Month: June 2019

I got back from Maine – good company, good weather, good lobster – just in time to get laid low by some kind of flu.  Fortunately, I have the strength of ten men because my heart is pure, so an illness that might have killed a lesser human just cost me about 48 hours of down time.

I spent that time sorting through recent events, and finding several hilarious stories that bring me joy:

Joe Biden’s latest gaffe – unless he’s made another gaffe since I started writing this sentence – was to cite his past ability to work with segregationists in the Congress to get things done.  His Dem rivals, along with some empty heads in the MSM pounced.  An MSNBC goon got the story right, with one telling Freudian slip of an error: she identified the two segregationists as Republicans.  (For future reference, MSMers, you don’t need a scorecard to keep the players straight.  Whenever you write a story referring to some racist segregationist, or Klansman, or Jim Crow-enforcing bully, you’re writing about Democrats.  Pretty simple, right?)

I really enjoyed the blue-on-blue firefight over Old Joe’s unforced error.  Sure, his rivals all lied about what he clearly meant: Kamala, Bernie and Grandma Squanto all said that he’d “celebrated” or “praised” or “adored” the old segregationist Democrats he mentioned.  It’s almost enough to make we want to defend Plugsy McBackslapper.

But then I remember him talking to a mostly black audience, claiming that Republicans, “would like to put y’all back in chains.”  And I make myself some popcorn and enjoy the karmic comeuppance.

 

In more “me-too” hypocrisy news, CNN boss Jeff Zucker recently made a painfully unfunny sexual joke that would certainly cause him some serious employment problems, if he weren’t a reliable leftist robot.

For those keeping score at home, please don’t mistake leftist hack CNN boss Zucker for leftist hack CNN political correspondent Brian Stelter.  Which you may be tempted to do, since — as I’ve pointed out before — they both look remarkably like giant, dishonest human thumbs.

But Zucker looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb with glasses, while Stelter does not wear glasses.  (And yes, that distinction can fairly be called a “Rule of Thumb.”) (You’re welcome.)  Also, neither of them should be confused with Tom Thumb, a character from English folklore who never lied to the American public about politics, as far as I know.

Anyway, Zucker was “being honored for leadership at the Mirror Awards, which recognizes excellence in journalism” at Syracuse.

I am not making that up.  Thumbkin Zucker.  Excellence in Journalism.

So CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota introduced Zucker at the awards ceremony.  (By the way, the judges do not accept “Alisyn” as an acceptable spelling. Would Elvis Costello’s song “Alison (My Aim is True)” have still been awesome if it had been titled “Alisyn?”  Probably, because Elvis is so great.  But that spelling is still an atrocity.)

After Camerota introduced Zucker, he took the floor and said, “I was gonna say that I love waking up WITH YOU every morning, but I want to say that I love waking up TO YOU every morning.”

Yikes!  If he were a conservative boss or commentator, there would be pitchforks and torches and demands for his resignation.   Spoiler alert: that did not happen.  But according to several people present, there were “groans in the room.”  I’ll bet.

I think the audience might have felt sorry for him.  Camerota is no Nikki Haley or my wife, but she could reasonably be described as “easy on the eyes,” while Jeff Zucker looks like… Jeff Zucker.   It must be tough to be the boss of a much more attractive woman, and have to try to maintain a professional demeanor, when your heart is crying out for you to say to her, “Run away with me, and be my Thumbelina, and we’ll live happily ever after!”

On the other hand, he’s a leftist creeper, and that lame joke is unforgivable.  So descend upon him with fury, leftist PC police!

Wait.  What’s that?  The leftist “me too” police only descend with fury upon non-leftists?

Got it.

 

AOC has continued to entertain, with her mixture of mediocre bartending skills, wafer-thin knowledge of the world, and bottomless self-confidence.  Remember when Don Rumsfeld discussed “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns?”  Well the entire world is one big ball of unknown unknowns to AOC.

Most recently, we learned that we can add concentration camps to the list of things about which AOC knows nothing.  (Note to AOC: those were not places you go so that you can REALLY focus your thinking.)  Because she called the places where the US temporarily houses people who break into our country “concentration camps.”  The reaction from the sane community was strong and negative, with several conservative commentators pointing out that the Nazi extermination camps were quite different, not least because thousands of Jews weren’t eagerly crossing the border into Germany so that they could be temporarily housed in THOSE concentration camps.

The Westchester Wizard was not deterred. She said that she wasn’t referring to Nazi concentration camps.  Even though she used the phrase “Never again,” – which is famously associated with the determination of Jews and the West to prevent another Nazi-like holocaust — in her original tweet.   She also got offended by her critics using the phrase “extermination,” which she said aligned them with the Nazis, who first used that term.  Unfortunately for her, so has every other serious writer and thinker about the holocaust, including such non-Nazis as Simon Wiesenthal.

Someday AOC will likely be back to screwing up drink orders in a bar somewhere.  But between now and then, she’s going to be a political thorn in Pelosi’s side, and the gift that keeps on giving.

 

In LGBTQ-l-m-n-o-p news, the big recent story was that some nameless weasel-crats at the US embassy in Botswana had asked for permission to fly the rainbow pride flag over the embassy, and when the WH turned them down, they flew it anyway.

When I read that, I decided that I needed to learn more about Botswana.  A little research revealed that Botswana is a country in southern Africa with roughly the same land mass as Texas.  Its primary export is tungsten, its national insect is the botfly, and its largest freshwater lake is Lake Botswana.   The literacy rate is 63% and life expectancy is 58, with the leading causes of death being dengue fever and poison-tipped arrows.  As with most Africans, Botswanians are not particularly accepting of homosexuality.

Okay, I confess.  None of the “facts” in the previous paragraph are true, except that Botswana is in southern Africa.  (Here are a few tips for any of you youngsters who want to make up facts about a country in the future:  Tungsten is good to use, because nobody knows what it is, but everyone vaguely remembers it from high school social studies class.  Always compare a country’s size to Texas; it’s like comparing the size of hail to golf balls – it just works.   And if a country is tropical, you can’t go wrong with dengue fever.) I made it all up to prove a point: nobody outside of Botswana knows or cares about anything in Botswana.   Which means that the only reason for the controversy is the exhibitionist virtue signaling over all things gay.

I mentioned in a previous column that as a well-raised Midwesterner, I don’t care for the airing of everyone’s sexual proclivities in public.  I understand that for many gay people, the long-lasting stigma against their preference made it feel liberating to fight back with public declarations of their sexuality.  But c’mon!  As the resistance and prejudice against gays has withered away, the pride parades and readings and paraphernalia get more and more strident.  Surely there’s some happy medium between the bad old days of “the love that dares not speak its name” and this year’s “the love that never shuts up about itself!”

Leaving all the gay stuff aside, as a general principle I’d rather that we only flew the US flag over US embassies.  Sure, there might be temptations to fly different flags on special occasions.  Maybe a Cubs flag when they win their first World Series in a century.  Or a Redskins flag to mock Elizabeth Warren when she makes an especially stupid public statement. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But if you make one exception, every obscure interest group will come out of the woodwork, and pretty soon you’ve got a different flag flying every day.  On Monday it’s a flag for Arbor Day, on Tuesday it’s a flag for Adult Children of Alcoholics, and on Wednesday it’s Breast Cancer Awareness.  On Thursday we celebrate that McDonalds has brought back the McRib sandwich, and on Friday a men’s rights group who got steamed about the breast cancer flag insist on a flag for testicular cancer.

And nobody wants to see THAT flag flying over their embassy.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to make a run to Costco for a Michael Moore-sized wheelbarrow of popcorn, because the Dem debates start this week.   I’m still rooting for Avenatti at the top of the ticket.

On Friday I’m heading up to Maine to spend a long weekend with an old grad school buddy.  He’s the guy through whom I met the great and powerful CO, and we always have a great time when we get together.  There will be talk of politics and sports and books, and some rum may be consumed.

Because Father’s Day is Sunday, I thought I’d re-post a column I wrote two years ago about my dear departed dad.  This one will be a departure from my usual snarkfest columns, but I hope it doesn’t disappoint, with its lack of jokes aimed at various mock-worthy leftists.  (That reminds me: Elizabeth Warren is as white as a curling competition in St. Paul in January.  #wemustneverstopmockingher  #evenonfather’sday)

If you’ve followed the CO site for more than two years, you might have read this column already, in which case I apologize for the self-indulgence.  But if you haven’t – or if you don’t remember what you read two years ago – I hope you enjoy!

As this Father’s Day approaches, I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad.  He died not long before Christmas in 2014, and time has been doing its work, to the point that thoughts of him have shifted over to a mix of many happy memories of him, to go along with the pain of his loss.  I’m a father to two daughters, and have known hundreds of other fathers as friends, relatives, co-workers and acquaintances, and off the top of my head, I can’t think of anyone who carried out that role any better than my dad.

He was born into a family of four boys and four girls to working class parents in Illinois in the late 1930s.   He married my mom not long after high school, and had me and my younger sister, and raised us while working at the Northern Illinois Gas Company, until he was forced into an early retirement at the age of 57 by injuries.   He operated a variety of heavy equipment, and he took great pride in his work.

When I was little, I can remember him pointing out subdivisions or houses that he’d run services to, and whenever we’d pass a parking lot with heavy machinery, he’d brag that he could operate anything on that lot.  My mom had to explain to an excited young me (at maybe age 5 or 6?) that no, she was not going to let dad scratch my back with his backhoe.  (He’d assured me that he could do so, no problem.)

He was not perfect, as none of us are.  He could be short-tempered and impatient, for example.  But even then, he was the most unusual of people: he was a short-tempered man whom I never heard swear.  Not once in my life.  Not when he bounced a hammer off his thumb.  Not when the Bears or the Cubs went O-for-a-month.  Not when a Democrat got elected.

He used ridiculous euphemisms to avoid cursing – “son of a buck,” “dirty rip,” and the like – but as a grown man who rarely makes it across town in heavy traffic without dropping at least one trenchant Anglo-Saxonism at one of my many brain-dead fellow citizens who cannot seem to master a turn signal or figure out which lane is for passing, that’s almost more than I can comprehend.

People are freaking idiots all the time — I am too — and my dad was surrounded by them his entire life, but he never swore in front of his son!

In the summer of 2014 dad had cancer surgery that we initially thought had been successful.  But a month or so later we found out that it has metastasized, and a month after that we learned that it would be fatal.  I spent much of the fall of that year with my mom and dad in Tennessee, and I’ll always be grateful for that time.  I recorded dad sharing a lot of memories from his life, and I saw the evidence of how many lives he had touched in the form of a steady stream of visitors who came to see him, and to see what they could do for him and for my mom.

He kept his sense of humor throughout his final illness.  One of my cousins was visiting not too long before dad died.  That cousin is known for sarcasm and smart-assery – even by Simpson standards – and he has some Scottish background on one side.  Dad was sitting in a recliner and drifting in and out of the conversation, and the cousin was joking that he was going to try to learn the bagpipes.  He promised (tongue-in-cheek) to play them at dad’s funeral.  Dad delivered his line with a perfectly dry tone: “That’s it.  I’ve changed my mind.  I’m not dying.”

Dad died on a Sunday evening, and he told me his last joke two days earlier.   He and I had both been Chicago Bears fans for life, and the Bears really stunk in 2014.  In the last couple of months in that season, they were on tv unusually often for a team that bad.  On the final Thursday of dad’s life they were on Thursday Night Football, and dad and I watched from our dueling recliners.  He was pretty heavily medicated and drowsed on and off; each time he woke up a bit, he’d ask me the score, and I’d report that the Bears were down by another touchdown or so, and he’d roll his eyes and make some comment before sliding back to sleep.

The next day, he asked me for a favor.  He had been unable to make it to church for a while by then, but his church made each week’s services available on DVD for members who had been unable to make it on Sunday.  Dad had several of those stored up to watch, and on that Friday, he asked if I could put a DVD in for him.  He seemed a little drowsy, but I put in the DVD and handed him the remote, asking if he thought he could stay awake for the sermon.

“I’m not sure,” he said, “But I don’t want the last tv I ever watch to be that stinking Bears’ game last night.”

To end his good life, he died a good death.   He had hospice care in his home, and my mom, my sister and brother-in-law and I spent some time with him every day in his final months.   He had the chance to tell everyone he knew how much he loved them, and that he was ready to go, and he was solicitous of others at a time when most of us can focus only on ourselves.  Because of great hospice workers and morphine (which by itself is proof to me that God exists, and that He loves us), he was able to die at home.

He slept for most of his final day.  In the evening, mom and I arranged a schedule; I would stay up with him, and give him morphine twice, and then she would get up early and administer the morphine while I was sleeping in.  She spoke to him the last time, kissing him and telling him that he had been a great father and husband, and that he could go.  Then she went to bed, and I’m convinced that he passed before she fell asleep.  I had some papers to grade, so I went down the hallway to get my computer, and brought it back to set up in the chair next to his.   By the time I got the computer plugged in and checked on him, he was gone.

Ronald Lee Simpson was born on January 22, 1938, and died on December 14^th, 2014.  In between he lived a loving and generous life.  I think it is hard for some people to come to faith in a loving heavenly Father if they have an abusive, or neglectful, or absent earthly father.  I am a Christian because of both of my parents, but my path to God was made much easier by the example of a father’s love that I witnessed all my life.

I can’t wait to see him again.

I wish for you all that you have had a father like mine, or that you marry a father like mine, or that you are a father like mine.  Happy Father’s Day!

After a week when I mostly didn’t pay attention to the news, I dipped into a few web sites this evening, and found some stories that provided food for thought.

First up was some Iowa polling and the latest on the Dem presidential race.  One of the themes is how awful most of the candidates are doing, which I guess is inevitable when there are two dozen candidates.  And they’re Democrats.  And the terribleness of their ideas is only exceeded by the terribleness of their personalities.

The uptake is that Biden still has a considerable lead, and that there are only three main contenders: Bernie, Grandma Squanto and Mayor Pete, in descending order.  (Although, doesn’t it feel like any order in which you list their names is descending order?)  Skateboarding Doofus spoke to a mostly empty church in Iowa, and his 15 minutes of fame now seem to have started about 22 minutes ago.

I think that Biden’s sizeable lead is more a commentary on the weakness of the field than any indication of his electoral greatness.  The guy’s been around for decades, and he’s crashed and burned in previous attempts.  He only stops sniffing women’s hair for long enough to plagiarize.  And he only stops plagiarizing for long enough to spit out a gaffe or two that must then be cleaned up by his spokespeople.

He’s a glad-handing BS artist, and the Dems who absolutely detest Trump for those qualities are going to pick Biden for their candidate?

But worse than that, how would you like to be one of the Dems who is losing… to Joe Biden!?  That’s like adding insult to injury, and then injuring you again.  And then pouring salt into the wound of that second injury.   And then making fun of your mother, while poking your original injury with a stick.

I’ve got to say that I’m surprised that Grandma Squanto is still in the top tier.   (And yes, that is the most ironically self-satirizing use of the phrase “top tier” you will ever hear.)  I thought that she was electorally dead long ago.  (But you know her favorite saying:  “Better red(skin) than dead!”  #wemustneverstopmockingher)

After her tussle last week with that goofy black radio personality who calls himself “Charlemagne tha God,” I’m surprised she can show her (pale) face in public again.

And think about this: not only is she losing to Biden, but she got outfought in a battle of wits against a guy who spells “the” as “t-h-a.”  Yikes!

Maybe the funniest statistic I saw is that the bottom 9 Dem candidates all garnered 0% in the latest poll.

Which is the same percentage of the Democrat primary vote that I’m getting.  And I’ve spent zero dollars on my campaign, and given zero speeches.  And my campaign slogan is: “Democrats: Terrible policies, terrible people. Vote Trump.”

 

Speaking of Trump – I often find myself wishing that he’d only say about half of the things that he says.  But man, that other half can be pretty great!

My latest favorite came in response to London’s mayor Sadiq Khan, who I think would feel right at home with our own HJTs (hateful jihadi twins Omar and Tlaib).  As so often with Trump, the other guy threw the first punch.  Before Trump got to England, Khan took time out of his busy schedule of not stopping jihadi knife attacks in London to pen an anti-Trump editorial that included the sentiment that “It’s un-British to roll out the red carpet for Donald Trump.”

Because when you’re trying to get a fix on whether something is super-British or not, you skip past the guys named Winston or Nigel or James Bond and ask a guy named “Sadiq.”

Trump responded that Khan is “the twin” of NYC mayor Reinhardt Di Blasio, “only shorter.”

In Khan’s defense, a president taking that kind of shot is pretty much the definition of “punching down.”

But in Trump’s defense, how else are you going to punch a guy like Sadiq “Keebler Elf” Khan, except down?  Have you seen the size of that guy?   (By the way, if you’re keeping score at home, my favorite Coleridge poem is – you guessed it – “Keebler Khan.”  That Coleridge was ahead of his time.)

I’m not sure about the cost/benefit calculation of Trump’s instinct to constantly punch back at all attackers, large and small. I know that most conservatives have been so starved for a candidate who will fight back that we can’t help but love him for it.  But I also know that a lot of voters dislike it, and see him as a bully.

For those people, when a London mayor insults Trump and he responds, it starts to look like a Dinklage and Goliath situation.  (Boom!)

To make that story even more laughable, the intrepid investigative “journalists” at NPR (by all means, let’s force taxpayers to subsidize those hacks) really outdid themselves on this story.  When they heard that Trump said that Khan was, “half the height” of Di Blasio, they leapt into action.

In an interview, NPR reporter Frank Langfitt said, “One difference, Trump said, between the two mayors, he said that Khan is only half the height of de Blasio.”  Then he dropped the bombshell, which I swear I am not making up: “That’s not true. Mayor Khan is 5 foot 6.”

You just know that NPR threw all of their resources into nailing down that story.  A three-reporter team established that Di Blasio is 6’ 5” while the Editor-in-Chief turned to their most valuable source – Wikipedia – to discover that Khan is 5’6”.

Then, amidst the clacking of an abacus, a white board was filled with formulae:

“half of 6’5” is around 3 feet.”  (“around” gets crossed out, replaced with “a little more than”)

“5’6” is taller than 3 feet”

“Are you sure?”

“Somebody check that!”

“There’s NO TIME TO CHECK!  We need to go to press with this immediately!”

Great job, NPR!  You may have missed stories like Bill Clinton raping one aide and assaulting many others, and Obama using the IRS against his political enemies, and Hillary paying for a false Russian dossier to accuse Trump of working with Russians.

But when the chips were down and the fate of a nation was on the line, you broke the “5’6 is more than half of 6’5” story wide open!

Look for NPR’s next blockbuster story in October: “Trump says he could ‘eat a horse,’ yet our investigation shows that he only had a salad!  Impeach him!”

 

Finally, in the “Martacus Moral Equivalency Round-up,” I have two stories for you.

Last week the Democrat-dominated New York state assembly passed a bill outlawing the declawing of cats, which legislators called “brutal.”  They noted that it causes pain for the cat, and is done only for the owners’ convenience, to prevent cats from scratching furniture.

(For the record, I agree with that bill.  We have three cats, and although none of them are at the level of greatness achieved by Cassie the Wonder Dog (obviously), I love them, and the scratched-up furniture in our house demonstrates our commitment on this issue.)

The second story involves our always-stable friends at PETA, who celebrated “World Oceans Day” by releasing a video in defense of oysters, noting that, “Bivalves are animals that deserve our consideration and should never be eaten or used in any other way.”

The video highlights the damage that evil, oyster-eating humans do to the mollusk-American community, pointing out that, “Their shells are torn open and their bodies are cut up,” and that, “Oysters can sense danger and hide inside their shells.”

PETA also used the occasion to throw in a little extra nagging about those who like to fish or eat fish, reminding us that, “Fish are sentient individuals who feel pain.”

So to recap, our leftist moral betters want you to know that you should never de-claw a cat out of a selfish desire for convenience or couch-preservation, and that oysters should not be torn from their shells or cut up, and that fish feel pain, so you can’t catch them.

Also, you’re a patriarchal, fascist pig if you object to aborting human babies minutes before they are born.

Because they aren’t the kind of higher life forms that have claws or have to be torn from their shells, and they can’t feel pain the way, say, a catfish does.

Got it?

Five different stories have caught my attention this week, and that’s not including Trump’s performance in England, which even his MSM critics have had to admit (through gritted teeth) has gone well.

Story #1:  As I’ve said in earlier columns, I almost feel sorry for Nancy Pelosi as she tries to herd the rabble of miscreants and moonbats that make up the Dem House majority.  Almost.

She’s been trying to keep them from their own extremist instincts, even if only for pragmatic reasons.  She’s counseled against a futile impeachment drive, and has attempted to rein in AOC and the HJT (hateful jihadi twins Tlaib and Omar).

But she may have given up.  On the top of Drudge yesterday was a big picture of Rictus-Grin Pelosi over a giant headline: Pelosi Wants Trump in Jail!

Hold your breath, Nance.  Here’s a partial list of other things Pelosi wants that she is NOT going to get:

The ability to change facial expressions.

The ability to control her trembling, dessicated mummy hands.

The ability to come back to the House floor after a bathroom visit without trailing her rotting burial wrapping behind her.

The ability to retreat to her palatial estate behind giant walls protected by armed security while she lectures the rest of us that walls and guns are evil.

Correction: She has gotten #4.  But she won’t get the others.

 

Story #2:  Joe Biden plagiarizes.  AGAIN!

After getting in trouble for plagiarizing a law review article when he was in law school, and having an earlier presidential run derailed for plagiarizing various other politicians’ speeches, you’d think that Creepy Joe would have made Job #1 the obvious one: don’t freaking plagiarize again!

But he just couldn’t do it.  After a week of Hyding out (Get it?) from the press and promising a great new plan for saving the planet, the Biden campaign put out a bunch of talking points lifted verbatim from some lefty enviro site.

The saddest thing might be what banal, boiler-plate talking points they are.  I’m sure that everyone reading this could come up with the basic beats without even breaking a sweat.

Biden tried to contain the damage as best he could, by releasing a prepared statement:

“Four score and seven hours ago, I had a dream.  The dream police, they live inside of my head.  But I cannot tell a lie: this plagiarism business is not serious, just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  I think, therefore I am.  I came, I saw, I conquered.  And as I’ve always said, blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth, and you can take that to the bank.  Remember our new campaign slogan: Biden 2020 – I’m with Her!”

“In conclusion, I am the walrus, goo goo g’joob.”

This guy is leading all other Dem candidates by double digits, people.

Which, sadly, sounds about right.

 

Story #3: Lizzie Warren goes nuts at a Boston gay pride parade.

If you haven’t seen the video, do yourself a favor and watch it now.  In a parade full of moral exhibitionism, Grandma Squanto outdid everyone else by a long shot, dancing and laughing and exhibiting manic, over-the-top attention-seeking behavior that should have its own chapter in a psych textbook.  She made the most flamboyant drag queens look like austere Puritans in a coma.  No straight person could possibly be this enthusiastic about gayness.

So I can only draw the obvious conclusion that she’s going to start pretending to be gay, as well as Indian.  Be on the lookout for a sequel to Pow Wow Chow that targets the “native women who enjoy comfortable moccasins” demographic.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Story #4: Whoopi Goldberg is disgusting.

If you — like me — have spent the last two weeks fighting the scourge of OGI (ocular gouge instinct) at the thought of Bette Midler and Alyssa Milano ending their sex strike and forcing themselves on you, do NOT search for Whoopi Goldberg’s recent criticism of Nikki Haley’s position on abortion.

Normally, any mention of Nikki Haley is worth at least one instinctive “giggity” from your humble Martacus.  But the mental image that Goldberg created…

Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

If you must call up that video, for the love of all that is holy, lock up your cutlery and put on some oven mitts before you press play, lest the OGI overwhelm you!

 

Story #5 is my favorite: the morally superior hobgoblins from Hollywood have spoken, and now Georgians must start aborting their children, or else!

If you haven’t heard, Georgians recently passed a bill restricting abortion in their state, which is approximately 2000 miles from California. So when the Polanskis and Weinsteins of the world heard about that, they naturally got up off of their latest underaged victims, pulled their pants back on, and erupted with righteous anger.

The elite of California – home to the casting couch and the porn industry and poop maps, and the land where they give out roofies to adolescents like they were m&ms on Halloween – are threatening that if Georgians don’t get with the aborting post haste,  the film industry is going to boycott the Peach State.

The irony is staggering.  Major Hollywood studios and newer players like Netflix have filmed all around the world in recent years, including such places as Northern Ireland (where abortion is illegal), most European countries (virtually all of which have stricter abortion laws than we do), and exotic Muslim-ruled locales including Egypt and Jordan, where the only sport that competes in popularity with soccer (ugh!) is a spirited round of “toss-a-gay-fellow-off-the-roof.”

Yet Hollywood does not lecture the Europeans about their benighted anti-infanticide prejudice, or explain to the Muslims of the world why women should not be trussed up in black beekeeper outfits when they go out in public, or why they should replace all of their madrassahs with satellite campuses of the RuPaul Drag Queen Academy.

I was confused about why our celebrity betters would tolerate the backward beliefs of all of those countries, so I did a little research and found – mirabile dictu! – that all of those places are cheaper to film in than the tax-happy leftist greed-ocracies of California and New York.

Imagine that.

All of this reminds me of the eternal truth of the principle that I introduced in this column a year ago, along with its catchy acronym of MYOBYTJ: Mind Your Own Business, You Totalitarian Jerks!

Perhaps the most obnoxious tendency of the left – along with terminal humorlessness and unchecked hubris – is the urge to micromanage everyone else’s lives.  They are congenitally unable to mind their own business!

Conversely, one of the best of our Founding Fathers’ many great ideas was the concept that the states should control as much of their own self-government as possible.  Beyond the few, crucial unifying ideas and tasks of the federal government, the founders argued that the states should be what a later Supreme Court justice would call the “laboratories of democracy.”

Each state could decide for themselves how to approach various governmental tasks – involving education, the penal system, regulations, and more.

Thus Texans have decided that if you kill someone in Texas, they’re going to kill you back.  But Massachusetts residents have rejected the death penalty, and opted instead to give murderers weekend passes. (Admittedly, that was under Dukakis, and may not still be going on.)

Red states opt for less regulation, and if you want to start a business there, they welcome you.  Blue states regard your idea for a business with suspicion, and then present you with a list of demands.

Red states allow for educational innovation through ideas like charter schools and vouchers, while blue states do everything they can to force your kids into failing public schools where great teachers go unrewarded and terrible ones can’t be fired.

The verdict is in, and Americans are voting with their feet – they’re leaving blue states for red ones.

But that doesn’t mean that conservatives want to dictate how leftists live.  If San Franciscans want to dodge junkies and poop piles and dirty needles the minute they step out of their over-priced houses, go nuts.  If New Yorkers want to turn their city back into a Dinkinsonian hell of crime and filth, have at it. If the people of Detroit and Baltimore want thugs to victimize them because it’s racist to fight crime, God bless ‘em.

Just don’t try to make the rest of us live the way you do.

MYOBYTJ!

June is already upon us, and thus it is time to look back at the best and worst of May.

I’ll start with the worst, which is something that actually happened in March, but that I didn’t hear about until May.

Before you can object to the apparent inconsistency of writing about things happening in March in a column on things that happened in May, let me remind you of these words from Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  Also, that “hobgoblin” is a fine word that is not used nearly enough anymore; I suggest that we all start trying to work it into our everyday conversation.

So back in March, another upstanding abortion advocate happened upon a peaceful pro-life protest outside of a Planned Parenthood Clinic in San Francisco, and he delivered an inspired and trenchant critique of the pro-life position that left all who heard it in awe of his wisdom.

HA! I kid.

Actually, the mouth-breathing young male – who would usually be precluded from having a position on abortion, on account of his not having the requisite lady parts to comment – stole a banner from an 85-year-old protestor and took it to his bicycle.  When the old guy followed him to block his escape by trying to push a stick into one of the bicycle’s wheels, the brave young leftist shoved the man down.

The old guy tried to hold onto his banner, so the young punk gave him a few vicious kicks, warning him to “Stay down, old man.”

When I heard about this story on Adam Carolla’s podcast, I looked it up, and saw the sickening video. As far as I can tell, the cops have been unable to identify the cowardly creep.  Which makes sense, because the SF police have their hands full trying to keep the streets free of the mountains of dirty needles and human feces left by the Democrat voting base of their fine city.

I’m not sure why I haven’t heard of this story before, especially since the assaulter demonstrated all the hallmarks of a contender for the Democrat nomination: he doesn’t respect his elders or the private property of others, he is a bully, he is completely intolerant of anyone who disagrees with him, and he throws a violent tantrum if anyone crosses him.

If the white male candidates for the Dem presidential nomination hadn’t already promised to choose a token female for their VP, this guy would be a prime contender.

 

The best story of the month might appear to be superficially similar to the worst story, since it too involves a violent confrontation.  But the similarities end there.

Because this fight did not start over a trivial issue like abortion.  No!  This donnybrook originated in the kind of deep-seated, intractable dispute over which nations have gone to war many times in the past.  I refer you to the May 1st headline from a newspaper in Bedford, Virginia:  “Ford-Chevy Dispute Leaves 3 People Shot at Virginia Home.”

The reporting is frustratingly thin, but the major facts of the case seem pretty clear.

56-year-old Mark Edwin Turner was having a pre-Easter dinner at his home with his unnamed girlfriend, and her son Logan Bailey and his girlfriend.  I’m assuming that the dinner conversation about who is going to get the starting QB spot for the Cavaliers this fall and the relative merits of each family member’s favorite Federalist Paper had waned, because the family was out in the yard after dinner when talk turned to the relative merits of Ford vs. Chevy trucks.

Naturally, tempers flared.  Turner pulled a knife – as one does, when one’s truck of choice is unjustly maligned – and his girlfriend got in between Turner and her son Logan.  The news report notes that at this point “she got stabbed in the lower back,” though in Turner’s defense, maybe the knife was loaded and “just went off.”

Turner went into his house and came back out with a gun.  Obviously.

Turner’s girlfriend – because she is apparently not a quitter – once again got in between Turner and her son.  This time she ended up getting shot 5 times, “all of those injuries occurring to her legs.”

Because the reporting doesn’t include any actual quotes, I’m going to give you my best guess as to what was said:

Turner:  You know what FORD means?

Logan: What?

Turner: Fix Or Repair Daily!

Logan (furious): Well… you know that Chevy stands for (pause) Crappy Hellish… Embarrassing…

Turner: HA!  You can’t even think of an acronym!

Logan: Oh yeah?!  Well my F-150 has pieces of your Silverado in its stool!

Turner: That makes no sense!

Turner’s girlfriend (holding up her hands, palms out): Let’s not get into this again.  I’m sure that each truck has its good points.

Turner: Are you taking his side?

Logan: Of course she is, because Chevy makes a terrible product!

Turner: My Silverado could mount your Ranger like Mayor Pete turning out his (making air quotes with his fingers) “husband.”

Logan: Nice!  Homophobe much?

Turner: Truth hurts, don’t it?

Logan (after fuming silently for a minute, in a cold, dead voice): “Like a Rock” is the worst song Bob Seeger ever wrote!

Turner: That’s it!

Gunfire ensued.  Apparently rage interfered with Turner’s aim, as he never managed a center mass hit on his girlfriend, and he only hit that Ford-loving common-law son-in-law once, in the arm.  The kid’s girlfriend also caught two shots, which the police described as ricochets.

You’ll be shocked to know that according to police, “alcohol was involved.”  Also, that Turner had a previous felony.  I can only assume that conviction arose from an incident after a fender bender with a Fiat driver, which turned violent after Turner noted that “Fiat” stands for, “Fix It Again, Tony.”

The moral of the story is obvious: when you are tempted to engage in gunplay over your vehicle preferences, ask yourself, “What would Martacus do?”

Then buy a rear window decal of cartoon character Calvin urinating on the corporate logo of your disfavored auto maker.

Problem solved, and you’re welcome.

 

The best political story of May came at the end of the month.  It seems that FireEye, a California-based  cyber-security company, was planning its annual summit, scheduled for October in Washington DC.  But they needed a cybersecurity expert to give the keynote address at the summit.

Who to choose?  They considered a crack team of 20-somethings from MIT who had come up with facial recognition software that can identify any individual on earth within 12 seconds, and a Poindexter consortium from Israel who perfected a retinal scan that can be done from a satellite in geosynchronous orbit.

Then they chose a crotchety old hobgoblin with the littlest of little minds: Hillary freaking Clinton.

I’m not making that up.  On May 30^th, FireEye announced that they had chosen Hillary to give a keynote address.  On cyber-security!

I’d like to predict her talking points.  So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go over to the new climate-controlled glass cabinet that I’ve built to display my prognosticating wizard hat on a back-lit, rotating base.  I’ll just let the scanner confirm my fingerprint, and…

Okay, the hat is in place.

I predict that Hillary will grace her audience with a six-step plan to ensure their cyber-security:

1. Buy an off-the-shelf private server and install it in the utility closet of an off-site small business about which you know nothing. (Make your monthly checks out to “Definitely-not-a-Putin-front, LLC.”
2. Connect that server to your mansion in Chappaqua using knob-and-tube wiring from the early 1930s.
3. Set up a password, preferably either the word “password,” your birthdate, or “#atthispointwhatdifferencedoesitmake?
4. Give your husband access to your computer. Immediately get buried in spam from “Zaftig-Topless-Interns.com”
5. When the cops are onto you, try to clean your hard-drive, “with a cloth, or something.”
6. When that doesn’t work, herd your underlings into a room full of hammers, and smash every bit of hardware in sight.

So as June begins, I have two bits of advice:

1. Google the Grandma Squanto interview with some left-wing radio guys, and savor the part when they ask, “When did you know that you were white?” #wemustneverstopmockingher
2. Call your stockbroker, and short FireEye Cybersecurity.

I spent a lot of the last week on the road, going to Tennessee and then Illinois to see family.  On the trip, I listened to several books on cd — I recommend Daniel Silva’s novels featuring Gabriel Allon if you haven’t read them – and attended several cookouts to celebrate Memorial Day.  I played golf and ate with a gaggle of cousins, and celebrated one of their birthdays, and my own.

No politics were discussed, and by the time I got home, I felt the strange mix of disconnection and contentment that always comes from brief sojourns away from all things political.

But then I caught up a bit, and several fragmentary thoughts hit me:

I wish Trump would talk and tweet less.  Yes, Plugs Biden is manifestly a low IQ individual, and in some sense, the truth is an absolute defense against slander.  On the other hand, don’t publicly agree with Porky Nork (hat tip to CO) about anything.  Even if you privately agree with Porky Nork about something.

I wish Nancy Pelosi would talk more.  Mostly because I like seeing her getting her karmic punishment: for her greed and pride and lust for power, she has been sentenced to try to hold together the malevolent, quarrelsome Children of the Corn that make up the Democrat House majority.

Her moon-bat base is baying for impeachment proceedings against Trump, and she knows how futile and self-defeating that will be.  (Can bats “bay”?  For purposes of my tortured metaphor here, I’m going to say yes.)  On the other hand, all of the energy on the left is coming from downtown Crazyville, and they’ve darkened the skies with their massive flocks of ceramic chickens.  If she doesn’t try to appease them, she’s going to have a scat-throwing mutiny on her hands.

One Dem commenter advised splitting the difference, and moving ahead with more investigations and eventual impeachment while simultaneously advancing legislation, under the theory that Democrats can walk and chew gum at the same time.

Then she turned away from the podium, tripped down the stairs, and swallowed her gum.

 

My first night back, I was skimming through Breitbart when I came across an ominous headline: “Lena Dunham Poses Nude to Encourage People to Love Themselves More.”

I have no excuse for reading that story.  I immediately knew that if I didn’t close that page, I was embarking on a path with only one possible outcome: me rolling on the floor in the fetal position, moaning.

And yet, as Saint Paul said, “That which I want to do I don’t do, but what I hate, that I do.”

So, long story short, I’m elbows-deep in a kitchen drawer, desperately searching for something long and pointy to shove into my eyes, when a thought occurs to me: suddenly, the idea of having sex with Bette Midler or crazy Alyssa Milano doesn’t seem quite so repulsive after all.

HA! I kid.  It still seems pretty repulsive.

But I thought the Dunham story included a few teachable moments, once you got past the OGI.  (Ocular Gouge Instinct.  Duh.)

First, as most bad leftist ideas do, her point actually contained a nugget of truth: she argues against judging yourself on your weight or appearance, and as far as that goes, she’s right.  It’s shallow and creepy to assign value to people based on how they look, and our self-esteem shouldn’t rely on our meeting an unrealistic beauty standard.

On the other hand, purposely making yourself look hideous might not be the best way to protest look-ism.  And tattooing yourself from flank to fetlock, then mowing down a battalion of glazed donuts like they were Germans charging your trenches at Ypres might not be the best way to prepare for your nude photoshoot.

Second, Dunham has perfected the leftist approach to reality: ignore it, and it will go away.  In a video accompanying the article, she records herself breaking off what she calls a “25 year relationship” that “isn’t working anymore.”  The camera pans back, and we see that she’s holding a scale, which she then tosses into a garbage can.  (I thought I could hear the scale saying, “Oh thank God!  My long nightmare is over!”  But that may have been my imagination.)

I get it.  Acknowledging unpleasant facts can be painful.

But Lena, that’s not a passive-aggressive Mean Girl friend you are tossing in the trash.  It’s a mechanical device that provides you with empirically true data.  Throwing it away is not going to make you less obese any more than standing in a freezing room and throwing a thermometer away is going to make you warmer.

What is it with leftists and the inability to see basic truths?  NYT “reporter” Walter Duranty traveled to the Soviet Union in the midst of a murderous, government-caused famine and saw a workers’ paradise.  MSM reporters looked at Michael Avenatti and saw a truth-telling presidential contender.   Cory Booker looked at his weak-cheese Walter Mitty self and saw Spartacus.

Liz Warren looked at her pale reflection in a mirror and saw head-band-wearing Indian hottie Leilani from the original Star Trek series episode 58, “Paradise Syndrome.” #wemustneverstopmockingher (I know, pretty obscure reference.  I may be running out of Indian references with which to mock Grandma Squanto.)

The bottom line is (warning – if you looked at those pictures, hearing the word “bottom” may give you traumatic flashbacks) that body shaming is not a nice thing.  But body flaunting is also not nice, especially when you look like Lena Dunham, and seemingly don’t care that you’re forcing many heterosexual males to reconsider their sexual orientation.

But as bad as that photo shoot was, at least one feminist icon had a worse week than Lena Dunham did.

That feminist is Naomi Wolf, whom you may remember as the author of books such as The Beauty Myth.  (Thesis: female beauty is a myth made up by diabolical men to make you feel bad about yourself if you totally let yourself go and become Dunham-esque.) She has also been a high-profile political consultant; she advised Al Gore to wear more earth tones, and Bill Clinton to be less rapey.

So you know that she’s just brilliant.

And yet she somehow wrote a new book, the premise of which is hilariously wrong.  Her book is called Outrages: blah, blah, blah.  (I hate the academic practice of giving books pretentiously long titles with a portentous colon in the middle.)

(Although it can be a fun quirk to parody.  E.g.:  “The Unbearable Whiteness of Being: the Elizabeth Warren Story,” or “Cankles Falls at the Last Hurdle: How Hillary Clinton Snatched Defeat from the Jaws of Victory in the Most Shocking and Hilarious Upset in the History of the Known Universe.”)

Wolf’s thesis is that gay men were so oppressed in 19^th century England that they were routinely executed for having consensual sex.

Instead of going on tv with empty heads like Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo or anyone else at CNN or MSNBC, she made the fatal mistake of submitting to an interview on BBC radio with a man named Matthew Sweet.

Sweet played the dirtiest of dirty tricks: he did some research.  He found out that in British courts, the description that someone had been sentenced to “death recorded” meant not that they had been executed, but that they had been spared execution by a judge.

I’ll grant you that that phrasing is counter-intuitive, and that you or I would not have immediately reached that interpretation.  On the other hand, you or I have not spent the last year or more researching and writing a book on the treatment of gay men in 19^th century England.

But Naomi Wolf has.  And she never checked to see what “death recorded” actually meant. Which led to a beautiful exchange, live on the radio.

Sweet explained to her that a court case listing a gay man as being sentenced to “death recorded… doesn’t mean that he was executed…. I don’t think any of the executions you’ve identified here actually happened.”

After a stumbling response from Wolf, Sweet hammers in another nail.  Referring to the case of a Thomas Sylva, whom Wolf had cited, he says that he’s found “newspaper accounts and prison records which show the date of his discharge.”

Ouch!  But Sweet isn’t done.  Wolf had already laid out her idea that these death penalty sentences were egregiously applied to adult gay men in consensual relationships with other adults.  But Thomas Sylva was only 14.

Sweet goes in for the kill:  “Also, it’s the nature of the offense here.  Thomas Sylva committed an indecent assault on a six year old boy.”

So great job, Naomi Wolf.  You wrote an entire book based on the premise that gay men were routinely executed, when it turns out that they were not.  And you claimed that the non-fatal non-executions happened to adults who had consensual sex with other adults, but a case you cite involved a gay teen who raped a child.

Other than that, you nailed it!