I must begin this column with a trigger warning for any Christophobes who may be reading this.
That doesn’t apply to the regular members of CO nation, of course, because although our happy online family seems to include Christians, Jews, atheists, agnostics, festivus observers, lepidopterists, and everything in between, COers are not the types to shriek hysterically and cover their ears if they hear someone else express a belief that they don’t happen to share. Because we are well-adjusted, old-school adults.
But just in case anyone has wandered over here from Vox or MSNBC or the Hollywood Actors Guild, please re-insert your cranium where you’ve had it snuggly nestled since November of 2016, lest you accidentally hear some of the following 80-proof, super-offensive speech:
I love the Christmas season! As I write this, we’ve decorated our house, and I’m listening to some sweet Christmas carols played on the cello. (When I’m writing I can’t play anything with lyrics, or I get distracted.) But since Thanksgiving I’ve also been listening to a lot of Christmas-themed hymns and carols, in a variety of different formats.
If you like that kind of stuff, I’d recommend Audrey Assad’s “Abide With Me” (with a gorgeous, wintry video), Sufjan Steven’s oddball, banjo-inflected versions of “O Come O Come Emmanuel,” “Once in Royal David’s City,” “I Saw Three Ships,” and “Bring a torch, Jeanette, Isabella.” And, of course, the Hallelujah Chorus flashmob from a food court in PA about 10 years ago.
Which is not to say that this isn’t a season that can be very sad for some people, and I’ve got a little touch of that, too. Yesterday was the fifth anniversary of my dad’s death, and that’s an old wound that never completely heals. On the other hand, he’s with Christ and my grandparents and many other family and friends, and I know that I’ll see him again. So how sad can that be? One of the best things about being a Christian is that we are anti-Keynesians: in the long run, we are all alive!
So I’m usually in a pretty good mood this time of year. But after the week that our country has just had, I’m on another level. A “Jimmy Stewart in the last 10 minutes of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’” level. (That’s right. I’m running around downtown, screaming like a lunatic. “YAY! Merry Christmas, movie house! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building & Loan!”)
Probably the healthiest thing to be happy about is when good things happen to good people. And to find an example of that, I can start in England, and the unprecedented victory of Boris Johnson’s Tories, and the Brexit that is now finally going to happen for the beleaguered British voters.
I can’t pretend to follow UK politics closely, but I’ve read enough to appreciate the parallels of the conservatives’ victory there. After all, the “deplorable” British citizenry voted to get out from under the heavy hand of a distant, arrogant, micro-managing left in Brussels (think: DC swamp) years ago, and their own political elite have been condescendingly explaining to them why that can’t happen ever since. So along comes a blustering, clownish, perpetually-bad-hair-day guy whom the elites disdain, and against most expectations, he wins a sweeping victory. To sweeten things, he also happens to defeat an anti-Semitic, hateful far-left crank who has been demonizing rich people and fanning the flames of envy for his own self-aggrandizement. Also, mobs of leftist thugs rioted and vandalized property in London to protest the democratic process, apparently because they cannot accept the results of an election.
Sound familiar?
I don’t know if that election is any kind of bellwether for next year in the states, but I certainly hope so.
Here in the states, we’ve got a lot of our own good news. The economy – the same economy that whiz-kid leftist Paul Krugman said “would never recover” from Trump’s election – is firing on all cylinders. The stock market is at record highs, unexpectedly good job numbers were announced last week, along with an upward revision of the numbers from the last several months, wages continue to rise, and unemployment is at record lows, especially among minorities. Of course, our debt continues to balloon, which is an ominous indicator for the long run that neither party seems to care about, and the market is always cyclical, so this can’t go on forever.
But all things considered, we’re doing very well, so much so that two polls came out that gauged African-American support for Trump at 34%, up from the traditional low single digits. That thunking sound you just heard was thousands of racial arsonist Dems, fainting dead away.
But it’s not just that good things are happening to some good people: bad things are happening to people who richly deserve them.
Yes, I’m speaking of the House Dems, who appear to have painted themselves into a corner with their stupid impeachment, and are now about to enter the “reap what you sow” phase of this fiasco.
The impeachment poll numbers are indicating just how toxic the congressional Dems have been making themselves. Consider some non-impeachment examples first:
Human whoopie-cushion Eric Swalwell dared the GOP to “dispute” his “facts” – and then he listed about a dozen “facts,” the only one of which was actually true was that Rudy Giuliani was Trump’s lawyer.
Hateful anti-Semite and non-beauty-contestant Rashida Tlaib wasted no time in blaming “white supremacy” for Tuesday’s murders in a NJ kosher supermarket… only to delete the tweet when it turned out that – inconveniently – the hateful killers were black anti-Semites.
Joey Gaffes managed to cram his old guy’s Velcro-closing loafers past his horrifyingly white dentures again, this time by declaring that a citizen hero who used an AR-15 to stop a murderous creep who shot up a church “should not have had that gun.” Yes. More people should die in churches so that some ignorant and frightened politicians can feel better about themselves.
But the impeachment stuff is even more fun.
Dems are floundering, and for good reason. After all of this build-up, they couldn’t NOT impeach.
But they also could not impeach on the totally bogus charges of the actual, real-life crimes of bribery, or extortion, or obstruction of justice. Or on any of the other crimes that they’ve been referring to for the last 3 years. (I, for one, never thought that human sacrifice charge was going to stick.) And after all of the promised explosions, bombshells and IEDs, did they go to a vote with a bang? Or a whimper?
What do you think? They can’t even cogently explain what the charges are. After a fierce internal debate that resulted in their dropping the “used the wrong fork for the main course” accusation, they ended up with only two charges. As I understand them, those are: 1. He looked at us the wrong way. And 2. He hurt our feelings.
Meanwhile, I don’t think the leader of the House Majority, and of the entire Mummified-American Community, can be sleeping very well these days. I picture her laying on her stone slab, staring up at the stone ceiling, her eyes burning bright from deep within her facial bandages. She’s got to be kicking herself, because she knew all along with that her party’s radicals were leading her down the wrong path. But she was raised in a household where her faith in Ra guided her every move.
With a heart full of love – an organ, by the way, which she keeps in a canopic jar, along with her other embalmed internal organs on a stone shelf beside her bed – she staggers forward to what looks like an ill-fated impeachment. I don’t know what more she can do to stave off the disaster at this point.
I mean, other than releasing the swarm of scarab beetles from the recesses of her burial wrappings to go forth and skeletonize her political opponents.
Wait, this just in: Trump is now over 50% approval in a new poll of ancient, flesh-eating Egyptian scarab beetles. So… I guess it’s back to the stone wall full of pictograms for Nancy and the House leadership?
One more bit of bad news? Those “Don’t Mess with Imhotep!” t-shirts that the DNC had printed up are not selling well at all.
I know what you’re thinking: did someone challenge Martin to work a half-dozen “mummified Nancy Pelosi” jokes into one column? Yes, someone did, thanks for asking. In fact, it was the same person who said that I would never be able to work a deft lepidoptery joke into a column.
So, done and done.
Anyway, one other part of the impeachment that I enjoyed was watching IG Michael Horowitz trying his best to stay out of the partisan fray, even if it meant torturing logic and the language.
For the former, consider that his report found 17 major errors, but because none of the corrupt Obama supporters at the FBI or CIA either wrote down or would admit to having been biased, Horowitz had to report that he had found no “testimonial or documentary evidence” that those errors are connected to any bias. Even though those errors were made in favor of the anti-Trump trolls 17 times out of 17. Even Paul Krugman could understand those numbers well enough to calculate what percentage of those errors were made in favor of Trump. (Keep your shoes and mittens on, AOC: it’s 0 percent.)
For tortured language, I’d point you to Horowitz’s response to the charge that Obama had had “spies” in Trump’s White House: he said that he’d prefer to use the term “confidential human sources” rather than spies. As if that changes who they were, or what they were doing.
At some point, euphemisms become lies. And they also clot up the language unnecessarily.
Would I have enjoyed the James Bond film “The Confidential Human Source Who Loved Me” as much as I did the original?
Would I have even read LeCarre thrillers like “The Confidential Human Source Who Came in From the Cold?” Would my favorite part of Mad magazine have been “Confidential Human Source vs. Confidential Human Source?”
Wouldn’t my childhood have suffered if I’d hung around with my friends on a rainy Saturday afternoon saying, “I confidential human source, with my little eye, something that starts with a ‘b’?”
They were spying, Michael. Because they were spies.
Finally, one last happy tidbit comes to us from the world of sports. It turns out that the NFL is finally done with mediocre, cop- and America- and whitey-hating third-string quarterback Colin Kaepernick. Apparently the bile-filled has-been with 1976 Lionel Richie’s Afro burned his final bridge when he snubbed the special arrangements that the NFL had made to give him a special workout, moving the event to a nearby location at the last minute so that he could have his own cameraman film it.
The icing on that particular schadenfreude cake is that the wide receiver who went to that event to catch Kaepernick’s passes was supposed to be the human equivalent of a piece of utilitarian furniture, or maybe a Golden Retriever. Kaepernick was the attraction. The receiver was just supposed to catch the balls and return them.
But three weeks after the workout session, Kaepernick was still whining as an amateur, rather than professionally. But the receiver signed a contract to join the Redskins’ (no offense, Liz Warren) (#wemustneverstopmockingher) practice squad.
It’s as if a whiny hitter got a try-out in a batting cage with a mechanical pitching machine in front of some MLB scouts.
And then the Yankees signed the pitching machine to a 3-year deal for $12.6 million!
HA! YAYYYYYY! Merry Christmas, Mr. Kaepernick! Merry Christmas, you wonderful old Building & Loan!”
Avenatti/ Kaepernick 2020!
Martin Simpson 