Month: October 2019

In large part because I am mature, and keep politics in their proper perspective – i.e. I recognize it as something which should never occupy too much of our time and energy, and as a sometimes entertaining, sometimes horrifying cavalcade of elected narcissists who reflect the manifest failings of us, the muddle-headed electorate – things have been looking up for me lately.

After a month or so of physical therapy, my meniscus is back at Olympic-athlete level, my family is healthy and happy, the weather is starting to get cooler, and football season is in full swing.  And because I live in the best country in the world, I don’t have to lose sleep over things that have kept most of humanity awake at night for most of human history, and I take for granted so many blessings that I can’t count them.   Thanksgiving will be here before you know it, and I’m feeling grateful already.

For example, the Democrat debate last week made me super grateful.

I’m grateful that my eye isn’t filling up with blood, and that I’m not perpetually on the verge of losing my dentures, and that none of my offspring is a drug addicted ne’er-do-well who left his wife to play a sickening game of Clinton-and-the-intern with his dead brother’s widow.   Like Joe Biden.

I’m grateful that I’m not suffering from a deadly combination of restless arm syndrome and empty brain syndrome, like the Skateboarding Doofus.

I’m grateful that I’m not Spartacus, or Yang the Merciless, or Julian “wishes he were Fidel” Castro.  Because, just look at them.

 

This is how strange the world is:  Trump has somehow lost his last three press conferences, and yet he’s won the last 6 Democrat debates, hands down.

Look at the people on that stage.  Amy Klobuchar has the charisma of a piece of plywood leaned up against a podium.

Kamala Harris has the intellectual dexterity of a thicker piece of plywood leaned up against a podium.  She wants to prevent a president from being able to use Twitter to speak to the American public.  She wants to use the Justice Department to “pre-clear” any law that the legislature would pass on abortion to stop it from going into effect. The climax of her rhetorical attack on Trump was – I am not making this up – “dude gotta go.”

And if you thought that she couldn’t say anything more stupid than that, she would only reply, “hold my comically over-sized ganja spliff and watch this,” and proudly recite a challenge that she recounted giving to Brett Kavanaugh.  She defied him to name any criminal charge that sought to control men’s bodies.  To which he was apparently too deferential to reply, “How about rape to start with, you dimwit?  Followed by ALL OF THE OTHER ONES!, since you need to use your body to murder someone, or rob someone, or make an obscene phone call, or drive your car off a bridge and then leave Mary Jo Kopeckne to drown in it while you go shopping for phony neck braces.   Also, are you under the impression that a baby in the womb is ‘a woman’s body’?”

And Kamala didn’t have the worst night, because that honor belonged to Grandma Squanto.  Everybody took shots at her, and she looked ridiculous as she contorted herself into pretzels to avoid giving an obviously truthful answer to the question about whether her obscenely expensive plans would require middle class tax hikes.  As she continued to duck and dodge, it almost looked like – for the first time ever – she got a little red in the face.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

Only two of the Dems looked even intermittently good – Mayor Pete and Tulsi Gabbard – and then primarily because they looked comparatively moderate and reasonably smart.  On the other hand, in the middle of that crowd, Chairman Mao would look comparatively moderate, and Forrest Gump would look reasonably smart.

 

As bad a week as the Dems on stage had, CNN’s week was worse.  First, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas came out with several recordings, one of which featured CNN boss Jeff Zucker urging his staff to keep focusing on impeachment, no matter what else happens in the news.  As the head of a purported “news” network, Zucker – who I pointed out earlier looks like a giant, dishonest human thumb with glasses — is supposed to at least pretend to behave in an even-handed, unprejudiced manner.  Of course he is nothing of the sort, and he does nothing of the sort, as anyone who has watched his network already knows.

Still, it’s fun to watch the truth laid out there, so that Zucker can squirm and twitch like he just got hit with a giant hammer.

I really admire O’Keefe, but his repeated successes should shame our entire MSM.  As a young kid with a dream and a cheap camera, he’s been able to expose one corrupt leftist institution after another, while the entire bloated, over-compensated army of MSM hacks stumbles around in the dark.

Sure, if a nobody like Joe the Plumber dares to ask Obama why he wants to slap the middle class with ruinous taxes, the MSM is all over that story, and before you know it, they’ve interviewed a girl whose pigtails he pulled during recess in pre-school.  They also track down the Kentucky high schoolers who smiled at a crazy Indian activist who was trying to provoke a fight, and they find decades-old emails from the Iowa fan who donated a fortune to a children’s hospital.  And if you want someone to sniff out a flatulence joke made by Brett Kavanaugh’s buddies in a high school yearbook, they’ve got you covered.

But if a Democrat president is banging interns two at a time like Fredo doing cocktail waitresses, the MSM is mum.   If another Dem president uses the IRS to go after his political enemies, or gets caught on a hot mike promising Putin to remove armaments from our NATO allies who might use them to resist Putin’s aggression, the MSM marvels at his “scandal-free” administration.  If Joe Biden coerces a Ukrainian pol to fire an administrator who is looking into Biden’s son’s $50K per month no-show job – not to mention his shady ground-floor investment in a porn site called SWILF.com  (the S & W stand for “Sibling’s Widows”), the MSM no habla Ukranian.

Where was I?

Oh yeah: Thumbkin hates the Trumpkin.  But he also loves him some Grandma Squanto.

So as soon as the debate is over, CNN had multiple spokes-hacks grilling the other candidates about why they went after Land-o’-Lakes Lizzie.  These are just a few of the actual examples from the post-debate questioning:

Van Jones to barely-mirror-fogging Klobuchar: “Is there something that you’re aware of now, you’re seeing the ascendance of Elizabeth Warren, and some of these other ideas that have you afraid?”

Fredo Cuomo to mayor Pete: “Warren was a target for you and others. Why?”

Dana Bash to Mayor Pete:  “Why — I have a question specifically on Senator Warren’s answer to you on Medicare for all and how she’ll pay for it. But just broadly. Why did you think it was so important to go after Senator Warren tonight in a way that you haven’t before?”

Yes, you creeps!  Why on earth would you ask pointed questions to the front-runner in the race that you are trying to win?  What do you think this is, a competition for votes or something?!

When Tapper finally got the chance to interview Warren, he said, “I have to say based on the amount of incoming going your way, it seems like whatever the Democratic voters think, your colleagues think that you’re the frontrunner. Do you think any of the attacks that you faced tonight were out of bounds?”

I am not making that last question up.  That’s the kind of hard-hitting journalistic question that General Tom Thumb’s foot soldiers tossed at their Cherokee champion: Do you think that the attacks on you were unfair?

Can you imagine living on a planet when any of those cretins would ever ask any GOP politician such a disingenuous softball of a question?

“Mr. Republican nominee, did you think it was fair when Joe Biden told black people that you’d like to enslave them again?”  “Hey, Generic Conservative, do you think it crossed the line when every Democrat in the House called you a Nazi and a fascist?”   “Yo, Orange Man Bad, would you say it was legitimate when we allowed a succession of lunatics to use our airwaves to accuse you of treason and call for your execution?”

 

CNN’s week might have been even worse, if ABC News hadn’t stepped on a bias landmine that drew attention away from CNN.  In their rush to report how badly things are going in Syria – which had been a bucolic paradise for several millenia, until Trump got elected and ruined the world – they aired some footage of a vicious firefight, which they described as “appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians in a Syrian border town.”

Even for people who have gotten all their knowledge of armaments from watching The Dirty Dozen, the Rat Patrol and Saving Private Ryan, that description didn’t seem right.  Because as everyone knows, bombs go “wooooooooooooooo KA-BLAM,” whereas machine guns go “rat-a-tat-a-tat-tat-tat,” with an occasional bullet-whistling sound thrown in.  The footage sounded like the latter, rather than the former.

Alas, as it turns out, the video wasn’t from Syria.

“Big deal,” you’re probably thinking.  “So the footage was from Kurdlvania, or Turkey, or Iraq.  All of those places over there are pretty much alike.”

Au contraire, my gullible friend.  The footage was actually from… drum roll… wait for it…

Kentucky.

Not “Kentucky” as in, “Kentucky province, Syria.”  “Kentucky” as in, “right next to Tennessee.”

The geniuses at ABC couldn’t tell the difference between one of the biggest armies in NATO bombing civilians in the Middle East, and cell phone footage of a bunch of hillbillies blasting away with machine guns near Louisville.

I haven’t been to a prestigious J-school like those trench-coat-wearing wanna-bes, but the following details MIGHT have made me suspicious:

1. Do that many people really have Southern accents in Syria?
2. Weren’t there a suspiciously high number of powder blue t-shirts with a big “K” on them being worn by Kurdish civilians?
3. Would ISIS members be quite so likely to holler, “Yee hah! I bet they heard that one prit’ near all the way over to Paducah!”
4. Is there quite that much kudzu in the arid regions of Syria?

 

Nice job, media.  Really.

 

Avenatti/”Dude gotta go” 2020!

 

It’s been another good news/bad news kind of week, and I’m going to get the bad news out of the way first: the Kurds are in the process of getting screwed, and it looks like the Trump impeachment circus is going to be with us for quite some time.

I will not claim to be an expert on all things Kurdish.  I couldn’t even find Kurdlvania on a map.  (I know that’s not the name of their homeland.  I’m not actually that uninformed.  But I’m damn close.)  And I am as annoyed as anyone else to see a bunch of empty talking heads on all of the networks bloviating about how there’s an obvious solution for all of the Kurds’ problems, and of course Trump is blowing it.  (Or conversely, Trump is totally crushing it, and everyone else is wildly wrong.)

But what little I know about the Kurds is enough to know that there is no obvious solution to their problem.  Why?  Let’s try this hypothetical.  Say you wake up tomorrow morning, make yourself a cup of coffee, and walk out onto your front lawn and look around you.  And you find out that during the night, your neighbors have all disappeared, and they’ve been replaced by Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.

That’s right.  You’d spit your coffee all over yourself, race back inside, throw the deadbolt and head straight for your gun safe.

Other than Israel (and if you don’t see Israel as our best ally in the region, I shake my head at you in disdain), the Kurds have been our only reliable allies in the Middle East.  They are tough fighters, and they’ve responded to our calls since the first Gulf War, fighting with us or parallel to us in a lot of locations for a number of years.

I don’t mean to romanticize them.  They’ve fought primarily because they are surrounded by evil scumbags like Saddam Hussein and Assad and the Iranian mullahs and Erdogan, and it’s been in their best interest to fight with us.  They’re mostly Sunni Muslims, and I’m sure they’ve got a lot of the societal dysfunctions inherent to that region.  At the same time, to the extent that we will ever have any presence or influence in that region – and complete withdrawal and isolationism is a tempting but utopian pipe-dream — we are going to need to choose allies from among the available options in the region.

And pacifistic Jeffersonian democrats don’t last long in their neighborhood.

You don’t have to be Sun Tzu or Von Clausewitz to know one basic thing: if we screw our allies, no one is going to want to be our ally in the future.   And it looks like we are screwing the Kurds, by abandoning them.

Again, I don’t see any perfect solutions.  The American public has no appetite for a lot of American boots on the ground in the Middle East, fighting for other peoples’ interests.  I don’t either, and I think Trump’s heart is in the right place about that.  But that’s not the only other option other than abandoning the Kurds to be slaughtered.

We should at least arm the Kurds to the teeth, and give them any air or logistical support that we can.  I’d like to see us do more of that around the world – give the Poles, Ukrainians and Eastern Europeans the armaments to allow them to give Putin a huge fight if he’s tempted to encroach on their territory; give Taiwan and Hong Kong and maybe Japan the same kind of strategic support against Chinese aggression; and give Israel and the Kurds the ability to defend themselves, and deter the Erdogans, Iranians and ISIS of the world.

If any country or people won’t fight for themselves, we shouldn’t fight for them (or maybe even with them).  But if they are our allies and are willing to fight for their own freedom, we should give them our moral and political support, and a boatload of weapons.

Yikes.  I guess I can do a little bloviating on my own, can’t I?  But I just hope we don’t see the Kurds getting destroyed, while Trump pulls an Obama (i.e. talks tough but does nothing).

 

The other bad news is the Dems’ impeachment circus.  But I’m already exhausted by that.  I don’t know how it’s going to turn out, and I’m going to try to ignore it as best I can, but I’m reasonably hopeful that if the “whistleblowers” and wildly over-played charges are as transparently bogus as they so far appear to me, the public will take it out on the hypocritical left, and thrash them at the polls.

 

Moving on to the good news, I have three feel-good stories: an Iowa “journalist” opens a can of kharmic whup-ass on himself, Ilhan Omar files for divorce from Ahmed II, and Grandma Squanto is caught lying about herself again.

You’ve probably heard about the Iowa story already.  Carson King is a regular Joe watching a football game, holds up a sign asking for Busch beer, and ends up getting $1 million in donations.  Then, because he’s a better man than me, he donates all of that money to an Iowa children’s hospital.  He becomes an instant celebrity, and everybody’s happy.

Everybody except a social justice warrior nitwit named Aaron Calvin, who works as a “reporter” for the Des Moines Register.  I did 90 seconds worth of looking into the story, which was enough to discover that Calvin has written for such leftwing echo-chambers as Buzzfeed and some other one exactly like Buzzfeed, and that he (and I’m guessing just a bit on that pronoun) looks to be about 2% more masculine than Rachel Maddow.  And just so you know that he’s a serious journalist, he’s written about white privilege.

So Calvin looks into Carson King’s social media history, and finds some posts he’d written when he was 16.  Shockingly, the 16-year-old’s posts were not erudite dissertations on Proust.  They were, instead, sophomoric references to an unfunny tv comedian who says crude things.  But to be fair to King, he likely was a sophomore when he was 16, so I’m not even sure that “sophomoric” is an insult.

In fact, I was called “sophomoric” many times when I was in 8^th grade, and again in my freshman year.  I naturally took those as compliments.

Anyway, Calvin knows a world-shaking story when he sees one, and he wrote a hard-hitting story that crapped all over the guy who just donated what is likely the only million dollars he’s ever going to see to a children’s hospital.  Thankfully, while the corporate weasels at Busch immediately denounced Carson’s ancient tweets, the general public lashed back at the Des Moines Register, and at Calvin.

While the backlash was going on, some intrepid fellow looked at Calvin’s own social media past.  And wouldn’t you know it, the gender-amorphous little leftist poke-nose had written a few offensive things himself.  Things like dropping the “n” word – and I don’t mean “narwhal,” which is a damn fine word, and appropriate for all occasions – all over the place.  And wishing that the police would be [a verb that starts with an “f” and can be either transitive or intransitive], and demonizing the Christian types who voted for Trump in spite of his moral failings.

Hilariously enough, the last tweet he’d written before those that focused on Carson King was a re-tweet of a lefty article in the New Republic which praised the outing/condemning of people for their old social media posts.  The title of that article?  “The Cancel Culture Con.”

HA!  You know the rest: Aaron Calvin loses his job because of his old tweets.  HA! And again I say HA!

Calvin had only been hired at the Des Moines Register in February.  So I guess you could say that his Iowa newspaper career was nasty, brutish, and short.

And yes, that’s a bank-shot Calvin and Hobbes joke that I am not ashamed to have made!

 

Next, up Ilhan Omar.  Mother to Ilwad.  Wife to at least two Ahmeds that we know of, one of whom is likely her brother.  (Ilhan to Hunter Biden: “Oh, so you think you’re so transgressive, just because you ran off with your brother’s widow?  Well hold my hummus:  I ran off with my brother!”)

She  has now filed for divorce from Ahmed 2: Electric Boogaloo.  (See my column at Martinsimpsonwriting.com from June 28^th, in which I explain the twisted matrimonial history of Omar.)  Apparently she had been carrying on an affair, and the heart wants what it wants.

In her case, does the heart want to destroy America?  I’m pretty sure it does.  Does it also want to smite some infidels?  I’ll let you be the judge of that.  But it definitely wants a third Ahmed, or at least a third Ahmed-adjacent type.

I’m not usually one to see the bright side of divorce, especially when there are kids involved.  But there is at least one silver lining here:  Boogaloo, you have definitely dodged a scimitar with this one.

 

Finally, Lizzie Warren is back in the news for another lie that she has repeatedly been telling about herself.

Is it the one about that time she ran off with a boy from a neighboring tribe, and they took a canoe down the Father of Waters for a romantic honeymoon?  It is not.

Is it the one about how she got mad at her folks, and went off into the woods and gathered all of the necessary materials, and built her own tepee from scratch? It is not.  (To quote a scowling old white lady:  You didn’t build that!)

This tall tale is one she has been telling on the campaign trail for years, and always with the same lines.  When she was a young teacher fresh out of school, she was offered a second-year teaching contract, but when the principal found out she was pregnant, she was fired. Because, sexism.

You can see video of her delivering that story with great conviction, over and over and over again.

The only problem is that there is also video of her from the early 2000s, explaining to some earnest interviewer that she voluntarily took a couple of years off from teaching to have that baby and another.

There are also records from the school board that was involved, proving that they offered her a second-year contract, and when she turned it down, they were disappointed to lose her.

You’ve got that right.  After decades of lying about being discriminated against because of her race, it turns out that she has also been lying about being discriminated against because of her sex.  What’s the over-under on her hitting the leftist victim sweepstakes trifecta, by claiming that she has also faced brutal discrimination because of her lifelong lesbianism, which I’m guessing she’ll make public in…. 3… 2… 1…

At this point, what can you say about this woman?  Other than, “Grandma Squanto speak with forked tongue!”  #wemustneverstopmockingher

#seriously

#never,never,ever!

 

Avenatti/Ahmed 3 in 2020!

Politics has seemed a pretty small and petty arena this past week. I’ve been reminded again and again of all that is repugnant in politics: the hypocrisy and vanity and low character of politicians, and the corresponding flaws in ourselves, as we vote these knuckleheads into office, and overlook the flaws in our own side, while we exaggerate those in the leaders of the other side.

The leftist elite always provide fodder for much-deserved mockery and ranting, as well as much schadenfreude-y entertainment for me.  But the GOP are no big prize either, as they proved when they had both houses and the White House for two years, and managed to not try to get control of the border, or cut the budget, or definitively repeal and replace the “You-Can’t-Keep-Your-Doctor Dumpster-Fire Health-Care Monstrosity Act of 2009.”

And I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Trump.  He’s an out-sized character, with out-sized flaws, including some especially obnoxious ones.  But I’ve never really been able to get too far down on him, partly because most of his flaws seem like misdemeanors – his juvenile braggadocio and ego, his lack of discipline and too frequent blowhard-y tweets – and partly because his opponents are virtually always SO MUCH worse.

But Trump’s congratulatory tweet to the thugs who run the leftist slave-state of communist China on the 70^th anniversary of their bloodthirsty kleptocracy was a low point.

The 20^th century was the bloodiest in history, and dictators had to slaughter overtime to even get noticed  If there were an Olympics for mass murder, Hitler would have barely made the medal stand, taking the bronze for his national socialists, behind Stalin and his soviet socialists.   But leading the pack with a death toll of around 65 million were the ChiComs and their “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”  (Pol Pot might have been more murderous than the big three, in terms of per capita deaths.)

While China’s totalitarians are not still killing at the pace they were in the old days, they’re still an oppressive, leftist dictatorship.  Their bullying of plucky little Hong Kong should outrage us all, and the bravery of the protestors should inspire us.  They are risking prison or worse, and flying our flag while doing it, because they understand the greatness of our country and its message better than most of us seem to.

I’ve been heartened to see Trump getting at least intermittently tough with the Chicoms on trade, and he’s pushed back on them more than any recent president.  But no conservative should ever have been able to congratulate that oppressive regime, even though much diplomacy seems to involve that kind of moral relativism and unmerited politeness.

Having said all that, the national Democrats are so much worse!  The measurement system does not exist which can plumb the depth of their unrelenting terribleness!

Consider the case of Hunter Biden and his dad.   Sure, Trump often seems to speak bloviation as a second language.  But Joey Gaffes is freaking fluent!  Trump may brag about his crowd sizes and his perfect conversations with heads of state, but have you ever heard him go on and on about how he vanquished the Dread Gangbanger Corn Pop with just a steely expression and a length of chain?   Has Trump ever talked any bigger than Plugsy McBloward when he bragged to an audience about how he threatened to withhold US military aid and forced the instant firing of a Ukranian prosecutor who was looking into his son’s manifest corruption?

Speaking of his son, how much has our unbiased media done to report on his background?  How many average Americans know that young Hunter’s resume consists of lines like “cocaine enthusiast and frequent arrestee,” “did a one-month stint in the Navy before being kicked out because of the Navy’s judgmental intolerance of cocaine enthusiasts” and “betrayed his wife by carrying on a sexual relationship with his dead brother’s widow?”

You read that right.  Of all of the women in all of the world with whom he could have cheated on his wife, he chose his dead brother’s wife.  Good lord, even Ted Kennedy didn’t take a run at Jackie O after JFK got killed!

I hope.

But hey, maybe I’m being too hard on Hunter.  Maybe there’s more to him than being a degenerate, addicted, quasi-incestuous widow-jumper.  For example, he must be pretty smart, considering how many high-powered jobs he’s had.  He probably double-majored in physics and classics, before going on to get his doctorate in Ukranian energy production.

Well, he did go to Yale and get a law degree.  Which I’m sure had nothing to do with his powerful dad.  And he did get a job with a huge bank… which coincidentally had contributed to the Corn-Pop-Slayer’s political campaigns.  And he did get that $50K per month job as a consultant to a Ukranian energy company.   And before you ask, yes, I said $50k per MONTH, not year.

Maybe Hunter is smart after all.  Because he found a way to get paid $50K per month consulting on energy issues for Ukranians, despite his knowing nothing about energy except how much of it is required to run back and forth between your bedroom and your brother’s widow’s bedroom, and his inability to find Ukraine on the map.

Fun fact: to her fans in Ukraine, my Aussie shepherd is known as “Cassie, the Wonder Sobaka.”  Because “sobaka” is the Ukranian word for “dog.”

Congratulations!  You now know more Ukranian than Hunter Biden does.  Please provide your banking information so that Ukranian oligarchs can deposit your first monthly payment of $50 large by November 1^st.

 

But it’s not just the Bidens.  First the Dem hypocrites accused Trump of colluding with the Russians when it was actually the DNC and Hillary who paid for a phony dossier put together in part by Russian spies to hurt their political opponent.  Then it was the Bidens who got a pass from the Dems when they shook down Ukranians for their own political gain, right before the Dems decided that Trump’s alleged shaking down of Ukranians for political gain was an existential threat to our country.

Adam “Mr. Mackey” Schiff (mmmkay?) is outraged that Trump would allegedly ask a foreign official for dirt on his political opponent.  But that very same lying, bug-eyed creep is on tape – you can easily find it and listen to it with a quick online search – with a guy whom he thinks is a Russian insider peddling a salacious tape of Trump in a Moscow hotel.  The Russian is actually some shock jock pranking the hapless Schiff-for-brains, putting on a thick Yakov Smirnoff accent to tempt him with video of “naked Trump.”

Listen to Schiff’s eager gullibility as he desperately tries to secure the non-existent dirt on his political opponent.  Which he now says is the worst thing you could ever do.  Even worse, presumably, than banging your brother’s widow.  (No, I cannot get over that.)

 

You can’t make this up.  It’s like God has created the karmic equivalent of the plagues of Egypt for the Democrats to torture themselves with.  Falsely accuse Trump of colluding with the Russians, then get revealed as Russian-colluders.  Accuse him of extorting the Ukranians, then get exposed as Ukraine-extorters.

When you are certain you’re going to win the White House, spend a month before the election pre-emptively braying that anybody who does not accept the election outcome would be an un-American threat to all that is good and holy.  Then fast forward three years, and find yourself pitching the fourth door-stop volume of your projected 23-volume book series, “Reasons that We Cannot Accept the Legitimacy of Trump’s Election.”

Use accusations of sexist piggery against Roger Ailes and Trump, only to turn around in time to see Weinstein, Franken, Charley Rose, Matt Lauer, Garrison Keilor et al – not to mention our former Intern-Fondler-in-Chief — falling like dominoes all around you.

Call out some obscure GOP elected official for having worn blackface decades ago, only to learn that all but two members of the Democrat party in Virginia have old pictures of them in blackface.  And those two posed in Klan hoods.

Bah!

One of the main reasons I’m a conservative is that I want a government that is as small and least intrusive as possible.  I’d like to live in a world in which politicians have so little power that I can afford to go about my business and ignore the small-minded, ignoble games that they play.

Weeks like this last one remind me of just how right I am.   Which is always nice.

Avenatti/Schiff 2020!

Well, it’s time once again to say a fond farewell to one of the legions of Democratic presidential candidates.

This time, the dearly departed is physical giant/moral little person Bill De Blasio, who declared the end of his candidacy on Friday, to an audience of six empty plastic chairs and a folding table with uneven legs, in a lost luggage area near the bathrooms in a bus terminal in New Jersey.

Why would I kick De Blasio while he’s down, you might be asking yourself?

Have you seen how tall that guy is?  It’s very tough to kick him properly UNTIL he is down.

But that’s not the only reason.  My thesis today is that Bill de Blasio might be the purest distillation of all that is wrong with the elite left today.

Before I continue, let me reiterate that I know a lot of very fine people who are Democrats.  A few are family, some are friends, some are work colleagues.  Most of them are attracted to the ideals of a traditional, blue-collar Democrat party that once stood up for workers against larger societal forces, combined with a desire for such worthy ends as protecting the environment and fighting discrimination, goals that most conservatives (whether those Dems realize it or not) share, and would be happy to make common cause around.

Those are good people, and it’s a shame to see us becoming alienated from each other in these polarizing times.

But that’s not the people I’m talking about.  Bill de Blasio has no more in common with those folks than he does with conservatives.  He’s an archetypal lefty elitist, and I think it’s worth considering the markers of his genus, because while he may have limped ignominiously off the stage, there are many others of his type left, and one of them is almost certainly going to be the Dem nominee for president.

So let us consider my list of six identifying characteristics of lefty elitists:

1.They reflexively falsify their own identity in some crucial way.  Sometimes the fakery has to do with personal habits, as when Ted Kennedy pretended to be sober, and married, and a Catholic.  Other times it involves matters of class origin, as when Al Gore pretended to be a humble dirt farmer… raised by a millionaire civil rights-opposing Senator, and spending his childhood in a swanky DC hotel suite.   Sometimes it involves a make-believe ethnicity, as when an Irish rich kid named Robert Francis Patrick Declan Macmanus Houlihan O’Rourke poses as your quasi-Hispanic border-town buddy “Beto,” or when the whitest lady in the western hemisphere gets an academic job because she claims Indian ancestry on the grounds that she watched a lot of F-Troop reruns and had several Siouxsie and the Banshees records.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Bill fits that bill.  First, because his first name isn’t “Bill,” it’s “Warren.”  Second, because his last name isn’t “de Blasio,” it’s “Wilhelm.”  The story is that he was often called “Billy” as a child.  But then again, as a child I was often called “Carlos Danger” as far as you know, and you don’t see me adopting that nom de pol as an adult.  (Thanks for ruining that option, Anthony Weiner!) Also, he supposedly adopted his mother’s maiden name as part of “embracing his Italian heritage” at age 22, becoming Warren de Blasio-Wilhelm in 1983, and then “Bill de Blasio” at age 41.

The “embracing an Italian identity” part sounds believable, but call me cynical.  I think for a two-faced pol like would-be Kaiser Wilhelm, that change likely had at least as much to do with getting away from a German moniker that would do more harm than good in the atmosphere of identity politics in NYC.  Sure, a German name can come in handy if you’re making pianos, brewing beer, selling a well-made luxury car, or angling for command of a panzer division near the Polish border in the summer of 1939.

But when you’re up against one leftist candidate from the Black Panther Party and another from La Raza in the early 21^st century?  Not so much.

 

2. They build hypocrisy into every policy. Elitist lefties want to keep little people from owning guns, while they retain their armed bodyguards. They want to force regular folk to send their kids to sub-standard public schools, while sending their own kids to private schools.  They want to make the little people return to using trains or bicycles — or maybe oxcarts – while they fly private jets and are then driven around in SUVs with a carbon hoofprint of Hillary-esque proportions.  They want to show compassion to criminals by releasing them into your neighborhoods, and generosity to downtrodden voting blocks by giving your money to them while keeping their own fortunes in trusts that are beyond the tax code’s reach.

Again, Warren fits the bill.  He wants to disarm little people who haven’t committed any crimes, and who might live in dangerous areas where the protection that guns can provide might literally be the difference between life and death.  Meanwhile, he makes his speeches – and goes to his office, and to the gym, and to public events, and home – while surrounded by bodyguards who carry licensed guns.  He opposes or slow-walks approval for charter schools, and he’s done his best to shut down gifted programs in the public schools.  Programs like the ones that his own kids attended, coincidentally.

 

3. They prefer utopian feel-good plans, while neglecting the common sense/good governance front. They don’t maintain infrastructure, don’t fill potholes (unless you count San Francisco’s plan to fill potholes – and streets — with human feces), and preside over crime running wild. California spent billions on a now-defunct bullet train and established elaborate networks of sanctuary cities and welfare support programs for illegals, while managing to be out-performed by the 15^th century French Rat-Catchers unions in the crucial metrics of preventing typhus, smallpox, and the bubonic plague.  (LA’s new tourism motto: “What happens in LA, stays in LA!  Except for the ebola.  That you’ll be taking home with you.”)

De Blasio is totally sympatico with the downward trends in NYC, many of which (to be fair to him) he inherited, from ignoring crumbling subway infrastructure and rising crime, while micro-managing what size drinks and how much sugar New Yorkers can consume and through what kind of straws.  My favorite of his idiotic notions was his push to ban steel and glass skyscrapers.  In New York City!   Even though I never wanted to live in a huge city, I always saw skyscrapers as incredible achievements, emblematic of human ambition and abilities.

Not Big Bill.  He knows better than us that such gaudy buildings are too often just tributes to the egotistical people and companies who built them.  Plus, they’re terrible for the environment, somehow, with the climate pollution and the global warming.  So get on board with his vision, and in no time Manhattanites will be living in mud huts and yurts, saving tons of energy by not walking to their non-existent jobs.  Soon they’ll cut their carbon footprint even further, when they make the de Blasio-approved decision to stop respirating – and thus exhaling all of that nasty carbon dioxide into the air – by the simple process of starving to death.  Hoorah!

 

4. They tend to fail upward in their political careers. It’s a familiar pattern: an elite leftist becomes mayor and runs a city into the ground, then becomes governor and mismanages his state, and then becomes a candidate for national office. You don’t have to look far for examples.

Spartacus Booker went from a disastrous stint as mayor of Newark  (whose motto is NOT: “A well-governed paradise on earth!”) to representing New Jersey in the Senate (whose state motto is NOT “Come for the low taxes, stay for the Absence of Corruption!”), to running for president.  Pope Pete went from running South Bend (motto: “Tired of Indiana’s low homicide rate and lack of racial tension?  Come to South Bend!”) to running for president.  Skateboarding Doofus spent 6 years in the House with zero accomplishments, then spent a record amount to lose a Senate seat.  So he’s naturally running for president.

But Bill de Blasio might out-do them all as the most flaccid example of the Peter Principle known to history.  He’s continually underwater in his poll ratings in New York state and city; last month’s poll had him at 26% favorable and 57% unfavorable, for a net negative of 31.  And that’s in a heavily blue state, where Donald Trump only has a net negative of 27!  His presidential support never got to even 1%.   Perhaps the most telling stat of all: in that August poll, he was hands down the single most unpopular political figure in the entirety of New York!

And remember: Chucky Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand, Anthony Weiner and Al Sharpton can all be considered political figures in the state of New York.

As best I can tell, de Blasio’s finest mayoral achievement has been the emotional boost he’s given to 92-year-old David Dinkins, who until recently looked to be taking to the grave the title of Worst Modern Mayor of NYC.

 

5. They are extremely arrogant — It’s a hallmark of elite leftists that they know better than we do how we should live our lives. They’ll tell us what we can buy, what kind of car we can drive, what we can do with what was formerly considered “our property,” who we can hire at and what rate, and etc.

And Bill de Blasio was always at home in that world.  In the June debate, he gave us the most accurate and pithily distilled example of the leftist attitude toward the world in one quote:  “There is plenty of money in this world, and there’s plenty of money in this country, it’s just in the wrong hands. Democrats have to fix that.”

That just about sums it up, doesn’t it?

 

6. They are intrinsically unable to learn from past mistakes. After a century of trying socialism in dozens of countries all over the globe, and reaping a bumper crop of poverty, oppression, misery and gulags, let’s give it one more try. After the latest mass shooters broke 27 existing gun laws, passing the magic 28^th is going to do the trick.  After 50 years of tax increases produced less revenue to the government, and tax rate cuts have produced more economic growth… we need another massive tax increase.

Here again, Wacky Warren has established his bona fides.  He started out in the 80s as a big supporter of Nicaragua’s murderous revolutionary Sandinista party, and even after that socialist experiment dissolved into disaster, he was still calling himself a democrat socialist years later.  He got early jobs in campaigns of various leftist stereotypes come to life, from Dinkins to Charlie Rangel to Hillary Clinton, and advocated for a myriad of leftist policies that never seemed to work.  So naturally, when he came to office in a deep blue state that deeply wanted him to succeed… he followed the same failed policies over the same cliff.

Somehow, the fusillade of negative feedback produced by decades of terrible decisions has never managed to pierce the thick cloud of unwarranted self-regard with which he’s surrounded himself.

Sound familiar?  I’m looking at you, Grandma Squanto, and Crazy Bernie, and Joey Gaffes.

 

Let us end with the traditional farewell haiku:

 

Disastrous mayor

Approved by no New Yorkers

Tall as he is dumb

 

Avenatti/Wilhelm 2020!