Month: July 2019

I read perhaps the perfect summation of what it means to be a woke leftist in Town Hall last week.  The article is called “Sad Clown: Progressive Reporter Unfriends Old High School Pal Over a MAGA Hat.”

The title pretty much gives the plot away.  But the details are worth savoring.  It seems that a Think Progress reporter (and yes, I read “think” in that title as ironic, too) named Zack Ford is the open-minded leftist who was shocked when he came across a picture on FB of a high school friend of his celebrating Independence Day, with her daughter on her lap.  Worse, she was wearing a MAGA hat.

How does Che McWoke-ington react to that offensive image?

He says, “I really disagree with her political choice, but I’m not the boss of her.  As a committed leftist, I always mind my own business, so I’m going to wish her a happy Fourth, and continue our friendship for the rest of our lives.  The end.”

HA!  I kid.  He did pretty much the opposite of that.

After noting that “she and her family are evangelical Christians,” [Gross!] he explains that they had spoken respectfully in the past, and he had even stayed in her home.  But now she has crossed the line, because wearing that hat “violated this accord deeply.”

Isn’t that the way you discuss differences of opinion with your friends?  In terms of “accords” which must not be “violated”?  “Hey Ribbentrop, your inexcusable wearing of a St. Louis Cardinals hat has broken the social contract between us!  If you don’t apologize and burn that hat immediately, I’ll never speak to you again, or my name isn’t Fred Molotov!” (Yes, that was a timely Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact joke.  You’re not going to get that kind of top shelf humorous reference in your average Stephen Colbert monologue!)(Also, Molotov had a sinister Russian first name that I am not going to waste my valuable time looking up.)(Hence, Fred Molotov.)

Ford next went through a series of oh-so-deep thoughts.  First, “It’s not just a hat.  It’s a symbol of all of the oppression and injustice the Trump administration is responsible for.”  Okay.  That might sound stupid, if it weren’t backed up with a lot of solid evidence.  To wit: “It’s an endorsement of caging kids, banning Muslims, firing trans people… and the fascist military display that graced the National Mall last night.”

Great points, all!

Except that the caged kids pictures were taken when Obama was president, and Trump never banned Muslims, or fired trans people.  And that fascist parade featured two tanks and a couple of military fly-overs (as virtually every national parade and major SEC football game has featured since we figured out how to fly), as well as a non-partisan patriotic speech that even dullards like Ford couldn’t point to as objectionable.

But Ford is not dissuaded by such petty details as these.  No!  He is going to bless his old friend with his wisdom, in a teachable moment: “I explained all of this to my old friend.”  Insert a bunch of insulting smears about how that hat is an offensive symbol of all that is wrong with humanity.  “It’s unacceptable to me to be subjected to that symbol from someone with whom I hypothetically have mutual trust.”

Did you catch that?  Her choice of headwear is not to be accepted!

You may be starting to think that this dope takes himself a wee bit too seriously.  And the beginning of the next paragraph will not dissuade you from that impression: “I gave my friend an ultimatum. I told her I wouldn’t unfriend her so long as she apologized for wearing the hat and promised me I wouldn’t have to see it in my feed again.”

He’s giving his old friend an ultimatum — about her hat!

And the way he threatens to unfriend her suggests that anybody would logically regard that action as tantamount to being eternally damned. “If thou dost not repent of thy sartorial choice, I will cast you into the outer darkness, where my non-friends weep and gnash their teeth.  Thou art become like lukewarm water, which I must spew out of my mouth!”

Lighten up, Edsel.

Unfortunately, his benighted friend was foolish enough to object to his threat.  “When she claimed I was trying to police her beliefs, I corrected her, pointing out that my conditions only regarded the hat, not her position on any particular issue.”  See?  She can still cling to her stupid, deplorable, ungood thoughts – she just can’t wear the hat.

Did she modestly stand corrected and beg his forgiveness?  She did not.  “When she claimed that she’s equally offended by the Pride flag, I corrected her again, explaining that objecting to a symbol of inclusion is in no way comparable to objecting to a symbol of exclusion and that she was making a false equivalency.”

Thank God she has him there to correct all of her stupid wrong thoughts.  Also, FYI, this guy has the lefty buzzwords down pat.  As in, “I’m ‘inclusive’ in the way that I totally refuse to accept your hat, whereas you are ‘exclusive’ when you object to my gay flag.”

This genius goes on, adding a little theological twist: “Anyone reading this is free to wear a MAGA hat, but you can’t both wear a MAGA hat and claim to “love thy neighbor.”  First, thanks for granting us the freedom to choose what we wear.  Second, that sound you heard is not thunder – it’s God, face-palming himself over this guy’s misunderstanding of virtually everything.

“You can’t both wear a MAGA hat and claim to respect me or millions of other Americans.”  Don’t get ahead of yourself, there, Mr. Ford.   NO ONE respects you, and it has nothing to do with their choice of clothing.

As this bonehead is wrapping up his comically pompous screed, you’re probably thinking, “I can’t believe this guy didn’t play the other “greatest hits of leftism” theme: I’m a victim!”

You might want to sit down to read this next part: “My decision today to unfriend this individual was no simple purge; I am significantly emotionally wounded.”

There it is!  If we were playing BINGO on a card full of leftist clichés, Ford just dropped G-4, and Hans Landa just clapped his hands and said, “Oooohh, that’s a BINGO!”

When I first read that, I couldn’t help but think of my dad, who worked for the gas company.  One time when I was a teenager, he came home with his face wrapped in gauze, with holes for his eyes and mouth.  He had been working on a gas service in a ditch beside a house, and he lit his welding torch in a spot where the gas was supposed to have been turned off.  A roiling fireball went up the side of the house, scorching the siding.  My dad had closed his eyes tightly at the moment of the ignition, and he had deep crow’s feet around his eyes for almost two years afterward.  He had to put ointment on his forehead, he had spots in his vision for the next day or so, and my mom had to trim his beard to cut away the hair that had been singed.

He went back to work the next week.

Guess what he said at supper that night?  “I’m significantly emotionally wounded!”

HA!  I kid again.

He actually said that he was thankful to God, that it could have been much worse, that it was his own fault for not double-checking that the gas had dissipated from the ditch, and that he was very lucky to have a beard that protected most of his face.

I had THAT guy as a dad.  Thus I am the well-rounded Renaissance Man you see before you, a working dog, not a show dog, and a contributing member of society.

If Zack Ford somehow manages to have children – and I think the smart money is on “nope” – they are likely to be emotional hemophiliacs who live in a bubble and are allergic to everything.

Anyway, Ford is almost done: “Here was someone with a happy, clean, healthy child on her lap openly praising the man who has torn apart families and won’t even give kids soap. And when asked to choose between a hat that embodies that evil and someone she’s known half her life, she chose the hat.”

Good lord!  I don’t know that woman, but I still know that choosing that hat over this colossal wuss had to be one of the top 5 decisions that she ever made.  Also, she is a saint, if only because she knew Zack Ford for half her life and still managed not to give him the beatdown he so obviously deserves.  I mean, emotionally speaking.

Take it home, All-Knowing Zack: “My final words to her were: ‘Every time you wear the hat, you remember you lost a friendship over it. Every time.’ I know for sure I’ll now think of her every time I see a MAGA hat, and I’ll fear its corrupting power even more than I used to.”

This guy is the purest distillation of everything that is wrong with young leftists; he’s a nauseating combination of arrogance, unearned moral certainty, inflexible judgmentalism and a delusional view of the world and himself.

So… Avenatti/Ford, 2020!

Long-time readers of this column – and if that’s you, God bless you!  You’re the kind of people that this country needs more of – will know that most of the feedback I get is positive.  “You’re a hilarious genius!”  “My IQ goes up every time I read you.” “Your writing has saved my marriage.” “I want to give away my worldly possessions and follow you!”

That kind of thing.

But I do get negative feedback from time to time.  Most of that is the usual leftist repartee.  “You’re a sexist, racist, fascist homophobe,” and other examples of the human equivalent of those great apes whose most cogent response is to throw their scat at anyone who crosses their paths.

But the remainder of the critiques usually boil down to one thing: your pieces are too long!

When I first started hearing that, I dismissed it as the whining of those with a Youtube attention span.  I wondered whether these people would heckle Tolstoy at the local coffee shop.  “Hey, Leo, thanks for War and Peace.  I needed a big heavy door stop at home.  You couldn’t write a novella, just about War?  And then, maybe if that does well, a tight little sequel about Peace?”

Then it occurred to me that I was comparing myself to Tolstoy, whose quill pen I am obviously not fit to carry!  And I remembered that CO and Christopher Silber and many in CO nation regularly write pithy little pieces and responses that succeed like a professional bank robber: they get in, they get out, and nobody gets hurt.

So I’ve resolved to write some occasional shorter pieces, in a sort of “lightning round” format.  Although you may have noticed by now that I’m about 30 sentences into an explanation of how I’m going to write more concisely….  D’oh!

So, the lightning round:

1. Let’s get this out of the way: Elizabeth Warren is as white as Iceland during a snowstorm. #wemustneverstopmockingher

2. I haven’t written anything about journalist Andy Ngo getting assaulted by a bunch of Antifa creeps a couple of weeks ago, mainly because I’m a Christian, and seething with rage and typing obscenities in ALL CAPS doesn’t feel like the most “turn the other cheek” kind of action I could take.

In fact, you know one difference between Christ and me?  (There are a few.)  I don’t think He ever fantasized about coming up behind three masked cowards as they prepared to fracture the skull of an out-numbered little Cambodian-American gay guy, taking a batter’s stance, and knocking each of them unconscious with a Louisville slugger.  And I can’t see Him then gloating, “Oh, He went YAHHHHDDDD with that one!” like the Bear Jew in Inglorious Basterds.  (Also, do we not have rubber bullets anymore?  Is that not a thing in 2019?  If not, I know we have tasers, and those have hilarious results, with the bad guy locking up and then toppling like a redwood onto the concrete.)

3. Did you hear that Leana Wen is out as the head of Planned Parenthood only 10 months after she took over the job? (And if not now, Wen? HA!) Which should surprise no one, because her tenure lasted longer than three trimesters, but that’s never stopped the fine folks at P-squared from dropping the axe. Or scalpel, or scissors, or whatever.  Anyway, sorry about that Wen, but I guess you just weren’t viable.

4. I’ve got to write more later on the idiotic, hate-filled “Squad,” but for now, I’ll just mention the juvenile inanity of that nickname. It’s something that some self-conscious, cliquish and not-too-bright junior high girls would make up for themselves.

First it made me think of The Mod Squad, a tv show whose name I can forgive because it was the late 60s-early 70s, and everything was terrible.  (Plus, a young Peggy Lipton.  Giggity.)  Then it made me think of Suicide Squad, which I can forgive because it was about a bunch of comic book characters, none of whom want to be in congress.  (Plus, a young Margot Robbie.  Giggity giggity.)(I mean, if I had ever noticed her.)(Which I haven’t, since all other women became invisible to me after I met my wife.)(But still, if you put her in those shorts and pigtails, swinging that baseball bat into the mush-filled skulls of some Antifa members, I am so subscribing to that pay-per-view!)

So I refuse to call these anti-American miscreants “the Squad.”  In fact, since they’ve been rhetorically defecating on our country since they arrived in congress, I hope that everyone will start calling them “the Squat.”  You’re welcome.

5. While Trump’s “go back where they came from” comment was ham-handed and ill-advised, IMHO, I do understand (and agree with) the sentiment behind it. Xenophobes do sometimes use some variation of that phrase as a knee-jerk response to even valid criticism. But on the other hand, it speaks to an instinctive – and justified – reaction to people who come from elsewhere and then run down the place they moved to.

When I came to Florida from Illinois to go to grad school, I saw a similar sentiment on various license-plate frames and t-shirts: “We don’t care how y’all did it up north!” Now that I’ve been here for decades, I totally understand.  If everything is so great in New York, why did you move down here?!  Could it be that your leftist policies turned NYC into an open-air asylum where the greedy leftist government taxes you on both inhalations and exhalations?   Hence: Go back where you came from!

6. Finally, I saw a headline that raised my expectations sky high, because it warned of, and I quote, “meth gators.”

My first thought was: great name for a garage band.

My next thought was that some drug dealers have found an amazing new way to protect their stashes.  I’ve always hated (and Cassie the Wonder Dog wholeheartedly agrees) the way that those criminals abuse several big dog species – pitbulls especially, but sometimes Rottweilers or German shepherds – to turn them into vicious sentries.  The idea of using meth gators to keep your rival gangs at bay seemed like a perfect solution!

First, because Gators are not Man’s Best Friend, but soul-less apex predator dinosaurs, so they don’t need to have their sweet and loyal nature perverted to do their work.  Also, the idea of a bunch of violent criminals turning up in emergency rooms and morgues with gator-bite-sized chunks missing from their buttocks, abdomens or faces seems like a leap forward for society.

So imagine my disappointment when I read the story, and learned that is it about a Tennessee police department warning people not to flush drugs, to prevent them getting into the aquifer and creating the titular “meth gators.”  Even more disappointing, scientists discounted that idea, and the only example the department could provide of a “methed-up” animal was – and I am not making this up – “a caged ‘attack squirrel’ who was believed to have been given methamphetamine to keep it aggressive.”

So another dream of mine is dashed.

On the other hand, if we can put some R&D money into creating methed-up attack squirrels with a taste for the flesh of Bloods, Crips, biker gangs  (or – and I’m just running this idea up the ol’ flagpole — Squat members), that would not be the worst use of government funds I’ve ever heard of.

Avenatti/Epstein 2020!

Although I’m enjoying all of the entertaining feuding going on within the Democrat party, and between the Dems and Trump, I have a few thoughts about a story from last week that combines several of the things I hate most in the world: soccer, entitled young adults with ridiculously colored hair, and economic illiteracy.

I am speaking, of course, of the US Women’s soccer victory in the World Series of Soccer, or the Triple Crown, or whatever it’s called.  (If you just spoke out loud the correct name of the competition they won, you should be ashamed of yourself for having so poorly spent your life that you know the name of the Super Bowl of soccer.  We’re all going to be dead relatively soon, and you wasted some of your precious time – time that could have been spent reading a Shakespeare sonnet, or listening to Tom Waits singing, “Martha,” or drinking a chocolate milk shake – following soccer.  Hang your head in shame!)

Early on in their quest for the Stanley Cup – or whatever obscure trinket one “wins” for being good at soccer – the US women’s team was getting a lot of international condemnation for their “ugly American” behavior.  Apparently they beat a few very weak teams lopsidedly, and gloated over each run scored – I’m not up on the details of each game/match/bout/whatever, because each time I started trying to research the details, I fell into a sound sleep.

Most of the time, I’m not one to worry too much about what the international community thinks about American behavior, especially since “ugly Americanism” often means whipping the locals in sports or a world war.  But lefty “citizen of the world” types usually lose sleep over such things, and cannot stand to think that the Belgians or the Wakandans might be turning up their noses at us.  Which might account for why we didn’t hear so much about the US women’s soccer success early on in this year’s tournament/round robin/googly/whatever.

But when it turned out that one of our most prominent players is an anthem-hating, gay, leftist, Trump-despiser, the MSM jumped on the boredom bandwagon and made the Master’s of Soccer the biggest sports story of the year.

So I read a story about this woman, who is named Megan Rapinoe.  She looks like a young Tilda Swinton, with purple hair and a perpetual smirk. My first thought was that this is a youngster in her early 20s, and she is probably going through a phase that she will grow out of.  You know that she went through a goth thing in her sophomore year, and she’s got a few weird piercings, and she calls her step-dad “Brian” just because she knows how much that bugs him.

Then I found out that she was 34 years old!   Good lord!  When I first read her list of grievances, it sounded like a manifesto scrawled in purple ink by a teenager who just discovered Sylvia Plath and Howard Zinn, and finally knows the truth, man.  “Amerikka was founded by old white men to protect their money and to keep down women and people of color and the differently abled.  Also, male football players are paid way more than female soccer players!”

It was this last point – that female soccer players are woefully underpaid compared to their penile-American counterparts — that especially irritated me.  (I’d say “triggered me,” but I’m not a narcissistic undergrad with the mental fragility of a delicate porcelain mouse.) Because the equal pay mantra has been taken up by a lot of lefties, celebrities and MSM empty heads, and it is so dumb that it makes my teeth ache!

Of course, it’s no surprise that leftists don’t generally know much about economics – if they did, many of them wouldn’t be leftists.  (Some still would.  Because if you haven’t been reasoned into a position, you cannot be reasoned out of it.)  And you don’t have to try hard to find recent examples of absolute economic ignorance being spouted by nationally prominent Democrats in recent months:

• Bernie and the other socialists claim that removing the profit motive will produce inexpensive, high quality health insurance for all, with no rationing or wait lists.
• Various Dems think that doubling or tripling the minimum wage would help all unskilled workers, without causing any negative effects at all.
• AOC thinks that if NYC gives Amazon a tax break worth X million dollars, that means that NYC writes a check for that amount to Amazon from taxpayer funds.
• Elizabeth Warren thinks that she’s an Apache princess. (I know, that’s not an example of economic illiteracy at all.  But #wemustneverstopmockingher)

 

I would wager that not 10% of the Congress – and way fewer Dems – could explain even relatively straightforward economic fundamentals such as moral hazard, or the tragedy of the commons, or the Laffer Curve.

But this ain’t that! It’s a little basic supply and demand, and the kind of simple math that even Paul Krugman could do without taking off his shoes.

Rapinoe’s essential point is that the US women soccer team has been more successful than the men, so they should be paid at least the same or more.  She was thrilled that after the victory, many in the crowd chanted “equal pay,” and booed the head of the soccer organization, whoever he is.  She gave an interview calling on the organization to increase women players’ pay, saying, “It’s time to take it forward to the next step. A little public shame never hurt anybody, right? I’m down with the boos.”

She’s basically arguing that the women nag and browbeat the men running things until they cave in and give the carping harpies what they want.

Way to fight those gender stereotypes, Megan!

There are at least two ways to look at this issue, both of which quickly destroy Rapinoe’s position.  I’ll call one the “context-less judgment” test, and the other the “butts-in-seats” test.

The first would involve removing all context – in this case, the gender of the players – and rewarding whoever are the best players with the highest pay.  In other words, have the women’s pro soccer team play the men’s pro soccer team, see who’s better, and pay them accordingly.

A sane person might say, “But men and women are different.  Men are physically bigger and stronger, and they’d destroy the women.  That’s ridiculous.”

And as a fellow sane person, I would agree.  But good leftists like Megan Rapinoe and the Democrats in congress and the MSM could NOT agree. Because they’ve been telling us for years that gender is a social construct, and men and women are NOT different.  This would be a great chance for them to put their money where their genitalia are.

Wait.  That didn’t sound right.  But you know what I mean.

We don’t have to hypothesize who would win such a contest.  Because in 2017 a team of under-15-year-old boys played a scrimmage against the US Women’s Soccer team, and beat them by a score of 5-2.  To be fair, some have pointed out that the women likely didn’t play all-out because they were preparing for a tournament, and didn’t want to risk injury.  Still, do you think an NBA team – even one playing at half-speed, to avoid injuries – could ever come close to losing to some talented teen-age girls?  Or, for that matter, to the best WNBA team?

I don’t mention any of that to denigrate the women’s athletic talent.  But the same principle would hold true in almost every sport.  The best male college (and often, high school) players – in tennis, soccer, basketball, baseball, wrestling, track, golf, etc. – would dominate the best female pro athletes in the world.  Because men and women are different.  (This report brought to you by Commodore Obvious.)

And since those under-15 boys get paid zero dollars, while the US women are paid millions, wouldn’t that mean that the women are wildly over-paid?

No, it wouldn’t.  Because of the “butts-in-seats” test.

In even a quasi- free market economy, pay rates for jobs in sports, entertainment and the arts are based on how many fans pay for the product.  Two bands might put identical amounts of work into creating an album; if one bombs and one’s a hit, the latter is paid way more.  Two actors might work equally hard on two movies; if fans stay away from one movie and see the other one, one actor gets paid way more.

I learned this painful lesson first-hand.  In my late 20s, I wrote 5 novels.  They were competent but not great – I think I’m a better writer now – and I was able to interest two different agents, but the novels ultimately didn’t sell.  I put several thousand hours into them, and earned a total of zero dollars.  At the same time, Stephen King and Tom Clancy also wrote 5 novels each, and they earned millions from theirs.  Because millions of people were willing to buy them.

Did you hear me whining about how unfair life is, or how the publishing world is biased against ruggedly handsome young unknown authors?  Did I try to shame the government into paying me for writing books that nobody wanted to buy?

You did not.  Because I’m not a purple-haired, leftist, gyno-American goon.

In the past year, men’s soccer competitions have raised $6 billion, while women’s games have raised $131 million.  According to my golden abacus, that means that the men’s teams brought in around 45 times as much as the women’s did.  If Rapinoe could put some more butts in seats – and be less of a giant arse in interviews – she would be earning a piece of a much larger pie.

Rapinoe herself seemed to acknowledge the real root of the problem.  When she was being interviewed by cute little guy Rachel Maddow, Rapinoe was asked what fans can do to support the fight for equal pay.  Her answer undercut her entire “blame sexism” argument: “Fans can come to games…. [W]e have nine teams in the NWSL. You can go to your league games. You can support that way. You can buy players’ jerseys, you can lend your support in that way. You can tell your friends about it, you can become season ticket holders.”

Everything she said was true.  The bottom line is that almost none of us want to watch soccer, and fewer than that want to watch women’s soccer.

I call that an encouraging sign of the health of our culture.

Did you wake up the last several days to find that life seemed emptier, somehow?  That the sun is shining a little less brightly, that food has lost its savor, that your affection for your spouse has dulled a bit?  That my writing seems a little less entertaining or hilarious?

That might be because Eric Swallwell has dropped out of the Democrat presidential race.

But probably not.  Because even Mrs. Swallwell and whatever little Swallwells there may be were not excited about his candidacy.

Don’t despair, though, because as non-entity Swallwell was dropping out, billionaire Tom Steyer was getting into the race.  Which means that the declared Democrat candidate count holds steady at 138,756 candidates.

As I sat and stared into my coffee — wondering how I was going to go on, now that we won’t have Swallwell to kick around anymore — it occurred to me that it might be fun to write a brief political obituary for each of the Democrat candidates, as they begin to drop, one by one.

So here’s the first in what might end up being a series: A fond farewell to Eric Swallwell.

“After an inconsequential career as a Congressman from California, little-known Swallwell shocked the world when he announced his candidacy for the most powerful office in the world.  Or he would have, if anyone in the world had heard anything about it.  He ran an inconsequential campaign, his greatest accomplishment being to remind voters that Joe Biden is very old – a fact which is not exactly as mysterious as the contents of Obama’s college transcripts.  He was not respected, or even noticed, and he will not be missed.”

 

Speaking of leftist pols who would not be missed, I give you Florida congresswoman Frederica Wilson.  If you don’t remember her, she’s the African-American loon who always wears ridiculous cowboy pimp hats, and says very dumb things.  (How can you tell her apart from the rest of the Democrats in congress, you ask?  She’s the one wearing the cowboy pimp hat.)  You might remember her from my discussion of the way she bungled her attempt to accuse Trump of bungling a condolence call to an army widow, posted last January.  (You can read that column by going to Martinsimpsonwriting.com, and go back to January 13, 2018 in the archives.)

The latest stupid thing she said may be stupider than the stupid things she was saying last January.  She went to a detention center on the border last week, and when a reporter asked her for her thoughts, this is the best she could come up with:  “Those people who are online, making fun of members of Congress, are a disgrace and there is no need for anyone to think that is unacceptable.”

I know that the double-negative rule can be confusing, especially if your 10-gallon hat is cutting off blood flow to your half-gallon brain.  But the rule is that two negatives cancel each other out.  For example, to say “I’m not going to say that Frederica is not a moron,” means, “I’m saying she’s a moron.”

And that’s what I’m saying.

Her statement actually means that there is a need to think that mocking leftist politicians is acceptable.  Which you know is NOT what she meant to say, because it makes perfect sense.

She goes on to say, “We’re going to shut them down and work with whoever it is to shut them down, and they should be prosecuted.”  She’s probably referring to the Federal Department of Shutting People Down.  You don’t know fear until you’ve heard that the FDSPD is on your trail!

“You cannot intimidate members of Congress, threaten members of Congress. It is against the law in this United States of America,” she said.  Notice how she conflates making fun of someone to intimidating and/or threatening them.

I’ve obviously got a dog in this fight, because if mocking leftist politicians was a crime, I’d be eligible for the death penalty.  But it really is amazing to get a glimpse into the “thinking” (if you can call it that) of this leftist politician.

She’s an outlier in terms of her taste in comical headgear, but I fear that she’s not an outlier when it comes to her disdainful attitude toward the voters, and her own exalted position.  She really does think that not only should she not be criticized, but that it should be a crime to criticize her.

On the other hand, I’m glad that she’s in congress, if only because every time Liz Warren sees her, she almost jumps out of her (super-white) skin.  Because there’s nothing that scares a faux Indian like a faux cowboy.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

 

Finally, I’ve got to comment on the way that Old Joe Biden flip flopped yet again, this time on whether Cory Booker is owed an apology.

When Spartacus first slandered Joe as a racist several weeks ago, Joe showed a little fire in the belly; when a reporter asked him if he’d apologize to Booker, Joe said no way, and suggested that Booker should apologize to him.  But as usual, Joe’s firmly held, bedrock conviction withstood the storm of strongly worded mewlings from a bunch of woke scolds for around two weeks, after which he broke down and groveled, apologizing to Booker.

Did Booker respond with class and maturity?

He’s Cory Booker.  So, no.

He started out saying that he always likes to extend grace to others, so he appreciates Biden’s apology.  Then he spent several paragraphs tearing down Biden: Booker is “frustrated that [Biden’s apology] took so long… and he was “hurt” that Biden’s comments were directed at him.  He said, “I’m sorry we went through all this and I’m sorry he tried to shift blame to me. But I’m grateful. I want to say thank you. We need to extend grace to each other.”

We’ve all heard of the “non-apology apology,” wherein somebody says, “I’m sorry if you misunderstood my comments.”  But now Cory Booker has created the “non-acceptance acceptance,” along with the “graceless extension of grace.”

This exchange lowered my opinion of Spartacus – which I would not have thought was possible – and left me with two thoughts.

First, I’ve mentioned before that CNN hack reporter Brian Stelter looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb, and that CNN hack boss Jeff Zucker looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb with glasses.  I don’t know how I never noticed it before, but Cory Booker looks like a brown, giant, dishonest human thumb.

Second, he’s becoming so creepy that I’m having to re-think calling myself Martacus.  I originally did that just to mock him, and then I continued doing it because I like the sound of it, and to continue drawing a contrast between someone making a self-referential joke, and a pompous dope like Booker, who meant his self-flattering “Spartacus” label deadly seriously.

But if he continues getting slimier, I may have to come up with another tongue-in-cheek self-aggrandizing name for myself.

So far I’ve only come up with “The Count of Marty Cristo,” but I’m still working on it.

And, oh yes:  Avenatti/Epstein 2020!

In a post on Breitbart, John Nolte argued that this past week was the worst for the Democrats in 47 years, and when the man’s right, he’s right.

He pointed to 9 examples, many of which involve either current economic strengths that the Left has to deny, or the increasingly far-left positions which the Dem candidates are taking to out-flank each other, most of which clash with the positions of the political middle that both parties try to appeal to in a general election.

Nolte also mentioned the way the Left managed to express their contempt for American patriotism – and on Independence Day, to boot!  First, there was Nike’s idiotic decision to accept Colin Kapernick’s objection to the Betsy Ross flag and pull a line of patriotism-themed shoes.

Sidebar, because I have to get this off my chest:  Kapernick was a talented quarterback, and entertaining to watch, for about a season and a half.  Then he had an injury, and his performance deteriorated, and he was benched.  Then he became a woke racial arsonist and a secular leftist saint, and suddenly everyone – or at least everyone who doesn’t know anything about football – is acting like he is a great quarterback, suffering for his political opinion.

To the contrary, he’s a mediocre quarterback, and he lost his starting position because he played badly.  And as a political thinker, he’s … a mediocre quarterback.  Every statement he’s made over the last 3 years is grounds for performing a concussion protocol on him, and all of his political insight rolled together wouldn’t fill the thimble that Betsy Ross used when she was sewing the flag of a great nation!

Not satisfied with having wiped their posteriors with the Betsy Ross flag, the Leftist elite thought they’d do the same thing with the 50-stars version on the Fourth of July.  They objected to a DC parade, and to our jets doing a flyover, and to tanks, because military participation in a parade is something only evil fascists would stoop to.  (Cut to 37 hours of video footage of military parades under FDR and Truman and Ike, not to mention a sweet little missile-palooza passing in front of JFK.)  They compared the 4^th festivities to military parades from the kind of totalitarian leftist regimes they now pretend to dislike, such as the USSR and Porky Nork’s and the Chi Coms.  They said that no one was going to show up, and that Trump’s speech was going to be a partisan screed.

And then the crowds were big, and the flyovers were cool, and there were 2 tanks, and Trump’s speech did not attack Dems and was pro-American, and the pop music was terrible but the fireworks were great. And regular people enjoyed it.

In retrospect, all of the dire, leftist warnings before the Fourth now look sour, petty and ridiculous.  The same way that Paul Krugman’s election-night prediction that the stock market would plunge and never recover under Trump now looks ridiculous.  And Hillary’s CAW CAW CAWing about how Trump wouldn’t accept the results of the election now looks ridiculous.  And the Democrats’ Jeremiads about how Trump’s election would immediately lead to Holocaust 2 and World War 3 now look ridiculous.  And Snow White Warren’s pretending to be a Choctaw now looks ridiculous.

I know, that last one has nothing to do with Trump.  But #wemustneverstopmockingher.

The Dems’ collective self-inflicted rake-stomping injuries during the Fourth makes that Dem hack who brought the ceramic chicken to a House hearing look like King Solomon.  They’ve found a way to combine the worst aspects of the Chicken Little story with the worst aspects of the Boy Who Cried Wolf story, all wrapped up in the blind narcissism from the Emperor’s New Clothes story.

They’ve become the Naked Ceramic Chicken Who Cried Wolf!

Okay, that sounded better in my head that it looks written down.

Moving on…

Nolte also pointed out the self-destructive way that Joe Biden, after posing as the one sane Democrat of 2019, flip flopped and went far left on every reasonable position he ever had, from taxpayers being forced to pay for late-term abortions, to raising taxes on everyone to ending the deportation of illegals.  That Biden was ever seen as “the sane one” in the first place is a damning indictment of the Dem presidential field.

But Nolte’s column suffered the same fate as any column on Biden’s gaffes is destined to: by the time it appeared, it was already outdated.  Because Plugs McGaffe-Master was at work on brand new, mortifying mistakes.

On Friday, for example, Biden gave an interview with Chris “block of petrified wood” Cuomo, during which he lambasted Putin’s election interference attempts all over the world, including in Europe, and specifically in Hungary and Poland.   He ended that paragraph with this quote, which I swear I am not making up: “You think that would happen on my watch or Barack’s watch? You can’t answer that, but I promise it wouldn’t have, and it didn’t.”

Um….  Joe, your entire party has been outraged FOR TWO SOLID YEARS about the way that Putin interfered with our very own election in the EXACT way you just described.  And do you know when they have been saying that this happened?

In 2015 and 2016, Joe.  Do you remember what we call that dark period in our mist-enshrouded, distant past?  YOUR WATCH!!  (Cue Sam Kinison: OH! OHHHH!)

Ugh.  But that’s not the most enjoyable Biden gaffe of the last several days, IMHO.  In fact, it’s not even his best gaffe of Friday!

Nope.  That would be when Biden accidentally referred to little-known sweaty hack candidate Julian Castro as “Julio.”  Thus setting off a scalded-dog howl from woke scolds everywhere that Biden is a racist old white guy who can’t tell one Hispanic-named non-entity from another.

As odd as it is to say, I’m on Joe’s side on this one.  You may remember Simpson’s Law of Stupid Spellings, which states that none of us are bound to mis-pronounce the idiotically spelled names of others.  (For example, must we call Brett “Favre” Brett “Farve?” We must not.  Similarly, must we refer to Obama’s former flunky “Jeh Johnson” as “Jay?” No weh.)

So along comes Julian Castro, and he wants his name to be pronounced “Hoo-lian.”

I don’t think so.  Did “hoo-lius Caesar” give us the “hoo-lian” calendar?  Do we celebrate our independence on the “Fourth of Hoo-ly?”  Did Shakespeare write about Romeo and Hoo-liette?  Would Batman ever have been tempted by the feline charms of “Hoo-lie Newmar” as Catwoman?  No, no, no and don’t be ridiculous!

I’m sure that in Joe Biden’s old, cobwebby, low-functioning brain, he registered that Castro has a Hispanic-sounding first name, and the feeble, intermittent sparking in what passes for his synapses spit out the little ditty about “Me and Julio down by the schoolyard.”  Thus, “Julio” Castro.

In the spirit of bipartisan compromise, I would give Mr. Castro “Julio” if that were his name, because it’s a Hispanic name without an equivalent English pronunciation.  But “Julian” has a recognized English pronunciation, and the unifying language of the country for whose highest office he is running is English.

But I’m still willing to meet him halfway.  I’ll agree to a pronunciation of his first name that differs from its spelling, if he’ll agree to allow me to choose the most fitting non-literal pronunciation: “Fidel.”

 

Finally, let’s turn from the laughable antics of our home-grown lefty clowns to the laughable antics of lefty clowns in Belgium.

You may have read about the way that many Europeans have been inviting huge numbers of mostly uneducated, low-skilled immigrants – most of them from Muslim-ruled countries – to pour into their countries in recent years.  Shockingly, things have not gone so well, what with lawless “no go” zones in Paris, and crime rates against women and gays skyrocketing, and reinvigorated anti-Semitism everywhere.  Plus some truck bombs, and some train bombs, and some cartoonists getting murdered here and there.

As in the States, many of the elites pushing the hardest for open borders just happen to live in walled, gated, wealthy and protected neighborhoods.  But one young Belgian woman named Ameline (possibly pronounced “Hoo-lian.”) deserves more credit, because she was willing to put her Euros where her big mouth was.  She lives in a Belgian village with the cool/weird name of Spy, and about a year ago she began inviting immigrants to set up camp on her own property.  Before you know it, word got around in the migrant squatter community, and she soon had around 100 migrants living in tents on her property.

When I first read about this story earlier this year, I decided to do some prognosticating.  So I opened the well-lit, climate-controlled cabinet where I keep my extensive hat collection, and I pulled out my tax-deductible wizard hat.  I sat down at my desk, put it on, and wrote down a few predictions.

The power of the wizard hat is such that I spontaneously made a couple of predictions on other topics before I could focus on Ameline/Hoolian.  (I predicted that after receiving an initial media tongue-bath, Beta o’Rourke would become a skateboarding laughingstock, and that the Mueller report would make the Democrat leadership look dumber than the Skateboarding Doofus.)(Done and done.)

Then I predicted that Ameline’s utopian experiment would end badly.

For a while, it looked like the mighty wizard hat might have faltered.  Breitbart posted a story about her in April, which initially sounded like she was sticking to her guns.  The story referred to some neighbors who were upset, and mentioned that Ameline had tried to placate them by moving some of the migrant tents a short distance.  When the local police said that they might try to forcibly move some migrant tents out of the area, Ameline sounded like a smarter Belgian AOC:  “I respect the work of the police and the commune. If they come, they come but not on my private land! That’s for sure!”

But as I read between the lines, it sounded like this Belgian might be beginning to waffle.  (HA!)  At one point the story noted that Ameline and her family had been feeding and cleaning for the migrants, but quoted her as saying, “We try to do our best … but it’s not easy for us, we are starting to become exhausted.”

Fast forward three months, to last Friday, and Breitbart did a follow-up story, entitled, “Woman Who Invited Migrants to Camp In Her Garden Now Demands They Leave.”

The details are about what you’d expect, if you were wearing a magnificent wizard hat like mine:  There were “incidents of aggression and violence.”  The situation deteriorated until the family “stopped all aid to the migrants,” citing alcohol and violence and the statement that, “We did not feel safe anymore.”

If only other countries who are considering opening their borders to millions of unvetted migrants could hear this story, and learn its crucial lesson: Respect the Wizard Hat!

As my previous column ended, I was discussing the pandering awfulness of Spartacus and Julian “Fidel” Castro speaking Spanish for no legitimate reason.  However, as difficult as it may be to believe, their “Me habla bovine excremento” (my Spanish is really rusty, but I think I got that translation right) moments were NOT the low points for either of them.

Booker’s nadir came when he played the race card – which in his case has been used so often that the suit and card number have been rubbed completely off -to go after an even tinier slice of the Democrat base: the black transgender community.  (Or as they are also known, Jamal, Marcus and Larry.)

Quoth Spartacus:  “Look, civil rights is someplace to begin, but in the African American civil right community, another place to focus was to stop the lynching of African Americans.”  Yes, and just in the nick of time, Rip Van Booker!  Although to be fair, virtually all lynchings of black people were carried out by Democrats, so at least Cory is addressing the right audience.

He went on: “We do not talk enough about trans Americans, especially African American trans Americans and the incredibly high rates of murder now.”

My math is even rustier than my Spanish, and it’s been a long time since I did any algebra.  But I vaguely remember that there’s a rule that allows you to cancel out any identical numbers repeated on both sides of an equation.

So if you have African Americans on one side, and trans Americans on the other, does the “American” on both sides go away, leaving us with “trans Africans?”  And would those be Asians or Latinos who identify as Africans, or Africans who used to be black but are now on their way to becoming Rachel Dolezal?   My head hurts!

So let me pull out my abacus, and work on some simpler statistics:  Black folks make up about 13% of Americans.  Trans people make up about .0001% of all people.

Okay, now my fingers are cramping, and my abacus beads have started to smolder from being frantically slid back and forth.  But right before the beads burst into flame, I arrived at the same sum for the black transgender community:  Jamal, Marcus and Larry.

So what can Spartacus mean when he refers to “the incredibly high rate of murders” in the trans black community?  Wouldn’t ANY murder in a group that small constitute an “incredibly high” rate?

For example, what if the entire black trans community was holding a convention – say, in the back of a Honda Odyssey – when a member of a rival group such as the trans Aleutian community (yes – Nanook him/herself) leaps in, flips down the empty third-row cargo seat, and harpoons Jamal right through his or her Adam’s apple?  Which may or may not be very prominent, because I really don’t understand this whole situation?

Now you’ve got two problems:  1. How are the NYC cops going to come up with a fair line-up that can survive judicial review?  (Six people stand in front of a blank wall facing a one-way glass, holding up numbered signs in front of them.  Numbers 1-5 are two black cops, a mixed-race parole officer, a Hispanic janitor and a Puerto Rican bodega owner.  Number 6 is an eskimo in a blood-flecked fur-lined parka.) 2. There is now a 33% murder rate in the trans black community.

Good lord, where was I?

Oh yeah.  Castro’s lowest moment.

Not to be out-pandered by Spartacus – and not willing to forfeit the potential votes of Marcus and Larry (RIP, Jamal!) – Castro played the gender confusion card.  (FYI – that card looks like a cross between a Queen, a suicide King and a one-eyed Jack.)

He opened with the most reliable trick in the Democrat book: a meaningless slogan:  “I’m not just for abortion rights, I’m for abortion fairness.”

Of course the audience went nuts, applauding as if they had any idea what that meant.

Speaking of which, the Trained Seals Union Local 107 should be filing a grievance over the way the Dem audience impinged on their turf by applauding mindlessly at every lame talking point.

Castro quieted the hooting and bashing of flippers by explaining: he wants the government to pay for trans women to have abortions, too.

Read that again, and savor the sagacity of the Party of Science™.  And then let’s walk through the chain of “logic” behind that statement.

1.“Trans women” are biological males.

2. Biological males can never ever, ever become pregnant.

3. Even if pregnant biological males did as the Dems want, and aborted about 75% of their babies, 75% of zero is still zero.

Which means – stay with me here… that this might be the stupidest campaign promise ever.  But simultaneously, it might be the smartest campaign promise ever, because it will create the first government program that will NEVER cost anyone even a single penny!

Maybe we should take a page from Castro’s book, and see what kind of cost-less promises that we can make.  How about free pap smears for every American male, for life?  Free testicular exams for American women?  A free lifetime supply of diet meals for Michael Moore?

 

But it wasn’t just the audience – the moderators were terrible, too.  A lowlight came from Savannah Guthrie, a leftist robot who often grills Republicans mercilessly (as well she should).  She once blasted Paul Ryan about a GOP tax plan, ending with the question, “Are you living in a fantasy world?”

So what tough, inside pitch did she hurl at Beta, after he dodged a question about what top tax rate he would support?  “Would you support a 70 percent individual marginal tax rate? Yes, no, or pass?”

I am not making that up.  She offered a politician the third option of passing on a tough question!

Can you imagine a world in which an MSM empty head did that for any conservative or GOP pol?  It would certainly change the tone the next time Jim Acosta confronted Trump at a press conference: “Some of your critics call you the worst president ever, but others say you’re more like Hitler.  Would you say that you’re more like an awful president, or more like Hitler, or should I just go “eff” myself?”

I’m going to take door #3 there, Jimbo.

 

The commentary after the debates focused on the big moment when Kamala went after Old Joe on race and busing.  To do so, she employed the “magic but.”

And no, that’s not the set-up for a Kardashian joke, nor a reference to how Kamala got started in politics.

It’s the slimy rhetorical tactic of claiming good intentions, and then belying those good intentions with an immediate, under=handed attack.  Kamala started out saying, “I don’t think you’re racist, but…”  And then she spent the next 10 minutes calling Biden a racist.

If Joe had any fire in his belly besides acid reflux, he’d have thrown it right back at her: “I don’t think you’re some kind of desperate, soul-less political hooker.  But you did start your career in the bed of a withered old married leftist power broker who then gave you your first two political jobs.  Did you use all of that time on your back, staring at Willie Brown’s ceiling, to come up with the ideas that you wanted to campaign on?”

THAT response would have shown that Plugs was in this to win it.  What did he do instead?

He mounted a half-hearted defense that was starting to gain momentum, until he stopped himself mid-sentence and said, “My time’s up, sorry.”

You can say that again.

For better or worse, winning candidates need to be aggressive.  They punch back, they go on the attack, they bulldoze through a moderator’s warning that their time is up in order to finish their point.   But the moderator wasn’t even trying to interrupt old Joe – he just pre-emptively took himself out.

Would that the other Dem contenders had the good sense to do the same.

I see three main winners from the first round of Dem debates:

1. Kamala Harris seems to have been the consensus “winner,” because she was aggressive and pandering in the way that lefty voters seem to like. (I.e. she raised a bunch of dishonest points in a dirty way.)
2. Donald Trump. By going so far left and providing so much rich material for attack ads for whomever finally gets the Dem nod, they have made Trump’s re-elect campaign easier.  While I can definitely picture Trump losing in 2020, can anyone easily imagine any of these small, extremist boneheads winning the presidency?  I think if Trump showed up on the stage with all 20-something of them, it would be the political equivalent of one of the set pieces in a John Wick movie, with Trump as Keanu.

He’d stride into the scrum and glide through a series of movements that were half ninja, half ballet, dropping one flailing leftist dope after the next with a rapid-fire sequence of headshots, stopping only long enough to slap in a fresh clip of ammo each time he was out.

3. The other main winner: Michael Avenatti! If anyone can make the creepy porn lawyer look better by comparison, it’s this cavalcade of numbskulls.

Avenatti 2020!

Leo Tolstoy opened his novel Anna Karenina with the observation that, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

After having watched the first two Democrat debates, I would like to amend Tolstoy’s dictum:  Sane politicians may be alike, but each Democrat on the stage last week was insane in his/her/its own way.

Consider Marianne Williamson.

Enough said.

No, seriously.  Her big idea is that she will govern with the Power of Love.  (And yes, when asked to name her most admired political philosopher, she named Huey Lewis, circa 1985.)

Or consider the following Democrats on stage in one of the two nights:  Tim Ryan, Jay Inslee, John Delaney, John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet.

I am more of a political junkie than most, and I don’t know who any of those people are.  Though to be fair, all of these nobodies would make better presidents than any of the top tier (?) Dem candidates, if only because it would be metaphysically impossible to do worse.

Bernie Sanders’ act has now become old hat.  I mean VERY old hat.  As in those steel, pointed-at-both-ends conquistador hats.  Four years ago he ran as a 104-year-old man, and although only four years have passed, he is now somehow 112.  When I hear “Bernie 2020,” I momentarily catch myself wondering if that is his age.

But it’s not just his age that disqualifies him, of course.  It’s that his ideas – which were way too extreme four years ago – have now been coopted by the 20+ dwarves around him.  So if you are a leftist dolt who loves socialism, why not choose one of the others who has a decent chance of surviving through at least one term as president, rather than the wild-haired crank who is likely to plotz halfway through his inaugural address?

How about Eric Swalwell?

Ugh.  First, his last name bugs me.  It sounds like “small” and “swell,” and somehow both of those associations feel right about him.  More substantively, Little E knows better than you do whether you should be able to have a gun, like the constitution says.  (Spoiler alert: you shouldn’t.)  His big moment was to remind everyone that he’s a lot younger than Joe Biden.

Well guess what, Eric?  Everybody (other than Bernie, and Mummy Pelosi, if she’s around) within a 100-mile radius is younger than Joe Biden.  That’s not reason enough to vote for you.

 

Speaking of “no reason to vote for someone,” how about that giant, terrible mayor of NYC – the leftist mayor so bad that even New York leftists don’t like him.  His name should actually be spelled phonetically – “duh” plus “blah” and then “zio” – because you can’t think of him without a “blah” and an even bigger “duh.”

But he had good company on the first night, when one of the partisan hack moderators – it doesn’t matter which one – asked for a show of hands from those who would abolish private health insurance in favor of government health care, and only Grandma Squanto joined him.  Put on your ceremonial face paint and do your death dance, Lizzie, because you have just disqualified yourself from the presidency.

Or she should have, if half of the electorate wasn’t crazy for Crazy Horse.   (Worst breakfast cereal jingle ever.) (Also, #wemustneverstopmockingher)

But she seems to have gotten a bump out of her debate performance, which surprises me, even though she is plainly being helped by a combination of the MSM pushing her candidacy, and the far-left audience’s eating up her far-left prescriptions.  She gets such an absurd amount of credit for her ridiculous “I’ve got a plan for that!” nostrum.

It’s easy to have a plan for every situation, when the plan is identical for every situation: more government intervention!

You know who else has a plan for every situation?  A none-too-bright toddler with a square peg in each chubby little hand, sitting in a room, surrounded by toy boards filled with round holes.  If you walked into that room and saw little AOC (I’ll call her, hypothetically), pounding her square peg ineffectually against all of the round holes, you’d say, “Sweetie, what are you doing there?”

And she’d say, “I got… I gotta… I got plan.”

And you’d say, “What’s your plan?”  And she’d slam the pegs manically against the holes for two minutes straight, never seeming to tire of her futile task.

And you’d say, “Why don’t you take your Ritalin and a nap, and stay far, far away from the white house?”

My favorite moment of the first night was when Skateboarding Doofus got his first question about tax rates, and started yammering a non-answer in Spanish.  It was such a cheesy and idiotic move, and I’ve come to expect nothing less from Mr. Wild Gesticulator.  (Worst Spiderman villain ever.)  Does he not understand that even though a lot of people in this country speak Spanish, the vast majority of them also speak English – and the vast majority of Americans do NOT speak Spanish?  And that he’s running for President of America?

We American voters get irritated when our ATM makes us opt out of Spanish before we can withdraw cash. (“Am I in Tijuana?” I incredulously ask my 17-year-old daughter, who rolls her eyes and says, “Let me guess, dad.  The bank wants to know if you want to proceed in Spanish?”  And I put on a wide-eyed, exaggerated look of Cory Booker-esque confusion as I bend to look into the card slot, “Do you think this machine thinks it is in Chiapas?” And my daughter looks to the skies and says, “Dios Mio!”  I raise my hand to her and say, “Give me cinco,” but she turns on her heel to go wait in the car. )

(And, scene.)

That being the case, how do you think most of us feel when we can’t watch a bunch of socialists bicker and beclown themselves without keeping an English-Spanish dictionary handy?

I really enjoyed the incredulous look that Spartacus gave La Beta, so much so that I almost had a brief moment of respect for Spartacus, thinking that he might be on the verge of calling out Beta’s ridiculous pandering with the Spanish talk.  But the moment passed, when Booker then started speaking in Spanish too!  By the time Julian Castro started with the “me llamo Sweaty Loser,” it was old sombrero (HA!), but at least he had the excuse of actually being Hispanic.

Beta’s espanol moment taught me three things:

1. There is nothing that that goofball won’t do to pander to a minority audience.
2. He still didn’t answer the straightforward question, proving that he’s not just vacuous – he’s bilingually vacuous!
3. I am indeed not cut out to run for the president on the leftist moron ticket. If I found myself on that stage, and then out of nowhere all of my competitors started speaking Spanish, I would first wonder whether they were having strokes, and then realize how screwed I was.

Because I’d have to fall back on all of the Spanish I learned as a kid.  I would stammer, “Silencio, por favor, Martino.”  And then mutter, “Yo quiero, taco bell.”  And then mumble, “Aye, yi yi yi, I am the Frito Bandito!”  And then be pelted off stage for my crude racial stereotyping.

More to come in Part 2…

The two Dem debate nights have momentarily left me speechless in horror.  So I thought I’d mention a few other things that caught my attention this week.

First, Elizabeth Warren is really obnoxious.

I know: not exactly breaking news.  But every time I see her, or hear her speak, my dislike for her grows.  I think she may be on the verge of elbowing aside Hillary as the most grating, entitled, hate-filled, phony old super-white (not that there’s anything wrong with that) lady on the planet.

What got me this time was a short video from last Saturday, in which several people sang a rousing version of Happy Birthday to her.  Afterwards, she said, “What better way to celebrate my birthday than right here at Planned Parenthood?”

You can’t make that up.  Grandma Squanto is thrilled to celebrate her birthday at a place dedicated to profiting from preventing millions of birthdays.  How does somebody say something that creepy without hearing herself?

That’s all I have to say to you, Lizzie: How?

(Get it?  #wemustneverstopmockingher)

 

In other news, Mayor Pete had a little richly deserved trouble at a town hall meeting in South Bend.  An African-American man had been shot and killed by a cop earlier in June in the Indiana metropolis (just smaller than Evansville, and larger than Hammond – so obviously being mayor there totally qualifies one to be the Leader of the Free World).  The cop’s body camera was not on at the time, which protestors took to mean the obvious: a murderous white racist cop purposely switched off the camera before gunning down a totally innocent minority guy.

The national MSM is using the case as an opportunity to lecture on the terrible racial history of America, and is simultaneously doing its best to NOT report the details of this specific case.   Which, as best I can tell from scanning the local paper’s coverage, are these:

The cop got a call in the middle of the night about a man breaking into cars.  The cop responded, and said that he found the suspect in one of the cars.   When the cop asked him if that was his car, the suspect said it was.  (Spoiler alert: It was not.) The cop said that the suspect had a purse and a knife, and when he told the man to drop the knife, he charged the cop, superficially cutting him before the cop shot him.  It turned out the knife and purse came from two of six cars that had been burglarized earlier than night, and the suspect had done time for drug dealing and illegal gun possession in the past.

Obviously, racism is a terrible thing, and a wicked part of human nature that has caused disproportionate suffering in the black community.  But the Democrats have been fanning the flames of racial hatred for so long, encouraging the black community’s most extremist positions and anti-white members.   They’ve pretended to believe in racial hoaxes like those perpetrated by Tawana Brawley and Jussie Smollett, and that Michael Brown was a “gentle giant.”  They’ve treated despicable Al Sharpton as a revered party elder.

They’ve sowed the wind, and now Mayor Pete got a little taste of reaping the whirlwind.  A crowd of angry black people screamed and taunted him, and then shouted him down when he tried to reply to their accusations.

It’s sad to contemplate the effects of the increasing racial polarization in the country, but there is at least a little grim satisfaction in seeing some of the animosity turned back on the representatives of the party that has spread the racial poison.    Maybe Mayor Pete’s problem will give the Dems pause, though that’s not where the smart money is.

Regardless, they’d do well to consider that the mob might not always target some phantom Trump supporters in MAGA hats, or Kentucky high school kids.  It may someday turn on small, smug men like Mayor Pete.

 

And just when you think that the HJT (hateful jihadi twins) can’t get any weirder, Ilhan Omar asks an aide to hold her hummus and watch this.

It turns out that she’s had a colorful marital history.  (And there’s my entry for “euphemism of the year.”  It’s got tough competition from “women’s reproductive health” (i.e. abortion), but I like my chances.)    The story is too tangled to be sure of the details, but the gist of it is this:

Within the last 20 years or so, Mullah Omar – sorry, Ilhan Omar — has spent some of the time that she saved (by NOT writing “thank you” letters to the United States for rescuing her from the oppressive hellhole where she was born) on marrying a couple of guys in the most confusing way possible.  In 2002 she sort of married a guy I’ll call “Ahmed.”  Because that’s his name.

How does one “sort of” marry someone?  Good question.

She applied for a marriage license with him, but never completed it.  But she married him in her “religious tradition,” and had two kids with him, before divorcing in 2008.  Except that she couldn’t really divorce him, because they weren’t really married.  Maybe she divorced him in her faith tradition, in a ceremony that I imagine involved curses and spitting and each party asking for their records back.

A year later, in 2009, she married again, this time legally, to a British citizen named… Ahmed.

Um, okay.  So the first Ahmed was Ahmed Hirsi, and this second Ahmed was Ahmed Elmi.

So let’s call Ahmed Hirsi “Ahmed the First.”  (Sing it with me, and a cockney accent does help: “He’s Ahmed the First he is.  Ahmed the First he is, he is.”)  And we’ll call Elmi “Ahmed 2: Electric Boogaloo.”  (For my money, the finest terrible breakdancing film of 1984.)  You can’t tell the Ahmeds apart without a score card, people.

So Omar and Boogaloo live happily ever after, if by “ever after” you mean “for two years.”  Then, in 2011 she reports that they divorced “in their faith tradition” – which is awkward, because they had married legally – and she reconciles with Ahmed the First.  The next year they have a third child which – with unconscionable cruelty – they name “Ilwad.”

Which I’m guessing is the Islamic version of a Boy Named Sue, meant to toughen the little Wad-ster up, because his mom is apparently going to keep bringing a revolving door of Ahmeds through his life.

At the end of 2017 Ilhan finally gets around to officially divorcing Boogaloo, and the next month she legally marries Ahmed the First, even though by then she’s been shacked up with him for five years, and young Ilwad is starting to punch his way through his taunting first grade classmates, because he’s already sick of all of the, “You make me ill, Wad!” jokes.

To make things more complicated, in 2014 and 2015 she filed joint tax returns with Ahmed the First, even though she’d never been legally married to him at that point, and was in fact legally married to Boogaloo.  Which would, technically speaking, be tax fraud.

To make things yet more complicated, there’s apparently a bunch of evidence that Boogaloo might be Ilhan’s brother.  (Don’t ask.  At this point my head hurts too much to try to figure out how an elected official in the public eye for a decade can be married to someone who might be her brother, without the media figuring that out.) (Then I remember that the media includes Chris “block of petrified wood” Cuomo, Brian “giant, dishonest human thumb without glasses” Stelter and Don Lemon.  And I wonder no more.)

All of which leaves two possibilities, and puts Omar in what I like to call “a Northam conundrum.”  Named after the idiotic Democrat governor of Virginia whose college yearbook featured a big picture of two people, one in blackface, and the other in a Klan hood, this is a classic lose-lose dilemma.  (“Governor, are you the one in the blackface, or the Klan hood.”  Ummmmm.  Can I pass?)

To wit: either Ilhan was married to her brother because she was romantically involved with her brother.  In which case, EWWWW!  (This is the Klan hood option.) (Or is it the black face option?)

Or she was in a sham marriage to her brother for some illicit purpose – a citizenship scam, or a college loans or tax scam? – while she was actually married – religiously, but not legally – to the true Ahmed-o’-her-heart, Ahmed the First.

Yikes.  Also, I just looked it up, and found that Ilwad is a girl. Which makes this whole story even sadder.

This is why I could never be a Democrat politician.

Because consider my story: as a young man, I dated many women, bringing joy to them all, and then ultimate heartbreak, when I met the CORCAW (CORCA Wife), and all other women became invisible to me.  We married – religiously AND legally — and have stayed so for 30 years.  We’ve had two daughters – neither of them named Ilwad – and the only Ahmed my wife knows is the hilarious “Ahmed the Dead Terrorist” skeleton puppet created by Jeff Dunham.  The end.

I’ve got none of the Dem pre-requisites:  I’m not gay or black, and I can’t even pretend to be American Indian.  (Although c’mon.  Compared to Grandma Squanto, I look like Crazy Horse Junior.) I haven’t run NYC into the ground, and I was hating socialism before hating socialism was cool.  I only call myself “Martacus” in jest, and I don’t sniff the hair of strange women in public.  (Or, for the record, in private, either.)

So the path to the Dem nomination is not open to me, and I’ll have to settle for remaining out of the spotlight, living the life of a humble, hilarious genius.

By the way, I hope to be able to overcome my gag reflex enough to comment on the Dem debates by Monday.  But here’s a preview: AVENATTI 2020!