Month: August 2019

Biden’s most recent campaign ad came out, and it’s about what you’d expect – a gravitas-laden voice-over, a little bile directed at Trump, and a lot of fairy-tale praise for Old Joe’s amazing yet fictional accomplishments during his storied career.  But the best part is the tone-deaf way that the Biden political team decided to name the ad.  It’s called, and I am not making this up, “Bones.”  The first lines are, “We know in our bones this election is different.”

Now I’m not a paid political consultant, or even a small-town country lawyer.  I’m just a humble, salt-of-the-earth snark-master who just so happens to personally know a guy who urinated in Hitler’s bathtub.

But even I know that you don’t want to reinforce your candidate’s vulnerabilities in your own damn ads!  And what is Biden’s greatest vulnerability?

I can hear all of CO nation right now, simultaneously shouting out many different answers: “His stupidity!”/”He helped his crooked son line his pockets!”/“Too white!”/”Super creepy.”/”Gaffe machine!”/ “Flip flopper!”/”Fondler of campaign aids.”/”Can’t find his butt with both hands and a topographical map.”

And you would all be wrong.

Well, you’d all be right, because those are all Biden weaknesses.  But his main weakness is that he’s a doddering old man.  Bernie Sanders looks like a spry, mentally engaged 70-year-old next to Biden.

So what does the Biden brain trust start their ad with?  BONES?!  And the words, “we know in our bones…”

You mean the way a really, really, old, frail person can tell when a storm is coming in his bones?  You mean the way an octogenarian’s doctor asks her if she’s getting enough calcium to support her bird-like, fragile bones?  Good lord!

It’s like Nancy Pelosi starting a campaign with an ad called, “Ancient Egyptian Burial Wrappings.”  Or Skateboarding Doofus O’Rourke starting a campaign with an ad called, “Alpha Male.”  Or Bill Clinton starting a campaign with an ad called, “Fidelity.”  (Come to think of it, “Bones” would not be a good theme for a Slick Willie ad, either.) (“We all know in our bones – and we can’t stress enough that there is no “r” in that word – when a president is fit to lead our nation…”)

Or Elizabeth Warren starting a campaign with an ad called, “The Trail of Tears.”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Nice job, Joe Biden.  You have gotten your walker off the starting line very, very smoothly.

 

In other news, my skills with language are being challenged by the fact that two more Dem candidates have dropped out of the race.  Because nothing challenges language skills like needing to write cogently on the subject of when a nonentity does something inconsequential.  But here goes.

Jay Innslee has dropped out of the presidential race, and the sound you hear is an entire nation of 300+ million people not noticing.

Innslee, picturesque Austrian mountain town and site of the 1976 Winter Olympics, announced…  No, wait.  That’s “Innsbruck.”

Let me google “Innslee.”

Oooookay, first off, only one “n” in his name.  Also, “Jay” is his first name, and not an initial that stands for something cool and interesting, like “Jocko” or “Jehoshaphat.”

According to his Wikipedia entry photo, he is “Generic White Guy from the 1991 Sears Catalog Menswear Section.”  Apparently he is also a climate change activist – the hell you say! – and had been in the first two Dem debates, though his only notable contribution was to call Trump a white nationalist.  So, no points for either originality or accuracy.

He officially withdrew on Wednesday night, when he said “it’s become clear” that he didn’t have a shot at winning the primary.

Typical climate change alarmist: he’s absolutely certain of what the exact temperature is going to be 93 years from this coming Tuesday at 4 o’clock Eastern time, but he just now noticed that he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance at winning the Democrat primary.  At least he has a job to go back to: he’s the governor of Washington state.

Which I’ve got to believe has to come as quite a shock to the citizens of Washington state.  Where, Wikipedia tells me, he signed a document calling Washington a sanctuary state.

Of course he did.  Beat it, Innsbruck.

 

Seth Moulton is a different story.  First, he never qualified for either of the first two Dem debates.

Which begs the question: how the hell does someone get outpolled by Jeremiah Inslee and Marianne Williamson?!

Then I read his bio, and the answer became clear.  Moulton earned a physics degree from Harvard, then joined the Marines, and saw combat in Iraq.  He challenged Nancy Pelosi, focused his campaign on national security and caring for our veterans, and warned Democrats about “veering too far left.”

I don’t want to make him sound too good.  After all, he got elected as a Democrat from Massachusetts, so there’s got to be problems in there somewhere.

But he’s a straight, white, Marine veteran who talks common sense and might actually love his country.  So of course he had absolutely NO chance in today’s Democrat party primaries.  More’s the pity for him, and for us.

Goodbye, Seth Moulton – you were too good for the company you were trying to keep.

 

I found my favorite under-covered story of the last week on Don Surber’s fine blog on Thursday.   Just from his title – “Reporter wastes 2 days trying to show how easy it is to buy a gun.” – I knew it would be my kind of story.

The reporter in question is Business Insider senior correspondent Hayley Peterson.  After the shooting in an El Paso Wal-Mart, Peterson decided to go and buy a gun at a local Wal-Mart, to illustrate the grave danger of easily available handguns to our nation.

What followed was the opposite of what she expected.  She ended up going through a DMV-like experience, during which her attempts to buy a gun at Wal-Mart were thwarted at every turn.

First, it was difficult to find a Wal-Mart near her in Virginia that sold guns.  After “hours of googling and calling,” she finally found one.  When she got there, she found that Wal-Mart had a lot smaller selection than local gun stores, that they no longer sell handguns, and that they have stricter requirements than the law requires.  They also have security cameras, and extra training for the handful of employees who are allowed to sell guns.

Having no luck that day, she returned a few days later, only to be faced with a ton of paperwork, insisted on by competent employees.  When they discovered that Peterson’s address and the address on her driver’s license didn’t match, that ended her attempt to buy a gun at Wal-Mart.

To her credit, Peterson wrote the story, and Business Insider published it, even though it clearly didn’t match their preconceptions.  Do I wish that she had ended a little more emphatically, hammering home the moral of the story: guns are not legally easy to get, and people who jump through hoops to buy a gun legally are not the problem? Sure.

But supporters of the Second Amendment are constantly vexed by outrageously biased media coverage, and fact-less slurs from hack activists, as well as the opposition of well-meaning but uninformed people.  Our leftist pols have not helped, to put it mildly.  One of Obama’s most ridiculous pronouncements – out of a crowded field – was his 2016 statement that, ““it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”

Hayley Peterson’s story just demonstrated – again – what a crock of Schumer that always was.  For that, I thank her.

Avenatti/Inslee 2020!

After a hectic couple of weeks at work, I finally have a few minutes to sit down and review what’s been happening in the world.

Aaaannnndddd… it’s a dumpster fire.  But an intermittently entertaining one.

I just now caught up to the most counter-intuitive news of the month, which blew up when it turned out that an investor in exercise equipment maker SoulCycle had given a fundraiser for Trump, and the tolerant left hit him with a torrent of abuse and boycott threats.

That’s not the counter-intuitive part.  Because there is nothing more intuitive than outraged leftists getting offended that someone who disagrees with them is investing or running a business or going out in public or expressing an opinion or breathing.

The counter-intuitive part is that Michael Moore (D-irigible) came out with a statement that he will no longer use SoulCycle.

Which gave me several thoughts:

1. Is Michael Moore actually self-aware enough that he’s making a self-deprecating joke? If so, that’s pretty funny, and thus the opposite of his usual insufferability.
2. If he actually did use Soul Cycle, sweet merciful crap! What would he look like if he had NOT been working out?  He looks like he’s always posing for a “before” and a “WAY-before” picture.
3. Is it possible that he was shorting Soul Cycle stock and then announced that he had been a customer, thus making a quick killing in the market? If so he’s got CO- or Silber-like investment chops.  (To go with all the pork chops! HA!)

 

The Trumpkin has been tweeting up a storm as usual, and he’s giving me a mix of agita and hiccups.  When he takes to late-night, serial tweeting, he reminds me of an 85-pound person firing an entire clip from a heavy machine gun on full auto.  The first bullet might hit his target, but after that it’s holes in the ceiling and upstairs neighbor’s exploding microwave and splintered door frames and glancing blows off the downstairs neighbor’s toupee and shattered shower tiles and RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!

But just as I want to slap him, he lands a shot like a professional comedian.  Consider his comment when anti-Semitic nasty piece of work and jihad-enthusiast Rashida Tlaib pretended she wanted to go to Israel only to see her dear old granny who will likely be dead soon.  When Israel agreed to let her do so, she had a change of heart, and said, “No thanks, I’d rather hate Jews than see my grandma.”

Trump’s response, after rightly pointing out Tlaib’s hypocritical grandstanding: “The only real winner here is Tlaib’s grandmother. She doesn’t have to see her now!”

That’s some top shelf burn right there – I don’t care who you are.  Nicely done, prez – but please, more aimed shots and less “spray and pray!”

 

Elizabeth Warren continues to be a delight.  She recently repeated the race-baiting lie that Michael Brown “was murdered by a white police officer.”  But the Obama DOJ issued an exhaustive report four years ago, the key findings of which are that Brown was a large, violent, African-American male who was justifiably shot by a cop because Brown was assaulting him.

To me, the key parts of that story are “cop justifiably shoots attacking thug.”

To Grandma Squanto, the key parts are “black guy murdered by white cop.”  She ought to be ashamed of herself, and the violent, “Ferguson effect” backlash that racial arsonists like her helped to create.

Speaking of Warren-related atrocities, have you seen the video of her trying to dance earlier this week at an event in MN?  Yikes.  But before you laugh at her, consider that she may have been having a grand mal seizure brought on by a potent combination of political hatred and utter lack of skin pigmentation.

Also, although she may appear to the naked eye to be what scientists would call “an old cracker lady,” can you explain why it began to rain heavily as soon as she started to dance?

I didn’t think so.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Old Joe Biden appears to be losing it.  He has confused recently-defeated Brit PM Theresa May with beloved but long-dead Brit PM Margaret Thatcher (peace be upon her), he’s stated that RFK, JFK and MLK died in the late 1970s, and he’s said that poor kids can be just as talented as white kids.   He also said that he prefers truth over facts, and chocolate over vanilla and Big Foot.  Then he called his wife “mommy” and asked her if the mailman has come yet, because he’s waiting for his order from the Columbia Record and Tape Club, which went out of business when the only thing Obama was president of was the Choom Gang.

And that was all before lunch on Wednesday.

Also, he’s got a double-digit lead over the rest of the Democrat Z-Team.  Sooooooo… good for him, I guess?

 

I mentioned a while back that I was going to write a zippy little political obituary for each of the Democrat candidate as they drop out one by one, and now I’ve got a challenge: What does one say about John Hickenlooper?  Other than, “Who?”

Okay, his goofy name was a little entertaining.  “Hickenlooper/Buttigieg” would have made for funny bumperstickers.

Other than that, he had more support than Eric Swallwell, but less than Marianne Williamson.  (And you can look that last sentence up in the dictionary, under “Damning with faint praise.”)

We salute you, Johnny Hickenlooper!  You are the radon of Democratic politics: your presence is colorless, odorless and impossible to detect.

 

Did you catch the Dimmest Cuomo’s ™ Master Class in “How to Ensure that You are Forever Stuck with a Nickname You Hate?”

I love that the big dope decided to fight what he sees as an anti-Italian stereotype by… wait for it… getting in a guy’s face, dropping a dozen F bombs and threatening to kick him down the bleeping stairs.  The only thing missing was a warning that if the other guy didn’t shut up, he’d soon be sleeping with the fishes.

We get it, Cuomo.  You can handle things.  You’re smart.  Not like everybody says, you’re not dumb.  You’re smart, and you want respect.

Now put on your Gilligan hat and go out to the boat, Fredo.  Rocko will be out in a minute.  Because that’s the way pop wanted it.

 

Finally, as regular readers know, some of my favorite stories are the ones about stupid criminals.  In the past, for example, I’ve written about oft-arrested rapper Yung Mazi, who bragged that he was bulletproof shortly before being shot to death, and about the robber who took four guns away from a TN homeowner whose house he was breaking into, only to get shot by the fifth gun the man had in the house.  (As one does, in TN.) (Go Vols!)

One great sub-genre of the stupid criminals story is the incredibly stupid denial to the cops.

For example, when a guy is pulled over and the cops find drugs or guns in his car, he always says they are not his.  Which is sometimes pretty plausible, if he hangs around with the kind of miscreants who are always leaving their guns or drugs lying around.

If the gun or drugs are under his seat, maybe less so.

The funnier ones are when the cops find the contraband in one of his pockets, and he says something brilliant like, “These aren’t my pants!”

Well step aside, army of idiot criminals (and, coincidentally, large slice of the Democrat voting base), because you have officially been topped.

I give you the story of young Ms. Ashley Beth Rolland, 23, who was recently arrested in Louisiana.  A man with whom she’d been staying for a week accused her of theft, and the cops picked her up and searched her.  They found, and I quote, “a clear plastic bag with approximately 1 gram of meth and $6,233 in cash.”

Did they find that stuff in her car, you ask?  They did not.

Did they find it under her seat?  No. (But… sort of.)

Did they find it in her shirt pocket?  Nope.

Because this is a family column, I’m going to say that they found it… secreted in her person.

And yes, the operative pronoun here is not “on,” it is “in.”

Not as in, “I’ve got a song in my heart,” or “Deep down inside, I’ve got a little something called grit.”

I mean, “in” as in, “Let’s play a spirited round of ‘Democrat President and Young Intern.’  Today’s episode: “Where Did I Leave my Cigar?”

When you look at Ms. Rolland’s booking photo, I think you’ll be surprised.  She’s pretty attractive, with a rough-around-the-edges Olivia Wilde vibe to her.  At the risk of being look-ist, I would not have expected that.  If you showed me a lineup of mug shots and asked which of these gals is most likely to be carrying a mortgage down-payment on her, without the benefit of a purse or pocketbook, I would not have picked out Rolland.

All that being said, Ashley Beth Rolland is not a hero because of her crime.  She’s a hero because of her brilliant response to the accusations of the cynical police.

When the female officer had… I’m going to say “extracted” … the contraband, Rolland said that “the illegal drugs were not hers, and she did not know how they got there.”

How would you like to be her defense lawyer?  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury… um… this is not what it looks like.  Well, maybe it is.  But you know how some people don’t trust banks?  Well my client REALLY doesn’t trust banks.  So….”

Avenatti/Rolland 2020!

Before I start today, I wanted to mention two brief stories about our Europe trip that I’d missed in my column last week.

Please forgive me though, because I don’t want to turn into the obnoxious, elitist jerk who goes on and on about having gone to Europe.  (“You simply must see Paris in the summertime.  The escargot are to die for!”)  We took a cost-saver tour, and the only thing that makes me a little big-headed is that I rubbed elbows with a bad-ass nonogenarian who pissed in Hitler’s bathtub(!)

Anyway, when we saw the armory in the tower of London, we came across two suits of armor made for Henry VIII.  (And you know the original Henry must have been a money-maker, because there were 7 sequels!) (And he had his own Herman and the Hermits song.)  One was much portlier than the other, and when I read some material on it, it turns out that both had been made for him in adulthood, but the second had been made 20 years after the first.

As an egalitarian American, it made me feel a little schadenfreude at Henry’s expense.  We regular folks tend to struggle with weight gain and loss as we age, but the worst ramification is that we have to donate or toss our skinny pants or fat pants from time to time.  But although Henry was the immensely powerful monarch of a great empire, endowed with access to anything he wanted — including the power to have troublesome exes beheaded when they became annoying (sweet, sweet consolation of 16^th century divorce laws!) – he still had to battle the “coronation 15.”

And because his fancy clothes were made out of long-lasting armor, great crowds of people get to traipse through his armory centuries later, and point like Nelson (the Simpson’s character, not the hero of Trafalgar), and say, “HA, HA!  Henry was a pudgy potentate!”

By the way, that’s why my will stipulates that at my death, all of my suits of armor will be melted down and re-cast into a statue of Cassie the Wonder Dog, gazing mournfully at the grave of her beloved master.

The other thing that I hadn’t mentioned is that my world-class wife surprised me at the end of our trip, by booking rooms in an Elizabethan manor house for our last night’s stay in England.  We had mostly stayed in reasonably priced hotels to that point, but Gatwick is far away enough from London that she was able to get us rooms in a place built in 1580 for not much more than a good hotel room in central London.

As a guy who’s rehabbed a few houses over the years, I really loved that place!  The interior doors were solid wood almost four inches thick, with old box locks that took skeleton keys to open them.  Almost all of the interior woodwork and much of the leaded glass windows were original, and the grounds were all sculpted hedges and English gardens.  It was a great place to spend our last night in England, and even though marriage isn’t a competition, my wife is somehow winning.

(If you’d like to see a picture of the place, you can check out Martinsimpsonwriting.com.)

 

Okay, on to some other scattered thoughts.

The bit of my last column that got the most reaction was the part where I chose my pronouns and adjectives (thee/thou, brilliant, handsome).  And by the way thank you all for not pointing out that my chosen adjectives aren’t exactly spot on, since I’m average-looking at best, and less than Einstein-ian in the IQ department.

That’s what I love about CO nation – you are blackbelts at the suspension of disbelief in the service of a joke!

But of course my point was that I’m a lot closer to being both brilliant and handsome than a biological male is to being a “she” or “her,” and ultimately it does no favors to someone suffering from gender dysmorphia to pretend otherwise.  The “list your pronouns” issue – though well-meaning, on the part of many liberals — is part of a larger leftist strategy to achieve political goals by using language to obfuscate/battle/re-shape reality.

And, as a side benefit, it tends to drive those of us in the reality-based community nuts!

Euphemisms – even well-intentioned ones – also work this way, and today’s elite left have raised euphemism to a misleading art form.  The prime objective of “Planned Parenthood” is to prevent parenthood.  The practice of preventing reproduction by aborting children is “women’s reproductive health.”  Non-citizens who came into the country illegally are “undocumented citizens.”  The top earners who pay the lion’s share of the taxes – roughly twice the percentage that they earn, per capita – are “not paying their fair share.”

War is peace.  Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength. (hat tip to Orwell)

Translucent Elizabeth Warren is “Native American.”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher).

I could go on.

The point is whoever controls the language, tends to control political battles.

I’m reminded of a joke that is attributed to Lincoln, though I’m betting it’s apocryphal.  It goes, “How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?”  The listener says, “5.”  Lincoln says no.  “Four.  Because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.”

To class things up even more (though Lincoln is no slouch in the quotable wisdom department), I’m also reminded of a few lines from Hamlet.  When he’s telling Rosencrantz and Guildenstern that Denmark feels like a prison to him, they say that they don’t think so.  Hamlet replies, “Why, then, ’tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison.”

Because Shakespeare is a freaking genius, there is some truth to Hamlet’s double-edged reply.  Because our attitude indeed shapes our emotional state, anyone can make a prison of Denmark; the glass really can be half empty or half full, depending on our outlook.

On the other hand, Hamlet is either crazy, or pretending to be so (lit critics differ on this point), and in one clear sense he is obviously wrong.  He is not in a prison, though his grim, tragic outlook makes it feel so.

I can’t help but think of the young, impressionable Americans – I hope it’s not too many — who fall under the influence of leftist thought leaders, and end up with a correspondingly distorted view of the world.  They live in the freest, richest, most opportunity-laden country in the history of the world, but when they look around, they see a hellhole of racism and sexism and bigotry.  They enjoy freedoms and comforts and security that kings and emperors could never have dared dream of even a few centuries ago, but they feel like victims, vulnerable and hopeless.

They have been taught since grade school that a tail is a leg, and now they feel like they’re surrounded by five-legged predators who don’t exist.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, Lighten up, little AOC followers!  The world’s not going to end in 12 years, and you’re not being persecuted by a shadowy white supremacist cabal.  And assuming you don’t vote in a raft of socialists in the next several elections, your lives are not going to be nasty, brutish and short.

 

Let’s end on a happier note, and one that always makes me smile: stories of hypocrites being hoist on their own petard.

Already in the last month we’ve had Grandpa Socialist Sanders get caught not paying his campaign drones the $15 wage that he’s been hectoring the rest of us to pay for several years now.  (HA!)  And we’ve had Ol’ Joe Biden – purveyor or racism accusations galore – getting caught saying that – I’m sure you’ve seen this fantastic quote – “Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids.” (HA!!)

When I first heard that quote, I immediately thought of the greatest character on tv today: Ron Swanson.  If you haven’t seen Ron Swanson’s Pyramid of Greatness yet, drop everything and google that and watch it.  I’ll wait.

My favorite square on the pyramid is the one that’s as tongue-in-cheek funny as Old Joe’s latest gaffe is unintentionally funny: “Capitalism: God’s way of determining who is smart, and who is poor.”

Which brings us to Sarah Silverman, someone who I think is actually a pretty talented comedian, when she can pull her head out of her politics.  Which, sadly, is not that often lately.  She’s been an outspoken leftist, of the “Trump is racist and conservatives are terrible and anyone who doesn’t agree with me is horrible” type.

Which means that she’s not been funny for a while.

But those days are over, because I just saw an article about why she lost a recent movie role.  According to lefty Brit paper The Guardian, she was fired because of a 2007 skit she did in which she wore blackface.  The original skit was intermittently funny, and involved her getting into an argument with an African-American guy over whether Jews or blacks have had a harder time, resulting in an experiment where she went out in blackface to see “how the other half lives.”

Not the most original concept in the world, but she handled it well.  And the whole point of comedy is that you should be able to poke fun at everyone.  But more than a decade after that sketch, when she was on the verge of starting what she called a “sweet part” in a movie, the producers found out about the old skit and fired her.

To which any compassionate, empathetic person could only respond, “BWA HA HA HA HA HA”… let me pause to get my breath – “HA HA HA HA!!!!”

Is that situation really worthy of a “BWA,” 10 “HA”s, and four exclamation points, you ask?  Yes. In fact, if it weren’t for my mild, adult-onset asthma, I would be tempted to add another “BWA”, many more “HA”s and at least two more exclamation points.

Because it’s not just that a hypocritical leftist racist-baiter should get a karmic come-uppance.  But the way she reacts is perfect, archtypically lefty: convinced that right wingers are to blame, with not a smidgen of self-awareness.

She says, “It was so disheartening.  It just made me real, real sad, because I really kind of devoted my life to making it right.”  Which is ridiculous, because she didn’t kill somebody in Reno just to watch him die.  She did a comedy sketch 10 years before the p.c. police declared that no racial joke can ever be funny again.

She certainly has the self-flagellation move down pat, saying, “I cringe at material I did 10 years ago.”

But don’t think that she is actually accepting the blame for this.  Let her explain who is really at fault.  “I think it’s really scary and it’s a very odd thing that it’s invaded the left primarily and the right will mimic it,” adding that she dubs it “righteousness porn”.

First of all, I cannot think of a worse type of porn than “righteousness porn.”  Ugh.

Second, “it invaded the left,” did it Sarah?  Like maybe it came from outer space?

Look at her verbs.  “Invading the left,” makes leftists passive victims.  But then the right “mimicked it.”  It didn’t invade or infect or contaminate the right – in which case the right would be victims, too.  No.  It invaded the poor, victimized left, and then the evil right wingers picked it up and took it from there.

She closes with the most unintentionally perfect summary of the leftist mindset possible: “It’s like, if you’re not on board, if you say the wrong thing, if you had a tweet once, everyone is, like, throwing the first stone.  It’s so odd. It’s a perversion. It’s really, ‘Look how righteous I am and now I’m going to press refresh all day long to see how many likes I get in my righteousness.’”

Yes, Sarah!  It’s EXACTLY like that.  If only we could figure out what group started this awful political correctness that has turned on you, and caused you to lose a sweet job.  Because then maybe we could see to it that people with the mindset that started this trend could be made to suffer the consequences.

Oh, wait.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!

Avenatti/Silverman 2020!

So while I was in Europe, soaking up the culture and meeting cool Kiwis who went to Europe to chew gum and urinate in Hitler’s bathtub (and they’re all out of gum), leftists in America were going all Thelma and Louise, fighting over the steering wheel and mashing the gas pedal as they raced toward the cliffs of insanity.

Exhibit A: Humans are rarely confronted with social experiments having conditions so perfect that they could have been designed in a laboratory.  But when we are, we should learn from them.

One such example was the division of Germany into east and west after WWII.  One group of people – with the same history, language, culture, everything – was artificially split, with half living in a free market/capitalist west, and the other half living in a totalitarian leftist-governed east.

Fast forward 30 years and West Germany has BMWs and functioning institutions and a clean environment and adorable Nena singing about 99 Luft Balloons, and East Germany looks like Baltimore or Detroit or any other leftist-run city.  The lesson couldn’t be more obvious: allowing statist, command-and-control leftists to run your society results in disaster.

The media wing of the Democrat party was offered a similarly instructive test in the form of two near-simultaneous events.   In separate mass shootings within 36 hours of each other, two evil and possibly mentally ill (but definitely evil) jackasses shot a ton of innocent victims.  One killer left copious evidence that he was mostly a right-winger, and the other that he was a left-winger.

Here was the MSM’s chance to shine.  If they were even minimally honest, they had two viable options before them: either argue that the killers alone were responsible for their actions, regardless of what political views inspired them to act, or argue that the pols on both left and right were at least partially responsible for inspiring these nutballs.

And, of course, they chose option C: the “right-wing” killer was triggered by Trump’s terribleness, and Trump and all conservatives are responsible for his evil actions.  But what about the leftist killer, who gushed about his love for Grandma Squanto and Screaming Socialist Grandpa Bernie?  His actions were Trump’s and conservatives’ fault too, somehow.

The MSM are thoroughly dishonest and immune to shame, and they have earned the contempt of decent people everywhere. Fox and the conservative media found on the net and elsewhere are far from perfect.  But if you believe ANYTHING you see on MSNBC, CNN or the big 3 networks, you should undergo a concussion protocol and be put into conservatorship until you are no longer a threat to yourself or others.

 

Exhibit B.   The FBI’s reputation has been battered once again.  In the wake of the exposure of James Comey, Strzok and Page, and doddering Bob Mueller and his army of faceless partisan Dems, it was hard to imagine that any insider could inflict a worse black eye.

But then former FBI agent Frank Fugliuzzi – whose name sounds like something made up by a lazy, anti-Italian sitcom writer – took to MSNBC, but only after asking a cameraman to hold his beer, and his copy of Mein Kampf.  Frankie noted that Trump ordered that flags be flown at half-mast to mourn the dead in the recent shootings, and then he argued that Trump has ordered them to be returned to their normal position on August 8^th.

Therefore, Trump is a Nazi.

While that might seem like an Evel Knievel-ian logical leap (“Hey Martin,” you may have asked, “Can you spell Evel Knievel’s name correctly, and also turn it into an adjective?”  Done and done, my friend.), F-squared has a solid explanation.  It seems that “H” is the eighth letter in the alphabet, and among cultist Nazis, the number “8-8” signifies “Heil Hitler.”

So Trump obviously planned for the two losers to go on shooting sprees in early August, so that he could order flags to be lowered then, so that he could order them to be raised later… on August 8^th!  8/8.  Get it?

Hey, on a related note, do you know what members of the animal kingdom are the most sympathetic to National Socialism?  (And no, it’s not anti-Semitic lemurs.  That’s too obvious.  Hang your head in shame for even guessing that.)

The answer is the octopus.

As Frank Fugliuzzi could tell you, an octopus has 8 limbs.  So when two octopi get together, put on a Marvin Gaye record, and make some sweet cephalopod love… the obvious number involved is 8-8, and the result is a veritable nautical Nuremberg!  Do you think it’s a coincidence that the top Nazis were famously enthralled by tentacle porn?  Duh! Wake up, people!

Okay, that got a little weird.

But not as weird as Exhibit C: the Democratic Socialists convention that took place in Atlanta last weekend.

By now you’ve heard all kinds of hilarious details that arose from this cavalcade of misfits. How they unironically call each other “comrade” in 2019.  The way they all agreed to do “jazz hands” rather than applauding, so that those among them who are hyper-sensitive to sound wouldn’t be tormented by… clapping.

But the most entertaining detail for me was when one beta male asked that people not talk amongst themselves, because he is easily triggered by background noise.   But he started his mewling statement with the words, “Guys, can we…”

So naturally some loon in the cheap seats said, “Can you NOT use gendered language?  If I hear the word ‘guys’ one more time from Comrade Patriarchy up there, I’m going to clap my hands, which will send you into a seizure that leaves you curled up on the floor in a fetal position!”

I paraphrased that a bit, but I believe I caught the essence of it.

But I left out something crucial.  This is how the beta male began his statement: “Um, guys, first of all, James Jackson, Sacramento, he/him…”

This “giving your pronouns” practice is a grammatical offshoot of the “gender is a social construct” anti-scientific goofiness that has recently become required thinking on the left.  But it’s also indicative of the leftist mania for controlling people in general.  If you’re a baker, you must be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding.  If you’re a pro-life employer, you must be forced to pay for your employees’ abortions.  And you can’t put salt on that, or buy a drink in a cup that’s too big, or drink it with a plastic straw.  Etc.

But the absurdity involved in “choosing your pronouns” allows the left to do some especially satisfying linguistic bullying.  When a person stands before you, and he’s built like a Clemson starting strong safety, with a beard as thick as a whale omelette, and he tells you that his pronouns are “she” and “her,” that’s an intimidation move.  It’s meant to force you to either meekly say something that you know is not true, or take the social and political consequences of “traumatizing” someone from a protected victim group.

Even a year or two ago, this would have been so absurd that no one would take it seriously.  But now it’s mandatory, and an emotionally satisfying way for pinched, humorless scolds on the left to virtue signal.

Case in point, re: humorless scolds — Just a few weeks ago, Liz Warren changed her campaign website to include “she/her” as her pronouns.  If I had any talent at computers, I’d hack into her website and add, “Her noun used to be ‘papoose,’ but now it is ‘squaw.’”  #wemustneverstopmockingher

In fact, I’d like to take a page from the lefties’ handbook.  If they can choose their own pronouns, I should be able to choose my own parts of speech.

So I have.

For my pronouns, I’m going Old Testament: “thee/thou/thine.”   From now on, my adjectives are going to be “brilliant” and “handsome.”   And I’ve chosen my adverb, too: “breathtakingly.”

Also, my title is henceforth, “Your Excellency.”

I can’t wait to get emails from my lefty colleagues at work, so I can correct the hell out of them.  Within a week or two, I’m going to bully them into sending inter-office emails like this:

“To: Martin Simpson

From: Whomever

“Your Excellency,

I wanted to touch base with thee about thy breathtakingly brilliant memo of last Monday, as well as how breathtakingly handsome thou appeared at thy presentation at the weekend conference.  Could I stop by thine office to meet thee for a few minutes later today?”

In fact, I think I might also start picking other peoples’ titles.

For my co-workers, I like the sound of “Thy Humble Servant.”

Avenatti/Jackson 2020!

Well, I’m back from Europe, although the time change has thrown me for a loop, so I’m still not sure whether I’m afoot or horseback.  But I’ve never been one to let a little disorientation keep me from offering a few thoughts.  I won’t go into an exhaustive travelogue, but I thought I’d mention some highlights.

We spent 3 days in London first, which obviously wasn’t enough.  I saw the usual bucket list of sites, but the Tower of London was a particular favorite, and contained one surreal moment.

We were in the White Tower, and I’d just read a plaque telling how Richard III had imprisoned 2 princes there who were never seen again.  Of course my thoughts went to Shakespeare’s play about the famously hunchbacked Richard.

So I turn from the plaque and bump into a guy with a hunched back!

Of course I don’t mean any disrespect to what I’m sure PC rules would have us refer to as “a member of the differently-postured community,” and God bless anyone with any kind of physical deformity.  But that freaked me out.

My wife noticed the odd look on my face, and said, “What?”

I nodded toward the guy, who was leaving the room ahead of us, and whispered, “Now is the winter of our discontent, made glorious summer by this son of York.”  She just stared at me blankly and shook her head, not being as big of a Shakespeare fan as I am.

When she shook her head and turned away, I had a thought that has occurred to a lot of people who passed through that tower in the last 900 years: Tough room.

 

Amsterdam is beautiful, but I hadn’t anticipated how much the legal red-light district would depress me.  The booths themselves just looked like empty rooms to me, since (as I may have mentioned in earlier columns) all other women became invisible to me when I met my wife.

Even when I was single, and still retained the ability to visually perceive other women, I was never tempted by the idea of going to a hooker.  (Other than when I watched Rebecca De Mornay at the height of her powers in Risky Business.)  (Giggity.)

But even if I had been, I’d guess that part of the thrill would be the forbidden frisson of illicitness of the whole thing, a sense of having gotten away with a naughty indulgence.  But government-sanctioned and regulated sexual misbehavior sounds like the most soul-less, un-thrilling experience since Kamala Harris hooked up with creepy old Willie Brown in exchange for a government job.

Plus, if I had just finished with a woman and then saw a license on the wall, auto-signed by Chuck and Nancy and assuring me that she was healthy as a horse, I would sprint to the nearest de-lousing station and then seek out the most comprehensive round of antibiotics known to man!

We took a boat ride past some impressive castles on the Rhine, and saw the cathedral at Cologne, before traveling through Switzerland, which was as beautiful as advertised.  We took a cog train to the top of Mt. Pilatus, overlooking Lucerne, and later took a boat ride on Lake Lucerne.  We ate fondue and listened to some mountain horn-blowing, and saw the amazing speared-and-dead Lion of Lucerne carving in a granite wall, and I couldn’t help thinking of Aslan. (You may have guessed that C.S. Lewis is one of my top few favorite writers.) (He should be one of yours too, IMHO.)

There is much to admire about Switzerland and the Swiss, and their famous neutrality has been a wise course during most of Europe’s wars.  But their behavior during WWII rightly taints their reputation.  To be neutral in a conflict when the Nazis are on one side is unconscionable. To in effect collaborate with the Nazis and provide safe haven for much of their stolen loot is egregious.

But to spend decades after the war resisting attempts by Jews and other victims of Hitler to recover their property from Swiss banks should shame the nation.  (FYI, a great book on that history is The Swiss, the Gold and the Dead.)

We spent two days in Paris at the end of the trip, which let us start to scratch the surface.  We took a boat ride on the Seine at dusk, arriving back just as the Eiffel tower was lit up.  The next day I saw Napoleon’s tomb and the adjoining military museum, while my wife and daughters saw some frou-frou art elsewhere.

Not that I’ve got anything against art.

Except for modern art, which is uniformly terrible.  Firstly, because it violates Simpson’s First Rule of Art: If I can do it, it’s not art.

Secondly, because it doesn’t look anything like what it is supposed to.  If you paint a horse, and not 1 of 100 viewers can guess what it is, you are the Liz Warren of painters.  (That is, you are claiming to be something that you are definitively NOT.)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

For example, here is a conversation that has never happened in the history of the world:

Regular Person: “Hey Michelangelo, why did you think it was appropriate to paint a platypus being chased by a leopard with Stegosaurus horns on a church ceiling?”

Michelangelo:  “That’s God, reaching out to Adam at the moment of creation.  And get away from me.”

Thirdly, the pretentious titles.  It would be bad enough if I had laid out a blank canvas on the floor, took Cassie the Wonder Dog into the middle of it after I’d dipped her bushy tail into paint, and had her roll over a dozen times, and called the result a Work of Art.

But if I then titled the result, “Man’s Inhumanity to Man,” you would never stop slapping me.  And rightly so.

Where was I?

Oh yeah.  I really enjoyed the trip, and look forward to going back again.  But ironically, one drawback was that amazing things – statues, cathedrals, castles – suffer from proximity to each other.

During our Rhine cruise, we saw 11 castles that were between 400-900 years old.  If any one of those were in my home state, it would be the coolest structure there. (Except maybe for Wrigley or Soldier fields.)  But after a few hours on the Rhine, you’d turn a corner and say, “Oh.  Beautiful old castle #8.  Cool.”

As a lover of language, it was great to hear the various accents and expressions of Europeans.  It turns out that nothing is cooler than little kids yammering to their parents in adorable English or French accents.  And in London, I learned that the Victorians had called the first elevators “ascending rooms,” which made me love Victorians even a little more.

I also had a very cool encounter with a plain-spoken Swiss farmer.  He and his father have a dairy farm in a small alpine village, and our tour guide had arranged for us to get a horse-drawn cart ride around their farm in small groups.  The farmer’s son who took us around was probably in his mid-30s, with broken but understandable English, and a stoic grit that I recognize from the farmers in the Illinois towns where I grew up.

As we rode around the outskirts of town, he told us about a terrible flash flood that had hit the town in the early 1600s, destroying most of the buildings and killing a lot of villagers.  Afterwards, some local power-players from the Hapsburg empire – and he said “Hapsburgs” the way my grandpa would refer to the Japanese who bombed Pearly Harbor – scapegoated some alleged local witches for causing the flood.  “They murdered a number of women, and children too.”

Those words hung in the air for a moment, in our otherwise idyllic evening in the Swiss village.  And then he said, “It is a hard story,” and turned back to the horses.

A half hour later, during a stop by the town’s church, I was talking with him about the close-knit nature of the village, and he pointed to a nearby house.  A good friend of his lives there, and his 20-something daughter (one of the most talented yodelers in Switzerland, he told me) took a short motorcycle trip with her boyfriend to the Italian side of the alps two weeks ago.

While there, an Italian driver hit and killed the girl, and her father is now inconsolable.  After the two of us stood looking at the man’s house, he said, “It is a hard story.” And he turned and called his adorable four-year-old daughter, who rode seated next to him and held the horses’ reins, talking to the animals softly in Swiss German as they took us back to our hotel.

The coolest guy I met on the trip was actually taking the tour with us.  He was a New Zealander who I guessed was around 80.  But as we talked during our third day together, I found out that he will turn 94 on Christmas Eve.  When I asked him if he’d been to Europe before, he said that he had fought his way from Sicily up through Italy and into Germany when he was 19 years old.  I asked if he’d been at Monte Cassino, and he said that his unit arrived a few days after the Germans had retreated from there. I peppered him with questions about the war, and he answered me, but in a very low-key, modest way.

A few days later we were all eating together in Paris, and I asked him if his unit had been there during the war.  He said that they hadn’t gotten that far west, because France had already been liberated by the time his unit fought their way up through Italy, and then into Germany.  He said that they had an order change that sent them to Berchtesgaden, and I blurted out, “Did you see the Eagle’s Nest?” (Hitler’s mountain-top retreat there.)

He said he had.  His unit was arriving just as an American unit was leaving.  He asked a few of the GIs if they’d destroyed the place, and they told him that they hadn’t, but they’d liberated some of Hitler’s wine collection.  He said that he and his friends had heard rumors that Hitler might make a final stand there, and they’d hoped to be the group that captured or killed him.  But he killed himself several days earlier in Berlin.

I asked him what it was like to see Hitler’s private retreat, and what he felt when he got there.  In a deadpan delivery, he said, “We were all mad that Hitler had committed suicide. So we looked at the views and walked through the rooms, and then I drank a bunch of Hitler’s wine and I pissed in his bathtub.”

As a military history junkie, I was bowled over.  I had been talking with the guy for five days at that point, and asking specifically about his experiences in the war, and he tells me that as an afterthought.  If I hadn’t specifically asked about it, he wouldn’t have told me about it at all.

That shocks me.  If I had peed in Hitler’s bathtub, that would be how I introduced myself for the rest of my life: “Hi, I’m Martin Simpson.  I pissed in Hitler’s bathtub.”

If it was a social situation to which my wife had accompanied me, I would introduce myself and then my wife.  And then I’d point to my baseball cap, which I would never take off, and which would have embroidered on it, “I pissed in Hitler’s bathtub.”

The next day, when our bus got to Calais and we had to get out and be questioned by English customs officials before taking the ferry to Dover, I was right behind him in line. When it was his turn to step forward, I nudged his shoulder and said, “Tell them you pissed in Hitler’s bathtub. They’ll let you right through.”

That was one satisfying laugh to hear!

I’ve been catching up on the American political news that I’d missed, and will write another column in a few days.  But even though our internet was spotty over there, I did have a few people bring up politics. An Indian cabby in London, upon hearing that I was an American, said that he likes what Trump is doing very much.    And a guy from Hong Kong on our tour said that while he doesn’t care for Trump as a person, he really like’s Trump’s policies, and thinks he’s the right man to have in the White House now.

So according to my highly scientific poll of 2 people who brought it up, Trump’s policies have a 100% approval rating in Europe.

And that poll is at least as valid as anything you’ll hear from the petrified forest of blockheads at CNN and the MSM.

Avenatti/Williamson 2020!

I’m posting a quickie lightning-round column today, because tomorrow my family and I are leaving for Europe.

This March was the 30^th anniversary of my marrying WAY up, and after only a couple of years of my wife dropping increasingly obvious hints that she wanted to go to Europe, I had the brilliant idea that we should go to Europe.  So we’re going to spend 11 days, starting in London, and then going through Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and France.

My 21 year old daughter is already something of a world traveler, but this will be the first time my wife, younger daughter and I have been to Europe.  In fact, I just got my first passport last month.

As a history and literature junkie, I am especially looking forward to spending time in the British Museum and Imperial War Museum.  I’m going to look at the Bayeux Tapestry and some early volumes of Shakespeare and Milton and a bunch of other dead white male geniuses – and some female ones, too.  I’m going to see the Globe theater and some castles, as well as some cool sites in Belgium and France.  If any French waiters or Belgians are rude to us, I’m going to ask if they speak German, and hope that they say no.  Because I will then say, “You’re welcome.”

Another upside is that I won’t be following American politics as closely for those 11 days, which will likely spare me much idiocy from the Democrat “Dirty Two-Dozen” and lower my blood pressure.  On the downside, I am going to have some serious Cautious Optimism withdrawal.  I will check the site when I can, but I know that I’m going to miss a lot, and I’ll definitely miss the chance to rant in these friendly confines.

I will also miss Cassie the Wonder Dog, of course.

So before I go, here’s a few tidbits I’ve noticed in the news this past week:

1.Bernie Sanders’ campaign was hit with accusations of hypocrisy from some of his campaign workers because they aren’t being paid the $15 minimum wage which he is campaigning to force into law.

To which any reasonable person would respond with a spit-take, followed by howls of breath-depleting laughter.  Because there is nothing funnier than a 100-year-old man being caught flat-footed by basic economic facts that most of us first encountered when we opened a lemonade stand at age 6, or started a lawn mowing business in junior high.

Even funnier was Bernie’s team’s response: the pay raise to a morally-acceptable rate is going to force Bernie to cut workers’ hours.  In other words, “Hey little proto-socialists, we’ve heard your righteous demands, and we agree.  Starting Monday, you’ll be working less.  Sure, you’ll be getting a much smaller paycheck, but just think of the social justice!  Which I’m sure that your landlord will accept in lieu of rent.  Now let’s get out there and bring our message of class envy and economic dysfunction to the entire country!”

Just a few months ago Bernie was questioned about his three homes and his millionaire status, and he had an epiphany that if you write a best-selling book, it’s totally cool if you receive giant wheelbarrows full of cash for it.  And now he’s learned that raising the minimum wage beyond a market level hurts workers.

Who ever expected that the learning curve would be so steep for someone at the dawn of his second century on the planet?

2. The Trump vs. the Squad donnybrook (and yes, I’ve been looking for a chance to use the word “donnybrook”) has turned out pretty well for Trump. I thought his initial tweets – go back to your own country, and etc. – were strategically dumb, unforced errors. But the Democrat and MSM reactions were so wildly exaggerated and unhinged that they appear to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.  Of course they accused Trump of racism, but that card has been so overplayed that it has lost all its power with any but the most partisan leftists – and they were already lost causes.

In the two weeks before they called Trump racist, various lefty elites and Squad members had called Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden racists.  Now, Nancy might be a barely animated mummy from the Ptolemaic dynasty, and Joe might be a low-energy codger who doesn’t know what year it is, but neither of them are racists.  In fact, years of labeling everybody except obviously racist leftists as racists has turned the Dems into the Person-of-Indeterminate-Gender who Cried Wolf.

The best thing about the back-and-forth insult-fest is that it has raised the profile of the squad, and increasingly welded them into the public mind as the snarling, ignorant face of the Democratic party.   Nancy and Joe are smart enough to know how disastrous that is, even though they don’t seem to know how to stop it.  AOC and her fellows are polling right down there between wisdom tooth removal and testicular cancer, and if Trump can cast 2020 as a choice between him and them, he’s got at least a puncher’s chance at re-election.

Ben Shapiro may have said it best: the only thing Trump has to do to win is to just shut up and point to the terrible Democrats, but he just can’t seem to do it. And the only thing the Dems have to do to win is to just not be crazy, and they definitely can’t do that.

3. At the risk of triggering Zack Ford and his cocklaphobia – which, I swear to you I am not making this up, means a fear of hats – I’m going to put on my wizard hat and make a few predictions about what is likely to happen on our domestic political front while I am gallivanting about Europe:

• AOC is going to say something hateful about American attempts to protect our borders, or America in general, or both.
• Ilhan Omar is going to say something hateful about the Joooos, and the MSM will perform a cranial-rectal inversion so that they can claim to neither see nor hear her.
• Purple-haired hateful soccer star “What’s-her-name” is going to move into the second and then third week of what should be a remaining lifetime of total obscurity.
• Grandma Squanto is going to remain as white as the love child of Icelandic oddball singer Bjork and Swedish tennis star Bjorn Borg. (And that baby would of course be named Sven Bjork-Borg, or something very close to that.)

(And that baby would STILL look like Yaphet Kotto next to Elizabeth Warren.) #wemustneverstopmockingher

 

Finally, I came across an article on the fine website Legal Insurrection that pointed me to a short piece in Esquire, written by someone called Charles Pierce.

Yes, Esquire is a train wreck of a leftist website.  And yes, after reading Pierce’s piece, I now have an answer to the eternal question, “Is it possible for someone to type three paragraphs of absolute tripe while he or she has his or her dress up over his or her hysterical head?” (Spoiler alert: yes.)

Pierce discusses the impact that Trump is having on the judiciary by appointing a raft of conservative judges to every court with an opening.  And despite the third-rate quality of his thinking, he still manages to write one of the most satisfying sentences of 2019 so far:

“The conservative effort to salt the federal judiciary with larval Scalias is devastatingly close to completion.”

First, from your stupid lips to God’s ears, Hawkeye.

Second, “larval Scalias!”  I haven’t felt such a warm contented feeling in my chest since the first wave of morphine hit me in the hospital after my appendix burst.

Third, I would pay any price to attend a concert in which the Meth Gators opened for The Larval Scalias.

Keep your chin up, CO Nation, and I’ll be back from exotic foreign lands before you know it.

And don’t forget: Avenatti/Ford 2020!