Month: March 2019

I have been spending some free time pondering the possible Democratic presidential tickets.

I know what you’re thinking: is he still on those narcotics?  (If you missed the story, I recently had a pain-med adventure that involved a dentist who literally went at me with hammer and tongs.) (But at least it wasn’t a hammer and sickle, which is what we’ll get if Bernie gets control over our health care system.) (HA!)

I am thinking about the various combinations of Dem Prez/VP combos because I find them all fascinating.   And by “fascinating,” I mean simultaneously hilarious and horrifying.

I trust that the sophisticated CO nation understands the horrifying part.  If any of this crop of ne’er-do-wells wins next year, tuning in to that inauguration is going to be like watching a baby carriage rolling in slow motion directly into the path of a speeding 18-wheeler on the interstate.

(For those of you who may not have majored in Interpretive Dream Symbolism, in this analogy the baby carriage would be my beloved United States, the baby would be an actual, adorable human baby – although she’d be clutching all of my hopes and dreams in one of her pudgy little fists, and my 401K in the other – and the speeding semi would be the doomsday administration of whichever leftist loon the Dems and MSM — but I repeat myself — managed to drag across the finish line.)

But as horrible as the general election would be if the Dems were to win, their primary debates are going to put the “high” in “high-larious.”  I can’t wait!

The black ones will be sneering at the white ones, and the women will be scowling at the men, and Beta will come rolling in on a skateboard like a doofus.  Bernie will lose a hearing aid, and Biden will grope a moderator. Either Amy Klobuchar or Kirsten Gillibrand will call Liz Warren “Sitting Bull” under her breath, and because Lizzie can’t tell the two of them apart, she’ll start calling them “Hillary 1” and “Hillary 2.”

Which will be fighting words, so with any luck, a three-way white-lady wrestling match will break out.  Cory Booker will command them to stop, but as he stands astride them with his hands on his hips, yelling, “I am Spart-“ he’ll be interrupted by one cankle shooting out of the scrum and catching him in the crotch, after which he’ll hobble off stage like Spartacus’ cowardly manservant, a character so nondescript that his name is unknown to history.

Harris will sidle up to Bernie and offer to sleep with him if he’ll put her on his ticket as VP – a political stratagem that is known in California political circles as “pulling a Kamala” – but he’ll be shaking his hearing aid in frustration, and won’t hear a word she says.

Biden will trip over Beto’s skateboard and fall into Bernie, and both of them will immediately break a hip.  Beto will take advantage by stepping through the mass of writhing idiots to the microphone, where he’ll begin gesticulating wildly as he recites a word salad made up of equal parts of randomly selected paragraphs from Jack Kerouac, a madlib of socialist talking points, and AOC’s dream journal (but I repeat myself).

It’s going to be like 4 months of Christmas, mixed with Wrestlemania 25 (“This Time It’s Personal – and the Personal is Political!”) and April Fool’s Day!

Once the primaries are over, and the Democrats have chosen a “winner” (and never have scare quotes been any scarier), the VP derby will begin.

Traditional political analysts, when mulling presidential tickets, consider ideology (a hard-liner and a centrist might be the most electable combination), age (a combination of older/experienced works well with younger/energetic), or geography (a VP from a key battleground state might tip the balance if he could bring along his home state).

But not me.   Because at times I’ve been called @hilariousgenius, and at other times Martacus, and at still other times, Martino.  (Okay, that was only in high school Spanish class, where I may have been called a lot of other names too.  But I wouldn’t have known that.) (Because I don’t speak a word of Spanish.)

But I have NEVER been called a traditional political analyst.

Which is why I have my own, idiosyncratic ways of choosing a dream ticket.

For example, I am tempted to pull for the Whitest Ticket In History combo: Warren/Gillibrand.

Or the best alliteration ticket:  Biden/Beto.

Or the least ethnic putatively African-American ticket: Kamala/Spartacus.

Or the double-barreled ethnic fraud ticket: Beto/Warren. (an Irish Hispanic and a translucent Iroquois) (#wemustneverstopmockingbothofthem)

Or the “never-worked-an-honest-day-in-their-lives” ticket: Sanders/Beto.  (But also, really, most of them.)

 

But perhaps my favorite dark horse ticket would come down to the coolest-sounding pairing: Hickenlooper/Buttigieg.

“Hickenlooper” is so goofy-sounding that I admire the guy just for having any career at all.  Because a name has traditionally made a huge difference in how someone is perceived.

You expect a woman named “Sophia Loren” or “Brigitte Bardot” to be smoking hot.  You expect a guy named “Michael Stonebreaker” to play linebacker at Notre Dame.  You expect someone named “Albert Einstein” to be the intellectual opposite of AOC.   (Also, in a coincidence that I’m almost too modest to point out, you expect a guy named “Martin Simpson” to be a smoking hot, linebacker/genius.) (Take that, tropical-disease-name-sounding Idris Alba!)

It usually works in the opposite direction, too.

Nobody was going to watch a tough-guy western starring Marion Morrison, so he became John Wayne.  Women weren’t likely to swoon over Archibald Leach, so he became Cary Grant.   No one was going to vote for Willard Romney, so he became Mitt.   (As it turns out, not enough people voted for him anyway, but that’s probably because “Mitt” is not such a great name.  Also, he’d had his spine surgically replaced with a slinky, which did NOT help.)

And before you can raise the Arnold Schwarzenegger objection: he’s the exception that proves the rule.

(Fun Historical Naming Fact Digression: Hitler’s dad was the illegitimate son of a woman named “Shicklgruber,” and he and Adolph came very close to being stuck with that name.  Which would have changed history, because no gang of rowdy Germans in a beer hall could ever have plausibly been induced to shout out the salute, “Heil Schiklgruber!”)

Where was I?

Oh yeah: Hickenlooper’s little buddy, Buttigieg.

Wow.  I don’t know anything about the guy, except three things: He grew up gay.  In the Midwest.  And his last name started with “butt.”

Therefore, he’s got to be tough as nails, and I want to like the guy. Not since the great Johnny Cash told the story of the Boy Named Sue has there been a name as guaranteed to get a youngster toughened up.

So as I was writing the above, I thought that I’d research Buttigieg a little, because maybe he’d be a Dem who might not be awful as president…

Aaaannnnnndddd nope!

First of all, I was devastated to learn that his last name is disappointingly pronounced something like, “Boot-edge-edge.” (Though I’d probably say that too, if my name had an obvious “butt” in it.)  At least his first name isn’t “Jeh.”   (Because if you spell someone’s name to look like “Jeh Butt-a-gig” but insist that it’s pronounced “Jay Boot-edge-edge,” I don’t care if he’s the newly discovered son of Ronald Reagan – I’m out!)

Secondly, he’s another cookie-cutter leftist, supporting the usual disaster-producing policies: Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, forced increases to the minimum wage, etc.

So we’re back to square one: all of the Dem candidates are as crazy as outhouse rodentia, as we used to say in my small Midwestern town, when parents were in earshot.

But the primaries are going to be all the more entertaining because of it.

Hickenlooper/Buttigieg 2020!

 

So March is off to an iffy start.  I just had a little visit with an oral surgeon who removed a cracked tooth.  If I weren’t a stoic, Spartan type of guy – as some of you may know, my close friends often call me Martacus – I would guess that he used a mining drill, and possibly a few shaped charges.  There was definitely smoke involved.

I’m going to end up getting an implant several months from now, and to that end, the dentist put in a cadaver bone graft.  And yes, before you can ask, I checked with him beforehand to confirm that the cadaver involved was not from Egypt.  Because I don’t want to suddenly find myself slurring my words, and wildly gesticulating with dessicated mummy hands, going all Nancy Pelosi.

At one point, the assistant warned me that the doc was going to be “manually raising the sinus floor” (which has to be one of the greatest euphemisms ever), and to that end, I would hear some – and I quote – “tapping.”

This was followed by some concussive hammering on my upper jaw with what I can only assume was a 24-ounce waffle-faced framing hammer.  (I’ve done a lot of home renovations over the last 20 years, and I stand by that guess.)

I would like to take this opportunity to once again thank a benevolent God for inventing anesthetic.  Because although I was bouncing around in the chair like Ted Kennedy’s date on the ride home, I didn’t feel a thing.  Not until 3 hours later.

Anyway, long story short, I’m taking an assortment of antibiotics and some sweet pain meds.  And I’ve always found that the best time to write about the actions of various leftist boneheads on the national scene is when I’m hopped up on goofballs.  So here goes…

I’m sure you all really enjoyed the Oscars, and neither did I.  Instead of watching the cavalcade of America-hating prima donnas, I checked out the Daily Wire podcast about it, on which Ben Shapiro summed it up best: gay black guy story beat out several regular black guy movies and several other regular gay person movies.   And evil Cheney movie was nominated, but couldn’t win due to a shortage of disabled transgendered people of color in the cast.

My favorite part was that after the leftist witch-hunters drove off anyone willing to host, the anemic ratings actually went up about 9%.  I just like the message that that sends to Jimmy “waah” Kimmel: after two years of you doing the hosting job, you were replaced by nobody.  And nobody did a better job.

Terrible bartender and juvenile thinker AOC continues to amuse.  She’s lost her patience with people always picking at tiny little details that she gets wrong – such as $93 trillion deficits, and the fact that you can’t build a railroad to Hawaii, and the fact that you can’t replace cars with a national system of thousands of miles of slip-and-slides, and that there’s not supposed to be any Murphy’s Oil Soap in a scotch and soda.

She finally snapped in an interview.  Responding to skepticism about her Green New Deal, she threw down the gauntlet, demanding to know why no one else has come up with a plan to fix the world’s climate.  Because I wasn’t there, no one said, “Because real scientists are debating nearly every aspect of the myriad factors that influence global temperatures, and what steps humans might be able to take to affect even a few of those factors.  Also, a planet’s ecosystem is a little more complicated than a Long Island Iced Tea.  Which, by the way, is not supposed to have lye and pepper in it, so please take this back.”

She worked herself up into a perfect, pre-teen snit, sneering that “no one else has even tried” to deal with the climate, and ending in a finger waving, “like”-infested rant:  “So people are like, oh, it’s unrealistic.  Oh, it’s vague. Oh, it doesn’t address this little minute thing.  And I’m like, YOU try!  You do it!  Cause you’re not.  You’re not.  So until you do it, I’m the boss!  How bout dat?”

You’ve got to see it and hear it to get the full inanity of it all.  She’s like that “Cass me ousside, how bout dat?” girl from some daytime talk show.  Only she has the ability to propose legislation, and deter multi-billion dollar companies from opening a branch in a blue state.  (HA!  Take that, Cuomo and Schumer!  The illiterate and innumerate chickens are coming home to ROOST! (How bout dat?)

And the other fresh faces in the new Democratic congress aren’t faring much better.  In particular, two new Muslim congresswomen Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib have stumbled from one anti-Semitic and anti-American gaffe after another, including mocking Mike Pence’s Christian faith, and altering a map to show the state of Israel replaced by Palestine.

If you throw in scandal-prone abuser Keith Ellison, the Democrats have gone 0-for-Islam so far.

 

But even considering all of this leftist smorgasbord of stupid, my two favorite lefty stories from last month came from lesser known Democrats.

First, Lamar, South Carolina mayor Darnell Byrd-McPherson, an African-American female (despite being named “Darnell”) has been on the lookout for MAGA-hat wearing deplorables committing hate crimes.  On February 7^th, this knucklehead announced in a press release that the racists had struck:

“The incident happened last night. Even though I drove my car today, I thought it was pollen. My husband and our neighbor noticed the cars looked like someone had spray painted on both our vehicles, which were parked in our front yard.

As an aside, during the 70s, crosses were burned in the yard of our home when my mother was involved with the civil rights movement. On this very same corner in this very same front yard!

Again, we are grateful the person or persons did not try to take our lives but the culprits will be identified and prosecuted.

Love conquers hate and my husband and I refuse to be intimidated by those who perpetrated this act of vandalism which I classify as an act of hatred. ”

Byrd-McPherson referenced how bills are being introduced to address hate crimes in the South Carolina General Assembly. She added hate crimes are on the rise in the state.

The incident remains under investigation.”

The give-away is in the first line: something that appeared to be pollen was found on her car.  Naturally, she immediately thought about Klansmen (whom I must point out were Democrats) burning crosses on her yard.  As one does. From there it’s only a hop, skip and a smear to people trying to kill her, and her not being intimidated, and by the way she’s introducing more hate crime legislation.

As it turned out – you guessed it – there was pollen on her car.  In South Carolina.  During pollination season.

But don’t give up, Darnell.  How do you know that your property is NOT surrounded by racist trees and shrubs?  Trying to kill you, or hold you down, or mess up your cars?  Not to mention making you sneeze and wheeze?

In fact, only a few minutes of research revealed to me that in your region, you are surrounded by such suspicious trees as WHITE pines, WHITE firs, and WHITEbark pines.  Not to mention the Torch Pine!  I don’t think I need to remind you who was fond of carrying torches: Democrat klansmen!

And don’t get me started on lynchberry bushes or Jim Crow kudzu!

So look alive, mayor.  I’m already hearing rumors that many white supremacist trees are colluding in a conspiracy – reports indicate that this will happen in October — to drop millions of leaves on the heads of unsuspecting minorities, possibly injuring them, and definitely clogging their gutters.

 

Not to be outdone by idiot leftist politicians, idiot leftist vandals also had their moment to shine in February.   This story happened in North Carolina, where some unknown miscreants continued the recent trend of vandalizing statues of Civil War figures by trying to light a statue of Robert E. Lee on fire.

They encountered two problems.  First, the statue is made of marble, which is not famous for being flammable.  Fun fact: of all of the buildings that burned to the ground in the great Chicago Fire, roughly zero of them were made of marble.  Which is why you may not have been taught in school about how Mrs. Leary’s cow was slipping and sliding around in her marble barn when the fire started.

Second, it turns out that the carved marble figure was not in fact Civil War general Robert E. Lee, but World War II Major General William C. Lee, who was known as the “Father of the US Airborne.”

To be fair to the vandals, both Lees are white males who identified as males, and to many idiots, we all look alike.

On the other hand, Robert E. Lee had a cool beard, and wore a Civil War era uniform, and is virtually always depicted on a horse.  Whereas William C. Lee is clean shaven, wearing a WWII uniform (with a 20^th century military hat, uniform and boots) and is not sitting on a horse.

Note for those who may have learned their history from blue-state, unionized public school teachers: the Civil War did NOT happen in the 20^th century.  Also, one of the main reasons for the Confederate defeat was NOT how ineffective their air force was.  Finally, surprisingly few WW II airborne assaults were conducted by soldiers parachuting out of the back of airplanes on horseback.

Although it does make me smile to picture a squad of German soldiers in Normandy on June 6^th, looking up in terror at a sky filled with airborne troops carrying six shooters, on the backs of descending horses with murder in their equine eyes.

“Mein Gott!” I pictured those Germans screaming, “a million American bad asses are descending on the back of a million Hillary Clintons.  Beware the hooves and cankles!  We surrender!”

Okay, I think that last paragraph can only mean one thing: it’s time for me to take more narcotics.

Martacus out!

Several events have started me thinking more about fathers lately.  For one, my mom was down for a visit last week. She’s 80 now, and dad has been gone for 4 years, which makes the time we get to spend with her even more precious.  We never get together without thinking about him a lot, and the great legacy he left for us.

On the other end of the spectrum, my youngest daughter turns 17 next week, and that shocking indication of the passing of time has a way of sobering one up.  It’s a cliché for a reason: it seems like just a year ago she was a defenseless infant, and just a week ago she was a prickly pre-teen.  And now when I have a tech question about my website or cell phone or wifi, I go to her, and she condescends to help me.  Plus, I get to try out some jokes for my column on her, which means I get to see some world-class eye rolling. (On the downside, she has been as reluctant as my wife to address me as either “@hilariousgenius” or “Martacus.” Which is disappointing.)

Regular CO readers have heard of some of my great parenting techniques, but for new arrivals, here are a few tips.

First, to be an adequate father, you don’t have to do that much: marry the woman you are going to have kids with, then stick around, earn a little, love them, don’t vote for leftists.  (That last one is not just for dads – it’s a requirement for all functional adults.)  If you’ve got daughters, keep them off the pole.  If you’ve got sons, don’t let them play soccer.  It’s not that hard.

To be a world-class dad, I would suggest devising a few additional monkey tricks for the kids that you teach them when they are very tiny, and then have them perform those for visitors.  That gives them self-esteem.

For example, in addition to my call-and-response routine with my first daughter when she was still in diapers (I’d say, apropos of any terrible story on the news when we were together, “Who do we blame that on?” and she’d respond with an adorable, “The Democrats!”), I also came up with a couple of other crowd-pleasers.

When I asked her, “Which is your favorite of Aristotle’s logical fallacies?” I taught her to say, “Post hoc ergo propter hoc.”  (This usually came out “procto hoc,” which is close enough.)  I’d follow up with, “What does that mean in English?” To which she would reply, “After this, therefore because of this.”

My closer would be to ask her, “When you are on the court, what kind of Supreme Court Justice will you be?”  She would answer with, “A strict constructionist!”

Her pronunciation wasn’t always perfect when she was two, but the answer still always killed.  The only exception was when she spoiled the moment after her answer by pointing to her diaper and saying, “I made poop.”

But I saved the day by pointing out that that was in fact her eerily accurate Ruth Bader Ginsburg impression.   Then I said, “Now do your Hillary Clinton!”  And she’d screw her adorable little face up into a frown and screech, “CAW, CAW, CAW!” at the top of her lungs.

Good times.

But enough about my terrific parenting skills.  I’d like to point to another dad who is doing it right: Donald Harris, father of Kamala Harris.

Hear me out.

I know that your first instinct is that he probably failed as a father.  He split up with her mom years ago, and although Kamala did manage to stay off the pole, she did something arguably much worse, sleeping with creepy old (married) Willie Brown to launch her career.

And anyone whose child ends up in this dementia of Democratic candidates (hat tip to, I think, John Gabris?  And all the other COers who chimed in with collective nouns for the Dem hopefuls) has been a less than super successful parent.

On the other hand, in response to one of her recent idiotic interviews (you need a scorecard to keep track with this bunch), he displayed the nuclear option of fatherhood: public shaming.

Some idiotic radio interviewer asked Kamala if she has smoked pot, she responded, “Half my family’s from Jamaica.  Are you kidding me?”

This answer was part of a painfully awkward pattern of leftists trying to appeal to millennials by pretending to be young and hip.   Hillary pretended that she carries hot sauce everywhere she goes, and she once said, “I’m just chillin’ in Cedar Rapids,” with a straight face. Squanto Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) pretended that she likes to crack open a cold one in her kitchen like a real-life Peter Griffin. RBG pretends that she’s a feminist spokesperson, and that she has a pulse.

In the same vein, Kamala came out with an execrable “mood mix” selection of music, and claimed that back in college, she used to get high listening to Snoop and Tupac songs.  (Fact check: those two haven’t ever actually produced anything that could technically be called “songs.” Also, neither of them produced an album until 6 years after Kamala graduated from college.) (So liar, liar, big floppy rasta hat on fire.”)

Anyway, Kamala’s dad was not happy with his daughter’s crass reference to the heavy-toking Jamaican stereotype.   He wrote a public letter saying, “My dear departed grandmothers…, as well as my deceased parents, must be turning in their grave right now to see their family’s name, reputation and proud Jamaican identity being connected…with the fraudulent stereotype of a pot-smoking joy seeker and in pursuit of identity politics.”

Ouch!  Daddy no like!

I love this for two reasons: he called her out on the kind of pernicious racial stereotyping the leftists deploy against conservatives but never pay a price for themselves.  And he also slammed her for playing identity politics, which I think is one of the most destructive trends in our public life right now.

So I salute you, Mr. Harris.  But I have to confess that I’m not as upset as you are that Kamala is a pot-smoking joy seeker.

I just wish she wasn’t a pot-smoking office seeker!

Martacus out.

(See.  I can be as faux hip as any Dem candidate.) (If I had a mike, I’d drop it.)