Month: October 2020

As far as the conventional wisdom about the final debate goes, I can’t disagree with the CO nation.  I agree that Trump was better than the first time around, and that Biden was only worse because he was given the chance to talk more, which is always a bad thing for him.

I also agree that Kristen Welker was much less bad as a moderator than we had a right to expect.  She was still biased, of course.  The best poker tell on her was when Trump said that we should open schools, because the virus doesn’t appear to be very dangerous to kids.

Trump’s basic point was correct: all of the science so far points to kids not being nearly as susceptible to be harmed by the virus, and much less likely to spread it to adults. In fact, something like 74 kids 15-and-under have died from the virus this year, compared to something like 480 who died from the flu during the same period last year.  (I don’t have the exact numbers in front of me, but those are very close.)

Which is why the American Association of Pediatricians – actual experts, who know more about the science and its real world implications than all of the MSM empty heads put together – recommended back in August that K-12 schools reopen.   

So a completely neutral moderator would have allowed Trump’s statement to stand uncommented on.  Naturally, our moderator had to comment on it, in perfect pseudo-reasonable biased journalist fashion.

To wit: “And of course the CDC has said young people can get sick with COVID-19 and can pass it.”

Her statement was technically true, in the same sense that it’s technically true that kids can also die from falling down the stairs, or being struck by lightning, or being caught between Chuck Schumer and a tv camera and being trampled to death.  

But since we’re talking about something like a 99.999998 chance of that NOT happening, her little jab was telling.  As was that snotty little, “Of course,” to start things off.

For example, when Joey Gaffes said that no one ever lost their health insurance because of Obamacare, did Welker respond, “Of course Obamacare actually caused many millions to lose their health insurance.”

Or when the Big Man said that no one has ever said that Hunter did anything wrong, did Welker respond, “Of course everyone on the planet, including Hunter himself and Beau’s widow, has admitted that he’s done all kinds of things wrong.”

Or when the Corn Pop Slayer said that he’s never had a bad word to say about fracking, did Welker do a classic spit-take as she was drinking from her moderator’s water glass?

That’s a no, and a no, and another no.

Still, in these days of radical leftist moonbats passing as journalists, Welker was not bad, and I’ve got nothing substantive to add. 

However, I’ve got several trivial and mocking things to add.  And since trivial mockery is my wheelhouse, I thought I’d toss out a few observations.

If I had to choose, I’d pick two favorite Biden one-liners.  The first one was when he said that, “We had a great relationship with Hitler before he invaded Europe.“

First of all, what?!  No, Joe, we NEVER had a ”great relationship” with Adolf Hitler.

Second, “invaded Europe?”  Does Joe know that Germany is already in Europe?  I mean, it’s practically in the middle of Europe.

Which made invading Europe easier for Hitler, I guess.  Because most invaders have to overcome a lot of logistical hurdles to launch an invasion, like sailing across an ocean to your opponents’ shores, or flying on long-distance air raids to get to your enemies’ cities.  Or hiding in a gigantic, stuffy horse on the off chance that your enemy might have enough Biden voters to lower their collective IQ to the point that they would willingly haul said horse inside their city walls like a bunch of adamschiffen. 

As opposed to Hitler, who had his army pop next door to the Polish border, and call out, “Hello?  Europeans?  It’s your neighbors, the ones with whom you’ve been having a great relationship?  You know, with the Wehrmacht and the Stukas and the ‘Give up your Juden!’  So anyway…”

Did Joe mention that he was at the top of his class when he earned his two degrees in European History?  Also, his IQ is higher than yours, and he could whip you in a push-up contest.  So get your history facts straight, Jack!

My second-favorite Biden moment was when he gave his audience a little rhetorical whiplash.  First he said, “I don’t look at this in terms of the way he does, blue states and the red states, they’re all the United States.”

Then – in what I swear to God was the Very. Next. Sentence! – he said, “And look at the states that are having such a spike in the corona virus: they’re the red states!”

You can’t make this stuff up.

In general, Joe cannot help himself from repeating a fundamental logic error: making strong claims, rather than qualified ones.   In this context, a strong claim is an extreme one, e.g. “all tax rate cuts always bring in more revenue,” whereas a qualified claim is a more moderate one, e.g. “tax rate cuts usually bring in more revenue.” 

Strong claims are ironically weaker, because they collapse if even one counter-example can be found. They can be tempting to all of us – Trump is certainly not immune to their lure! – but they are the stock-in-trade of the none-too-bright political extremist. 

For example, during a Biden rally in Minneapolis a few weeks ago, Grandma Squanto screeched, “Donald Trump threatens the existence of human life, of all life, on this planet.”

And you could tell that she was serious, because of how pale with fear she was.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

But the Translucent Tonkawa (yes, I had to do a deep dive to find a tribe name starting with “T”) has nothing on the Scranton Simpleton when it comes to laughably false strong claims. 

He can’t admit that Hunter has some problems – “He’s never done anything wrong!”   He can’t say that Obamacare was in any way flawed – “No one ever lost their doctor, or their insurance!”

He can’t say that Trump’s covid response was less than perfect – “Not one American would have died if Trump had responded to covid differently!”

But of all of Biden’s faux pas, the most enjoyable was the way he reverted to his favorite verbal tic: saying, “Come on!” whenever he doesn’t have a more substantive rebuttal.  Which is almost always.  He says that phrase more often than my daughters said “like” when they were teenagers.    

And sure enough, in the debate, he unleashed 9 instances of “Come on,” each more lame than the last. 

In fact, after the debate I did a little research, and I can confidently say that Joe Biden has taken second place in the “Most Uses of ‘Come on’ in a Spoken Word Production,” second only to the Beatles in their feel-good hit from 1963, “Please Please Me.”  (If you haven’t heard that one in a while, I dare you to listen to it and not smile.)   

FYI, this is another time when I really wish I understood modern technology.  Because I’d love to get hold of a recording of that Beatles song, and when it gets to the call-and-response chorus — “Come on (come on!), Come on (come on!), Come on (come on!), Come on (come on!), Please please me, oh yeah, like I please you.” – I’d keep Lennon’s initial “Come on”s, and splice in Biden’s various “Come on”s as the responses. 

(In keeping with my growing love of all things German, two Austrian sisters called the MonaLisa Twins do a version of “Please Please Me” during which their German accents come through at several points, and it is freaking adorable!)

If any of you in CO nation are technically adept enough to splice in some Joey Gaffes and produce a Lennon/Biden compilation — I know: Lenin/Biden would seem much more apt – please post it on the site!

On a final note, I’ve posted a pic from my recent Illinois hiking trip (at Martinsimpsonwriting.com) in which I’m holding a cool, telescoping walking stick that my cousin let me borrow.  When my wife saw the picture, she said that between my sunglasses and the cane, I look like a blind guy out on a hike in a forest. 

Of course I explained to her that since all other women became invisible to me the moment I first laid eyes on her, I carry this cane to continually sweep in front of me, to keep from bumping into all of the invisible women in the world.    

She rolled her eyes at me, but I was not fooled: she was impressed.

Avenatti/Grandma Squanto 2020!

So I’m back from Tennessee and Illinois, and I had a great trip.  I got to see a lot of family, take some satisfying hikes in autumnal forests in crisp, cool air, and generally enjoy the break in routine.  On my last morning in my hometown, I drove up and down some hills in old, familiar neighborhoods, and videotaped the changing leaves and the houses of childhood friends.  As usual, I left town in a pleasant fog of bittersweet (but mostly sweet) nostalgia.

During my long drive back south, I had a lot of time to think about our current political dilemma, ensconced as we are in a dumpster-fire-perched-on-a-precipice over a socialist volcano filled with the corrosive lava of court-packing, freedom-weakening, bad-faith pseudo-journalistic leftist hacks.

And I found myself returning to a recurring theme from my childhood: the virtue of common sense.     

Before I grew into the modest, mature, hilarious genius you see before you, I was a young boy being raised in a great family who had not had any formal education beyond high school.  (Both grandmothers went through 8^th grade, and both grandfathers through 6^th grade.  My parents’ generation all completed high school, and my generation was the first batch of Simpsons to go to college.)   While my family was very supportive and encouraging about me going to college, and later to grad school, they all had talks with me about not neglecting common sense as I became more educated.

After spending decades in academia, I have come to appreciate that advice more than ever.  The trope of some crackpot theory being so ridiculous “that only a PhD could believe it” does not come out of nowhere.  The old liberal arts department joke about capitalism vs. Marxism – quoth the poli-sci prof, “I know that free markets work in the real world.  But more importantly, do they work in theory?” – exists for a reason.

As the presidential race appears to be tightening and the MSM gets more desperate, I’m reminded of how the MSM has spent these last years pitching absurd stories that anyone with the slightest modicum of common sense would immediately see through.

For example, Baby-talking Blasey-Ford’s smears about Brett Kavanaugh were ludicrous for many reasons.  (His horrible attack rendered her so afraid of flying that she couldn’t fly to a hearing to air her charges… after it turns out that she’s got more frequent flyer miles than Richard Branson.  The people she identified as witnesses all said that the attack never happened.  Etc.)

But one little-analyzed red-flag in her story violated common sense so fundamentally that I knew for certain that she was lying: she said that she couldn’t remember what year she was in high school when the attack occurred.

I was pretty fortunate to not have any real traumas happen to me in high school.  The closest thing to anything horrible – if you don’t count some of my haircuts and fashion choices – was an injury during a pick-up football game.  I landed on my finger badly, breaking it close to the hand, and requiring 6 weeks with my hand in a cast.

I can tell you without hesitation that it was in the fall of my freshman year, two days before I was supposed to play my first high school football game as a cornerback.  And I’ll bet that you can do the same with any traumatic experience during your high school years.

Did your parents get divorced?  Someone in your family get into a serious car wreck?  Did you experience a traumatic teen break-up, or a serious illness?  Did you make varsity, or get kicked off the team, or find out that your boyfriend was cheating, or that your girlfriend was pregnant?

If so, you can immediately tell me what year it happened.  During your sophomore year from hell, or the senior year when things finally turned around for you, or whatever.

But Blasey-Ford spent four decades being traumatized and trying to recover from a terrible sexual attack, and she can’t even tell you whether she was a freshman or a senior when her world was shattered forever?

Common sense says, “No way!”

There’s always a basic smell test that lets you know when someone is lying. 

When definitive proof came out that Grandma Squanto had identified herself as Native American during and after her search for her first academic job – she listed herself as non-spelling-bee Indian at both Harvard and Penn, and Harvard bragged about her diversifying affect on their roster – she doubled down.  She insisted with a straight face – and a pale one! (#wemustneverstopmockingher) – that her faux minority-ness gave her no advantage whatsoever in either hiring or promotion. 

Anyone who’s every been within a mile of a diversity-crazed university campus knows that how crazy that is.   Common sense says, “Hell no!”

Hillary claimed that the Clinton Foundation raked in hundreds of millions of “donations” annually because public-spirited people knew a good cause when they saw one.  Then, she threw a shoe and ran into the rail, shattering her jockey’s femur in the final turn of the 2016 race – and thus ended any chance she had at wielding political power.

The very next year, the Foundation’s haul was three paperclips, two Canadian pennies and an expired Blockbuster coupon entitling the owner to a free weekday rental of Mission Impossible 2. 

The next thing you know, she and Bill are on a speaking tour at half-empty community college gyms – Bill always had a local sorority girl/Dem volunteer bouncing on his knee while he asked her what she wanted for Christmas – and Hillary was insisting that the Foundation was a great cause that must continue to do the Lord’s work.

Common sense says, “The hell you say!”

And lately we’ve been getting more of the same.  The MSM isn’t even trying to hide their ethically-crippling levels of bias any more. 

Peaceful protests of the lockdowns by conservatives are super-spreader genocide-fests promulgated by Nazis who want to kill grandma.   But much larger orgies of screaming, looting and rioting are civil rights demonstrations by a bunch of MLKs, and pose no health risk at all.

Trump gets the WuFlu because he didn’t wear a mask, and we get sermons about how we’re all Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Gaia.  But Imhotep Pelosi shambles through a salon maskless, and Chris “his brother is worse” Cuomo galavants around with his face uncovered – doubly dangerous, because of his mouth-breathing – and the MSM is struck dumb.

Not AOC-style dumb.  I mean, they lose the ability to speak.

And now comes the Hunter laptop story, and the MSM are at risk for adult-onset spinal torsion because of how vigorously they are turning their heads to look the other way. 

I don’t want to pick on Hunter, who is obviously a troubled mess of a person.  The usual concessions in a time of great pain could be made: all of us are flawed, and the heart wants what it wants, etc.  

On the other hand, should it work to say that sometimes what the heart wants is a soup can full of methamphetamine, carnal knowledge of your brother’s widow, and huge duffle bags of cash from murderous Chinese dictators and Ukrainian kleptocrats?

Could you imagine Don Jr. making that argument? Or Don Sr.?   It is to laugh.

Add in some incriminating emails implicating Plugsy as a corrupt Godfather-figure, insisting that he gets his cut from Hunter’s transparent bribes, and you’ve got what should be a humongous scandal. 

So last week there was a townhall meeting with Biden, and George “Dinklage” Stephanopoulos managed not to ask a single question about the meth-snorting, bribe-taking elephant in the room.  And if left to her own devices, the life-long leftist “moderator” at tonight’s debate likely won’t bring it up, either.

It’s been especially entertaining watching Twitter and the rest of the MSM scramble for a rationale for censoring the NY Post laptop story.  First Twitter claimed that sharing the story was “potentially harmful.”  As opposed to every doom-and-gloom story that they’ve posted exaggerating the death rates from the Flu Manchu, and justifying rioting and looting, and promoting fever-dream fantasies that Trump recreated an Esther Williams production number with a hundred urinating hookers in a Russian hotel.

Then Twitter invoked a suddenly made-up rule against sharing hacked or leaked material.  Which is why you’ve never heard of Wikileaks, or Putin’s imaginary support for Trump in 2016, or Donald Trump’s tax returns.

Finally Twitter swung at strike three, by claiming that information that may show that a presidential candidate is up to his Depends in foreign cash taken to influence legislation and foreign policy is out of bounds because it “violates [our] policies on displaying private information.” 

Did I mention Donald Trump’s tax returns?

Ugh.  They think we have no common sense at all.  The sad thing is, as close as this election is, they may be right.

“Hey Martin,” I can hear you asking, “are you really going to write a column without referring to Jeffrey Toobin?”

Of course not, even though I am usually too classy to stoop to dealing with such low-hanging fruit.  (HA!  Couldn’t help that.)

I’d like to say something in Toobin’s defense.  Like, I understand that it in the mock trial exercise that all of those lefty “journalists” were engaged in, Toobin was supposed to be representing the Judiciary.  So maybe he had heard that when you’re in court, you’re supposed to make a lot of motions?

Okay, you’re right.  That was beneath me.

Toobin obviously has some psychological problems.  But after how shabbily he treated Kavanaugh during the hearings, and after reading just a little about his past sexual misbehavior,  I have to admit that for me, Toobin puts the “Freud” in “schadenfreude.”

And what’s worse, now that he’s suspended, he’s going to have even more time on his hands.  So far that hasn’t been a good thing for him.

Is it possible that I’m not as classy as I thought?

Anyway, the last I heard, CNN has indefinitely suspended Toobin.  Which sounds about… Wait?  What?

Good lord!  What do you have to do to get fired at CNN?!

Avenatti/ Jeffrey “One-Armed Bandit” Toobin 2020!

I’m about to make a trip up north, to see my mom in TN, and then to hang with some cousins and see some leaves changing in IL.  So I thought I’d post a few random thoughts before I go:

In the last two weeks, Joe Biden has done the following: said that he’s “a proud Democrat running for the Senate,” forgotten Mitt Romney’s name, and forgot what state he was in.  He said that he got his start at a historically black college, and also spent a lot of Sundays in a black church when he was a teenager.  He also said that the American voters “don’t deserve to know” whether he’s going to pack the Supreme Court if he gets elected.  (Spoiler alert: he is definitely going to pack the court if he gets elected.)

On the upside, he didn’t say that the long-dead Tupac is his favorite living rapper, or that he fondly remembers when his job training involved sneaking around and snuggling with creepy old married Willie Brown.  (If by “snuggling” you mean… something much more terrible than snuggling.)

So he’s got that going for him.

If they hadn’t already won the Lifetime Achievement Award for Orwellian Scheisse-Shoveling, I would nominate the Dems and MSM (but I repeat myself)  for this year’s award in that category.  Their offense against common sense and clear language this time?  Redefining what it means to “pack the court.”

For the last several centuries, every sentient mammal in Christendom has understood “packing the court” to refer to what happens when a president who can’t get his way legislatively or judicially arbitrarily adds a bunch of judges to a court that has had 9 members on it since Nancy Pelosi was a young lass, in the early 19^th century.  (See, “FDR,” and look for the entry right before “packing the internment camps with innocent Japanese Americans”.)

Now that the late Joe Biden wants to do that next year — if a wrathful God allows him to be elected, to punish us for our sins – the MSM must run cover for his sleazy behavior.  So the memo went out: starting now, we’re going to say that “packing the court” no longer means packing the court.  Now it means filling all judicial vacancies by means of nominating and confirming judges for those vacancies, the way the Founding Fathers set out for us in the constitution.” 

Got that?  Getting elected, and then doing what the constitution says you are supposed to do when you are elected, is now “packing the court.”  In the same sense that the Jordan-era Bulls “packed the win/loss record” by winning many, many basketball games.  Like they were supposed to.

My favorite arschaffen of the group was Dem senatorial candidate from Montana Steve Bollocks, who during a debate said that he’d support packing the court as a way to “depoliticize” it.  Because nothing says “let’s get the politics out of this” like changing the rules to benefit your political party, after playing by the rules has resulted in your losing!

Sorry, that’s Bullock.  Steve Bullock. 

I watched about 8 minutes of Richard “everybody secretly calls him Dick” Blumenthal questioning ACB, and holy moly!  That guy’s SFPI (Simpson Face Punchability Index) is off the charts, and I’m always going to respect ACB just for not leaping across the room and pummeling his bad-faith-question-asking-posterior from here to Sunday. 

Also, the spectacle of someone like Dick Bloom (as I’m assuming he was called back when he perennially had the lowest GPA in the frat house) trying to interrogate and match wits with the estimable ACB was a sight to behold.  If there has ever been an IQ gap that large in one room, I’ll eat my Martacus-style Roman helmet. 

Do you remember the musk ox with a learning disability whom I mentioned in my last column?  Well watching ACB try to explain even the basics of constitutional law to the Dickster was like watching Einstein trying to explain relativity to that musk ox’s slower buddy, the furry highland cow who just emerged from the concussion protocol tent.  

Yes, the furry highland cow is a real animal.  Here’s a picture of one.  Now try to imagine explaining Marbury vs. Madison to him, and you’ll have some idea of what ACB had to endure.  

By the way, my favorite moment of ACB goodness was when John Cornyn mentioned that all of the empty-suit Senate interrogators have notebooks filled with prepared facts and questions, and he asked her what documents she had to refer to.  ACB held up a small notepad to the camera, smiling.  Cornyn said, “Is there anything on it?”

And she said, “The letterhead that says, ‘United States Senate.’”

Cut to Crazy Mazie Hirono looking surprised, because she had used her US Senate note pad as toilet-paper, and then to wipe the rabies foam from the corners of her mouth.  In that order.

Meanwhile, Dick Blumenthal surreptitiously crossed both arms over his briefing book, which contained pages of crayon drawings of Frankenstein and Godzilla fighting Batman. 

A CSPAN camera caught the piece of paper on top of his book.  It contained a stick figure labeled, “You,” and 12 single-word thought bubbles that together made this sentence: “Ask mean lady why she wants to force ladies to have babies.”

God bless ACB, and I wish her many happy decades on the Supreme Court!

Now I’m going to hit the roads of this beautiful country, and listen to some books on cd and some podcasts while I drive toward cooler temperatures and changing scenery.  I’m going to visit with some amazing family members – along with one Biden-voting cousin (someone’s got to be the musk ox at the garden party!) whom I dearly love anyway – and I’m going to watch some football and walk through some autumn woods and enjoy God’s creation. 

Please don’t let everything fall apart while I’m gone!

Avenatti/Frequently-concussed Furry Highland Cow 2020!

The debate itself was pretty clearly a blow-out, unless you are an in-the-tank CNN commentator.  If it were a fight, they’d have stopped it.   

Pence was calm and controlled, and he gave substantive, fact-filled answers.  When Comma-la said something untrue – her tell is that she either inhales or exhales right before or after lying — he corrected it with as little vitriol as possible, but forcefully. 

He was a rhetorical fencer, compared to Trump, who was a rampaging Viking, hopped up on mead, and swinging a battle axe in one hand and a broadsword in the other.

A marauding Viking is a lot more fun and satisfying to watch, if you’re a pro-Viking partisan.  But the persuadable non-partisans are who we need to get, and they’re put off by battle axes.  (Insert your own Hillary joke here.)  I think Pence’s fencing is much more palatable for middle-of-the-road voters, to the extent that there are any of them left.

I found myself thinking that I’d like our candidate to be 70% Pence, and 30% Trump.  Trump is definitely the essential element – we need a bare-knuckle brawler who won’t try to appease the MSM and Dems (but I repeat myself), like every GOP candidate since Reagan.  But his flaws are the sort that turns off enough of the electorate and endangers his chances of getting re-elected, maybe fatally so.  (I so hope and pray that I’m wrong about that!) 

But the media coverage of the debate was an actual outrage, if any of us were still capable of being outraged at our laughably corrupt and incompetent MSM. 

Playing the gender card is almost as tired as playing the race card now, but that wasn’t going to stop Comma-la and her MSM support team from going all in on the “I’m a strong, strong woman… but the mild-mannered man was mean to me,” gambit.

I love the left’s gender double standards.  I’m sure you’ve heard the old line that, “If a man is aggressive he’s a strong person, but if a woman is aggressive, she’s a b**ch.” I think we must admit that there’s some truth to that, because many people (including many female people, I should point out) don’t react well to a super-assertive woman. 

On the other hand, you may have noticed that Trump’s personal style is pretty unpopular with a huge part of the population for the same reason, so it’s not like this is a cross that only females have to bear.

You might also notice that most conservatives appreciate a lot of very strong women very much: Thatcher, Golda Meir, Phyllis Schlafly, Kylie McEnany, many of our wives and mothers and daughters, etc.  So your stereotype is invalid.

But consider the double-standard the left applied to Mike Pence.  In last week’s column, I pointed out that the left claims to hate Trump for all of his crudeness, ego and aggression… yet they hate Pence too, even though he’s Trump’s polar opposite in personality.

It’s almost like the left just hates conservatives, no matter what flavor they come in!

Take leftist pseudo-journalist Nicolle Wallace, whose brilliant commentary on the debate included her assessment that “Pence appeared flaccid and anemic” and that he looked “limp and lame.”

You’re probably no Freudian psychologist.  But do you need to be one, to perceive that this little charmer might be missing something in her life?  And no, it’s not just a higher IQ.  (But yes, that too.)

(Speaking of Freud, the smartest thing he ever said was, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”  Unless Bill Clinton has it, and you’re a 22 year old intern spending time with him in the oval office. In which case, run for your life!) (And don’t turn your back on him.  Or your front either, I guess.) (Just RUN!) 

Can you imagine the outrage if someone applied the same kind of slimy insinuations to Nicolle Wallace?  If, for example, someone noted that she’s probably had a lot of life experience with “flaccid, limp and lame?”  But you’re never going to hear that kind of talk on the MSM — unless it is aimed at conservatives — because the only lefty standards are double standards.  They don’t flinch at hitting below the belt, and no blow is too low for them.

Speaking of which, Comma-la got her start in politics a long time ago — Yes, I went there! — and she has apparently learned nothing in the intervening decades.  Because she really had nothing substantive to say the entire night.  While Pence was giving concrete answers (we’ve got 5 companies working on vaccines, the first of which will be ready within a year of the pandemic’s onset, unemployment rates were record lows, etc.), she had an insulting mix of glittering but hollow banalities and outright lies.

Every politician routinely shades the truth and spins stories in the most advantageous way for them.  But when a candidate for high office can tell the kind of cartoonishly obvious lies that Comma-la told, it’s a devastating indictment of our media.

She rolled out the “Trump called white nationalists ‘good people on both sides’ line.  (It’s on video, you idiots: literally seconds later he said, “And I’m not talking about the white nationalists and neo-nazis, who should be condemned completely.”)  He didn’t call the virus a hoax, he called Dems’ treatment of it a hoax.  He has condemned white supremacists literally dozens of times, including (although clumsily) when Chris Wallace asked him to do it AGAIN.

On the other hand Comma-la and Joe have both promised – on video! — to ban fracking, and their official websites say they support the Green New Deal.  But she can look straight in the camera and lie about it, with nary a ripple.

Even worse was than her “lady of color speaks with forked tongue” tendency (#wemustneverstopmockinggrandmasquanto), was her obnoxiously simplistic talking down to people.  When she was trying to smear Trump because he is a real estate investor with mortgage balances, she said that he “owes and is in debt for $400 million.”

Then she turned toward the camera with the air of someone about to explain quantum physics to a musk ox with a learning disability, and said these words, which I swear I am not making up: “Just so everyone is clear, when we say in debt, it means you owe money to somebody.”

Whoa, whoa – slow down there, Poindexter!  Let me get my calculator and green eyes shades.  You’re saying that “debt” means money that you owe? 

Get me my contact at the Wall Street Journal, because I am going to break this story WIDE OPEN!

Almost unbelievably, Harris was even worse when she was ham-handedly dodging questions. 

Here’s a tip: When someone asks you repeatedly if you are going to pack the Supreme Court, and you avoid answering it, and the person repeats it one more time: “Would you please answer the question: IF ACB gets confirmed, are you and Joe Biden going to pack the Supreme Court to get your way?  

Your answer should NOT begin, “Let’s take a look at history.  In 1864…”

I would have gone full Kinison on her:  “NOOOO!  We can talk about 1864 until 2064, but right now you are running for office!  Will you pack the court or not?! SAY IT! SAY IT!!!”

What Mike Pence said – because he’s a courtly gentleman, unlike me – was “I’d like you to answer the question.”

And Mrs. Empty-skirt Smirkster said, “I’m speaking… I’m speaking…”

Ugh.  Never has the old political cliche been more true: anyone who votes for Joe and Comma-la should get what they asked for.  Good and hard!    

Rather than end on that grim note, I thought I’d mention two hilarious stories of ineducable leftists running their cities into the ground.

You may remember Portland mayor Ted Wheeler from when he encouraged a mob of peaceful leftist thug rioters to destroy his town, and then let them force him to slink away in shame after he tried to tell them how much he admired what they stood for, and then let them force him to move out of his luxury building because they threatened to burn it down if he stayed there.

So when I saw that Wheeler is trailing in his re-election bid, I thought to myself, “Maybe there’s hope for Portland yet.”  I know that they weren’t likely to elect a conservative, but I thought that at least there might still be some old fashioned, patriotic, blue-collar Dems around to vote in someone who is not clinically insane. 

But of course I was wrong.  Because the leading candidate is a piece of work called Sarah Iannarone, a charming little radical and self-described antifa-supporter – yeah, let that sink in — who wants to reduce the budget for the police.  Also, her campaign manager admits that he is a communist.  And yes, she wore a skirt to a rally that had pictures of leftist murderers Stalin, Mao and Che Guevara on it.

(If you are wondering why international socialist murderers have been given a pass, while national socialist murderers – pikers compared to Stalin and Mao in terms of victim body count —  are beyond the pale, I wonder that too.  Wear a Mao or Che shirt to the next arson-fest and you’ll get nods of approval.  But show up in an “I heart Himmler” shirt and everyone will give you the stink eye.  It doesn’t make sense!)

You’d think that no American city could out-do Portland in leftist, mouth-breathing malevolence.  But then Seattle says, “Hold my bong, and watch this.”

The Seattle city council recently voted to cut police funding this year by $3 million, eliminating as many as 100 cops.  But don’t worry, residents of Seattle who may not want to be victimized by a mob of violent, recidivist Biden-voters.  Because the city council has your back.  They have been “re-imagining policing,” and have come up with a worthy replacement for all of those cops. 

His name is Andre Taylor, and he is a recognized leader in his field.  In fact, he was featured in a documentary a few years back.  Was it a documentary on community policing, or maybe one on the “broken windows theory” of crime prevention?

It was not.  It was a little production called – I scheisse you not – “American Pimp.”  Because Andre Taylor is a pimp.  And Seattle has hired him for a salary of $150K a year to bring to Seattle residents some “alternatives to policing.”

That’s the left, people.  They elect America-hating loons, who then let armies of thugs vandalize and burn and loot their cities.  Then, when the air is filled with smoke and the streets are filled with rubble, they hire a pimp to fix things.

Andre Taylor’s hookers are exploited and desperate victims, and they deserve our sympathy and help.

But the voters of Portland and Seattle have done this to themselves, and they deserve to get what they asked for the same way Andre Taylor’s victims did: good and hard!

Avenatti/Musk Ox with a Learning Disability 2020!

When I last checked in on the NBA, Game 2 of the Finals had set record low ratings.  And Americans who love their country had laughed heartily at the anti-white racist incompetents who run that league, and said, “You can’t get much lower ratings than that!   USA! USA!”

And the mensa members who own and play in the NBA said, “Hold my Tsingtao and watch this.”

Wait a minute.  I’m just getting a report in on my non-existent earpiece — which you wouldn’t be able to see even if it did exist, because this is a written column and not a broadcast – with breaking news from the NBA:  after getting the worst ratings ever in Game 2, the Game 3 numbers set a new record, losing another 105,000 viewers.

And now I will read the next screen from my non-existent teleprompter: HA! HAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

At this point I’m hoping that the series goes to 7 games, just to see how few people will still be around by the last game.  I’m guessing half of each players’ family members, and a small group of degenerate gamblers who will go double-or-nothing on Game 7 after a close loss on a Canadian curling match featuring Calgary vs. Saskatchewan.

Fun fact: the home crowd for Saskatchewan’s game – Go, Colorless Ice Brushers! – was nearly as white as Elizabeth Warren.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

A Breitbart story on the debacle has this salt-in-the-wound commentary:  “Mind you, this is a nearly 70% decline from last year’s Finals numbers which included a team from Canada. Not only that, unlike this year’s audience, last year’s audience was not on lockdown and did not include the game’s best player, LeBron James.”

I swear to you, I wrote the curling joke before I learned that a Canadian team was in last year’s finals.  (I haven’t been a big NBA fan since Jordan retired.)  Also, how can a Canadian team be called the “raptors,” which may be the least Canadian creature I can think of?!

The Daily Beast reports that Comma-la is going to attack Pence tonight on at least two grounds: the administration’s supposed failure on covid, and his homophobia.  Both of those charges are bad faith arguments – which by this point the elite left should have a copyright on.

The data on covid transmissions and death do not support any of the bomb-throwing accusations of the left.  In terms of death rates, the US ranks slightly below the average of the aggregate death rates of EU nations and Europe overall, but the way the left tells it, Trump has been uniquely terrible on responding to a pandemic that so far no one in the world has found a great way to deal with.

With the possible exception of Sweden. 

Inconveniently for the left, the Swedes have succeeded by doing what the GOP governors and Trump (to the extent that he has preached anything consistently) has said that we should do: protect the especially vulnerable, but don’t shut down your country and destroy your economy. 

A recent NR article showed graphs of the covid case and death rates in 13 US states, and they are all remarkably similar.  The deep blue, lock-down-at-all-costs states have had just about the same results as the red states – with the exception of those with idiot Dem governors who forced sick people back into nursing homes – which suggests that the economic devastation in those blue states has all been for naught.

The homophobia charge is equally specious.  Pence hasn’t made any homophobic speeches or pursued any homophobic policies, so this charge mostly comes down to, “We hate him because he’s an icky Christian.”

Has anyone else noticed the hypocritical irony on the left’s attitude toward sex in politics?  They hate Trump because he has been too open about really liking hot women, and they hate Pence because he has not been enthusiastic enough about liking hot men.  Also, they’ve got no problem with raping your subordinates (either with cigars or fingers, or – presumably – the old fashioned way) if you’re a Dem, but Pence is super evil because he doesn’t want to be alone in a room with a female to avoid the appearance of scandal. 

Anyway, I think Pence proves a consistent point about the national left’s hypocrisy for my entire lifetime.  They claim to hate the current GOP candidate because of his manifest flaws alone, while giving lip service to valuing a debate, and not being opposed to political disagreement.

This claim can at least seem logical when it comes to Trump; he has big flaws, and is everything they hate in a person, and so their claim that he is uniquely horrible rings true, from their point of view.

Until you consider that they equally hate every other GOP person of consequence. 

They claim to hate Trump because of his obnoxious ego and aggressiveness and uncontrolled appetites… but they also hate Pence, who is his polar opposite.  Where Trump jumps from wife to wife, Pence has not.   Where Trump is loud, Pence has been so quiet that after being the VP for almost four years, none of us could confidently recoqnize his voice in an aural line-up.  Where Trump is boisterous and undisciplined and gauche, Pence is controlled and sober and prudent.

They hate his guts anyway. 

They hated Reagan too, although now they compare every GOP candidate unfavorably to him.  They hated Bush 41 and Bush 43, but now they call the former a statesman, and the latter a non-Hitlerian fellow, contrary to their spittle-flecked arguments from 2000-2008.   McCain is now a noble victim, but in 2008 he was a mentally deranged wife-abandoner.  Romney is their favorite cuddly RINO, but in 2012 he was a homophobic dog-abuser who kept women in binders, or something. 

It sounds like Comma-la is going to add another chapter to their laughably dishonest hypocrisy tonight. 

But let me give Pence a bit of advice.  If the moderator asks you who your favorite living rapper is, don’t say Tupac.  Because he died a quarter century ago, and that answer will make you look like an idiot.

Instead, say Jay-Z.  And then say that you’ve got 99 problems, but Comma-la ain’t one.

I know that you don’t know what that means, but it will be funny.

Avenatti/LeBron 2020!

Here, in no particular order, are some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately.

First, you stay classy, leftist hate-mongers. 

If there are still any undecided voters out there – and great googly moogly, what does it take to make up your mind when the choices are this stark, for good and bad?! – I think it’s been instructive to watch the compassionate left’s reaction to Trump’s getting Covid. 

I understand it: we all love us some schadenfreude.  I’ve enjoyed watching Imhotep Pelosi getting some scheisse for traipsing mask-less through a salon after lecturing us about how not wearing a mask makes you a selfish pig.

I’ve enjoyed watching Cankles McPantsuit getting caught with her hoof in the Russian cookie jar after accusing Trump of colluding with the Russians with whom she was actually colluding. 

I’ve even celebrated the death of a few people.  The terrorist masterminds whom Trump took out with a drone in Iran, for example, and the antifa terrorists who tried to kill Kyle Rittenhouse and got righteously shot when it turned out that rifle beats skateboard. 

I’ve also made some jokes about some folks after their deaths, most recently RBG.   Were those jokes tasteless?  You can decide.  (Spoiler alert: no.) But they were jokes.

If you’ve seen any video or read any tweets from our leftist pols and celebrity “betters” lately, one thing is clear: these creeps ain’t joking.  They’re going full Hannibal Lecter, spewing hatred and bile, and they are dead serious. 

I hope the electorate is watching.

Second, I’m looking forward to Comma-la’s VP debate.  She has been flying under the radar in terms of how much she’s been hiding from the press, if only because no presidential candidate has ever hidden as much as Biden has been doing.   

And she has good reason to hide.  Because she is a terrible candidate.  I think people have forgotten what an early front runner in the Dem primaries she was, and we on the right under-estimate what a colossal feat it was for her to flame out so ignominiously.

Because we’re not a racist, identity-politics-obsessed mob like the far-left Dem base, we don’t appreciate the importance they place on which genitalia and skin color a candidate has.  But Comma-la was the only two-fer in the primaries. 

Pastor Pete had the gay, which was cancelled out by the white and male.  Spartacus had the black, which was cancelled out by the male and room-temperature IQ.  Bernie had the Jewish, but they don’t care for that particular minority on the left.  Marianne Williamson had the bat-guano looniness… but they all do.

Grandma Squanto had the female and the abrasiveness, but no amount of buckskin dresses and “crab a la Cherokee” recipes could disguise her blinding whiteness.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

But Comma-la had the femaleness and the quasi-blackness.  And she rode those enormous advantages to the dizzying heights of 7% in her home state’s Democrat primary polls, before dropping out. 

She wasn’t even able to convincingly play the race card against Joey Gaffes, the most colorless candidate since Edgar Winter ran for the Ontario school board.  (That little girl?  The one who made even leftists groan when she praised the universally hated practice of racialist bussing?  That little girl was Comma-la.)

And she hasn’t gotten any smarter.  A couple of weeks ago she had a softball interview during which she was asked questions that you would think were un-muffable.  And she muffed the hell out of them!

She kept referring to the late Supreme Court justice as “the notorious BIG.”  (Even I know that Biggie was a 300-pound black man, whom you wouldn’t think you could confuse with a 90-pound Jewish lady with the posture of a jumbo shrimp.) And when asked who her favorite living rapper is, she picked Tupac Shakur. 

Who died 24 years ago!     

Because a CO fan who works undercover in the entertainment industry is a source of mine, I also know some of Comma-la’s answers that didn’t make print.

For example, when asked to name her favorite living Italian politician, she picked Julius Caesar.  Her favorite living German leader?  Frederick Barbarossa.  Her favorite living American politician?  Joe Biden.

So…yeah. 

Third, you’ve probably seen the video of the female Trump-hater in traffic, who – when she saw some Trump supporters waving signs on the side of the road – engaged them in a trenchant debate, making many thoughtful points that, in their own small way, enriched our political dialogue.

HA! I kid!  She flipped them off and screamed incoherently.  Then she stuck her head out the window and gave them the double-bird, snarling in rage. 

Hilariously enough, her foot slipped off the brake pedal, and her car jumped forward and rear-ended an SUV in front of her.  Then she flipped off that driver – because how dare someone sit in their car in an orderly manner in front of Princess Rationality von Self-Control? 

And then the cops who had been sitting in traffic several vehicles behind her, walked up to her car to explain that 3^rd degree D-baggery is actually a traffic offense in Texas.  

Reports that she is going to be one of the questioners during the confirmation hearings of the Glorious ACB are unconfirmed. 

Finally, the pigeons are coming home to roost for the America-hating goons in the NBA, and they are defecating all over the league’s profits. 

Game 1 of the NBA Finals last Wednesday featured two of the game’s most high-profile franchises (LA and Miami) and stars (LeBron and Anthony Davis).  And in a nation that is starved for sports after a months-long pandemic-induced sports drought, Game 1 drew only a 4.1 rating, and 7.4 million viewers, which was the lowest Finals game ratings since those ratings have been kept. 

To which the only compassionate response is HA! HAHA! HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!

The NBA brain trust who had thought it was a good idea to encourage their whitey-hating players to insult America and cops and apple pie – while also taking time out to rhetorically fellate the brutal dictators in communist China – thought to themselves, “Okay.  The deplorable fans needed to get their little hissy fit out of their system.  I’m sure they’ll be back for Game 2 on Friday.”

You don’t need me to tell you what happened on Friday.  But I’m going to anyway, because I can’t wipe this smile off of my face. 

The 7.4 million Wednesday viewers dropped to 4.5 million on Friday, and the ratings slid to a 1.9.

1.9!   

To give you an idea of how bad that is, Game 2 was beaten out by the Home Shopping Network — who was running a four-hour feature on Electric Toothbrushes from Around the World – and the South Korean amateur soccer contest between the Seoul Dragons and the Incheon Inscrutable Cellists.  And that was a regular season game – not even the playoffs!  (The smart money there is on the Busan Moe-Haircuts, for those of you who trust your favorite bookie, Uncle Martacus.)

On the bright side, Game 2 did manage to just edge the “Watching Paint Dry Network.”

But that might be because they had a re-run from July that featured three consecutive hours devoted to “Semi-gloss on exterior window trim in intermittent sunshine.”  (The closed captioning for that program read, “And here we see the semi-gloss – I think the color is “ivory,” or perhaps “bone” — which has just been applied with a natural-bristle, 2.5-inch angled sash brush…” followed by “zzzzzzz” for the next two hours and 58 minutes.)

Hey LeBron, let me get my #2 pencil and my spiral notebook, so I can record your thoughts about how outraged I should be when a career criminal sexually assaults a woman and fights with the cops until they have to shoot him.

And don’t forget to lock up the gym when you idiots are done!

Avenatti/ Trump-hating, Bird-Flipping Driver Harpie  2020!

Well, that was a pleasant debate, wasn’t it?

My short take is likely the same as yours:  everyone was pretty awful, but Chris Wallace was the worst.  

Trump played to his worst instincts – fighting on every single point, regardless of the significance of the point, which both watered down the effectiveness when he was on target, and was stylistically off-putting to most people.  Plus it kept Joe from talking more, which would have hurt his cause.

Because Biden was terrible too – nasty and dishonest and at least as boorish as Trump.  But he did manage to avoid the worst case scenario for him, which was to forget where he was, lose control of his bowels, refer to Trump as “Corn Pop,” and challenge Chris Wallace to a push-up contest. 

In which case the MSM would have said that he only narrowly won the debate

The consensus is that Wallace was horrendous, and I can’t disagree, because the template for being a good moderator is pretty clear.  Plan A is to be practically invisible: ask the questions and stay out of the way, so that the focus is on the candidates and their answers.

If that doesn’t work – and to be fair to Wallace, the relentless crosstalk and interruptions and omni-directional aggression of both candidates pretty much necessitated that the moderator take more control – then go to Plan B: take control, but do so by being scrupulously balanced in your pointed questions and rebukes to both candidates. 

This is where Wallace completely fornicated with the pooch.   He wasn’t a neutral referee but a partisan, which is inexcusable.  I’ll just point to two moments, because we’re already pretty tired of this.

Trump recently signed an executive order banning government agencies from wasting taxpayer money on Critical Race Theory training.  CRT is a collection of far-left, America-hating Marxist superstitions crossed with vicious anti-white racism, run by a small army of grifters and con-persons who ritually insult and debase white people because of their skin color, and encourage minorities to see themselves as victims.

It’s hard to over-state the awfulness of CRT, but to give you a taste, Hans Bader reported on a typical 3-day training session for white males conducted for Sandia National Laboratories, an important designer of America’s nuclear weapons.  Among other activities, the white males “were forced to recite publicly a series of statements” acknowledging and denouncing their white and male privilege.  “At the end of the training, the white males had to ‘write letters ‘directed to white women, people of color, and other groups’.”

These weren’t guys who had sexually assaulted interns, or forcibly sniffed the hair and digitally penetrated the bodies of helpless women within arms’ reach.  They were just average white guys, forced to waste three days that could have been spent perfecting weaponry to deter this country’s enemies, rather than being browbeaten by a bunch of bilious would-be Farrakhans.   

So when Wallace questioned Trump about his decision, how did he describe those Maoist shaming sessions?  He said, “Why did you decide to… end racial sensitivity training?”

How’s that for a euphemism?  Aren’t we all for racial sensitivity?  

I for one would love the chance to tell some racist leftists how insensitive I find it when they call my race and gender “toxic.”  I’m sure that Native Americans would love to tell Grandma Squanto how much it hurts their feelings when a terrible translucent harridan like her pretends to be one of them.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

The second example was when Wallace called on Trump to denounce white supremacists.  Trump actually did, but he was so clumsy in his phrasing that he came across as reluctant to do so. 

We’re all Monday morning QBs at heart, but that seemed like an easy one to handle more directly: “I’ve done so repeatedly over the last 4 years, and of course I’m happy to do so one more time.  I unequivocally denounce any white racists anywhere, as I’ve always done.  But since all the rioting and looting and arson over the last 6 months have been caused by leftist groups that Biden and Harris have not been able to denounce, could you now ask Biden to do the same about Antifa and BLM?”

When Trump correctly mocked Biden’s feeble “Antifa is an idea, not an organization” answer, Wallace played the role of Biden’s cut man, and ended the round before Biden could say anything even more stupid and damaging, if such a thing were possible.

Wallace also didn’t follow up on any of Biden’s obviously contradictory bloviating.  At one point Biden said, “The Green New Deal would pay for itself!”  Seven seconds later, Wallace said, “So you support the Green New Deal?” Biden said, “No!” 

And Wallace let him change the subject and wander away!  Ugh.

Having said all of that, let me turn to something that you can’t get elsewhere: an analysis of the debate that applies the awesome analytical power of the Simpson Face Punchability Index (SFPI™).

For those of you who have only recently discovered the CO site and my columns, I think the best way to explain the SFPI is to share my initial introduction of it, from a column I wrote in July of 2017:

“Human faces can elicit strong reactions.  We’ve all known some guy who gets in a lot of fights, not because of his actions, but because people just don’t like his natural expression.  And we’ve all known unfortunate women who have been stricken with the heartbreak of resting b**ch face.

I’ve taken those facts, and through a proprietary process of rigorous thought and research, arrived at the conclusion that all human faces can be assigned a punchability value on a scale of 1 (a face that even a sociopathically violent person would be disinclined to punch) to 10 (a face that even a Buddhist monk so committed to nonviolence that he goes out of his way to avoid stepping on a bug can barely restrain himself from punching.)

For example, I have a pretty low SFPI.  I’m not very attractive, but small children and animals are drawn to me, I always got along well with my girlfriends’ parents, and strangers regularly ask me for directions, even though I am never the least bit helpful with directions. 

On the other hand, thin-skinned, humorless leftists really REALLY want to punch me, so I can’t be a 1 or 2.  Thus, my SFPI is 2.5.

This is not a partisan issue, either.  Rush Limbaugh and Ted Cruz both have SFPIs of 8, while Trey Gowdy is an 8.5 – and I like all of them!  By contrast, NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, North Dakota Senator Heidi Heitkamp and actor John Cusack all are 2s, even though they all could objectively use a good pummeling.  Trump and Hillary are both 7.5s, which is what made the November contest so close.

Because I know you’re curious: the highest SFPI ever recorded was Harry Reid, with a 9.9.  If Gandhi and St. Francis were walking down a hallway and Dingy Harry were walking the other way, Gandhi would set him up with a left jab, and Francis would put him down with a right cross.  And Harry’s mom, if she were inexplicably still alive at age 125, would high-five both of them. (I think that that mysterious eye injury that Harry had during his last year in office came from his own fist, when he saw himself in the mirror and couldn’t avoid the sudden instinct to punch himself.)”

Okay, back to the present… and before I move on, I know you are all asking the same thing: how on earth can Hillary’s SFPI only be 7.5??!  It’s because she’s female, and males who were raised properly are hard-wired to never punch a lady. 

If she were male, she’d be up there in the 9.9 range.  Picture Hillary abrasively braying into the camera that time, saying, “YOU MAY BE ASKING YOURSELF WHY I’M NOT AHEAD BY 50 POINTS!  CAW CAW!”

If she were a man, she’d never have made it past “asking yourself.”  Even the cameraman would have been unable to keep himself from stepping out and dropping her with an instinctive roundhouse.

Given that, it’s quite an accomplishment for any female to get over 5.5 or so.  For comparison, Crazy Mazie Hirono and Maxine Waters are both only in the mid 7s, and they need a good punching more than just about anybody.

Anyway, enough about the incredibly sophisticated science.

So how does the SFPI factor into the debate on Tuesday night? 

Simple.  Trump, as previously mentioned, has a SFPI of 7.5.  Biden is an interesting case.  When he was younger and healthier, his SFPI was 8.0. 

But – and here I am revealing another part of the proprietary calculations that go into shaping the awesomely accurate SFPI – it’s a scientific fact that age, frailty and mental infirmity reduce one’s SFPI. 

Consider a similar character to Biden.  Say, for example, a raving homeless man with shaving stubble, frighteningly white choppers, and horrendous hair plugs.  He’s on the sidewalk in front of your house muttering to himself:

“Look, here’s the deal: I’m Napoleon Bonaparte.  I was the top of my law class at a historically black college, and I can beat anybody in a push-up contest.   Wellington is a dog-faced pony Duke, and my son would never take up with his brother’s widow.  Get your facts straight, Jack!  Shut up, you clown!”

If he were young and fit and in his right mind, a guy like that couldn’t make it through a fortnight without multiple punchings.  He’d be trying to compare IQs with middle management at the company party, calling the receptionist “fatso,” and irking the CEO as he announced an ill-fated corporate merger by blurting, “This is a big friending deal, boss!” into a hot mike.

But now that he’s old and frail, and his mind is failing, his SFPI has dropped into the mid 6’s.  It feels like elder abuse even to shove him in front of a camera with a teleprompter to read.  So punching him seems out of the question. 

Still, if you just read the transcript, his SFPI is otherwise off the charts.

And Chris Wallace?  He should consider investing in an anti-punching vest and helmet.  Because that guy has a case of fourth-degree “backpfeifengesicht”. 

Thank you again, Germans!

Avenatti/Crazy Mazie  2020

Once upon a time, Supreme Court justice nominees were given the benefit of the doubt.  The assumption was that a president is entitled to the nominee of his choice, and Senate hearings were mostly geared to root out only unusually controversial or unqualified nominees – of whom there were not many.  Competence was sought, and it was considered unseemly to vote against someone solely based on Ideology.

But in recent years, as the SC has become a more and more powerful quasi-legislative branch, and a means for leftists to create laws that they could not otherwise get passed, every nomination becomes a life-or-death fight, and votes break down on party lines.  

The elite left has been largely responsible for the turn toward contentious, smear-job confirmation fights, the best examples being Bork, Thomas and Kavanaugh.  The latter circus left a terrible taste in the mouths of anybody outside of the hard left, so much so that it stiffened the spines of even the most RINO-y of the RINOs in the Senate. 

And now we come to the Glorious ACB.  I thought for a moment that she might escape the Kavanaugh treatment, for several reasons:

1. With the GOP seemingly having the votes to confirm her, and the timing so close to the election, rational Dems should see this as a lost cause and focus on winnable election issues.

2. She is actually a smart, disciplined lawyer, with no paper trail of outrageously controversial rulings that would justify an attack on the judicial merits.  (If there were such a thing, since the Senior Dirigible from Massachusetts slurred his way through his slimy attack on Bork.) (Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment.)

3. She doesn’t have any obvious character vulnerabilities.  She’s female, so no troubled, child-like harpie like Blasey-Ford can come forward and claim that she’s a rapist.  She’s married, and sober, with a great family and apparently no skeletons in the closet.

But I gave the hard left too much credit.  Because several slimy nematodes – and I mean no offense to the nematode-American community — have crawled out to attack ACB on the unlikeliest of grounds: her family’s adoption of two children from Haiti. 

That’s right.  She and her husband adopted two kids from Haiti.  And some on the left are crying … wait for it… RACISM!

Nematode #1 is a piece of work named Dana Houle, a self-described policy analyst and political consultant for Democrats.  (And by the way, after the performance of the national Dems over the last several decades, I’d suggest finding a more well-respected professional title than that.  Possibly something like “NAMBLA lobbyist,” or whatever job description was on Ghislaine Maxwell’s business cards.  “Personal assistant to an influential Democrat fundraiser who definitely did not kill himself,” maybe?)

So Dana slithered to his computer and started tweeting out nefarious-sounding rhetorical questions about whether anyone has investigated ACB’s adoption of two Haitian children, referring to how many Haitian adoptions are “unethical” and “maybe illegal.” 

What the hell is this moron talking about?  The only possible reason that adopting Haitian children could be “unethical” would be if it were done for sex trafficking purposes.  And ACB cannot be accused of doing that! 

(Besides, it’s not like a history of sexual exploitation would be a deal-breaker for the party of Jeffrey Epstein, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Anthony Weiner, Matt Lauer, Charlie Rose, et-freaking-cetera.)

Another lefty “journalist” named Christine Grimaldi – and never has “grim” been so aptly included in someone’s name – accused ACB of “weaponizing her white womanhood,” which sounds a little kinky, but most definitely is just deeply, deeply stupid.  She also accused ACB of “using her Black children and child with Down syndrome to score political points.” 

Think about that, the next time some pinch-mouthed socialist whines that conservatives lack compassion.   Because we’ll raise and love kids with Down syndrome, rather than compassionately aborting them, like Grimelda Grimsky, and some of us may even adopt Haitian kids, rather than compassionately exterminating them, like Planned Parenthood founder (Saint) Margaret Sanger. 

And no trifecta of hateful lefties would be complete without a whitey-hating racial arsonist/academic.  Enter Ibram X Kendi (the “X” is for “X-tremely vile), a “scholar” at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research. 

(And though I just now heard of this center for the first time, I already know enough about it – its stupid name, and that it hired Ibram X Kendi – to call for its immediate closing.  And possibly dynamiting, following by salting the site, so that no other center can ever grow there again.)

In a quote that proves both Kendi’s hateful nature and his inability to properly use scare quotes, he says, “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial.” 

Not satisfied with excreting one of the worst quotes of this century, he follows up with this gem: “I’m challenging the idea that White parents of kids of color are inherently ‘not racist’.” 

Yes.  Because what better proof is there that a white family is deeply racist, than that they find black children in desperate need and save their lives.  And then inflict upon them such racist horrors as “healthy meals” and “clean clothing” and “decent medical care” and “safe shelter.” 

(THAT’s how you use sarcastic scare quotes, X-Box!)

You almost have to feel sorry for the lefties who are faced with the upcoming ACB hearings.  (I said “almost.”)  With an election so close that they can taste the opportunity to finally get rid of the Orange Menace, they are suddenly hit with this 11^th-hour confirmation nightmare, like a plague brought down upon their misshapen heads by a just and hilariously vengeful God.

One of my favorite writers was C.S. Lewis, and one of his best books was The Screwtape Letters, a fantasy piece featuring a senior demon giving instruction to a newbie demon on how to torment human subjects.  (If you haven’t read that yet, finish reading this column first.   Then consider hitting the Tip Jar at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  But THEN run out and get a copy and read it immediately.)

While reading the truly evil sentiments above, I couldn’t help but think of Lewis’ demons, locked in their infernal strategizing.  So I imagined what it must be like to be a fly on the wall in a conference room filled with these kinds of demons, thinly disguised – oh, how thinly! — as far-left political consultants.

Political Consultant 1: Okay, the rumor is that Trump has a nominee. What do we know about her?

PC 2:  She’s a woman.

PC 1: Crap!  There goes the insanely unsubstantiated rape claims.

PC 3: But she’s white!

PC 1: Now you’re talking.  The race card is on the table!  How white is she?

PC 3: Almost as white as Elizabeth Warren.

Disembodied voice of Hilarious Reason:  #wemustneverstopmockingher

PC 1 (glowering): Who said that?!   (After no one will admit to it, he goes on.)  So she’s super white.  Did she marry a white guy, too?

PC 2: Yes.

PC 1: That’s good.  We can work with that.  “Why didn’t she marry a person of color?  Did she discriminate when she was dating?”  That sort of thing.  Do they have kids?

PC 3:  Yes, like 5.

PC 1: Five!?  What are they, Catholic or something?

PC 2:  Yes, in fact.

PC 1:  Ooh, that’s good.  Text Senator Palpatine from California.  “The dogma lives loudly in this one!”  She’ll know how to spin it.   Moving on, I bet the kids are all preppy-looking little private schoolers.  We can use that too: “Look at these perfect Stepford children!  They can’t know what it’s like to suffer in life.  They don’t have any problems, or any obstacles to overcome.”

PC 2:  Ummmm.

PC 1:  What is it? 

PC 2:  Well, the youngest kid… has Down syndrome.

PC 1 (snapping his pencil in anger): Mother-friender!  You have got to be scheiss-ing me! 

PC 3: Maybe we can use that, though.  We could suggest that they were selfish, bringing a kid like that into the world, as though his life mattered, and was worth living.

PC 2: That sounds risky.  What kind of shameless arschaffen would say that out loud, in public?

PC 1: Get that “journalist” on the payroll – Grim Reaper, something like that?

PC 3: Nice use of sarcastic scare quotes, boss!

PC 1: I know, right?  Okay, so we’ve countered the Down syndrome gambit.

PC 2:  Ummmm…

PC 1: What is it?

PC 2:  She and her husband also… adopted a couple of foreign kids.

PC 1: Schiff on a shingle!  Adoption too?  (thinks for a moment)  Okay, maybe we can spin this.  A couple of white nationalists like these, I’m sure they went to some lily-white country and picked out a couple of blonde, blue-eyed Hitler-youth types to carry on their Master Race.  Where did they get the junior Aryans from? 

PC 1 looks around the table, but nobody will meet his eyes.

PC 1:  Where?  Norway?  Sweden? Denmark? 

PC 2 (clearing his throat):  Haiti.

PC 1 (leaps up and throws his laptop against the wall): Are you friending kidding me?!  This is turning into a bottomless cluster friend! 

Everyone stares at the table, while PC 1 struggles to get control of himself, before flopping back into his chair.

PC 1: At least tell me that the Haitians were hot teenage girls, so we can start a smear campaign.

PC 2:  Ummmmm…

PC 1: If you tell me that they have Down syndrome too, I’m going to stick this friending pen right through your friending skull!

PC 2: No, no!  No Down syndrome.

PC 1:  Good!

PC 3: But the girl was 14 months old when they got her, and only 11 pounds, and in danger of never being able to walk normally again.

PC 1: And?

PC 3: Now she’s a track star.

PC 1 (throwing his coffee cup against the wall)  I swear to Marx, I will friending KILL YOU!  What about the other kid?  Let me guess, he’s got a heart murmur and a cleft palate, and he’s legally blind?!

PC 2: No he’s completely healthy as far as we know.

PC 1: Thank Alinsky for small favors!  Was he at least snatched away from a happy life in Haiti?

PC 4 (in a very small voice): He was adopted at age 3 after an earthquake destroyed his village.

PC 1:   NOOOOOO!  

(He leaps across the table and begins to strangle PC 4 by his necktie.)

And, scene.

Avenatti/ No-friend-y “X-Box” Kendi 2020!