Believe it or not, the elections on Tuesday were not the highlight of my week. Because on Monday, my daughter saved someone’s life.
Forgive a preening dad’s quick diversion: my oldest daughter has been a pediatric nurse for a little over a year now, and on Monday she was taking meds to some of her patients, when she heard a beeping in a room she was passing. Inside, she found a 12-year-old girl who had been doing fine, but who had suddenly stopped breathing. My daughter jumped up on her bed, starting doing CPR and chest compressions, and had the girl’s dad (who didn’t know what was going on) call for the docs.
Long story short, the girl had to be intubated, because each time my daughter stopped CPR, she stopped breathing. But she’s alive today because my daughter was there, and noticed that someone else’s patient was in distress.
All of which puts things in their proper perspective. I mean sure, my daughter may have SAVED A HUMAN LIFE (!) this week. But I also contributed to our society, by inventing some caustic nicknames for malevolent leftists in a snarky column about the political scene.
We all do our part, is my point. 😊
Speaking of which, I am about as far removed from the “damp, drizzly November in my soul,” with which I started my last column as I can possibly be. Between my almost painfully puffed out chest (because my offspring is a life-saving heroine) and my equally disruptive priapism (because the Dems got beaten like a rented mule on Tuesday), I don’t know which way to turn.
And whichever way I turn, I’m knocking things over!
But perhaps I’ve said too much.
Let’s turn to the highlights of that beautiful election, and I’ll count down some of my favorite elements of the day:
1.McAuliffe loses, and it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
As Tuesday night turned to Wednesday morning, I was thinking about how much I miss Rush. Back in the bad old Clinton days, he called Terry McAuliffe “the punk.” And boy, did McAuliffe live down to that nickname in this election!
Oblivious and tone-deaf to the last, he doubled down on his toxic, elitist racism at the end of the campaign. He took the commonplace Dem line on critical race theory: it doesn’t exist, we’re not teaching it, and it’s great! He also promised to decrease the percentage of white teachers in VA!
Because racial discrimination is bad, don’t you see?
2. The down-ticket GOP winners were worth rooting for. The fact that Youngkin’s Lt. Gov candidate is a black, female ex-Marine, and that his Attorney General running mate is Hispanic made the irony even sweeter.
I will always savor the picture of the Punk on stage, lecturing voters on what evil racists his opponents are. Never mind the black lady and the brown guy on either side of Youngkin – they’re the black and brown faces of white supremacy, I tells ya!
Meanwhile McAuliffe is as white as Grandma Squanto Warren — #wemustneverstopmockingher!
Don’t get me wrong: I don’t like racial identity bean counting, or racial essentialism. However, if the touted candidates are good ones, AND they allow the good guys to beat the bad guys with their own racial hypocrisy? Pretty sweet!
And the cherry on top of that schadenfreude sundae was watching Terrible Terry spew his racist bile while standing next to the current Dem governor, who is most famous for taking a yearbook pic wearing either blackface, or a klan hood!
3. McAuliffe lost, even after bringing in all the big-name Democrats he could. Obama offered his usual classless stew of mean-spirited race-baiting, dishonesty and condescension, and it availed him not.
Que Mala? No bueno.
Joey Gaffes? He was as lively and inspiring as any other speaker you’d find at the city morgue with a tag affixed to his wrinkly, blue toe.
4. I’ve got a new favorite politician’s name. Sure, leftist hack Charles Blow is perfectly named, as was Anthony Weiner. But the new VA Lt. Governor is: Winsome Sears!
That’s so beautiful I almost can’t believe it. “Winsome” is like some kind of archaic Puritan name – Amity or Charity or Prudence. The word itself is old-fashioned – so of course I love it! – and means “attractive or appealing in appearance or character.”
Especially when you consider the snarling, angry Dems aligned against Sears and her running mates, “winsome” is a delightful, refreshing contrast.
Perfect!
5. You won’t read this sentence very often from me… but I spent some very enjoyable time watching CNN in the last couple of days.
And boy, was that crowd enmeshed in an all-pro, Olympic-quality exercise in expert-level point-missing!
They couldn’t accurately work their way through a two-part cause-and-effect chain if the first part was stepping on the tines of a rake and the second part was taking a rake-handle to the cranium.
They all insisted that CRT doesn’t exist, and wasn’t taught in VA schools, and that girl didn’t get raped in a bathroom by a boy in a skirt, and if she did, that had nothing to do with the transgender bathroom policy in that school.
They said that if voters are unhappy with Dems, it’s only because they didn’t pass those two gigantic, wastefully expensive bills that they’ve been fighting over. Never mind that nobody outside of the far left wants those bills to pass!
They said the disaster was Joe Manchin’s fault. I guess because West Virginia is very close to Virginia, and “Manchin” almost rhymes with “Youngkin?”
They also started to throw the Punk under the bus, arguing that his campaign was mostly incompetence and under-handed attacks… which also describes most major Dem races in recent years, and they never objected to those.
They are seriously trying to posit a “Youngkin just ran a better campaign” diagnosis. Which might be more convincing… if just about every Dem candidate and policy across the whole country hadn’t been shellacked!
The voters in Minneapolis resisted up-talking, brother-marrying jihadi-sympathizer Ilhan Omar’s call for defunding the police. In Denver, a slate of anti-CRT school board candidates whipped the usual anti-whitey leftists. In NY, GOP candidates on Long Island trounced some high-profile Dems who had voted to get rid of cash bail, so that career criminal Biden voters wouldn’t have to spend any time in jail just because they’d gotten caught practicing their profession.
In deep-blue NJ, there are literally a million more registered Dems than Republicans, and it looks like creepy Gov. Phil Murphy is going to just barely win, with a few thousand vote margin. A bunch of GOP state house candidates defeated Dem incumbents, and in my favorite underdog story of this election, a truck driver who has never held public office named Edward Durr ran against a machine pol named Stephen Sweeney.
Sweeney is the state Senate president, and won re-election in 2017 in a race in which both sides spent more than $24 million. This time around, Durr claims to have spent $153 on his campaign.
Not $15.3 million. Not $153,000. Not even $1530.
$153!
The vote count as of Wednesday afternoon? Durr is leading Sweeney, 52-48%.
I’m sure the Dems will keep counting, and I wouldn’t be shocked if they “discover” enough votes to edge Durr out. But if he manages to hang on?
I look forward to his bringing a bill to the state house proposing that all future candidates are limited in their campaign spending to a max of $153.
6. The most wrong-headed and offensive crack-pot explanation the bitter Dems have given for why Mr. Sweater-Vest and his multi-racial ticket defeated Gov. Black-face and the pasty Punk is that they used “racist dog whistles” to motivate the mouth-breathing rednecks to vote for… Winsome (who, to be fair to them, does actually have a black face) and the Frito Bandito?
Nice try, you racial arsonist dopes!
Not since Christ used the analogy of ignoring the log in your eye to criticize the speck in another’s has someone more perfectly punctured a hypocrite’s pretensions. The metaphor of a dog whistle suggests that most people are not aware of the super-subtle, subterranean racist message being communicated.
But I would counter with a better analogy: the “racist megaphone,” which malicious, race-obsessed leftists have been using to broadcast their anti-white and anti-Asian racism from every rooftop.
Whiteness is a cancer. White people are evil. Only white people can be racists, and all of them are. White supremacy underlies every founding principle of this nation, and taints every achievement it has produced.
The dog whistle is in your fevered imagination, lefties, but your racist megaphone has been heard far and wide. You’ve stood in the road with a boom box over your head and the dial turned to 11, broadcasting your message like a demented John Cusack at the end of Say Anything.
And Edward Durr just filled up his 18-wheeler with $153 worth of gas and drove right over you!
That’s it, CO nation. We’re facing a lot of challenges, but there’s still a lot of good in this country, and even the bluest of states have shown that they’re capable of giving some truly egregious characters a much-deserved political whipping.
Plus, my daughter is a life-saving mensch, and I’ve got the community of CO nation to rejoice with, and savor the small victories like the ones on Tuesday. To paraphrase my favorite under-appreciated Republican president — US Grant:
“We’ve given them the devil’s own day. And we’re gonna lick ‘em in 2022!”
So for the first time in several brutal election cycles, cue the happiness montage. (For those new to this column, that’s a musical pastiche made up of Ray Charles and the Voices of Jubilation doing “O Happy Day” (find it online), Ode to Joy, and Jimmy Stewart running joyfully through the streets of Bedford Falls at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life.”)
And watch Ray Charles as the cool bald brother in the tux helps him walk off stage toward the end of the song. That’s what I looked like in the wee hours of Wednesday, with Cassie the Wonder Dog standing in for the escort guy, wondering what was wrong with me.
For today at least: not a single thing!
Avenatti/Punk McAuliffe, 2024!
Martin Simpson 