I could easily spend this column talking about all the stuff that has immediately started going terribly wrong with the fledgling Biden administration.
For example, Hacky Psaki™ is already drawing ridicule from even the far-left media, for her constant refrain of “I’m going to circle back on that.” to even the simplest questions. AOC is telling fabulous tales of that time she was almost killed because she was four blocks away from a building where a handful of idiots wearing Viking horns broke in and took selfies and made scary noises.
And after nearly four years of explicitly inciting their mouth-breathing followers to physically attack all elected Republicans, the Democrats in congress are gearing up to impeach a former president because he supposedly incited some of his followers to violently attack Democrats… in a speech in which he literally said, “March down to the capitol and patriotically and PEACEFULLY protest.”
As I say, I could easily talk about that stuff.
I could, for example, compare the Biden administration getting out of the gates to the start of an ill-fated horse race. One in which the gun sounded, spooking several of the horses into throwing their riders and then trampling them to death, while several of the other horses sprang forward, collided with each other and went down in a cacophony of snapped fetlocks and equine screaming, and in which the lead horse, just as it was breaking away from the pack, somehow burst into flames.
Even though horses are normally pretty reliably known to not be the least bit flammable.
I could write about that stuff, and much more. But I’m not going to. Because it’s a Monday, in the mid-winter of our discontent, and I want to focus on something positive, in the form of three public figures I admire. You might not be surprised that one of them is a thinker and writer. But the other two are from very unlikely fields: one politician, and one actor.
When it comes to professions, even the famously low-status ones don’t strike me as worse than politicians. I’ve bought several cars from used car dealers that weren’t total lemons. I’ve employed a few lawyers over the years, and none of them tried to double-bill me for time they spent with hookers. Speaking of which, even though – and I cannot stress this enough – I have NO first-hand experience with hookers, I’ve been told that they at least allow one to do to them what our politicians routinely do to us.
But let’s not let the 95% of terrible politicians give the other 5% a bad name.
And one of those 5% is the governor of my state, Ron DeSantis. A veteran, military lawyer and congressman, DeSantis just barely won in 2018, defeating far-left incompetent Andrew Gillum.
In a lot of ways, DeSantis’ election was the opposite of the heartbreaking razor-thin losses in 2020, in which equally terrible far-left creeps like Ossoff and Warnock and Biden and Harris managed to win. And in the ensuing two years, the judgment of the voters in electing DeSantis has been richly rewarded.
Though not especially telegenic or charismatic, DeSantis has demonstrated the positive qualities of Trump – he governs like a conservative, is impervious to leftist criticism, and doesn’t back down from any political fights – while avoiding the negative characteristics of Trump. He’s not bombastic, and he’s disciplined, and he aims his fire at the real opposition, rather than at his own feet.
And the results speak for themselves. When the MSM were shrieking that Florida would soon be a covid deathscape – and never mind those blue states, where wannabe-dictators destroyed their economies, oppressed the working class and churchgoers, and produced death rates much higher than Florida’s – DeSantis stood his ground. He trusted the citizens to assess the real risks of the virus, and take appropriate precautions, and run their own lives, free from enforced micro-management from a bullying government.
To pick just one almost laboratory-perfect example, consider the two Disney theme parks in America. The one in deep-blue CA, ruled by Ken-Doll Newsom and an arrogant army of leftist poke-noses, has been closed for almost a year. Tens of thousands of employees have been unemployed, millions of children’s Disney vacation dreams have been dashed, and the streets of Disneyland have been occupied only by tumbleweeds.
And they are partially charred tumbleweeds, since half the state has been intermittently on fire, thanks to suicidally stupid, far-left mismanagement of forests and the electrical grid.
Florida’s Disney park, by contrast, re-opened in early July, after only 4 months of closure. For those of you without a calendar nearby, that’s around 7 months ago. And you’d better believe that if there were mounds of bodies stacked up like cordwood all over Orlando because of the great covid Disney die-off, the MSM would be shouting that story to the rafters. (By the way, “The Great Covid Disney Die-Off” had the worst box office of any Pixar production ever!)
But alas, there was no horrendous Florida corona-pacalypse. Only hundreds of thousands of employed people, hundreds of millions of dollars flowing into the hands of Floridians and their well-run state government, and millions of happy children. Oh, the humanity!
And the last half-year has only seen the wisdom of electing DeSantis become more obvious. He oversaw a clean and well-run election, and by 11:00 on election night, the world knew who won in Florida. He has stood up to big tech censorship, and almost alone among GOP pols is aggressively fighting back against the dishonest, power-hungry censors who did everything they could to tilt the 2020 electoral playing field.
And how has his narrowly defeated leftist rival been conducting himself since the election? Well, he’s been hard at work, studying and making political connections, and preparing himself for another run.
If by “hard at work” you mean “getting caught in a seedy hotel room with a male prostitute and a dazzling array of illegal drugs.” I am not making that up. When the cops arrived, the hooker was overdosing on meth, and Gillum was nude, intoxicated and vomiting in the bathroom. (In other words, he was truly the “Florida Man” you’re always reading about in the tabloids.)
Because Gillum is a Democrat, and graduated from the “Bill Clinton School of Honest Confession,” his statement was a classic example of the genre. Gillum said, “I was in Miami last night for a wedding celebration when first responders were called to assist one of my friends.”
Because who amongst us doesn’t traditionally celebrate weddings by ingesting a festive cocktail of drugs and alcohol, and ending up naked and puking on a hotel bathroom floor, after paying one of our “friends” to have sex with us?
Let he who is without sin among you cast the first vomit-flecked meth rock!
The actor I admire is Denzel Washington. He’s the type who is always worth watching, even if he’s in a movie that isn’t great. And most of his movies are very good, usually with a moral center, and without a political axe to grind. In a time when half the movies go out of their way to insult and slander conservatives and religious people, I haven’t seen Washington do that.
He’s been outspoken about his Christian faith, and though he supported Obama, he’s been very circumspect about politics, pointedly not insulting conservatives or bashing Trump. In the leftist-dominated, censorious atmosphere of Hollywood, I usually assume that anyone who doesn’t wear his leftist principles on his sleeve is likely a closet conservative.
That assumption got some support from an interview he recently gave to the lefties at Yahoo Entertainment. When asked about how he sees cops and the military, he said, “I have the utmost respect for what they do, for what our soldiers do, [people] that sacrifice their lives. I just don’t care for people who put those kind of people down. If it weren’t for them, we would not have the freedom to complain about what they do.”
Not too many years ago, that would have been a typical sentiment, mouthed even by the celebrities who didn’t believe it, just out of social and career pressure. Today, sadly, it takes courage to say it, and I admire Denzel for doing so!
Finally, Thomas Sowell is 90 years old, and a national treasure. A skilled writer and a clear, logical thinker, Sowell has written more books than the entire Island of Misfit Toys that is the Biden administration has read. He’s written about taboo topics like race and politics with a combination of erudition and blunt, honest common sense that is well nigh irrefutable. So the left virtually never tries to refute him, preferring either to ignore him, or smear him.
The latter is made considerably more difficult because Sowell is black, but that doesn’t stop the charlatans who make a living fanning racial flames. I can only imagine the kind of courage it takes to be a black conservative, especially when your first name is Thomas! I’m sure the racial arsonist leftists all think they’re brilliant when they roll out the “Uncle Tom” charge against him.
If you haven’t read Sowell, you really owe it to yourself. The Vision of the Anointed and A Conflict of Visions are personal favorites of mine, but you can’t go wrong with anything Sowell writes. In addition to the cogent analysis, you’ll find bon mots on every page. He is a smart, brave adult in an academy full of blinkered, cowardly juveniles.
Reading Thomas Sowell is the anti-dote to reading trendy hucksters like Ibram X Kendi, Ta-Nehisi “gesundheit” Coates or Robin DiAngelo. In an interview or debate, when he’s given a tough question, there’s one reply I’ll guarantee you will never hear Thomas Sowell utter:
“I’m going to have to circle back on that.”
Avenatti/Ta-Nehisi 2024!
Martin Simpson 