Month: August 2020

I’ve read some coverage of the first two nights of the DNC rant-a-palooza, and have come away with a shocking realization: the Democrats apparently don’t have the foggiest notion of the main point of a political convention.

Traditionally, savvy parties are hyper-conscious about their image.  They craft it meticulously, especially when they are putting on their convention – the moment of peak national exposure, and the definitive opportunity to present the most carefully calibrated public face of the party and its beliefs.

This image-management goes across party lines.  The GOP knows that many people see it as too white and too identified with the rich, so the party does its best to showcase minority Republicans, small business owners, and people of modest means.

Similarly, Democrats have traditionally known that they are seen as not being too fond of this country, and as disdainful of the military, so they usually do their best to drape their convention with American flags and round up as many military members (in uniform) as they can (even though the result is inevitably a lot more Bradley Manning than George Patton).

So I think it’s a sign of how badly the Dems have gone off the rails this year that they seem to be purposefully – some might say perversely – foregrounding the darkest underbelly of their party, the rigidly radical elements and positions that they have to know are most likely to repel independents and persuadable non-partisans!

In just the first two nights of the convention, I can point to at least 5 glaring examples:

1.The Dems usually get the vast majority of Jewish votes, but by 2016 Trump had already begun to make inroads there, and since then he’s moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and established stronger ties to Israel.  Within just the last week, he’s fostered what looks like it may be the first significant Middle East treaty between Israel and one of its Arab neighbors in decades.

So who do the Dems give a “speaking role” at their one of their convention’s key assemblies to?

Hateful, vicious anti-Semite Linda Sarsour!   Talk about an unforced error.  The Dems can’t do anything about the black eye they deservedly get from being associated with the jihadi twins, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib – they are elected Dem congresswomen.

But Sarsour is a free-agent hater – she has no official role in the party, so there’s no rational reason to let her near a camera, let alone give her a sanctioned speaking slot.

The blunder was so painfully obvious that Biden’s team had to issue a same-day apology, saying that Biden “obviously condemns her views.”  If it’s that obvious, why did you give her a speaking slot?  C’mon, man!

By the way, how do we know that Biden didn’t write his repudiation himself?  Because if he had, he would have called Linda Sarsour, “Jacinda Velour… I mean, Oui Oui Monsieur.  No, that’s not right.  You know, you know the thing!  The little scarf lady who hates the Jews!”

2. It’s not unusual to give a speaking spot to the party’s past presidents. But after the #metoo conflagration – and after Cankles McPantsuit turned a very winnable race into a debacle by snapping a fetlock in the campaign’s final stretch – you’d think that the Dems would have consigned the Clintons to the memory hole, never to be spoken of again.   But no, they give cadaverous old lech Bill Clinton a prime speaking spot.

And guess what? He still feels your pain.  (Along with your supple buttocks, if you don’t keep a close eye on him.)

Clinton actually had the gall to say that, “At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center. Instead, it’s a storm center.”  Because that’s what we need to hear from Bill Clinton: tips on how to conduct yourself in the oval office!

But Mr. “Better Put Some Ice on That” wasn’t finished.  He continued, “Just one thing never changes — [Trump’s] determination to deny responsibility and shift the blame. The buck never stops there.”

The mind boggles.  When Bill said, “just one thing never changes,” was I the only one who heard, “I keep getting older, and the interns always stay the same age!” ?

Also, who better to condemn Trump’s propensity to deny responsibility and shift blame than the guy who wagged his bony finger at us and insisted, “I never had sexual relations with that woman.”

And yes, Clinton can definitely criticize buck-passing.

Because for him, the buck always stopped in the same place: tucked into the g-strings of several topless interns wrestling in a kiddie pool filled with baby oil.

Well done, you creepy old horn dog!

3. The Dems finally turned on Bernie Sanders in March and gave the nomination to the late Joe Biden, because they knew that a transparently far-left socialist would poison their brand with independents. So naturally they gave transparently far-left socialist AOC one minute to speak.

One minute was about right, because that’s how long it usually took her to take a drink order when she was bartending.  Sure, she often heard someone say “Give me a G&T and a Scotch neat,” and then came back with two glasses of Pine-Sol with a slice of lime and a tiny umbrella in them.  But imagine how much more damage she could have done with more than a minute!

Well, this time she used her minute – at the political convention called to herald the nomination of Joseph “Where Am I?” Biden – to proudly nominate for President… transparently far-left octogenarian socialist Bernie Sanders!

4. Another recent embarrassment that any sane party would want to make voters forget about was Grandma Squanto’s self-immolation. Despite being whiter than a circus troupe of albinos caught in a snowstorm in Antarctica, Lizzie Warren pretended to be a proud Cherokee-American, launching a thousand hilarious hashtags. (You all know the best one: #wemustneverstopmockingher)

But instead of banishing her to the Happy Hunting Grounds, at least until after the election, the national Democrats decided to give her a high-profile speaking role addressing one specific caucus.

If you had to guess, you might think that she spoke to the “Translucent-American Caucus,” or even the venerable PCAAA (that’s right: the “Phony Cultural Appropriation Association of America”) caucus.

But no.  The Democrat brain trust, in their infinite wisdom, assigned Elizabeth Warren – the whitest woman in this or ANY convention, anywhere, at any time — to speak to … wait for it… the NATIVE AMERICAN CAUCUS!!

If I had tried to make that up, even the most loyal COers would have said, “Martin, you may be a hilarious genius – and, we cannot argue, a quite striking figure of a man – but now you have gone too far!  Even with your blackbelt in sarcasm and tomfoolery, you could not pull off the conceit that such a farcical thing could ever happen.”

And yet it did. In real life, on Tuesday night, at the Democratic National Convention.

5. Finally, you may have heard that we are in the midst of a worldwide pandemic. And you may also have heard that the Democrat governor of New York produced one of the highest per capita covid death rates in the country through his brilliant decision to force infected senior citizens back into nursing homes, like so many wrinkly biological weapons, killing as many as 11,000 helpless New Yorkers.

Any sane political party which included that unintentionally homicidal bungler as one of its most prominent elected officials, would do everything it could to keep him as far away from its convention as possible.

You see where this is going, right?

Yeah.  So there he was on Monday night, kicking off the festivities: Fredo’s older (and possibly even less intelligent) brother, Andrew Cuomo.

During his speech, Cuomo said many dishonest and malicious things, but this column is already getting long.  So I’ll focus on my favorite part: he called the Covid virus “the European virus.”

First, the left has been screaming for months that identifying a virus by its area of origin is a very, very bad and racist thing to do.  Unless, I guess, that area of origin is well known to be lousy with white people.  (The Worst. Race. Of. All! According to our leftist betters.)

Second, I can almost read your thoughts when you heard that Fredo Sr. mentioned the “European virus:”

“What the friend?!” you thought to yourself.  “What the actual friend is this mother-friending moron talking about?! The European virus?”

Then if you’re anything like me, you began clacking away at your Google machine, typing in such search terms as:

“What canton of Switzerland is Wuhan in?” and

“How far from Luxembourg is Wuhan, by rail?” and

“Do the Wuhanians speak French, German, English, or all three?” and

“Which side of the Iron Curtain was Wuhan on, after the Russian socialists were helped to defeat the German socialists in WWII?”

Ugh.  These people have lost it.

If I were a bigshot in the GOP, I’d offer two pieces of advice about next weeks’ Republican convention:

1.Have Trump go on stage the first night, standing between Bibi Netanyahu and whoever is the head sheik of the UAE, holding the inside hand of each man.  And then have Trump raise their hands in his, over his head, and say, “You’re welcome America!

“Also, tomorrow morning we are equipping our wonderful federal troops – so tremendous! — with amazing rubber bullets and incredibly acidic bear mace, and we will deploy them to every riot-infested Democrat city, where they will go through those terrible rioters – they’re violent people! Really bad! – like incredibly effective poop through a terrific, metaphorical goose!  God bless America!”

2. Have him walk off stage and turn off the lights.

And then replay the entire Democratic convention for the next four nights.

 

Avenatti/ Jacinda Velour 2020!

As you know, the Democrats are having their convention now, and I am usually the first one to step up and take one for the team, watching nauseating leftist misbehavior so that you don’t have to.   But there are limits even for larger-than-life characters such as me.

Sure, I’ve got the strength of ten men, because my heart is pure.  And yes, I’ve built up some immunity to political BS by watching American politics for lo these many years. And I don’t want to brag, but I’ve even found a way to watch up to 10 consecutive minutes of a Hillary Clinton speech without gouging out either my eyeballs or my eardrums.

(Hint: it involves turning the volume down very low, and sitting sideways to the tv so that I use only peripheral vision, like when you are passing a member of the Democrat voter base on a poorly lit street, and he’s got both hands in his pockets and a series of teardrop tattoos beneath both eyes.  So you have to keep your eyes on him, but you don’t want to look at him directly, because he might be rabid, and see eye contact as a challenge.)

The point is, I’m taking a rain check on this one, and counting on the hardy souls of CO nation to watch this verbal and intellectual dumpster fire, and then tell me what I missed.

In the meantime, I’m going to look back at the highlights of last week, when Kamala “empty pantsuit” Harris was announced as the Dem VP nominee.

I’ll admit I was a little surprised.  Like Tucker Carlson, I thought Susan Rice was the likely nominee.  She’s not as viscerally grating as Harris, and she got exactly as much black support in the Dem primaries as Harris – and Rice wasn’t actually a candidate!

She is also a past master at speed lying, having gone on 5 network shows in 16.7 minutes and spun a fantastic tale about Benghazi that was as true as Bill Clinton’s stories about how he had no idea how those interns got into his office and started playing bottomless Twister without him asking them to, or even noticing, really.

So when I heard it was Kamala, I’m sure I thought the same thing all of you were thinking: I’d love to see Biden’s face when he finds out that he picked the woman who was calling him a racist and a rapist just a few short months ago!  Oooh, he’s going to be steamed!

The MSM got out of the gate quickly, going on a jihad against Tucker and other GOP members for mispronouncing Kamala’s name.  “It’s not Kam-e-la, like some white suburban lady named Pamela,” they sneered, “it’s Kam-a-la.  It sounds like “comma-la,” which all conservatives know, but pretend not to, because they’re so racist.”

Which was weird, because when I think of a grammar term to help me remember Kamala Harris, I keep coming back to the colon, for some reason.

Anyway, the MSM went right past a snit and into a full-fledged hissy fit, howling about how anyone calling her “Kam-e-la” is obviously a dog-whistling racist.

And then the late Joe Biden announced that this card right here said that he’d picked her for something or other.  And he pronounced her name “Kam-e-la” several times.

You can’t make this up.

In the several days since the pick, Biden has been on a media blitz.

If by “blitz” you mean what happened in London in 1941, when people hid in the basement with their arms over their heads for weeks on end.

Even Chris Wallace and some MSM empty heads were surprised this weekend, when Joe and Kamala didn’t do any Sunday shows, and the Dems didn’t put out any spokespeople to pitch the partly line for the newly minted Dream Team in advance of their big convention.

No one has ever seen anything like this: a pivotal week in a campaign during which neither candidate gives ANY interviews.

Well, that’s not entirely fair, because each of them granted one interview this week.  And those two rake-stomping-fests speak volumes about the quality of each candidate.

Comma-la gave an interview to Stephen Colbert.  As a heavyweight political interlocutor, he’s known for an occasionally funny Bill O’Reilly impression years ago, followed by years of an unfunny comedy show.  Also he’s shown a slavish devotion to leftist pols.  He makes Don Lemon interviewing Jussie Smollett look like H.L. Mencken savaging some flack from the chamber of commerce.

And somehow, Comma-la screwed up the interview!  To call it a train wreck would be an insult to derailments everywhere.

To his credit, Colbert asked her the one blindingly obvious question that even a hack like him couldn’t get away with not asking: how could she attack Biden so viciously in the debates (“you landed haymakers!”), and now be his running mate?

This is a fair and tough question that most pols have to answer when the general election looms, and they must switch to praising the competitor whom they were lambasting during the primaries.  Deft politicians walk the tightrope, alluding to their worthy opponent and the necessity of spirited competition within the party.

But Comma-la had made that challenge even tougher for herself, because her slams against Biden included gratuitous, personal attacks.  She said that she believed the women who accused him of sexual assault, and that he was the kind of racist who would have kept young Comma-la in a segregated school.

So how would an intelligent, nimble thinker respond to that challenging question?

We will never know.  Because Colbert was asking Comma-la Harris.

What follows is an exact transcript of her response.  (For the laughter, imagine the sound of the unhinged giggling of Frank Gorshin as the Riddler, mixed with Caesar Romero’s maniacal Joker, and crossed with the disingenuous CAW CAW CAW of Hillary Clinton.)

Unfunny O’Reilly:  “How do you go from being such a passionate opponent, on such bedrock principles for you, and now you guys seem to be pals.”

Harris:  “It was a DEBATE!  HA HA HA HA HA!”

Unfunny O’Reilly: “Not everybody landed punches like you did, though.”

Harris:  “It was a DEBATE.  HA HA HA HA HA HA!”

Increasingly uncomfortable Unfunny O’Reilly:  “So you don’t mean it?”

Harris:  “It was a DEBATE.  HA HA HA!  The whole reason… HA HA! … Literally, it was a DEBATE!  HA HA HA HA!  It was called a DEBATE!”

Increasingly desperate Unfunny O’Reilly: “I understand.”

Harris:  “Everyone travelled to the DEBATE!  HA HA!  There were journalists there covering the DEBATE!  HA! Where there would be a DEBATE!”

Yikes.  She’s not just obnoxious, and she’s not just phony.  She’s the kind of dim-witted, obnoxious phony who doesn’t have enough sense to NOT say the quiet part out loud, and admit that she’s a soul-less hack who would stop at nothing to win a debate.  Which, in fact, she lost badly anyway.

The only moment when her laughter would have been appropriate would have been when Colbert referred to her as having “bedrock principles.”     Now THAT’S funny!

 

You wouldn’t think it was possible for a major nominee to do worse than Comma-la, whiffing on a series of softball questions from a slobbering sycophant like Colbert.

But then Joey Gaffes said, “Hold my Mueslix and watch this!”

And he gave his one interview of the week to… Cardi B.

You may remember her from such efforts as… um…

Well, you wouldn’t remember her.  Because she’s a sub-literate, pornographic moan-talker who puts out guttural, synthesized “songs,” none of the titles of which I could say at the dinner table without my wife slapping me in the face.

And I am freaking adorable, with a face that is well-nigh unslappable!  So you can imagine how terrible those titles are.

Apparently, when a minion told Biden he should give someone an interview, he said, “Let’s get David Frost.”

And his minion said, “He died in 2013.”

“How about Tim Russert?”

“He died before David Frost.”

“How about Corn Pop?”

“He never existed.”

“Well who else is there, then?”

“How about that foul-mouthed woman who used to pretend to be a hooker, only to drug and rob men?

“Perfect.

So the would-be President of the United States sat down across from the “singer” of “WAP.”  (Don’t ask what that means.  And DON’T look it up!)  And she came across as at least as smart as he did.

Sure, she expressed the same thoughts that naïve young people on the left often have.  She wants free health care, and free education, and for cops to stop slaughtering millions of black men every week.

And Plugs pandered like there was no tomorrow.

Afterward, when his handlers helped him back down into the basement – which took a really long time, because he walks with those tiny, very slow steps that people in his mental and physical condition walk with – he had a conversation with his handler, whom he thought was his wife.

Joe: “Jill, I—”

Jerry the handler:  “I’m Jerry, sir.”

Joe: “I know that.  Anyway, I was really impressed by that nice Car Max lady that I talked to today.”

Jerry: “That was Cardi B.”

Joe: “That doesn’t sound right.”

Jerry: “I know.”

Joe: “Where was I?  Oh yeah, that Busy Bee seemed really nice.”

Jerry: “Cardi B.”

Joe: “Anyway, I’m glad I picked her for my MP.”

Jerry: “MP is military police.  You picked someone for VP.  And it wasn’t Cardi B.”

Joe: “Oh, that’s right.  It was that other woman.  Camelback? Comma Splice?”

Jerry: “Kamala.”

Joe: “C’mon man!  That’s not a real name.  That’s just a bunch of macadamia.”

Jerry: “Do you mean ‘malarkey’?”

Joe:  “Look, fat—”

And, scene.

Avenatti/ Cardi B 2020!

So half of our society has gone insane.

I don’t mean harmless, eccentric, “Get a load of those loons on the left coast, with their vegan diets and their fully aligned chakras and their voting for outlier third-party whackos who are entertaining in their quixotic campaigns against everything rational” Insane.

I mean “insane” as in hamstringing, reducing, or getting rid of cops in the middle of a bloody, ruinous crime spree in a dozen major cities in the country.

As in allowing politics to contaminate every area of life, from sports to comedy to the arts, to the point that people are being censored and cancelled for saying the most innocuous, transparently true things.  (That 2 + 2 = 4, that men are men and women are women, that Joe Biden is mentally deteriorating, that Grandma Squanto is as white as the Ivory Soap girl.) (#eventhoughshe’snottheVPnomineewemustneverstopmockingher)

One main consolation of conservatism is that reality always re-asserts itself, eventually.  But it seems like “eventually” is taking longer to get here than it has in the past.

The citizens of Minneapolis and Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, not to mention Chicago and New York, should have seen enough long ago to have done some hard course correction.  The elected leaders of those cities – after allowing roving bands of violent rioters to prey on innocent citizens and productive taxpayers for weeks and months – should be ashamed to show their faces in public.  They should fear being tarred and feathered.

Not to mention being run out of town on a rail, and hoist on their own petard, and any other old-timey punishments that sane societies doled out for the worst amongst them.  (Drawing and quartering might be a little too harsh for them.  On the other hand, when I think about the cops blinded by lasers, and the murders of David Dorn and Italia Marie Kelly and many others you’ve never heard of, I think… eh.  Let’s not hastily rule out a few good, old-fashioned drawings and quarterings.)

But no, these boneheads are proudly standing in the smoldering ruins that their policies have produced, and railing against capitalism and white folks and patriarchy and the president.  And they’re going full speed ahead with the same policies.

A BLM spokes-weasel said that it was good for people to loot Gucci, because that way they’d have something to eat, and something to wear.  Also, looting is a form of long-overdue reparations.

What can you say about people that stupid and venal?   Especially when it seems like a 50/50 proposition that there are enough of them to elect the party that has degenerated to the point that it cheers these developments, and promises more of the same?

It is seriously baffling, and incredibly frustrating.  I’ve always loved reading history, and doing so has allowed me to vicariously witness the fall of other societies at other times, and to think through the events that led them to fall.

But I’m not sure I know of a precedent for this.  Even the most frail and decadent societies, when they were on the precipice, did not have a substantial portion of their own population cheering on the invaders.  You didn’t see huge groups of Europeans siding with the Mongols or Huns as they raped and pillaged their way toward Europe.  Romans didn’t welcome the sack of Rome by Germanic warlords.  French peasants didn’t sympathize with Viking raiders as they looted their villages.

But one of our two major parties openly sides with criminals over cops, and non-taxpayers over taxpayers, and America-haters over corny, old-fashioned patriots, and foreigners who illegally enter our country over our own citizens.

Never has so much blind, unreasoning hatred been directed at a nation that deserves it less.

 

As an optimist, I am pulling for a well-deserved Biden loss in November. But the fact that it’s even close is sobering!

Even in some leftist circles, red flags are being noticed.  Andrew Cuomo recently delivered a pathetic acknowledgement of leftist policy failure when he admitted that many rich people have wisely left New York.  But even then, he demonstrated the tone-deafness that comes from living one’s whole life in a bubble of partisan obliviousness.

He said that he is constantly talking to people who fled NYC, and he says, “You gotta come back, when are you coming back?  We’ll go to dinner, I’ll buy you a drink. Come over, I’ll cook.”

Andy, are you going to cook them a meal worth the tens of thousands of dollars that your greedy city is gouging them for every year?  Also, why did you kill their parents by forcing Wuflu patients into their over-priced nursing home?  And can you do something about Fredo?  That boy’s just not right.

To his credit, Cuomo knows what a disaster Democrat governance has been.  He’s trying to push back against the radical dopes who are trying to load yet another tax increase onto the poor saps who already pay most of the taxes.

To fight that effort, he is forced to say the painfully obvious truth out loud.  “They’re not coming back right now. And you know what else they’re thinking? If I stay there, I pay a lower income tax because they don’t pay the New York City surcharge.”

Thanks, Comrade Obvious.

And if you think NYC has it tough, think about poor Chicago!  Governed by a bug-eyed troll doll, forced to raise drawbridges to stem the onrushing hordes of professional useless people who think they’re entitled to steal and vandalize.

We have modern technology in America, like tear gas and rubber bullets and drones.  And Chicago is pulling up drawbridges like it was Avignon in the Middle Ages?  What’s next, pouring some boiling oil onto the raiders from a few stories up, and strafing them with crossbow bolts?

No, seriously.  How about you try the oil and the crossbows, and tell us how it works?  Asking for a friend in Minneapolis.

To give you an idea of how badly things are going in Illinois, they lost me to Florida in the mid 1980s, and now they are losing CO and the COW, also to Florida.   So, yeah.  That’s what I call a brain drain.

Or at least a sarcasm drain.

Meanwhile, with all of that rot in our country, little outposts like the CO nation are holding out, and winning at life.  This past weekend, my wife and I took our youngest off to college.  She’s going to major in a STEM field – if she wanted to pursue grievance studies, I’d disown her! – and she won a great scholarship.

Her biggest problem is that she’s not going to have any hardship stories to tell her kids, because she’s had it so good.  (Someday I’ll regale you with the tales of my un-airconditioned upstairs bedroom, with the kind of creepy wallpaper with old cars on it that you see in every serial killer’s bedroom after he’s been caught.  Or my first job weeding bean fields for $1 an hour when I was 13.  Or getting edged out by Idris Elba for People magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year award.  Which still really stings.)

The point is that we live in an amazing country, with boundless opportunities.  Let’s not let a bunch of nihilistic leftists ruin it the way they’ve ruined the cities they run!

Avenatti/BLM Spokes-weasel 2020!

I started off Monday with a dour recitation of some of the lowlights of July, so let’s now turn to the sunny side.

Story 1: On July 22^nd, the mayor of Portland  – apparently a first-cousin to fellow Democrat and Minneapolis mayor Wussy McPussington – decided he’d celebrate the 56^th straight night of rioting in his city by taking his special brand of sniveling appeasement to the streets, and receive his well-earned hero’s welcome from the merry band of peaceful rioters.

And… it didn’t turn out so well.

The guy’s name is Ted Wheeler.  If you haven’t seen him, the video of his shenanigans that night is worth watching.  But if you’ve got a life to lead, I can give you a quick description to save you some time.  He looks to be in his mid-50s, wearing both goggles and a mask, and not exactly giving off a Chuck Norris vibe.  He’s the kind of guy who, if he told he’s had three girlfriends lately, you’d be thinking, “Two imaginary, one inflatable.”

Anyway, he joined the peaceful mob, but things went wrong from the outset.  Individual dimwits immediately began challenging him — because racism — and one dope dumped a plastic bag of garbage on his feet.

When she saw the littering, Grandma Squanto stood by the side of the street, with one tear dramatically running down her cheek.  #wemustneverstopmockingher.

Okay, I made that part up.  Not the part about the garbage, though.  That really happened.

A minute or so later, the classy protesters began chanting, “Friendly Ted Wheeler,” over and over again.  Except that the “F” word they used was not actually “friendly.”

But our delusional Dem was not deterred.   He tried to have a “listening session,” but when one spokes-moron in the mob – media reports that it was Joey Gaffe’s old nemesis Corn Pop have not been confirmed — asked whether he’d agree to abolish the police completely – in the middle of a two-month orgy of lawlessness and destruction! — he said no.  And just as in Minneapolis, the crowd jeered and screamed at him.

He ended up at the fencing surrounding the courthouse that the peaceful rioters had been peacefully assaulting.  His taxpayer-paid bodyguards tried to protect him from the super-peaceful thugs around him, who began “throwing flaming bags of garbage at the courthouse.”

(By the way, if there’s a more accurate branding slogan for the Democrat campaign this year than “Flaming Bags of Garbage,” I have not heard it.)

Still undeterred, Wheeler pompously announced, “The reason I am here tonight is to stand with you. If they’re launching the tear gas against you, they’re launching the tear gas against me.”

To which the federal cops in the courthouse responded, “Works for us.”

And they tear gassed the bonehead.

Not since Eric Swalwells’ last press conference has a gassing been so hilarious.

 

Story 2.  But Mr. Wheeler’s Wild Ride wasn’t the only heart-warming tale of useful idiots getting blowback from the mindless mobs they are trying to appease.  You may remember that in early June, a couple of knuckleheads – I’m not sure that they are snowflakes, but they are most certainly as white as snowflakes – were watching a clot of peaceful rioters marching down the street outside of their second-floor apartment.

So the SJWs in the apartment showed the super-pacifist mob that they are down with the struggle, by flashing enthusiastic thumbs-up gestures in their windows.  And of course they were recording their noble gesture.

Because signaling your virtue is okay.  But recording yourself signaling your virtue is even cooler.

And… a brick came smashing through their window.

Said moron #1: “Holy sunshine!  We’re on your side!”

And… another brick came smashing through a second window.

Said moron #2: “Friend!  We’re on your friending side!!”

Said moron #1: “Holy friend!  We’re on your side, man.”

Now that’s entertainment!

So a little while later – after the dimwitted snowflakes played their game of “hot bricks” (it’s like “hot potato,” only with bricks) and before Ted Wheeler ran for his miserable life through clouds of tear gas and screams of, “That’s right, mother-friender, run for your life, you stupid friend-stick!” – gay Democrat Wisconsin state senator Tim Carpenter thought he’d take a stroll through the peaceful riots in Madison and capture some video.

I’ve never met Carpenter, but I do have a magical wizard hat that allows me to read people’s thoughts.  So here are the two thoughts running through Carpenter’s head as he left his (I’m guessing fashionably decorated) house:

“I hope I’ll come across some of those Republican white supremacists that I’ve hearing about in the news but have never actually seen, so that I can record them doing their evil Republican things amidst our utopianly peaceful riots.”

And
“I know I’ll get some great video of our righteous army of peaceful progressives vandalizing or tearing down statues, and if anyone sees me recording, I’ll smile at them and say, ‘Look at me, I’m a gay Democrat state senator Tim Carpenter!’  And they’ll cheer for me, and raise me up onto their shoulders and sing my praises.”

Spoiler alert: that’s not what happened.

When Captain Terrific and his Technicolor Dream Camera arrived at a government office in Madison, some totally chill and peaceful socialists had just peacefully tossed a Molotov cocktail into the government building.  (You guessed it: the cocktail peacefully ignited, and produced a small, but oh-so-peaceful fire.) They had also peacefully torn down two statues.

Well Timbo just had to capture this moment.  Because as his socialist co-religionists in Germany in the 1930s learned, mobs with fire at night makes for a great visuals!

But when Carpenter turned his camera on his fellow peaceful rioters, they took exception.  (According to my infallible wizard hat, they thought, “Who is that rotten friender over there, and what’s he doing?  Is he recording us?  Let’s friend him up!”)

So at least three people rushed him. Rather than hoisting him onto their shoulders, the first one to arrive knocked his phone out of his hand, and the second one sucker punched him.  Then he fell to the ground, and a group of roughly 10 people, and I quote a local reporter, “proceeded to punch and kick Carpenter as he ‘tried to explain’ that he was an ally to the demonstrators’.”

Excuse me for a moment, while I collect my thoughts.

HA!  HA HA HA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

I’m back.  Fast forward to July 28^th, and you can find mug shots of the two people charged with bravely assaulting Timmy the Terrible.  They appear to be women — though these days, who knows how they identify.  One of them looks relatively normal, except sad.  The other one has a striking combination of hair colors not found in nature, including bluish, greenish and purplish.

Purple Hair is a physical therapist in Madison.  Sad Trombone lady is… wait for it… employed by the local public school district as a… wait for it… social worker!

Because nothing says, “Let’s talk this through, and find a constructive way to address your problems,” like, “Put down that friending camera phone you FRIENDING FASCIST!!”

“Hey Martin, you hilarious genius,” you are probably asking yourself, “is there any way you can wring one more joke out of the comedy shammy that is this hilarious story?”

Yes, thanks for asking.

One of the two statues that the peaceful mob tore down right before they turned their homophobic rage on the first available leftist state senator was dedicated to which historical figure:

1. Democrat and founder of the KKK Nathan Bedford Forrest?
2. Democrat fire-hose enthusiast and vicious dog aficionado Bull Connor?
3. Democrat Grand Kleagle Robert “Sheets” Byrd?
4. Hans Christian Heg, an abolitionist Republican who died while fighting for the Union in the Civil War.

You can’t make this stuff up, people.  But you can laugh your friending arse off over it.

 

Okay, more quick happy story from July:

On July 24th, egregious hive of far-left journalistic hackery the Washington Post followed in the equally egregious slime trail of CNN and paid Covington high school kid Nicholas Sandmann an undisclosed sum to settle his lawsuit against them.  The lawsuit stemmed from their stories that accused the Covington kids of being smirking, Trump-supporting, racist bullies who threatened a respected, noble Indian elder during a protest several years ago.

The story was very close to the truth, in that the kids were Trump supporters, and Sandmann does have an unfortunate case of “resting smirk face.”

On the other hand, the kids were not racists and not bullies, and they didn’t threaten anyone.  Also, the old Indian guy was a toothless freak show who came up to them unprovoked and starting smashing an idiotic drum in their faces.

(Luckily for him, I was at work that day, and not on those steps in DC.  Because if I had been there and he pulled that Little Drummer Boy routine in my face, he would have had to be a contortionist to be able to keep hitting that drum after I repositioned it.  Also, he would have had a difficult time recovering the drumstick.)

So Sandmann has gotten some money out of CNN and WaPo, but he’s still got suits pending against such “journalistic” giants as ABC, CBS, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, NPR and Slate.

So if you find yourself feeling down about the state of our country, remember St. Paul’s advice:  “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.”

Those words have many different meanings for different people.  But for this humble, hilarious genius, they can be summed up by the following image:

The dishonest, partisan bosses of ABC, CBS, NPR et al are sitting in a fancy conference room, giving each other worried looks as they hear that Nicholas Sandmann has gotten a big bag of money out of CNN and WaPo.  Then, from the hallway outside of their double doors, they hear the faint, familiar, building guitar opening from a great Metallica song.

As the noise approaches, a throbbing base line begins.  Their coffee cups on the table begin to vibrate as the sound grows louder.  A driving, thumping drumming begins, and the leftist oligarchs become more and more frightened.

Finally the doors burst open and a smirking high schooler strides in, accompanied by the roaring crescendo of “Enter Sandman!”

Pull it up on Youtube, CO Nation, and turn it up!

And if any of you musically talented types can re-write those Metallica lyrics to mock the leftist hacks in the MSM, post them here, and we’ll all raise our glasses together!

 

Avenatti/Flaming Bags of Garbage 2020!

I haven’t done this in a while, but now that August has begun, let’s take a totally subjective, unscientific look back at the best and worst of July.

I’ll get the worst out of the way in this column, and then I’ll cover the ‘best of’ in a day or two.

1.Early in July, the two towering intellects of Chris “his brother was worse” Cuomo and Don Lemon were bemoaning the way that most Americans don’t know enough history, and aren’t willing to think deeply about how many statues should be taken down.

No, really.  That was a thing that happened.  Don Lemon and Fredo, complaining that people should know more things before they talk.

Then Lemon, not content to have demonstrated that he is an economic and political dunce, proved that he’s a three-tool player — okay, sure: a three-tool tool — by showing that he’s a theological dunce as well.

Quoth the Lemon, “Jesus Christ, if that’s who you believe in… admittedly was not perfect when he was here on this earth.  So why are we deifying the founders of this country?”

Now I don’t want to split hairs, but Citrus-for-brains is not dealing with some obscure point of theology here.   This isn’t, “What’s the difference between the Anabaptists and Baptists?” or “What do the different beasts in Revelation symbolize?”

This is kind of an important point in Christian theology.  As in, there wouldn’t BE Christian theology if Christians didn’t believe that Christ was perfect.

Worse still, Lemon compounds his mistake by arguing the opposite of a logical point.  It makes sense to say that our founding fathers weren’t perfect, so yes, we shouldn’t deify them.  But you know who we SHOULD deify?  The DEITY!  (Cue Sam Kinison, from heaven:  “OH! OOOOHHHH!)

What can you say about Don Lemon?  Other than, “Forgive him Father, because he knows not…“ any single thing, I guess.

 

2. Toward the end of the month, Barack Obama gave us the occasion for another round of “Stupid or Liar?” — Adam Carolla’s party game that involves guessing whether a horrible politician is being the former or the latter.

In Barry O’s case, the question arises from his politicizing a funeral with a bunch of leftist talking points and lies.  (But I repeat myself.)  John Lewis, once an impressive civil rights leader (but sadly, in recent decades a mediocre pol more given to race baiting than racial healing) died recently, and Obama spoke at the funeral.

After a little rhetorical throat-clearing about what a great guy Lewis was, Obama unleashed a graceless political attack on Trump and conservatives.  A particular lowlight was this little nugget of dishonesty, braised with bad faith, and glazed with malice:  “Bull Connor might be gone, but today we witness with our own eyes, police officers kneeling on the necks of Black Americans. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.”

Let us never forget – like we must never forget that Grandma Squanto, though she is as white as Obama’s super-white mother, made an academic and now political career out of pretending to be an Indian (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – that Bull Connor and George Wallace were Democrats.  Just like the founders of the Klan.  Just like the bigots who created and enforced Jim Crow laws, and turned water hoses on black folks, and sicced dogs on them.

All Democrats.

Also, no federal agents are using tear gas and batons against “peaceful demonstrators.”

So is Obama stupid enough to not recognize that there is a difference between peaceful demonstrators and violent, thug-filled mobs attacking federal buildings with incendiary devices and purposely blinding federal cops?  Or is he just a racial arsonist liar?

I’m going with big fat liar on this one.  And once again, I am so grateful that this small, small man is no longer our president.

 

3. In an enraging and yet highly entertaining confrontation, the Democrat brain trust in the House finally got their chance to go toe-to-toe with AG Bill Barr, and really grill him.

Of course, he immediately rhetorically stomped on their toes, which caused them to hop around spraying themselves with the lighter fluid that they’d brought for the grilling, then set themselves on fire. When the flames spread to their pants, they pulled those off and ran around shrieking and trying to beat out the flames like a bunch of hysterical, bottomless Nadlers.

Which was about as pretty as it sounded.  And which also explains why you can go into restaurants all over this great nation and get grilled tuna, chicken, steak and shrimp, but you will never EVER find a place that offers grilled Nadler.  Because, yuck.

I’m sure you’re all aware of how badly all of the Dem inquisitors acted.  One after the other, they rolled out a series of sleazy and delusional attacks – Barr is a murderer, federal storm troopers are brutalizing peaceful protestors, etc. – and then interrupted Barr’s attempts to answer them.

In what was supposed to be a hearing, they made mendacious speeches, and then as soon as Barr started to mop the floor with them by responding, they stuck their fingers in their ears and shrieked, “Reclaiming my time, reclaiming my time!”

I’ve chosen one short interaction, just because I think it sums up the Dems’ shabby behavior throughout.

This exchange happened when Dem congresswoman Lucy McBath of Georgia had the floor.  She blathered on for 375 words, taking up 2 minutes and 52 seconds.  Most of what she said was partisan question begging (Obamacare is great, and represents the only chance we have “to be able to live in this country freely with quality healthcare) or source-free nonsense.  She closed by playing the emotion card, saying that as a two-time breast cancer survivor, she is just the sort of sick American that the Bad Orange Man doesn’t care about.

Barr responded by deftly seeing her cancer-victim card, and raising her: “I have two children who are cancer survivors, so I feel very strongly about this issue as a matter of policy.  And I believe that the president’s made clear that he will ensure—”

After Barr had spoken those 33 words in 13 seconds, McBath interrupted him. “Sir, please answer my question. Will you stop playing politics with Americans’ health care in the middle of a pandemic?”

Barr then spoke 15 words, the first four of which were, “I’m not playing politics,” before she starts CAWing over him again.

To sum up: leftist hack uses nearly 3 minutes to make a bad-faith attack posing as a question.  Barr opens with a little cancer story jui jitsu, and she can only allow him 13 seconds before she has to interrupt him with a political “When did you stop beating your wife?” question.

Ugh.  I know, Trump has some outsized flaws, and someone should monitor his tweets before they are sent, and the congressional GOP are mostly spineless mopes who aren’t fit to carry Ronald Reagan’s briefing book.

But the national Democrats are absolutely, metaphysically, existentially awful.  Their standard bearer is barely functional, their congressional leadership is morally and intellectually bankrupt, and their left wing (which appears to constitute around 90% of their national leadership) hates this country and wants to burn it to the ground.

In November, they’re coming to kill cops and censor speech and chew gluten-free, locally sourced bubble gum, and they’re all out of bubble gum.

I’m praying that enough Americans recognize the threat that the leftist mob poses to our country and our future, but right now the outcome seems far from certain.

Hey, Happy Monday, folks!  I know that sounded grim, but some good things happened in July too, and I’ll get to them in a day or two.  In the meantime…

Avenatti/Bottomless Nadlers 2020!

I’ve described conservatives as more optimistic and leftists as more pessimistic, but there is a pretty big exception to both of those generalizations.

Conservatives see a lot of critical flaws in human nature, which would seem to be a hallmark of pessimism.  Religious conservatives (especially) hold the paradoxical Christian view that while people are made in God’s image and capable of great good, they are also fallen and broken, and capable of great evil.  The Founders – most of whom were Christians, but all of whom were philosophically grounded in the Judeo-Christian worldview, even if they were Deists or agnostic or atheists – built a political system that depends on a non-rose-colored-glasses view of human nature in general.

Because they knew that humans would seek power over others, they created a set of governmental checks and balances, “setting ambition against ambition” to counter the natural impulse toward tyranny.  They believed that economic and other freedoms would help counter the self-serving greed of the human heart.

The great conservative thinker Adam Smith (peace be upon him) pointed out that it’s not from the benevolence of the brewer or baker that we get our beer or bread, but from their self-interest.   A baker might well be greedy, but in a free market economy, his best path to making money is through serving his customers well; if he provides the best quality product he can at the lowest profitable price, he will be better off, and so will his customer.

(Sidebar: One great advantage of conservatism over leftism is that the former turns one of the common sins of humanity to a positive purpose, while the latter makes a related but different sin even worse.  Free market economics diverts greed toward a benign purpose, because to prosper I must serve my fellow citizens, by providing them with goods or services that they want.  But leftist ideology takes one of the 7 deadly sins – envy – and inflames it.  Socialism tells you that to envy your more successful neighbors is not only NOT a sin, it’s a righteous act.  It’s not right that they have more than you do.  They didn’t build that!  Those evil 1%ers need a holy jihad brought down on them!  Power to the collective!!)

So while conservatives and conservative philosophy has a strong pessimistic streak too, I would argue that it’s a mostly functional and useful pessimism.  Because conservatism recognizes human flaws and weaknesses, it establishes a system in which incentives and disincentives redirect such flaws toward positive ends.

Similarly, mostly pessimistic leftists also have a strong strain of optimism, in the form of a near-utopian confidence that a small elite – themselves, naturally – have the wisdom needed to re-design society from the ground up, and eliminate all social ills.

The USSR was continually coming up with new pie-in-the-sky 5-year plans that would create a glorious socialist future… never mind that the previous six 5-year plans had produced the grim, impoverished socialist present.  The French revolutionaries confidently tore down centuries of political, social, religious and economic traditions – because their ideas were better.  Perfect, in fact.  They even re-started the calendar at Year One, to correspond with their glorious revolution, which would fundamentally change the world forever.

Now THAT is optimism!

But it’s a dysfunctional, delusional optimism.  It is optimistic only about your own ability to run everyone else’s lives, and metaphysically pessimistic about 99% of humans’ capacity to reason, or chart their own course in life.

Fortunately for the world, all of those big brains that plotted the French Revolution were encased in heads that soon formed a big, gory pile at the foot of the guillotine that they had built to launch their glorious new age.  (Cue whatever French instrument was the 18^th century equivalent of the sad trombone.) (The “sackbut,” I guess?)

But you can still see the disastrous effects of utopian leftist optimism in our society to this day.  The motley gaggle of antifa mouth-breathers and coddled man-buns in Seattle staked out their own little utopia of CHOP… which ended two weeks later in a miasma of chaos, violence, badly spelled cardboard signs, and body odor.

Only a utopian leftist could run on a promise that he was going to “fundamentally transform” one of the most successful societies in the history of the planet.  But Obama didn’t think twice about making that claim.

He also had no trouble saying that he could design a greatly improved health care system from the ground up, despite the fact that he had no medical training, and couldn’t tell the difference between a stethoscope and a catheter.  And AOC knows how to run the largest economy in the world, even though her previous business experience consists of screwing up drink orders in several bars where she worked.

And leftist judges know better than the Founders what the constitution should say, and if it doesn’t happen to say that, hold their Pinot Noir… and voila!  Here is a brand new right to privacy, and abortion, and taxpayer-funded sex change operations, and anything else they can dream up.

Also, that part about the right to bear arms, which would seem to be ACTUALLY written into the constitution?  The Founders were idiots, and we know better, so that is now non-operational.

So I’ve blathered on for three columns about the psychological and political implications of optimism vs. pessimism, but I’d like to end where I began.  All things being equal – and even when they aren’t – we should strive to be optimists.  Sure, you should prepare for the worst and take precautions – that’s only prudent.  But hope for the best, and look for the positive in every situation.

I’ll leave you with two of my favorite ideas on this subject.  The first I’ve seen attributed to Amos Tversky, and it says something like “to be a pessimist is to suffer twice: once when you fear that the bad thing might happen, and again when it does.”

The other comes from one of my favorite presidents, Calvin Coolidge.

(I’m going to write a small appreciation of Coolidge in a future column. He’s the most under-rated president in our history, an assertion that I can go halfway to proving just by citing his nickname: “Silent Cal.” After the last 30 years, can you imagine a more refreshing and longed-for adjective to apply to a US president than “silent?!”)

My man Coolidge said, “If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure 9 will go in the ditch and you have only one to battle with.”

I don’t care who you are, your quality of life would almost certainly go up if you reminded yourself of those two quotes on a daily basis.  Throw in God, speaking through Paul (IMHO) – “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable–if anything is excellent or praiseworthy–think about such things.” – and you’ve got yourself a recipe for Ray Charles-singing-“Oh-Happy-Day” levels of happiness.

I can’t end these rambling without referencing the name of this website.  Why do we all congregate here?

Is it to be in the enigmatic presence of the great and powerful CO?  Is it to bask in the economic wisdom of Christopher Silber, or the good hearted sense of salon nurtured by the COSE, or the political insight and everyday common sense of the hundreds of stand-up guys and wise women and all around good eggs who comment and contribute here, or even the hilariously apt sackbut references and boyish (some might say “childish”) charm of yours truly?

I hope the answer is all of the above, but I know that it’s at least in part because this site is NOT called Cautious Pessimism!

Now let’s get out there and win the day!

Avenatti/Seattle Man-Bun Guy 2020!