August has been ridiculously busy at chez Simpson, so I’ve been exhibiting less than my usual laser focus on the news. I am digesting all of the latest Trump news, content to let CO and those more informed than me hash out the nuances.
In the meantime, I’ve been taking a few notes on what I have seen happening on the left over the last three weeks or so, and it has struck me as passing strange, even by the manifestly high strangeness ratings typically associated with the left.
Consider this: within 24 hours a couple of weeks ago, I learned that Peter “the Z is silent” Stroke got fired (again: best porn name ever. For an FBI agent? Not so much.) and John Brennan lost his security clearance. And like you, I was shocked!
Shocked because I don’t believe that this hadn’t happened a year ago.
For the love of God, what do you have to do to get fired at the FBI? Stroke was outed over a year ago as a biased, unethical hack. He let his own partisan prejudices drive his actions at work, and taint several high profile investigations. He cheated with a co-worker, and left an email trail that proved that they were both scheming dunces.
And when he was called before a congressional committee, he displayed a combination of Comey-ian self-righteous cluelessness and Dan Rather-esque oily abrasiveness. His two expressions were “smirking jerk” and “sneering comic book villain.”
Plus, his mistress is unattractive. I cannot stress that enough. It’s axiomatic that if you are going to risk your marriage and career to engage in an affair, she must at least be hot. Maybe not Nikki Haley or 1983 Nena hot, but at least Crazy-eyes Castro-Guevara-Chavez hot. Otherwise, after your wife kicks you out and you end up at 3:00 a.m., lying on the paper-thin mattress in your musty, next-to-the-airport apartment with the wheezily ineffective window air conditioner, you’ll have to stare at the ceiling and think about the horse-faced goon for whom you gave it all up.
And you’ll not be comforted, and you’ll realize that you are indeed too stupid to deserve a security clearance.
Speaking of security clearances, how in the world did John Brennan still have one?
Leave aside the fact that he’s spent the last year on MSNBC or CNN — or whatever left-slanted hack-fest that is just like MSNBC and CNN – spewing the most unhinged, reckless conspiracy theories and charges at the current administration.
Why wouldn’t he routinely – as a matter of course, and even if he wasn’t crazy “Heeerrre’s Johnny!” Brennan – be expected to give up his security clearance when he left government service, and therefore no longer had any legitimate reason to access classified information?
I honestly thought that people departing government jobs would of course routinely give up their security clearances.
When I finished my summer job of weeding soybean fields for a local farmer when I was 13, I had to turn in my bean hook.
When I finished my high school summer job of making milkshakes at the Laesch Dairy Barn in Illinois, I had to turn in my store keys.
As I understand it, when someone leaves the Hell’s Angels, he has to turn in his cool motorcycle jacket with the club patches all over it.
But you can be asked to leave the CIA and still keep your security clearance? Just so that you can keep dipping into our nation’s secrets, in case you can pick up something juicy to leak to your fellow creeps on cable news shows?
Think about that. Bill Cosby doesn’t still have access to roofies and women, and Bill Clinton doesn’t still have access to interns, and Kevin Spacey doesn’t still have access to boys, and Harvey Weinstein doesn’t still have access to would-be actresses.
But until earlier this month, Peter Stroke still worked at the FBI, and John Brennan still had a security clearance. Ugh.
Speaking of Crazy-Eyes Castro-Guevera-Chavez, did you hear what happened when Ben Shapiro offered her a chance to come on to his podcast and debate any of the core issues of her socialist worldview with him? He even offered $10K to her campaign or the charity of her choice to make that happen.
To be fair to Crazy Eyes, the offer was a bit of a gimmick, and there would have been no upside for her to accept. She’s guaranteed to win in November in her far-left district, where her constituents wouldn’t recognize a reasonable economic argument if it hit them in the face like a big old hammer and sickle. And she would have been guaranteed to lose a debate with Ben Shapiro, which would have looked like a boxing match between Mike Tyson at the height of his powers and Bradley Manning at the mid-point of his transformation into Chelsea.
So I don’t blame the Latina lunkhead for spurning the offer. But I do blame her for the lame, victim-card playing way she turned it down. She said, and I quote, ““Just like catcalling, I don’t owe a response to unsolicited requests from men with bad intentions. And also like catcalling, for some reason they feel entitled to one.“
That’s a lot of bad faith crammed into just two sentences. And a lot of stupid, too.
She’s a politician running to propose and defend her political ideas, so to characterize an offer to do so as “bad intentions” is more than a stretch. Her analogy also suggests that she’s never been catcalled by a human male before.
Quick quiz: Which of the following have never, ever EVER been used as catcalling statements before:
- “Hey baby, those are some sweet ideological principles you’ve got there. Care to debate them in a format of your choosing in a well-lit and controlled environment?
- “Miss, while I enjoy the way you are strutting down this street, I think you would look even more attractive strutting your way across a debate stage!”
- “You’re pretty good at proposals, but you’d really put the “butt” in “rebuttal!”
- “Please come and debate me, Mrs. Warren. I really have a thing for exotic Indian women!” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
- All of the above.
I for one am glad that Crazy Eyes will apparently be on the political stage for the foreseeable future. No matter how lame Republicans get, and how many shenanigans the media can find and exaggerate about Trump, it seems like the Left has an endless supply of knuckleheads to beclown themselves, and repel mainstream voters.
For example, did you catch NY Governor Andrew Cuomo – the sharpest knife in a drawer full of very dull, rusty hammers and an old horseshoe – respond to Trump’s desire to Make America Great Again by dismissively saying that, “America was never that great.”
This is not something he got caught saying on a hot mike, or whispering to some America-hating far-left woman he was trying to trick into bed, or drunkenly mumbling into his vodka tonic during the Cankles McPantsuit victory party after it turned into a wake.
He said this during a speech, into a microphone. With people present, and functioning lighting. And cameras turned on and pointed right at him!
And he’s not some homeless crank in a beret and a Che t-shirt, running for school board in San Francisco on a platform of “Free acid and sex changes for all!” He’s the Governor of New York state, which I’m pretty sure is actually in America.
This was a gaffe so breathtakingly stupid that it boggles the mind. Not because there aren’t a lot of lefties who don’t like their own country – duh! – but because it’s such a basic point that it should go without saying: DON’T SAY THAT OUT LOUD!
It’s politics 101. Can you imagine anyone in any other state or country saying that?
Ever heard of a Greek politician saying, “The Greeks are a great and proud people, so it’s too bad that Greece sucks so much!”
Ever heard of a French politician saying, “The only thing wrong with France is that it’s lousy with French people!”
Ever heard a New Jersey pol say, “People are always asking me what is so great about New Jersey, and you know what I do? I just shrug, and say, “You got me there, pal.”
Ever heard an Israeli pol say, “The state of Israel? Feh!”
You have not. But the Dem governor of one of the largest American states, apparently without any alarm bells going off in his big, empty head, said it. Can you imagine what his internal monologue must be, if THIS was the part that he felt comfortable saying?
I can only guess that it’s something like this:
“My fellow New Yorkers, You disgust me. I hate this state, and this country, along with mom, apple pie and baseball. I don’t care for any of our allies, and I think criminal illegal aliens should be treated better than American citizens. In conclusion, I believe that children are NOT our future, working class people are ill-educated louts, and I think Hitler got a bad rap. Good night, and see you in hell.”
Finally, a story so sad that even I cannot joke about it too much.
Jay Austin and his girlfriend Lauren Geoghegan were in their late 20s when they decided to go on a romantic-sounding adventure, spending over a year riding bicycles through much of the world. They went through parts of Europe, Asia and Africa, before they chose earlier this month to include Tajikistan on their itinerary.
Quick tip: don’t go to any country with “stan” in its name if you can help it. If you can’t, you probably want to be accompanied by some special forces guys and carry a belt-fed weapon. I know it sounds harsh, but there hasn’t been a good Stan since Laurel and Musial.
Where was I? Oh yeah, beautiful Tajikistan in the summertime.
So yada yada yada, a carload of jihadi freaks run over the bicyclists and then stab them to death.
The story has an especially poignant tragic element because of a blog entry that Austin wrote earlier in the journey. He said, “You read the papers and you’re led to believe that the world is a big, scary place. People, the narrative goes, are not to be trusted. People are bad. People are evil. I don’t buy it. Evil is a make-believe concept we’ve invented to deal with the complexities of fellow humans holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.”
These words have launched 1000 snarky comments, half of them involving Darwin Awards. And while I share some commentators’ impatience with the folly of these young adults, and I recognize the dark humor in such a macabre and predictable outcome, I’m not mad at them, and I think they deserve better.
We’ve all done impulsive, rashly stupid things when we were young and impressionable. We chased women who were bad for us, and ingested dangerous substances, and drove way too fast, and looked up to idiots, and spouted political theories that now make us want to never stop face-palming ourselves.
But most of us never died from it, by the grace of God.
I know that young people can be given to romantic and utopian ideas, and in a wildly successful Western nation they can be sheltered from the harsher realities of life more than ever before. But something has gone badly wrong for anyone who can make it into their late 20s and still believe something as oblivious to the human condition as “evil is a made-up concept.”
Now excuse me while I prepare tomorrow’s lesson plan for my two daughters. In the morning we’ll start with “Countries you cannot ride a bike through,” followed by readings from Dostoeyevsky, Conrad and Elmore Leonard. In the afternoon, we’ll do some philosophy, starting with two old proverbs (one Russian, one Latin) that should appropriately raise the hair on one’s neck, re: human nature: “The tears of strangers are only water” and “Homo homini lupus” (“Man is a wolf to man.”)
In the meantime, yes, I’ve got locks on both of their bikes. Why do you ask?
Martin Simpson 