Month: January 2020

The theme today is an especially satisfying one: lefties reaping what they sow.

Exhibit A: Stephen King.

I long ago had to make my peace with the idea that many talented people in the arts whose work I really enjoy are actually – when they are not making good music or movies or writing good books — bitter leftists who, if they knew me personally, would hate me and everything I stand for.

And I am absolutely adorable, and accustomed to nothing but praise from all who know me, so that really hurts.

Nevertheless, I’ve had to manfully struggle on, knowing that even though I like Springsteen’s music, and DeNiro’s and John Cusack’s acting, and Ken Burns’ documentaries, I have to separate the artist from the art.  Because in these and so many other cases, the artists are boneheads, or worse.

Which brings me to Stephen King.   I’ve read a lot of his work over the years with a lot of enjoyment.  True, most of it was decades ago.  The early novels and novellas entertained me and creeped me out, and I’ve got a lot of his tomes on my shelves in the library in Stately Simpson Manor.

But he’s been a vitriolic, bile-filled loon on the subject of politics for pretty much his whole life.  Which is why I’ve been especially pleased to see him getting hoist on his own political petard by his leftist co-religionists this week.

It turns out that he committed the unpardonable sin: he resisted the fascist pull of identity politics.  When commenting on complaints that this year’s Oscar nominees are too white, King said, “For me, the diversity issue — as it applies to individual actors and directors, anyway — did not come up. That said… I would never consider diversity in matters of art. Only quality. It seems to me that to do otherwise would be wrong.”

That’s a logical and ethical statement.  So of course the SJW’s went nuts, attacking him as a racist white guy who cannot talk about race because his white privilege has kept him from understanding any kind of struggle.  (Never mind that King was an underclass poor kid raised by a single mother who lived in a shabby trailer until his novel Carrie became a surprise best-seller.)

King quickly went wimpy, tweeting about how minorities are “shut out of the game,” but I can only hope that the leftist trolls and censors show him the same grace that he’s shown conservatives over the years.  That is to say, I hope they assail and harass him at every turn, until that glorious day when this thought occurs to him: the people I’ve been aligning myself with are small-minded racial bean-counters and bigots.  Maybe I should pull my head out of my politics, and reconsider things.

 

Speaking of groups that are too white, how about Exhibit B: the Democrat debate line-up.  How sweet is the irony that the party who constantly slanders conservatives as toxically white, and virtue signals ad nauseum about how racially diverse they are ends up with a debate stage as white as Fargo in the winter.  As white as a Siberian tiger in winter.  As white as Edgar Winter.

Almost as white as… Elizabeth Warren.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

And the vanilla icing on that vanilla cake on the bone china plate sitting on a white marble counter-top: the minority candidates are gone because they couldn’t get the votes of… Democrats!  Racist, klan-loving, Jim Crow-supporting, Dixie-whistling Democrats!

I’ve loved watching various MSM commentators waxing outraged at great length about how unfair it is that all the minority mediocrities are gone, shunted aside by the votes of a racist American electorate.  Yet somehow, none of them ever mentions that not a single Republican has voted yet.  By the logic of their own egregious identity politics, the Democrats are terrible, terrible bigots.

And they’re not wrong.

 

Exhibit C.  The Oscars are going host-less.  And after the verbal napalming that Ricky Gervais gave the sanctimonious, hypocritical Hollywood Left at the Golden Globes, I don’t blame them.

But this should give them pause.  Because their vicious, narrow-minded, humorless hatefulness has become so venomous that it has turned what used to be one of the most sought-after, high-profile, prestigious gigs in their industry into a lose-lose proposition that no one in their right mind would consider taking on.

Every reasonable human in Hollywood would rather carpool with Soleimani than host the Oscars!

This is why you can’t have nice things, Hollywood.  This, right here.

 

Exhibit D. Visitors to Glacier National Park over the last 20 years or so may have noticed signs all over the place that proclaimed, “These glaciers will be gone by 2020.”

But you may have noticed, if you have been to Montana — or can read, or watch tv, or surf the internet, or have even intermittently functioning neural synapses – the glaciers are all still there.

If you are a normal person, and you put up signs warning of an apocalyptic environmental disaster that will strike in 2020… but it’s now 2020, and that disaster hasn’t happened… you would feel a little sheepish. You might think things like, “How could I have been so wrong?” and “Maybe the alarmist weirdos I’ve been following are not scientific geniuses, but just… alarmist weirdos.”

That’s what you might do if you were a normal person who put up those signs.

But the people who put up those signs are not normal people, but Gaia-worshiping political zealots who wouldn’t know the Maunder Minimum from an aggressive case of genital warts.

So they tried to sneakily replace those signs last year, without admitting how ridiculously wrong they have been.  Somebody noticed, and started posting pictures of the idiotic signs, and now the story has exploded in the alarmists’ faces.

As I mentioned in my last column, one of my goals is to always try to learn from my mistakes.  But not these knuckleheads.  They might have predicted 135 of the last 3 disasters, but they are not deterred.  And they’ve got a plan to deal with the next disasters, don’t you doubt it.

Oddly enough, step one is to transfer a bunch of your money and freedom to a bloated federal government.

Step two?

Cut out a bunch of copies of the number 3, and start duct-taping them over the number 2 in the signs that warn that the glaciers will disappear by 2020.

Finally, in the tradition that I started last Fall, I have another lovingly written haiku in honor of each of the most recent Democrat candidates who have dropped out of the race: Julian Castro and Spartacus Booker.

 

Fitting name, Castro.

Abortions for trans women?

Those are men, you dope!

 

Bug-eyed race baiter.

You call yourself Spartacus?

Not so Smartacus.

 

Avenatti – Missing Glaciers, 2020!

This is my first column of the year, and I feel like I’ve been out of the loop, and missing the camaraderie and good cheer of the CO Nation.  Still, I’ve made a few ambitious new year’s resolutions this year: I’d like work out three times a week, and write a relevant-yet-hilarious NCAA basketball/dead terrorist joke.  We’ll see if I can pull those off.

As the new year started, the Dem leadership was in their accustomed position: at war with reality.  And I’m not referring to just the usual leftist struggles with delusions such as “socialism is bound to work this time,” and “America is terrible,” and “Antifa is against fascism,” and “Bruce Jenner is a nice lady named Caitlin.”

No, I’m referring to the story that dominated the hopes and dreams of Dems for the last half of last year: when the American public saw the mountain of evidence that Trump was literally Hitler (only worse), they would storm Trump Tower with torches and pitchforks.  Instead, after a months-long sham impeachment investigation that got worse reviews than the movie “Cats,” the Dems rushed through a sham-impeachment vote, because it was super-urgent that Trump be impeached and tried before he could do any more damage to national security.

Then Nancy Pelosi tucked the signed articles of impeachment into her burial wrappings and shuffled back into her pyramid, where she hibernated through the end of the year in a sarcophagus lined with pictograms of a bad orange man trampling the world, and other fantastic scenes so outlandish that only a mummified Marxist could believe them.

Meanwhile, back among the living, two brilliant men were planning vicious attacks that would devastate some evildoers.  One of them was the aforementioned orange man, who was planning “Operation So-Long, Soleimani.”

The other was Ricky Gervais.

I don’t know which of their attacks I enjoyed more, so even though they are both pretty much old news now, I feel I have to take a few moments to savor both of them.

First, though, I have a lesson for my leftist friends, in the form of a role model that you would all richly benefit from emulating.  That role model, you should have guessed, is me.

Let me explain.

Ricky Gervais is a leftist, and an atheist, and he’s said very condescending and insulting things about Christians.  Donald Trump is an often-bloviating, undisciplined goofball whose tweets and public statements – when they’re not making me laugh and cheer – sometimes make me wince and cringe.

Ricky Gervais is also pretty stinking funny, and Donald Trump is three years into what is shaping up – policy-wise – as one of the best presidencies of my lifetime.

The reason that I should be your role model is that I recognize the flaws in both men, and yet am very happy to watch both Gervais and Trump, because 1. I know that life is too short to be continually upset by those who disagree with me, and 2. I learn from my mistakes.

I’m afraid that too many lefties do neither.

Take Gervais, and his schaudenfreude-tastic carpet bombing of the pompous Hollywood community at the Golden Globes.

Outside of the US Congress, you’d be hard pressed to find a more narcissistic, virtue-signaling, clueless collection of morally blind, professional useless people than the acting community.  So when Gervais got up there and torched them all, it was beautiful to behold.

He hit all the high points: they pose as eco-warriors but fly private jets everywhere; they pose as feminists but they sucked up to Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein as they preyed on women; they pose as socialists fighting corporate greed but they take obscene salaries from the biggest corporations on the planet.

In an early contender for “Best Quote of 2020,” he warned the nominees that, “If you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech.  You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.”

Every normal person in the country, when they heard that — I mean the day after the show, because no normal person was actually watching the Golden Globes live – cheered at that.

But were the actors in the room suitably chastened?  Of course not.  Even after the much-deserved verbal whipping, several actors STILL shared their deep political thoughts with us in their speeches.  Patricia Arquette (I loved her in True Romance 20 years ago) talked about how terrible Trump has us on the brink of war, and also Australia is on fire, because global warming, and Trump, I guess.

Michelle Williams – who I thought was the cute singer in the Mamas and the Papas a million years ago, but I was wrong – gave a vapid speech about abortion, without mentioning the word “abortion.”  After talking about her professional success, she said, “I would not have been able to do this without employing a woman’s right to choose.”

By which I guess she does NOT mean that she chose an Uber over a private jet to get to the awards show, or that she chose a good acting coach or plastic surgeon.  I think that she probably means that she  got rid of an inconvenient life at some point in the past.  But hey, she got that keen little trophy out of it.

I know it would probably be bad form for me to point out that as I write this, I am looking at all of the trophies I’ve won in my life, which are lined up in impressive fashion on my bookshelves.

There’s the “Most Improved Player” from my senior year in high school football, my “High Average” bowling trophy from that same banner year, a third-place golf tournament trophy (I hit a pin-high approach shot with a five-iron on 18 that sealed the deal, thanks for asking), and my “Best Fantasy Short Story of the Year Published in the UK” award.

(That last one was for “Dancing About Architecture,” which you can read at Martinsimpsonwriting.com, if you are in the mood for some magical realism-style fiction.)

Also, I know: I didn’t mention my Runner-up Award for “People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of Year, 2018.”  Because that’s still a very painful memory.  And Idris Elba is dead to me.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

I’m proud of all of those trophies, as I’m sure that Michelle Williams is proud of the trophy that she won for pretending to be somebody else.  But I wouldn’t trade one of my daughters for any of them.

On the heels of the Gervais rhetorical drone strike on Hollywood, the bad Orange Man went Bad Orange Bad-Arse on Qassim Soleimani, in a hugely satisfying explosion that also took out another high-ranking Hezbollah terrorist with five names, starting with “Abu.”

(I’d devote more time to filling out my terrorist-name score card, except that all of them seem to be named either Mohammed or Abu, so it’s very confusing.  Also, every time I get my brackets almost done, Trump comes in and kills another one of them, and we’re back to square one.)

Heading into March Madness this year, I’m just going to save time and bet on Abu Gonzaga.  (BOOM!  Now I’ve just got to work out three times a week, and 2020 will be a wild success!)

As great as it was that Trump took out a clown car full of evil terrorists, it was even better to watch the aftermath in America, where every national Democrat seemed determined to do as much damage to their political future as Trump had done to Soleimani’s chances of getting his rental car deposit back.

It started before the strike, when a bunch of Dems — all of whom had nothing to say when Obama and “What Difference Does it Make? CAW CAW” did nothing when our embassy in Benghazi was destroyed – lambasted Trump for not preventing an Iranian attack on our Iraqi embassy on New Year’s Eve.

When Trump whacked Soleimani (and several assorted Abu’s) four days later, those same Dems hysterically screamed that he is a war monger who is going to KILL US ALL!

Propaganda filmmaker and Macy’s Day Parade balloon Michael Moore actually apologized to the Iranian mullahs for our president’s killing their pet Bin Laden-wannabe.  MSM reports said that he issued that apology in Farsi – I’m not making that up! – but if I know Mikey, he was likely trying to apologize while gnawing on a comically-oversized turkey leg.

And everyone knows that when you are apologizing to murderous scumbags with a maw full of half-chewed turkey, everything comes out sounding like Farsi.

It’s a cliché because it’s true.

Pelosi and a bunch of other Dems did their best to attack Trump’s action, suggesting that Soleimani was not so much as a terrorist with the blood of hundreds of American soldiers and many thousands of others on his hands, as a “beloved political leader.”

Chris “Tingle up My Leg” Matthews actually called Soleimani a war hero to Iranians, and compared the Iranian people’s reaction to his death to our culture’s reaction to the deaths of Princess Diana or Elvis.  (By the way, how much would you have liked to see someone show a picture of Soleimani’s bombed car with Elvis’ “Hunk of Burning Love” playing at that creep’s funeral?  “Lord almighty/I feel my temperature rising/ Higher, higher/it’s burning through to my soul!”)

Grandma Squanto also got her deerskin dress up over her head (#wemustneverstopmockingher), fighting repeated attempts to get her to call Soleimani a terrorist by insisting that he was a “senior foreign military official,” before she finally gave up.

Many Dems – probably after seeing how poorly their efforts at turning a dead terrorist into a Trump blunder were playing with normal human voters – eventually had to grudgingly admit that Soleimani deserved to die.  But then they immediately pivoted to how it was still a terrible mistake for Trump to kill him, and what if WW3 starts over this?

Hysterical MSM reports actually ran scare headlines about a possible draft, and “journalists” pretended to believe that Soleimani might turn out to be an Archduke Ferdinand for the 21^st century.  Iran would certainly strike back, and what kind of horrible, cataclysmic – possibly nuclear — attack would that turn out to be?!!!

Then, as reporters got into fetal positions and trembled, the mighty mullahs of Iran shook their terrible fists, and unleashed a hellish missile strike!  Did they target critical oil fields, or allied shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, or American embassies throughout the region, or Israeli civilians in Tel Aviv?

No. They struck some empty desert near an Iraqi military base.  In the immediate aftermath, MSM naifs breathlessly repeated Iranian media reports of dozens of US deaths and many more injuries.  Until it turned out that a revised casualty and death rate were adjusted to… zero of both.

If the killing of Soleimani was the cake, then the icing on that cake was the feeble Iranian response.  The mullahs were so terrified that the Orange Man would strike them again, they warned the Iraqis and Americans about their own missile strike, just to be sure they didn’t accidentally kill any Americans.

And now, the cherry on top of that icing is that the Iranian populace has taken to the streets, protesting and chanting against THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT!

When the Democrat leadership gets back home after attending Soleimani’s funeral, they are going to have some re-thinking to do!

Avenatti & an Abu To-be-Named-Later, 2020!

It’s the eve of Christmas eve, and I wanted to send one more, last-minute “Merry Christmas” to all COers everywhere, including to the founder of the feast, the mysterious CO himself.

In honor of the season, I want to focus on only good news. So the only political story I’ll mention is the surpassingly odd decision of Nancy Pelosi to not immediately send the articles of impeachment to the Senate.  The Dems spent months pounding the table and carrying on about the uber-urgent urgency of taking the historical step of impeaching a president for past-due library fines, or wearing white after Labor Day, or whatever it was.   And now that they have shaken the world and crossed the Rubicon and gone all in… they are just going to sit on the articles of impeachment?

This makes no sense.  But it is pretty entertaining, and I can’t imagine that it is going to end well for the Dems.

My favorite scenario would probably be to have the GOP force Pelosi to submit the articles of impeachment, though I can’t figure out how they could do that, or even if they legally can.

I just imagine them getting a warrant, and marching to the base of the pyramid beneath which she lives, and then pushing aside the giant stone that guards the entrance, and then descending the 113 steps down into her burial chamber.  Then pushing aside the stone slab that covers her, and snatching the articles out of her dessicated mummy hands.

The only way that scenario could be improved upon?  The GOP officials take Eric Swallwell with them, allow him to “express himself” in that eloquent way of his, and then hold their breath while they hurriedly replace the stone slab and retreat.

You’ve heard of a “Dutch oven”?  We could call this giving Nancy a “Dutch sarcophagus.”

But enough about politics, at least for a couple of days.  I don’t want to hear any more about “quid pro quos” – the only Latin I’m going to be thinking about is “adeste fidelis” and “Gloria in excelsis Deo.”

Instead, I’m going to praise another great Canine-American.  Because 2019 has been a good year for dogs.

Of course, it goes without saying that any year with a healthy and faithful Cassie the Wonder Dog in it is a good year for dogs.  But this year we also had Conan, the heroic dog who helped to corner and kill a smelly jihadi coward a couple of months ago.

And now we have Duke.  If you haven’t read the story, you can search something like “Police K-9 apprehends suspect,” and you’ll find the story, along with a great video of the event in question.

It seems that a creepy Californian named Julio Vasquez had been stalking his ex-wife, even after she got a restraining order against him.  After he showed up again at her work and threatened to hit her with his truck, the police found him parked near her house last Friday night.  Instead of cooperating with the cops, he led them on an hour-long chase that only ended when they did a PIT maneuver to stop his truck.  When the pig-headed Vasquez still wouldn’t get out of his truck, the cops shot his driver’s side window with a rubber bullet, leaving it broken.

And that’s where Duke comes in!  Watch the beautiful video, if you haven’t already seen it.  Moron Stalker is sitting in the driver’s seat behind his partially shattered window, when – from camera left – in comes a flying bundle of Canine Righteousness!  Duke makes a flying leap that takes him right through the window, startling the dimwit inside.  Apparently he had been used to bullying a smaller female, but he didn’t do so well against Man’s Best Friend!

Duke latched onto his left arm, and started whipping his head around vigorously, while his hindquarters were still framed in the window.  The best part?  Because Duke was doing what God made him for, he never stopped wagging his tail!

The video I saw didn’t have sound, but because I have a Master’s in lip reading, I’m pretty sure that Vasquez screamed, “Aye Caramba!  Dios mio, this loco lobo ees gonna sever mi arm-o!!  Thees diablo es no bueno!”

As I may have mentioned in earlier columns, I was not at the top of my class in high school Spanish.  Although I did often hear the Spanish equivalent of “Excellent job, Martin,” which I believe is pronounced – and you can check my translation here – “Silencio, por favor, Martino.”

Anyway, great job, Duke!

 

Finally, I mentioned that my dad passed away five Decembers ago, and naturally he’s been on my mind this past week.  So I thought I would share a favorite story about him, as my Christmas gift to the CO nation.

He was one of 9 kids, one of whom died in childhood, and they were the kind of poor family that used to good naturedly tease my aunt who was number 9, because she was so spoiled that she was actually born in a hospital, rather than at home like the rest of the kids.  So I got to hear a lot of the kind of dad jokes that involved how tough he’d always had it.  A favorite theme of his – deployed every time I complained about anything —  was how they’d had an outhouse in the backyard until he was 10 years old!

So about 10 years ago I got my pilot’s license.  I’d bought a 50-year old Cessna 172 to train in; it only cruised at about 110 miles an hour or so, but it was cheap enough that I could afford it.  I flew it from my home in north Florida to Illinois several times.  On my third trip up there, I was flying against a 30-knot headwind, which meant that I was only making about 75 miles an hour in ground speed.  As I neared the Florida-Georgia border, I was flying over I-75, and as I looked down at the traffic, I realized that one particular semi-truck was going faster than I was!  Over about 5 minutes time, he gained on me, passed beneath me, and slowly pulled away from me.

My flight ended up taking about 3 hours longer than usual, and as I crept along,  I became increasingly irritated by this.  I ended up having to make an extra fuel stop, and by the time I finally reached the airport in my parents’ Central Illinois town, I’d only gained about a couple of hours over what it would have taken me if I’d driven.   My folks met me at the airport, and we went out for a late supper.  My long day had left me in a pretty foul mood, and as our food got to the table, dad asked me what was wrong, and I unloaded about the flight: getting bounced around in the wind, watching trucks leave me in their dust, having to make an extra fuel stop, etc.

Dad was eating, and he never missed a beat.  Between bites, he said in a perfect deadpan, “I had to crap in a hole in the backyard until I was 10 years old.  But at least I was spared the pain of having a personal airplane that was too slow.”

Ouch!  He gutted me like a fish, and deservedly so!

But I learned a valuable lesson, and one that I now regularly deploy against my own spoiled children, when I mention that we never had computers or cell phones, and the minimum wage was $3.15, and if you wanted to know something, you had to look it up in a book.  And there were three tv channels, and tvs were 13 inches, and if you wanted to watch a show, you had to actually be at home when it was on, because there was no recording it.

I may not have had to go to the bathroom in a hole in the backyard, but I had to do it during a commercial.  So… yeah.  Tough times.

 

As you are enjoying your time with family this Christmas, remember my wise, dearly departed dad.

Because even if you have to endure flight delays and terrible weather and worse traffic, when you finally make it home, you won’t have to crap in a hole in the backyard.

Merry Christmas!