So I’m sitting in my book-lined study, listening to Bach’s Cello Suite 1 in G, with T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” open in front of me.
Because I’m classy like that.
Eliot’s familiar last lines go, “This is the way the world ends/ Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
In this most schadenfreude-tastic of weeks, I want to borrow Eliot’s theme, and focus this column on Things That Have Ended with both a Bang and a Whimper:
First, let’s get the easy joke out of the way — Kamala’s “job interviews” with corrupt and crusty old Willie Brown. Bang. Whimper. Here’s your no-show job, Kamala.
Second… of course… it’s Mueller time!
I know that CO and COers have already done an admirable job with this the story, but I can’t resist a few comments of my own. And to properly set the mood for that, I must ask you to go to Youtube and call up the video of Ray Charles and the Voices of Jubilation singers doing, “Oh Happy Day.” Please use that as your soundtrack as you read the rest of this column.
(Also, as a bonus: if I were somehow turned into an African-American woman in a red dashiki, my expressions while I was channel surfing the MSM Monday would look exactly like the lady at 2:13 in that video.) (And if that sounds too far-fetched to get your mind around, consider that I am a lot closer to being that woman than Liz Warren is to being an American Indian.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
First, does it make me a bad person if I’m enjoying watching the disappointed lefty true believers cycling between shocked despair and full-blown denial in the wake of Mueller-geddon?
If so, I’m a very, very bad person. I surfed from one channel to another, savoring the stammering, yammering boneheads. John Brennan is backpedaling like a scared cornerback lined up across from Willie Gault in 1985. (Yes, that’s a 34-year old Bears reference. What’s your point?)
Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo – from the “Help! I’m trapped in an airport with no other viewing options!” network – wobbled around like they’d been pole-axed. Lemon started a rambling sentence about Russian collusion that somehow ended with “…the easy fix, is to just release his tax returns.”
Um, what now? Does Lemon “think” (scare quotes intended) that Trump had a write-off labeled “collusion expenses?”
I saw the headline that Maxine Waters was having a meltdown over it, and of course my first thought was, “Don’t over-react — her face always looks like that.” But when I watched a little video, and saw that the melting has indeed spread from her face to her brain. In a rambling response, she said, “This isn’t the end of anything.” (pause) “Well, it is the end of the Mueller report…”
Yep!
One of my favorite moments was seeing CNN president Jeff Zucker defending his network’s getting everything wrong for two years. (If you’re not sure which one Zucker is, he looks like a dishonest, giant human thumb, with glasses on it.) In an email to the NYT, he pronounced himself “very comfortable” with CNN’s coverage of the non-existent collusion conspiracy. (Which tells you that he is a very much opposable thumb.) (HA!)
His best line: “We are not investigators. We are journalists, and our role is to report the facts as we know them, which is exactly what we did.”
Hey Thumbkin, if you don’t do any investigating, how do you learn the facts that it is your job to report? Do you just stand on a street corner in Atlanta until some bum who’s out of methadone stumbles up to you and whispers out of the side of his mouth that he saw Trump groping Natasha Badanov while her husband Boris conveyed marching orders from Putin?
(And before you can object, I know that “bum” is politically incorrect language. But I can’t keep up with the terminology. Is “vagrant” acceptable? How about “hobo?” “Member of the Poop Map Contributor Community?” “The Democrat Base?” Someone please help me with this.)
Anyway, Tom Thumb says that it’s not his reporters’ job to investigate anything. They just report whatever facts come through from the fillings in their teeth, I guess.
One last hilarious detail: since the Mueller report came out, CNN’s ratings have cratered, and I’m sure that Zuck-ster and his team are sitting around a big table, trying to understand. I mean, they’re not investigating, or anything. But they’re looking at each other with vacant, Cuomo-esque stares, wondering what this all means.
I’ll tell you what it means: One, two, three, four, we deplorables declare a thumb war!
Third in our “bang and whimper” list is the latest in the Jussie “don’t call me Jessie” Smollett case. The inexplicable decision to depart from all usual procedure and dismiss the rock-solid hate crime hoax charges against the Trump-hating obscure actor appears to be a whimpering end to the case. But the black police chief and the law enforcement rank and file are furious, and even Rahm “dead-shark-eyes” Emanuel has felt compelled to blast the dismissal. With any luck, another shoe will be dropping with a bang shortly.
Fourth, the execrable Southern Poverty Law Center has been imploding over the last several weeks, and it couldn’t happen to a better bunch of political arsonists. Creepy founder Morris Dees was fired on March 14th with a vague statement to the effect that he had “failed to meet standards.” Ten days later, president Richard Cohen resigned, and rumors about endemic racism and sexism in the SPLC headquarters for decades are running rampant.
In other words, so far two big bangs, and a chorus of whimpers at SPLC. By the way, that misnamed group has always reminded me of the old saying about the Holy Roman Empire – it was neither Holy, nor Roman, nor an Empire. The Southern Poverty Law Center mostly aimed to raise funds from guilty Northern liberals, accumulated great wealth, and was totally lawless. Good riddance!
Fifth, no bang-and-whimper list would be complete without the immolation of the Creepy Porn Lawyer Michael Avenatti. (Insert your own Stormy Daniels joke here.) (Um, maybe “insert” was not the right word.) A year ago this guy was flying high, appearing on CNN hourly (and thus being seen by literally dozens of people every day), and being taken seriously by some Dems as a potential presidential contender.
And now, he’s been fired by Stormy, kicked out of his law offices, and charged with multiple counts of extortion. Which means that he would now be no better than the fourth-most-impressive Dem presidential candidate. Oh, how the degraded have fallen… one or two steps lower than he already was.
Sixth, March 26th was the best day in the US Senate in decades. Cocaine Mitch McConnell finally forced a vote on the Green New Deal (also known informally as the “Titanic-Hindenberg-Edsel-New Coke-Dumpster-Fire-Act of 2019”).
The result? 0 yeas, 57 nays and 43 voted “present.”
So close!
“But Martin,” I can hear you saying, “Hasn’t every Democrat senator running for president praised the Green New Deal, ranting that if we don’t pass it, we’re all going to, like, die in only, like, 12 years or something?”
Yes. Yes they have. And yet every last one of them — Hillary 1 and 2 (Klobuchar and Gillibrand), Squanto Warren, Bernie, Kamala, Spartacus – voted “present.”
Along with, of course, every other spineless leftist in the Senate, including Schumer, Dick “nobody ever calls him Richard” Durbin, Richard “everybody secretly calls him Dick” Blumenthal and the other assorted Merkleys and Markeys.
Not since a herd of squishy RINOs got elected promising to end Obamacare and build a wall has a political party so betrayed their voters. Let the lefty whimpering begin!
Finally, I’m happy to end with a story that is all bang and no whimper: the Israeli response to Hamas terrorists firing rockets into Israel. When the fine folks from the Religion of Peace™ managed to reach Tel Aviv with a super-peaceful rocket (result: shrapnel wounds to 7 civilians, including a woman in her sixties, a 12-year-old girl, and two infants.), Israel responded with some vigorous diplomacy.
HA! I kid. They conducted 80 air strikes against dozens of terror installations in Gaza, leveling most of them. My favorite line from the reporting involved the administrative headquarters of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, which before the strikes was a three-story building. (Now it is less than one story.) The line referred to the building as Hamas’ “secret headquarters.”
Secret’s out, Ismail!
What’s the over/under on how long it takes Ilhan Omar to criticize Israel for attacking an innocent terrorist headquarters building?
What a week! Mueller nukes the conspiracy fever dreams of the left, Avenatti heads for the Big House instead of the White House, and Morris Dees gets the poop-map-contributor’s rush. (Get it?) And then the Dem senators get a chance to vote for the vital, “stop the end of the world now” act that they sponsored, and the whole rotten lot of them vote Present!
Look at the end of the “Oh Happy Day” video again, because I’ve stopped identifying with the lady in the red dashiki. (Don’t mis-gender me!) Watch when the big bald guy escorts Ray Charles away from the organ toward the end of the song, while Ray rocks that mile-wide smile, pats both side of his face, hugs himself, and does that weird little squatting, knee-slapping dance.
Call me Ray “Martacus” Charles, because that was me this week, dancing around my living room watching the MSM imploding, while Cassie the Wonder Dog pranced around me, barking with joy.
Martin Simpson 