film project. So… crisis averted, I guess?
Finally, it has fallen to me to be the brave soul to ask the question that has been on all of our minds lately: what is it with the left and feces?
As discussed in earlier columns, lefty San Francisco is battling a Rising Tide of Human Waste (worst-selling Tom Clancy book ever, by the way), to the point where there is now a handy Poop Map App (worst-selling Dr. Suess book ever) to help you negotiate your way across town. The mayor of San Fran (from guess which party?) has started an “education” campaign to try to get her voting base to stop defecating in public. When asked if she was thinking of implementing any punishment for those who use her city as a toilet, she said (and I am not making this up), “I didn’t express anything about a penalty.”
Of course you didn’t.
But now, in a bid to take part in the Great Leftist Bowel Movement, open-minded progressives in the Boyle Heights area of LA found a fun way to respond to a new business opening in their neighborhood. It turns out that the Asher Café and Lounge is owned by a legal immigrant (Boo!) from Israel (BOO!) who supports Trump (BOO!!!). So when he recently had a grand opening for his café, the local lefties engaged him in a respectful but bracing dialogue about their political differences.
HA! I kid! They actually put on masks, screamed at and accosted his customers, and threw human waste on his windows. And then celebrated their great victory on social media.
Lest you think that this was a one-off event – or, I guess, a #2 off (boom!) – if you google the story, you’ll find references to reports that the Defend Boyle Heights group used “similarly aggressive tactics against another coffee shop in the area last year and against an art gallery nearby that eventually shuttered.”
That’s right. When entrepreneurs try to bring leftists some artisanal coffee, they skip right past the cream and put poop in it. When a gallery owner tries to bring art to them, they throw poop on it.
This is why you can’t have nice things, lefties. This, right here.
I’m going to end this column by bringing together our two themes – art and human waste – in a way that you will not see done anywhere on the internet other than the CO site.
In his immortal work of literature The Divine Comedy, the great late-medieval poet Dante (see, you did not see this allusion coming, did you?) devised devilishly appropriate torments for the people that he thought would be going to the Inferno in the afterlife. In what I’ve always seen as a stroke of genius – I thought so when I first read it as an immature 16-year-old, and still think so today, as an immature elderly gentleman – Dante consigned flatterers to their own fitting torment.
Demons suspend them by their ankles over a trough of excrement. The demons repeatedly lower them into the vile quasi-liquid, and then pull them back up, allowing them just enough time to sputter and gasp for breath, before dunking them again. The implication was that people who talked s**t during their lives, would have their mouths full of it in the afterlife.
But that was an insightful rhetorical trope, used to great effect by a great writer, and meant to suggest what happens to people in hell.
By contrast, today’s lefties – knowing Dante only (possibly) as a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle – want to employ this hellish political tactic in LA, and San Francisco, and every city they govern.
Just as we feel pity for those in Dante’s Inferno, we should feel sorry for the poor protesting souls on the left. We’re far from perfect, and we’ve got some obnoxious folks on our side too. But for the most part, we try to engage the left with facts, and we quote Hayek and Krauthammer, and we draw examples from history, and cite economic statistics, and appeal to logic.
And they poop in their hands, and they throw it at us.
Well done, leftists.
For the rest of us, if there isn’t a blue wave in November, I think we’ll all be bracing for a brown wave in 2019.
Martin Simpson 