Month: February 2019

The responses to my last column once again prove that the CO nation is full of some witty people, with impeccable taste.

You all answered the call with some more suggestions for a collective noun to describe Dem presidential candidates.  A “dementia of Democrats” and a “failure of Democrats” were particular favorites, though I can’t discount the alliterative fun of “clown car of candidates” and “gaggle of goofballs.”

The positive response to the title of “Martacus” is growing on me.  Just this morning, I was standing in front of a full-length mirror in a toga (as one does), testing the sound of it.  Cassie the Wonder Dog stood by watching, and she seemed impressed.

On the other hand, John Gabris suggested that the ultimate test of the new name will be whether my wife will use it.  Early results are NOT encouraging.  On the other hand, she has inexplicably not taken to calling me “@hilariousgenius,” either, no matter how nicely I ask.  So I may have to disregard her opinion on this, as on a few other things.

We’ve got a new addition to the declared field of Dem candidates…and never has a “dementia” of Democrats more aptly applied than it does to Bernie Sanders.  The socialist dictator-enthusiast threw his hat into the ring on the 19^th.  Comically, it was a bicorne hat (like the one Napoleon wore), which was very fashionable in the early 19^th century, when Bernie was a young man.

(Speaking of which, I know that “octogenarian” describes people in their 80s, and “nonagenarian” people in their 90s.  But what word describes a guy in his late 100s like Bernie?  I want to say “centurion,” but I know that that’s one of those Roman soldiers.)  (Speaking of which, call me Martacus!)

(See what I mean?  It’s growing on you, too.)

I remember reading in 2015 about Bernie’s checkered past: kicked out of a commune for being too lazy (How is that even possible?!), no consistent job until he got elected at age 39, composer of amateurish pornography.  But the most shocking story was that as a young adult, he stole electricity from a neighbor when his own utilities were cut off due to lack of payment.

I wasn’t shocked that a leftist was stealing what belongs to others. Because, duh!

I was shocked that electricity had been invented when Bernie Sanders was a young adult.

It should be fun to watch Bernie wheeze his way around the track one more time, forcing the other candidates to move even farther left to counter him.  Assuming that they won’t already be so far left that they are barely visible, far out on the horizon.

 

But all of the fun this week has not come from the presidential candidates – it has also come from unstable types like Jussie Smollett and AOC.

I knew that the Smollett story was fishy, for several reasons.

First, Simpson’s Law of Ridiculous Names obviously applies in the case of “Jussie.”  Oddly spelled names have been scientifically proven to be associated with shaky character — you need look no farther than Obama flunky Jeh Johnston for evidence.  We can accept a “Justin,” and we can accept a “Jessie,” but “Jussie” is a no-go.

Also, he wanted us to believe that Trump supporters do the following: live in Chicago, recognize an obscure actor from an obscure tv show, hang out at 2 a.m. in a polar vortex with a bottle of bleach in one gloved hand, and a noose in the other.  (Someone has to say it: it was a FAKE NOOSE!  HA!)

Smollett’s tired, hackneyed leftist talking points in interviews were so boring that I started to believe that the only reason the cops didn’t point the finger at him earlier was that he wasn’t interesting enough to be a “person of interest.”

Finally, for a leftist, anti-white/anti-conservative/anti-common sense media, the story was too good to check, which always means that it should be taken with a grain of salt.

Cochise Frigidaire (the dentally-challenged Native American Vietnam-era refrigerator repairman who fantasized about conservative white kids screaming “build the wall” at him) was lying, but the MSM fell for it.  As was frequent-flyer but terrified-of-flying baby-talker Christine Blasey-Ford.  As were a variety of other atrocity-committing MAGA-hat-wearers who turned out to be imaginary.

If you are wondering if the MSM will ever learn, don’t hold your breath. Especially in a polar vortex.

 

But the award for most entertaining lefty of February has to go to AOC (Annoying Oblivious-Cortez).

Her roll out of the Green New Deal was a thing of beauty, combining all of the standard elements that we’ve come to expect from her party: utopian assumptions, laughable misunderstandings of the way the world actually works, and breathtaking incompetence.

Let’s lead with the incompetence.  (She certainly did!)

Remember when FDR pushed ambitious legislation that turned a temporary economic downturn into the Great Depression, or when LBJ started a War on Poverty that poverty won by a TKO in the 10^th round, or when Obama promised shovel-ready jobs that turned out to not be so shovel-ready?

Or when Obama promised that you could keep your doctor and your plan, and that you’d save $2500 on your health care costs, but it turned out that you could keep neither your doctor nor your plan, and you had to sleep with creepy old Willie Brown to get an appointment with your GP?

Wait, maybe that last part was just Kamala “bury me in a Y-shaped coffin” Harris.  (Hat tip to Black Adder.)

Well, AOC’s GND was just that kind of FUBAR CF, served with a side of WTF and another of STFU. (Acronyms are fun!)

First, she released a FAQ (and yes, the “F” stands for the same thing it did in the previous acronyms) describing the plan.   But the plan was so breathtakingly stupid – let’s confiscate the earnings of hardworking people to pay people who are unwilling to work, and then ram corks into the ends of cows that do not moo, and then replace air travel with trains! – that she immediately had to start backtracking.

She tweeted – and I quote – “There are multiple doctored GNC resolutions and FAQs floating around.  There was also a draft version that got uploaded + taken down.  There’s also draft versions floating out there.”

So the documents are “doctored,” but also draft versions, which were presumably not doctored, but were only preliminary and thus invalid, even though they don’t contradict the essence of later versions, which are no less dumb than the earlier versions.

Also, the dog ate my homework, eyewitness testimony is unreliable, my email was hacked, and table 3 clearly ordered the pitcher of kerosene served in breadbowls that I brought them.

In a 2/7 morning interview with NPR, AOC was asked, “Are you prepared to put on the table that yes, [conservatives] are actually right, what this requires is massive government intervention?” Her answer, which I am not making up: “It does.  It does.  Yeah, I have no problem saying that.”

Until that same evening, when she had a big problem saying that.  This time the interview was on MSNBC, and her response was subtly different:  “One way that the Right does try to mischaracterize what we’re doing as though it’s, like, some kind of massive government takeover.”

Anyway, after a few days of walking around in circles and stepping on rakes, AOC was finally knocked unconscious.  Her staff then leapt into action, telling reporters from the Hill that, “…while doctored FAQ documents are circulating on the internet, the one [we] released was an unfinished draft that [we] had not intended to publish.”

In related news, Carlos Danger (and why isn’t THAT guy a declared presidential candidate, by the way?) released a statement of his own:  “You know all of those pics of my genitalia that I sent to all of those underage girls?  I did not intend to publish them.  Sooooooo… can I be in Congress again?”

But the hijinks didn’t stop there.   Chinless cartoon turtle “Cocaine Mitch” McConnell plodded into action, proposing a vote on the GND in the Senate.  And leftists politicians cheered, eagerly climbing over each other to get in front of cameras and take credit for this visionary legislation.

Ha!  I kid.  They actually ran for cover, because even they know ridiculous it is.

But AOC was not deterred.   She touted the amazing benefits of the GND, saying that it can be a new “moon shot.”

When I first heard that, I thought that she might be planning to drop her pants and expose her rear end in the next House debate.  Which might be her best chance to distract the electorate from what is in the GND.

On the other hand, if it works, it might encourage DMH (“Dessicated Mummy Hands” Pelosi) or Hillary to try the same tactic.

So, please God, NOOO!!!

The encore to the GND launch was the Amazon kerfuffle.

True to her socialist hatred of all things prosperous or successful, AOC led the charge to prevent Amazon from bringing high paying jobs and a gusher of tax dollars to her constituents.  When Amazon agreed not to inflict these benefits on her district, AOC exulted, “Anything is possible!” and celebrated the victory over “corporate greed” and “worker exploitation.”

That’s the kind of “can’t do” spirit that made the left great.

Some of her supporters – who were all standing around with nothing to do in the middle of a work day – said, “Yay?”

Also, “I was told there would be a free lunch.  And afterwards a moon shot.”

From her interviews, it became clear that AOC thinks that a “tax break” means that New Yorkers would have to GIVE Amazon $3B, rather than agreeing to take $3B LESS up front (and then many billions more later ) than they would have otherwise received, if any hypothetical company was masochistic enough to invest in a hostile blue state.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: as a political thinker, she makes a hell of a bartender.

Thus spake Martacus!

So I was traveling for a big chunk of the last week, and now that the news cycle moves at the speed of light, I feel like I’m a month behind on mocking every public figure in the news.  So this is going to be a “lightning round” kind of a column.

First, I think we need a new word to describe the current crop of Democrat presidential candidates.

I’ve always enjoyed the way that English has a bunch of idiosyncratic collective nouns for groups of various animals.  In addition to the plain vanilla “flock of birds” or “herd of former first ladies,” there are cool oddities such as a pride of lions, or a murder of crows.  (By the way, if we were to apply those kinds of terms to specific parts of the Democrat base, I’d be hard pressed to come up with better options than “a pride of transgenders” and “a murder of abortionists.”) (Not to mention a “warren of Northeastern WASPS.”) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

I’ve been turning this idea over in my mind, and so far I’m thinking of the following options:

A confusion of Democratic candidates

A scourge of Democratic candidates

An embarrassment of Democrats

What do you think, CO nation?  Will one of those work, or do you have any better alternatives?

 

Let’s take a quick run through the Murderers’ Row of Stupid™ that is the current Dem lineup of declared candidates:

1.Spartacus.  Ugh.  He announced with a slickly banal video comprised of 73 cliches strung together – children are our future, gluten-free apple pie is great, I like Main Street not Wall Street – whose emptiness is only exceeded by that of the vast vacuum of deep space, and the tumble-weed-occupied hollowness of his own cranium.

I still can’t get over the fact that he called himself – un-ironically, and with a straight face – “Spartacus.”

Not since a young Gordon Sumner announced that he was henceforth to be known as “Sting” has someone so narcissistically renamed himself.  It’s a tribute to Sting’s musical talent that he was able to pull that off.

But kooky Cory is no Sting.  And he’s certainly no Spartacus.

Look, Cassie the Wonder Dog Simpson did not call HERSELF “the Wonder Dog.”  That’s an honorific bestowed by her many admirers and her owner.

And I could not get away with bombastically calling myself Martacus.

Though now that I’ve typed that, I like the way it looks.  Maybe when I’m ready to announce my exploratory committee, I run that one up the flag pole and see who salutes…

 

2. Elizabeth Warren. The gift that keeps on Indian-giving, and she who must eternally be mocked, manages to step in it again. After denying for months that she ever claimed Indian ancestry on official documents, a mid-80’s application to the Texas bar surfaced with her signature on it affirming her Native American ancestry.

To make matters worse, she met with the head of some Indian organization and gave a classic misdirection apology, saying that she regrets clouding the issue of tribal affiliation or membership.  As if the problem were that she didn’t properly document the genealogical minutiae that would establish her 1/1024th bona fides, rather than that she’s less Indian than Bjorn Borg!

By the way, if no one has gotten to this yet, can someone please check her high school yearbooks?  I’m sure that most of what we’d find is about what we’d expect.   Her favorite album was the Beatles’ White Album, her favorite song was Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” etc.  (And yes, that’s the deep pull of the day: a Procol Harum reference.) (#neverstopmocking)

But maybe we’d find out the sweetest possible irony: that once, for a Halloween party, she wore redface.

3. Amy “Who?” Klobuchar. This Minnesota Senator made her announcement outdoors, which meant that she warned about how global warming is going to roast us all, while a benevolent and hilarious God sent a snowstorm that threatened to bury her in a neck-deep drift as she read.

Also, within 24 hours of her announcement, reports surfaced that she is one of the worst bosses in DC, with a very high staff turnover rate, due in large part to her tendency to scream, belittle and throw binders at her subordinates.  According to reports, she has consulted Hillary Clinton, who advised her that lamps are easier to throw than binders, and that accuracy depends mostly on snapping the wrist on the release.

4. South Bend, IN mayor Pete Buttigieg. Never heard of this guy.  But he’s got “butt” right there in his name, so he should fit right in with this crowd.  And the bumper stickers will be funny.

5. Former HUD secretary Julian Castro has two things going for him. He can bask in the warm glow of success that we all associate with our nation’s well-run and desirable public housing projects, with their picket fences and spotless elevators and charming small-arms fire. And he’s named “Castro,” which subliminally endears him to leftists who cannot get enough of murderous socialist dictators.  As long as the competing ticket of Carl Hitler and Freddy Stalin continue to have fundraising trouble in the Midwest, Castro has the inside track to the mass murderer aficionado slice of the moderate left.

6. Kamala Harris. This gem is seen by many as the front runner, and I can see why.

She doesn’t have “butt” or “Castro” in her name, she’s never called herself Spartacus, she’s never pelted subordinates with office supplies, and she doesn’t have to pretend that she’s not white, because she’s not.  She’s also not Hillary Clinton, which is a huge advantage, in life and in politics.

On the other hand, she was a prosecutor, which for a distressingly large slice of the leftist electorate makes her one of those little Eichmanns who crush the noble victim classes under the heel of the patriarchy, or something.

But on the third hand, she was apparently a mediocre prosecutor at best, so she might be able to argue that she was secretly undermining the system from within by being terrible at her job.

On the fourth hand, she slept with creepy old San Francisco mayor Willie Brown to get two of her first jobs in politics.  She was 29 at the time, and he was 60.  And married.  And not exactly Idris Alba.  (Who you may remember as the guy who narrowly edged me out for People Magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive last year in what many have called “a very suspicious result.”) (And by “many” I mean “me.”)

So you know it was true love.  Because the heart wants what it wants.

And apparently what the heart sometimes wants is a $72K per year no-show job on the California Medical Assistance Commission.

There’s a name for someone who does what Kamala Harris did with Willie Brown to launch her political career.

And it rhymes with the last name of Cory Booker.

But as hilarious as the announced candidates are, other Democrats have been even funnier this month.  I want to talk about AOC (Annoying Oblivious & Callow) in my next column, but I cannot ignore the amazing shenanigans in the top echelon of the Virginia Democratic party.

Apparently the equivalent of “business casual” for Democrats in the 1980s was walking around in black face.  Two of the top three state officeholders turned out to have blackface pictures in circulation, and the third leftist stooge only managed to avoid that fate by being African-American, which seems to be what it takes for a Virginia Dem to resist the inexplicable draw to go full Jolson.

Unfortunately for him, he is also something of a Bill Clinton/Ted Kennedy old school Democrat (genus: “grope-a-saurus rex”), and has thus been credibly accused by two different women of rape.

And these weren’t Blasey-Ford-esque – “I only know that it happened sometime in the 1980s and somewhere in the Western hemisphere, and there were no witnesses and no corroborating evidence of any kind” – type of accusations.  These were made by credible women, who had dates and details and supporting contemporary accounts, and with whom the creepy pol admitted having sex.

And so naturally, the MSM and Democrats (but I repeat myself) have not said a word about this guy.  Thus launching the “Who? Me too?” movement, when the accused perv in question is a leftist.

Ironically, none of the above details about the Governor Blackface scandal are the worst part.

Even the picture of Gov. Northam was not the worst part.

(And you’d think that it would be hard to get worse than having your staff fidgeting in a meeting, until one of them clears her throat and say, “So… boss…  Were you the one in blackface, or the one in the klan hood?”  And then you notice that your p.r. person has her fingers crossed as she whispers, “klan hood, klan hood, klan hood.”)

The worst part was that just before the blackface scandal broke, the Governor revealed the leftist nonchalance about abortions up until the moment of birth, and – in his case, apparently – afterwards, too.

If I were hired to advise Democrat candidates (HA!), I would advise my clients to keep some old pics of themselves in blackface from their high school production of Porgy and Bess.  That way, when they get caught taking a bold pro-infanticide stance in an interview, they could leak those pics to the press, and hastily call a press conference to explain that they’ve always been admirers of George Gershwin’s work, and those were different times.

It’s a damage-control cliché for a reason: When the talk turns to baby killing, roll out the shoe polish.

 

Which brings me to my defense of dressing up as a member of another race.

I know.  But hear me out.

Of course I would never defend actual, old-style, racist minstrel show blackface.  That’s the perfect example of the kind of issue I used as teachable moments as I raised my children: if I saw a report on a blackface story as my then-2-year-old daughter was toddling by, I’d ask her, “Who do we blame that on?”

And she’d look at me angelically and say, “The Democrats!”

And I’d give her a hug and a cookie.

But enough about my fantastic parenting skills, and my thriving young adult daughter.

Blackface is obviously offensive and wrong.  But going to a costume party dressed as a favorite character of another race is the opposite, if it is meant to emulate and compliment, not denigrate.  White kids who look up to black celebrities might go to a party dressed as Michael Jordan or Bruno Mars, or – if they have not been raised properly – as Barack Obama, with makeup to match.

Even leftist hypocrites have been forced to implicitly admit that that is not offensive.  They’ve given passes to people like unpleasant professional shrieker Joy Behar (who once dressed up as a “beautiful African woman”), and Jimmy “Waaaah” Kimmel (who dressed up like Karl Malone and spoke in a parody of Ebonics).

Obviously, the purpose of a costume party – at Halloween or any other time – is to wear a costume.  If you’re dressing as someone, you want to try to look like that person.  If that person has different hair, you wear a wig.  If that person has a beard, you get a fake beard.  If that person dresses distinctively, you try to find similar clothes.

And if that person has a different skin color than yours, you try to match that.  Otherwise, no one at the party is ever going to guess that the white girl in the dress is supposed to be Beyonce, or the white kid in the suit is supposed to be Obama, or the black girl in the hideous pantsuit and the prosthetic Clydesdale ankles is supposed to be Hillary.  (By the way, if you are thinking that “Prosthetic Clydesdale Ankles” would be a good name for a punk band, you are not wrong.)

Which would lead us to the perfect world designed by humorless leftist poke-noses: a world in which everybody would go to costume parties dressed exactly like themselves.   Hooray!

I am Martacus, and I approve this message.

So we’ve all survived the January during which the Dems took over the House.  I’d like to look back and mock some people, but there is one truly sad thing to discuss first: the Democrats’ shocking move toward the extreme left on abortion.

Only a decade or so ago, the mainstream Left mantra on abortion was that it should be “safe, legal and rare.”  That was always a self-contradictory idea – what other medical procedure would you apply that to?  Tattooing?  Cosmetic surgery?  Kidney donation?

Yes, all of those should be safe and legal.  But then, why “rare?”

“Rare” was at least a nod toward the morally problematic nature of abortion, even if only in the most tangential, watered-down way.

Mainstream Dems also talked about abortion in qualified, carefully calibrated terms, focusing on extremely unusual situations: cases of rape, incest, or when delivery would endanger the life of the mother.

Sure, that talking point was hypocritical.   Rape and incest account for a vanishingly small number of abortions, and the “mother’s health” label was meant to suggest one thing – the very rare cases in which delivery truly threatened health – but in effect expanded to include “mental health,” which was then stretched to apply to any mother who suggested that having a child would be  at least slightly stressful for her.

Spoiler alert: having kids is stressful.  I’ve got two wonderful daughters, and along with love and pride and joy, they’ve caused my wife and I some stress.  (But the oldest is in her 87^th trimester, and the youngest is in her 68^th, so it’s probably too late to change our minds now, even for the Dems I’m about to write about.)

But as the old saying goes, “Hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.”

Unfortunately, the elite Left can no longer be bothered to feign even a passing acquaintance to virtue when it comes to abortion.

Consider 3 examples:

1.Andrew Cuomo (of the abortion-enthusiast “Catholic” Cuomos) recently signed a far-left bill guaranteeing that women can get third-term abortions.  Added bonuses: you no longer have to be a doctor to perform abortions in New York state, and if you decide to beat a pregnant woman badly enough that she loses her baby, you can’t be charged with a crime against that baby.

Because the baby was not a baby, understand?  Thank you, Party of Science™!

To add to the tragic idiocy, Cuomo had the World Trade Center illuminated with pink lights to celebrate the passage of this ghoulish bill, and a bunch of leftist creeps gave the announcement a standing ovation.

2. Virginia Democrat Kathy Tran was caught in a high profile gaffe. I am using the political definition of “gaffe:” when someone is caught accidentally telling the truth.

Tran was supporting a bill that would allow abortions up to the moment before birth.  When the GOP majority leader asked her if her bill would allow such an abortion, if a mother and her doctor agreed on mental health reasons, she hesitated.  He clarified, by asking what if the mother was in labor.

And Tran said that yes, the bill would allow that.

As you would imagine, narrow-minded Americans who are against infanticide – call them crazy deplorables if you must – expressed what some might call “horror,” and Tran was caught up in a firestorm.

Within a few days, she tried a classic political correction.  When someone pointed out that she had answered the hypothetical question with a “yes,” Tran got a chance to correct the record: “I should have said: ‘Clearly, no, because infanticide is not allowed in Virginia, and what would have happened in that moment would be a live birth.’”

First, you’ve got to love that: “What I meant by ‘yes,’ was actually ‘no.’”  Got it?

Second, anyone willing to risk being called either a traitor to her gender or a mansplainer might respond:  A. If this bill passed, infanticide WOULD be allowed in Virginia, and B. That hypothetical would not involve a “live birth,” since the baby would not have made it outside yet.

Because the extreme left argument seems to be that the birth canal is a magic tube, and passing through it (preferably while a person in the room chants an ancient Druidian incantation) mystically confers personhood.  And since Tran’s hypothetical involved a baby who hadn’t yet made it through the magic tube, there is no infanticide.

Again, thank you, Party of Science™!!

3. Fortunately for K-Tran, leftist mansplaining Democrat Governor Ralph Northam rode to the rescue.

Unfortunately for her, he was no more able than she was to square the moral circle.  In fact, he made things even worse – something I wouldn’t have thought possible, after Little Miss “Yes-means-No” had shared her wisdom.

When asked about Tran’s now-infamous answer, he hemmed.  Then he hawed.  Then he harrumphed, and cleared his throat, and babbled for a bit.

Then, because he is a pediatric neurologist who must have thought that “pediatric” meant “foot doctor,”  (So close!), he stuck his foot deeply in his mouth:“[Third trimester abortions are] done in cases where there may be severe deformities, there may be a fetus that’s non-viable.”

Yes and no.  I would guess that many late term abortions MIGHT result (note Northam’s repetition of “may” rather than “must”) from discovering that a fetus had severe problems that would make him or her non-violable.  But there’s nothing in this law – or in laws as proposed and executed (so to speak) by the far left in other states – that requires such a cause.

Northam continues, “So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. The infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.”

Yikes!  Read that again.  The infant would be delivered.  The infant would be kept comfortable.  THEN a discussion would ensue?!

What would the discussion be about, Dr. Mengele?  The weather?  What kind of bullpen the Yankees have this year?  Whether the infant is likely to identify with the gender that corresponds to its genitalia?

Tragically, from the elite Left’s perspective, Dr. Northam’s mistake wasn’t the obvious moral one of considering whether we ought to hold a pillow over the infant’s face until it stops that annoying crying.

It was the political mistake of calling the “tissue mass” an “infant.”  Three times!

(And maybe the scientific mistake of not acknowledging the mystical work performed by the infant’s passing through the magic tube.  Hooray for Science!™)

This is so depressing that if I didn’t laugh at these people, I’d have to cry.

But to all of my friends who usually vote Democrat, please consider whether your party has left you on this issue.  Because if you find yourself giving a standing ovation to late-term abortions, or lighting up public buildings to celebrate them, it might be gut-check time.

 

Ugh.  How about a change of topic to something more cheerful, like an incompetent sex offender story?  (He said, in a deftly skillful transition.)

Meet Arturo Martinez, a sex offender with horns in his head who was trying to lure an under-aged female into his house so that he could allegedly assault her.   I don’t want to provide a link — in case you are enjoying a meal while you are reading this column – but you can Google it pretty easily.  I mean, how many sex offender freakazoids with surgically implanted horns in their heads can be running around out there?

Wait – don’t answer that.  Let’s just assume that if you come across one story like this, that’s the guy I’m talking about.

There’s a nice mugshot of him in the story, and he’s exactly what you would expect: well-groomed, leading man good looks, appears to be someone who may have given Idris Elba and me a run for our money in our hotly contested campaign for People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive 2018 award.  (Don’t bother looking through the back issues: I narrowly lost, and I’m as shocked about it as you are.)

HA!  I kid.

He actually looks like the kind of guy whom you can picture saying, “You know what will improve my chances with the gals?  Intentional facial disfiguration and surgically implanted skull horns!”  (By the way, last year at Coachella I saw Intentional Facial Disfiguration open for Surgically Implanted Skull Horns.  Killer show!)

Anyway, this guy’s look:  grotesquely elongated earlobes from wearing those mini-ear-frisbees in them, unnatural holes in his upper ears, and in his cheeks.  And oh, yeah… he’s also got horn-like protrusions in his mid-forehead, and four or more short metal rods sticking out of his head above those.

So, yeah, I’m not going to be giving him my blessing if he decides to propose to one of my daughters.

The story is grim, but I’m not going to dwell on the details.  Instead, as part of my Mr. Bright Side campaign, I’m going to find the silver lining on this particular human dark cloud.

And that is: thank God that most criminals are so incredibly stupid.

If you were a results-oriented criminal-American go-getter whose primary goal was to lure females into your house, wouldn’t you want to make yourself look as non-threatening and benign as possible?  I think of a Ted Bundy, who kept himself well-groomed, and got a fake cast to play on the nurturing/helping instincts of potential female victims.  Or a Bill Clinton, who posed as a US president to lure women into his big, white house.

But this guy is no Ted Bundy.  He’s not even (to drop a few standard deviations further down the IQ scale), a Ted Danson.

This Dating Game winner had a bunch of repulsive holes punched into his vaguely porcine face, then had some metal rods and subcutaneous horns implanted in his big, evil head.

Because nothing gets the ladies to drop their defenses like a guy who looks like he just stepped out of a Grimm’s fairy tale.

Also, assuming that he somehow did successfully assault someone, do you think he’s going to be able to lay low afterwards?  I picture the police having a news conference, “We’re asking the public to help us find the suspect, who is described as being white, bald and ugly, with horns and little metal spikes sticking out of—“

Annnnnddd the officer’s voice is drowned out by the instant ringing of every phone in the building.

I always think the same thing when I see some gangbangers being perp-walked into an arraignment.   I wish I could be in the crowd of bystanders and heckle those idiots, “Hey Luis, way to keep a low profile!”

Then the Democrat-voting (I’m guessing) offender would glare at me and snarl, “How did you know my name, homes?” (Which is what I assume he’d say, because I get all my information about the Hispanic underworld from watching crime shows on network tv.)

And I’d say, “Because it’s tattooed across your forehead, you dope, along with your gang affiliations, one tear drop under your eye for each murder you are thus confessing, and that super cool tribute to your mom, whom I’m sure is really proud!”

Anyway, let’s not all judge Arturo.  Maybe he just had those horns implanted into his head because he identifies as a dragon. Or a goat.  Or a moose.  And don’t you dare go and mis-species him, you cis-species bigot.

Also, he can use whatever bathroom – or watering hole, or trough – he wants.

File this story under “coincidences in the news:”

Earlier in January, far-left hack-haven website Buzzfeed was proven laughably wrong on yet another anti-Trump story, so much so that even Bob Mueller felt compelled to issue a statement saying that their latest story was full of Schumer.  This is not at all unusual for Buzzfeed, as you could guess if you went to their headquarters, and noticed that the big sign in their lobby that says, “Consecutive Days Without Getting a Story Wrong” has been stuck at “0” since 2012.

Anyway, on Friday, January 25^th they announced massive layoffs.

I know what you’re thinking:  HA HA HA HA HA!

Also: WHOO! Stop!  My ribs are killing me!  Let me catch my breath!

And finally: HA HA HA HA HA!

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s dive deeper into the details of the story and tease out some nuance:

Far left website full of hateful “journalists” blows story after story, spends like drunken congressmen but can’t make a dime of profit, and is now careening toward insolvency like Hillary tumbling down some temple stairs after throwing a horseshoe.  The end.

That’s called “brevity,” people.  And it’s the soul of wit.

Actually, there are a few details worth savoring.  For example, the layoffs hit 43 of the 250 “journalists” working there.  Yet oddly, none of the zero conservative journalists who have ever worked there were affected.

Also, the hardest hit groups were the national desk, the entertainment team, and – I quote – “the LBGT desk.”

I know that I’m old and out of it, but what exactly is a “LBGT desk?”  A desk that thinks it’s an ottoman?  One that identifies as an armoire?  One that has some drawers that you pull out in the regular way, but others that must be pushed in?

And if you push in the pull drawers or pull out the push ones, it screams at you for being a cis-gendered bigot?

I’m so confused.

 

In other news, you might think that after the MSM humiliated themselves by jumping on the Buzzfeed story bandwagon and then having to retreat when it proved to be as phony as Lizzie Warren’s Cherokee birth certificate (#wemustneverstopmockingher), they might be a little gun shy about chasing the next “too good to be checked” political fairy tale.

But you’d be wrong.  Because at the first whisper of, “What’s that old Indian dude doing over there with those white kids in the red hats?” they stampeded across the national mall like Michael Moore when he hears someone drop a glazed donut a block away.

And within minutes, they were hand-fed a heavily-edited, minute-long video depicting a leathery-skinned old guy standing next to a young white kid in a MAGA hat.  So they raced off to immediately post their first, restrained accounts, with subtle titles like, “Sacred Native Elder nearly lynched by racist mob of Trump-supporting Stepford Children,” and “Bad Orange Man blows dog whistle, Sends bloodthirsty white-privilege junkies to dismember and consume saintly Minority Speaker of Truth to Power.”

Ten minutes later, when our leading leftist journalists had entered what is technically known as their “refractory period,” some sane citizens watched the entire video of the encounter, and Googled Nathan Phillips, and the MSM accounts turned out to be what AOC would call “morally right.”  (Which is to say, not even factually close to the truth.)

Read these accounts, and see if you can spot the subtle differences:

MSM version:  Nathan Phillips is a super-respected Native-American elder and Medal of Honor Winner who served many years in Vietnam. He was surrounded and threatened by obnoxious, age-ist and racist white kids who chanted, “Build the Wall,” and who blocked his attempts to get away from them.

Factual version: As a young man, Mr. Phillips had a history of assault and alcohol-related crimes.  He did spend two years in the Marines – and God bless him for that – but he spent his service time in El Toro.  (For those of you who didn’t get your Master’s in Vietnamese Geography, “El Toro” is not just outside of Da Nang.  It is, in fact, in “California.”) (Which, if I’m not mistaken, is a Spanish word which means “very, very far from Vietnam.”)

Although he didn’t win a Medal of Honor or a Purple Heart, he was a three-time winner of the prestigious “AWOL” award.   His service designation was not “mortar-man” or “tank commander” or “specialist-in-swimming-with-a-serrated-knife-clenched-in-his teeth.”

His job was actually listed as “util RefrigMan,” which my crack research team tells me is a refrigeration mechanic.

I’m not making that up.  He basically spent the war years as a Maytag repairman in California.

I’ll be the first to tell you that I’m not one to talk.  I’ve never served, and I couldn’t repair a fridge to save my life.  On the other hand, I’ve never claimed to be an amalgam of Crazy Horse, Rambo and Gandhi, either.

But boy, did Phillips get a lot of support from empty-headed celebrities. Fright-wigged decapitation-fantasizer Kathy Griffin called for the innocent high school kids to be harassed and publicly shamed.  Several dozen talking heads on the various CNN and CNN-adjacent networks aroused themselves with fantasies of what punishments should be inflicted on these evil white kids.

Leftist pols got in on the act, too.  A typical tweet came from Rep. Deb Haaland, New Mexico Democrat and a Native American, who accused the students of “blatant hate,” and praised the way Phillips “put his life on the line for our country.”

Yes.  Because those fridges are very heavy, and if you are super-drunk when you work on one, it can fall and squish you.  That’s probably why he kept going AWOL, because he was tormented by ice-maker-related flashbacks.

Back to our story: the full video shows that Phillips was the aggressor, walking into the middle of the Catholic kids, banging his drum in their faces and trying to provoke them into a response.  In an act of restraint that’s hard for me to imagine young males are capable of, they did not smash his drum over his head, or respond in any way.  They did not chant, “Build the Wall,” as Cochise Frigidaire claimed, but sang their school song.

Other than that, the MSM got the story absolutely right.

The low point in this story for me was when I heard that Reza Aslan posted a pic of one of the Catholic kids, asking, “Have you ever seen a more punchable face than this kid’s?”

First, I was heartbroken to hear that a magnificent Christ-figure lion was dissing the kids.  But then I realized that the “Aslan” here was the tiny-brained leftist who was fired by CNN two years ago for some anti-Trump tweets that were too obscene and vile even for CNN.

And if that description – too malicious to be a CNN host – seems like it’s almost metaphysically impossible, I agree.  It’s like the other members of the Grateful Dead staging an intervention, in which they tell you that they are worried about your drug use.

But more importantly, I don’t like that TB (tiny-brain) Aslan may have violated my trademark by pointing out the innocent kid’s face-punchability rating.

Those of you who have followed my work for CO over the last several years probably remember all the R&D money that I put into developing the Simpson Face Punchability Index (SFPI)™ in 2017.

If so, you’ll also remember that Harry Reid has been designated the proud holder of the highest SFPI of all time.  But there are tons of people with higher SFPI ratings than the innocent Catholic kid, including Hillary, Barack, Trump, Lizzie Warren, Jim Acosta, Scowling Wookie, Spartacus, Ted Cruz (sadly), and a cast of thousands more.

In fact, the Catholic kid couldn’t even compete in the Minors Division of the SFPI™ tournament, because the undisputed champion there is David “Kewpie Hitler” Hogg, of potty-mouth Parkland gun-grabbing fame.

Anyway, nice job, MSM.  Once again you’ve proven that no one should ever trust you about anything, ever again.

 

Finally, I thought I’d let everyone in on yet another New Year’s Resolution that I’ve made.  (At this pace, I should be making my last New Year’s resolution of 2019 right around the beginning of July.  Spoiler alert: I resolve to put on my biggest fireworks show yet!)

As a mature male with the ability to grow the 5 o’clock shadow/beard of a mature male who identifies as a male, I’ve been a user of shaving equipment since I turned 13.  (Did I skip right past the sad, weak little mustache stage of many adolescent males, and go straight to an impressive full beard that allowed me to begin dating college girls before I could legally drive, you ask?  Yes, thanks for asking.) (Also, how did you get access to my 9^th grade yearbook photo?)

When I saw the Gillette ad lecturing me about the dangers of toxic masculinity, I immediately had two thoughts:

1.Would any women’s fashion or haircare or makeup company EVER dare to insult their core audience this way?  “Hey ladies, you know how you are always making the men around you utterly miserable, with your constant nagging and terrible taste in movies and ridiculous voting choices and lack of driving ability and incomprehensible lack of appreciation for football and carpentry and logical argument and the music of Johnny Cash?   And the way that men die earlier, largely because your soul-sucking complaints eventually rob us of the will to live?   And don’t get us started on your unconscionable use of sex as a weapon.  Anyway, please buy all of our products, you awful, awful harpies.”

No.  You will never see that ad.

(*Also, please note that the preceding paragraph was written for humorous purposes only, and obviously has no relation to any female, living or dead, and especially not to anyone to whom I might be married, for example.)

2.Where is my Gillette razor, so that I can put it in the vice and then smash it with a framing hammer in “The Testosterone Zone” (which is what I have just now decided to call my workshop, where I keep a variety of power- and hand-tools which I use to build and maintain what we amateur anthropologists call “civilization”)?

Ugh.  Hey Gillette, thanks for the timely warning about the terrible dangers of “toxic masculinity.”

Here’s hoping that the men of America will soon teach you a little lesson about the horrors of “toxic profitability.”

Also, just in case you were hoping that whatever you lost by insulting your male customers might be made up for by increased sales to female customers – who, after all, need razors to use on their legs and underarms?  Well, think again.

Because the kind of women who get their gender-non-binary underwear in a bunch because of their outrage about toxic masculinity also happen to be the kind of women who do NOT shave either their legs or their armpits.

Enjoy bankruptcy, you condescending jerks!

On a related note, if any of the good people at the Schick razor company are looking for a sarcastic blogger with a firm jawline and no aversion to lucrative sponsorships – coincidentally, someone who was also a finalist for People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive, as far as I know — please contact me through CO at the Cautious Optimism page.