Today I answer the eternal question: how do you write a column about current events after you’ve spent about 10 days assiduously avoiding any events that could be considered current?
First, start with the strength of 10 men, because your heart is pure. Which I happen to have. So, check.
Next, add in a dusting of iron willpower and discipline. Which I sort of have.
Thus, I’ve tried to contain most of my net browsing lately to watching videos of happy and non-political things. Like couples making birth announcements or twins announcements to their families. And faithful dogs welcoming their masters back from long military deployments. And people giving obscenely large tips to servers at restaurants, and adult kids surprising their parents by paying off their mortgages, or giving an aged dad his dream car.
All of those are good for making you appreciate life. Also drinking a little scotch or bourbon – neat, because I’m not a savage — watching some football, eating a good meal, and walking a wonder dog. Though not necessarily in that order.
But on reflection, there’s not really a bad order for those. So go nuts.
Finally, realize that you can never be completely unplugged from current events, because sometimes a tv can blare some unwanted news as you are passing through a room, and before you can shoulder-roll into the next room, scaring the cats, even as you stick the landing.
Or your computer can betray you, and on your way to looking up the score for the Ravens-Patriots game or checking the weather forecast, a pop-up can assault your senses with, “AOC said Something Stupid Again,” or “Pelosi Won’t Give up the Speaker’s Gavel until the Dems Pry it from her Cold, Mummified Hands,” or “Biden Tries to Leave Transition Meeting, Gets Stuck in a Corner, Janitor Finds him when he’s turning out the lights.”
And you find yourself right back in “2020: The Year of Endless Groin Kicks.”
I still need a little more distance from this election to have any super-cogent thoughts about it. But I do have a few semi-philosophical musings, for what they are worth.
First, it’s a cliché because it’s true: this too shall pass. If (as seems nauseatingly but almost certainly the case) Biden does take office in January, he immediately becomes the lamest of ducks. He doesn’t seem a day over 120, with the mental sharpness of Howard Hughes when he was in his “walk around the penthouse wearing tissue boxes for shoes” phase. When he steps down – my money is on “keels over” – Comma-La steps in.
In terms of political skills, she’s a human toothache, and will not wear well. And the fratricidal warfare between the ultra-left and the far-left power bases will likely produce the highest deservedly-injured-bad-guy-body-count on both sides since the Iran-Iraq war. As long as Cocaine Mitch still has the Senate – please God, in the name of all that is good and holy! – he can sit back in turtle-y sanguinity and watch the impotent rage on the other side, and wait for the mid-terms.
Second, we’re likely to get a vaccine shortly, and that should finally end this enervating twilight that we’ve been suffering through in our public life. We should do our best to be sure that Trump gets credit for enabling this amazing accomplishment, even as the MSM does their best to pretend it was brought to us by socialized medicine. I first thought of insisting on calling it “the Trump Vaccine,” but then Andrew Klavan quoted one of his listeners with “MAGA-cine,” which sounds pretty cool.
So spread the word: the Flu Manchu has been whipped by the MAGA-cine.
Third, I’m heartened by the number of Americans who are resilient, and who resist the creeping leftism in their communities in ways various and sundry. I like it when Californians tell their governor that he can stuff his Thanksgiving restrictions, and when Americans all over the country respond to leftist gun-grabbers’ disdain and hatred by buying guns, and then defending themselves by shooting Biden voters who break into their houses.
And I love it when hard-working taxpayers get fed up and move out of kleptocratic blue states, leaving behind an increasingly immiserated stew of the base that far-left national Dems have been cultivating: the untreated mentally ill, violent felons, racial arsonists, malevolent trust-fund Antifa body-piercers, professionally useless grievance-studies graduates, and the terminally work-averse.
Trendsetting great-escapers include the entire crew at the Daily Wire (leaving CA for TN and FL), Joe Rogan (leaving CA for TX), and CO (leaving IL for FL). One of my favorite recent examples was described by Jerry Powlas in the American Thinker; he is leaving Minneapolis after almost 50 years. His closing lines are a gem of clean, clear writing: “We are moving out of the state to a town so small that you have probably never heard of it. We are moving to a state where the governor respects the Constitution and the Bill of Rights within it.”
“No, I’m not flaunting this. There is no challenge in my words. But where we are going, nobody wears masks. And everybody has guns.”
Amen, Jerry Powlas!
Fourth, the MSM has so exposed and beclowned themselves that I think it’s going to be difficult to put that bad-faith genie back in the bottle. Their credibility ratings are lower than they’ve ever been – right down there with pollsters, climate change predictors, and Harvey Weinstein. And I feel like I should apologize to Harvey for sticking him in with that group.
They looked like snarling, partisan Quislings in the run-up to the election, and when their sleazy Orwellian mendacity resulted in an undeserved victory, they’ve spent the aftermath looking like a hundred Toobins caught mid-Zoom-meeting.
Neither of which are good looks, to say the least.
Speaking of polling, the geniuses at the Cook Political Report (by no means the worst of the bad lot of pollsters) had rated 36 house seats as either “solid Democrat,” “likely Democrat,” or “lean Democrat.” The GOP took 7 of those. Even better, guess how many of the 27 house seats the Cook Report rated as “toss-ups” were won by Republicans?
Try all 27! How’s that for a Princess Bride moment? “You keep saying ‘toss-up,’ but I do not think you know that it means.”
If there were any justice in the world, in three months the folks at the Cook Report would all be short-order cooks in the same tavern where AOC would be screwing up drink orders.
I’m encouraged that outlets like the Daily Wire and the Blaze and Parler are stepping up to try to fill the gap left by the betrayal of free speech and thought by our media giants. And I’m more grateful than ever for little oases of clear thinking, good conversation and good cheer like the one we’ve all found here at Cautious Optimism. So raise a glass to CO and to each other, and toast to better times that are already on the way!
And what better way to end a scattered, semi-coherent column like this one, than with a stupid joke that I find funny anyway:
A guy goes to a zoo, only to find that the place is nearly empty.
The only animal he eventually finds is a small dog.
And he suddenly realizes that it’s a shih-tzu.
Avenatti (he’ll be tanned and rested!)/Divisive, Far-Left Loon-to-be-named-Later, 2024!
Martin Simpson 