Thoughts on the Fourth of July (posted 7/5/21)

I hope you all had a great Independence Day.  Or Oppressed Indigenous Peoples’ Day, or Julyteenth, or whatever our perpetually aggrieved contingent are now calling it.

I enjoyed this holiday as I always do, feeling grateful for our country, and the once-in-a-millenium gathering of flawed but iconic political geniuses who got us off to such a great start in 1776. 

Our town does fireworks on the 3^rd, and this year marked the 33^rd year since I proposed marriage to my smoke-show of a wife as the fireworks were going off around us.  This marks my crowning – and last — accomplishment as a beguiler of women, and one which has cemented my prominent position in the “Men Who Have Married Up” Hall of Fame.

The only flaw in this beautiful evening – other than the usual spate of leftist, anti-America hate pieces that always come out on our nation’s birthday – happened on my customary late-night walk with Cassie the Wonder Dog.  We went out later than usual this evening, to allow for the fireworks-related revelry to die down.

So naturally, just as we reached the farthest part of our walk, someone fired off a loud explosion one block over.  Cassie whipped around — haunches low, ears back, large eyes focused on me — and gave me an expression that communicated, “Is it go time?  Is Charlie inside the wire?  Is it time to grab my leash in my mouth, bark out the equivalent of, “Fill your hands, you son of a b*tch!” and race toward the explosion?!”

But I turned her toward home, and spent the rest of the walk soothingly explaining to her the virtues of a republic if we can keep it, and the separation of powers, and free minds, free markets and free speech. 

I hope your holiday was as good as mine.

As we reach the midpoint of this year, I thought I’d focus on some of the positive developments and silver linings in this year marked by dark clouds and a dementia-addled administration.  Some of these bright spots involve the sweet, sweet schadenfreude of watching bad actors get what’s coming to them.

For example, all of our pro sports leagues that have forced their woke, fact-free “America is terrible” preaching down our throats are being beaten like so many rented mules in the ratings.  The MLB is off by 50%, and the NBA has dropped even more.  The NFL has damaged itself too, most heavily in the blue cities.  LA built an amazing new stadium to house Rams and Chargers home games, and then kept it entirely empty all season, even after it was clear that the over-reaction to covid was not backed by any sound science.

While the sporting elites don’t seem properly chastened yet, some advertisers have already started demanding heavily discounted ad rates and refunds, and it brings joy to my heart when I think of the next round of contract negotiations.  I foresee a lot of ungrateful man-children walking into some huge pay cuts, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of jerks.

But the hijinks don’t stop there.  How about all of those national Dems and big city leftist mayors who were out there screaming to defund the police and get rid of cash bail just a scant year ago?  Fast forward a few months and crime has skyrocketed, bodies are piling up in blue cities, and Biden-voting felons are running roughshod through the minority communities that the Dem leadership pretended to care about. 

Add to that the completely predictable misery caused by the flight of businesses from the Dem-run cities, after a year of oh-so-peaceful leftist rioting and looting.  Recent examples include more than a dozen Walgreens closing in San Francisco, and high-profile Target stores closing in many cities, including on the south side of Chicago, as well as the Mondawmin area of Baltimore, and elsewhere.

The Chicago examples are particularly instructive, in that the all-Dem and almost all African-American pols who caused this devastation are apparently ineducable.  Council member Carrie Austin said of the Target closings, “They were like a thief in the night.  There were here one day, and then, boom, gone the next.” 

It’s funny she should mention thieves, because those stores and others in Dem-run cities have been plagued by high theft rates.  The criminals the Dems coddle strike like thieves in the night, and also in the day time.  In fact, some of them are crepuscular criminals – active at dawn and dusk.  (And there’s your new word for the day, people.)

When store managers and employees complain and warn about the rampant theft, lefty elites call them racists, and explain that all property is theft, and order police not to respond to non-violent theft calls.  

And then, boom!  The stores are all closed.  And Dem pols shake their heads, totally mystified by what could have caused such a thing.  Probably racism, they decide.  Boo, America!    

In a hilariously stinging development in NYC, the lefties there – having finally noticed that their chosen candidate Duh Blasio is destroying their city in every way possible – had a new election.  The candidates were a bunch of De Blasio-light mouth breathers, plus a guy named Eric Adams, an ex-cop who has bravely taken a stance against the firing – or killing – of cops. 

In a moment of apparent sanity, NY voters gave him a substantial lead on election night.  And as we all know, huge leads on election night always hold up, so what could go wrong?

Well, one thing is that the NY Dems set up a Rube Goldberg election system that features ranked voting. Which as near as I can tell means that you vote for half a dozen people, all of whom reek, and the rankest candidates move on to the next round, during which they are thrown into an octagon filled with a fog of smug arrogance and armed only with terrible ideas that have laid waste to various People’s Republics over the last century.

Any survivors are then subjected to a witching test.  Those who float are sent to a NYC jail, where they all mysteriously commit suicide, just like Jeffrey Epstein absolutely did not do.

The one who sinks is not a witch, and therefore the next mayor. Even though he’s technically dead. 

Just like our current president.   

Oh, and also, the brain trust running the election accidentally included 135,000 “test ballots” in with the actual ballots.  After discovering the mistake, they removed those ballots.  Or many of them.  Or maybe some of them.

Then, when it appeared that Eric Adams still might win, they added in some more ballots, and took some more away.  And did the hokey pokey, and turned themselves around.

So they should have a new mayor in time for the New Year’s ball to drop and welcome in the 2030s.  By which time, if AOC is right, the world will have ended because of global warming, or white nationalism, or capitalism.  Or some cabal of warming white capitalists.

As satisfying as it may be to watch the Dem chickens coming home to roost on the heads of Dem voters, there have been a few silver linings that fall under the category of “the Worst Has Been Avoided.”

In the darkest days of January, after the two Georgia Senate seats fell to terrible candidates, giving the Dems control over both houses of congress and the White House, I feared four political outcomes the most:

1. Some of the most radical Dems were promising to stack the Supreme Court with a bunch of illegitimate nominees to give them total control over the Court.

2. They also talked confidently of making DC – and maybe Puerto Rico too – a new state.

3. They pushed hard to get rid of the filibuster in the Senate.

4. They promised to nationalize the crooked election rules that helped them greatly in 2000, including getting rid of voter ID requirements, sending out many millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, preventing neutral oversight of elections, and allowing ballot harvesting by leftist political operatives.

Of those four bad outcomes, I considered the last one as far and away the most threatening.

I thought that packing the court would elicit widespread opposition, and I guessed that even our spineless GOP reps would have enough cojones to promise that as soon as they were back in control, they’d add as many justices as the Dems had done.

The DC and Puerto Rican state issue would have been a huge blow to any future chances of a conservative majority in the Senate, but I thought that it would be too controversial, diluting as it would the power of every other state in our current configuration.

Getting rid of the filibuster seemed a much more likely outcome, and with Que Mala (thank you, Spanish speakers, for that great nickname for our VP!) as the deciding vote, it would allow the Dems to push through every horrible bill their Marxist little hearts desired.  But I remembered that when the Dems got rid of the filibuster on approval of judges, they inadvertently allowed us to pass a wave of judges when we got control.  So I thought that the same thing would eventually happen with the regular filibuster, if it came about.

But my greatest fear was that the left would ram through their new, nationalized voting rules, which would enable and codify massive voter fraud, and make it nearly impossible for the GOP to ever win a national election again.

Looking back from the middle of this year, I am relieved to see that the Dems appear to have gone 0-4 on this list, at least as things stand now.  Yes, they’ve added trillions to our debt and huge burdens to our economy, and they are hard at work making everything worse. 

But so far, at least, they’ve been thwarted on the actions that I had feared the most.  

I know: it’s sad that the most horrible leftist schemes NOT being passed is what passes for good news these days.  But I’m taking my good news where I can find it, and I’m hanging on to being an Ameri-CAN!

Still, it’s been a long four years, and it’s only been 22 weeks.

Avenatti/Crepuscular Criminals 2024!