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 And you find out that during the night, your neighbors have all disappeared, and they’ve been replaced by Turkey, Syria, Iran and Iraq.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 8th 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 28th, 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!
Martin Simpson 