The Simpsons are Going to Europe! (posted 7/24/19)

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!