Month: December 2021

For the first half of May, I took a bucket-list trip with two cousins, driving Route 66 from Chicago to LA in an old Caddy convertible; if you’d like to read my daily journal from that trip, go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com and scroll down to the bottom right.

When I got back home I came across a CIA recruitment ad that seemed an ominous sign of the times:

“I quote from a story in the Guardian: “A social media campaign, Humans of CIA, aimed at boosting diversity in the agency—”

Whoa, stop right there.  That’s a lot of weapons-grade wrongness in a very small collection of words.  Let me count the ways:

First, I don’t want our spy agency to have “social media campaigns.”

Clandestine drone surveillance campaigns?  Yes.  Infiltration and disruption campaigns?  Abso-freakin’-lutely.  Counter-Fang-Fang reverse-engineered triple-agent honey-trap campaigns? Sounds like fun.

But social media campaigns?  “Here’s a pic of my meal in the CIA cafeteria this morning?” “5 Reasons why Masculinity is So Toxic?” “How to Handle Micro-Aggressions When you are Undercover?”

No bueno, and no gracias.

Second, ”Humans of CIA?”  That’s what you named your social media campaign?!  As opposed to what?  “Inhumans of CIA?”  “Amphibians of CIA?”  “Deciduous Trees of CIA?”  Ugh.

Third,“…aimed at boosting diversity…”  Good lord, will this NEVER end?!

We need super-sneaky, bad-ass spies.  We don’t need differently-abled, transgender, anorexic, Zoroastrian, little-person Asian-or-Pacific-Islanders!   (Besides, that 6-box-checking unicorn is already pulling down a 7-figure income leading a grievance study program at some horrifically over-priced college.)

I mean, sure, if we need to infiltrate a bi-polar, transgender terror cell, recruit with that in mind.  If we’ve got a lead on a hearing-impaired Pacific-Islander drug cartel, go find the Samoan Marlee Matlin and coach her up.

But otherwise, can we PLEASE just find some people who like to spy and are good at it?

“I wonder what kind of employee you get, when you begin with that insane set of criteria?” you are not asking, because you already know.

Let me introduce you to a 36-year old Latina CIA officer with a lot of issues.  How do I know these things about her?  Because she yammers about it throughout the video.

In the first minute of the ad, we learn that she likes Zora Neal Hurston’s fiction (okay), that she’s the daughter of immigrants (who cares?), that “nothing about [her] “is tragic,” (what?), “[she] is perfectly made” (Meh.), and she’s bilingual (I guess that could come in handy pretty often).

Also, she can “change a diaper with one hand, and console a crying toddler with the other.”  Um, is this a job interview for a daycare provider?

Then things go seriously downhill.  “I’m a woman.  I’m a mom. I am a cisgender millennial, who has been diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder.”

Oh, no.  You want to be a spy, and you have an anxiety disorder?

“I am intersectional, but my existence is not a box-checking exercise.” She says, after spending the entire ad so far checking off a dozen irrelevant boxes.

Then she segues into a half-minute of unintentionally revealing “methinks she doth protest too much” guilty defensiveness: “I did NOT sneak into CIA.  My employment was not and is not the result of a fluke, or slip through the cracks.  I EARNED my way in, and I EARNED my way up the ranks of this organization.  I am educated, qualified, and competent.”

Now we’ve gone from daycare to a self-help support group led by Stuart Smalley.  (“He’s good enough, he’s smart enough, and doggone it, people like him!”)

But then… the very next sentence: “And sometimes I struggle.  I struggle feeling like I could do more… and I struggle leaving the office when I feel like there’s so much more I could do.”

I’m no top-secret spy-training guy, but that sounds like a lot of struggling for someone who wants to get into the exciting field of high-stakes, life-endangering espionage.

“I used to struggle with imposter syndrome, but at 36, I REFUSE to internalize misguided patriarchal ideas of what a woman can or should be.”

And… there goes my gag reflex.

Imposter syndrome?! You’re supposed to be a spy!  Do you know what the operational definition of a spy is?   (Cue Sam Kinison wearing a James Bondian tuxedo.) AN IMPOSTER!!  OH! OHHH!

You pretend to be a gardener on the grounds of a ChiCom training base, or a caterer for a gathering of  Hamas big shots, or a secretary for a handsy Russian general who gets a little chatty after his third vodka.  And when Comrade Grope-ski gets a little flirtatious, you give him a sultry look and a third vodka, not a lecture on how he better keep his patriarchal mitts off your strong Latina cis-gendered butt, lest you report him to the CIA HR!

I cannot imagine anything more comforting to our enemies than watching a recruiting ad like this! 

And in case you’re wondering, yes I do have an idea for a better CIA recruiting ad, thanks for asking:

We open on a dark screen that stays dark throughout.  We hear a hoarse whisper, voiced by Clint Eastwood, or possibly Tom Waits.   

“Hey.  If you were an enemy of the United States, this is all you would ever see of me.  I might be shadowing you in a crowded public place, or behind you in line for a cab, or sitting beside your bed as you sleep.

I could be there to inject you with a drug that causes a heart attack, or to install some malware on your computer, or put a listening device in your bedside table, or a small explosive charge in your cell phone, so that you next time you call for an Uber you get your head blown clean off.

Or maybe I’ll just slide this very sharp, very thin blade between two of your ribs and into your heart or liver.  Both of which will hurt.  A lot.  So maybe you should re-think that, “Let’s screw with America,” plan you’ve got going.

I’ve got imposter syndrome.  Because I’m an imposter.  Which is why you won’t suspect that I’m the guy who’s going to get you and your fellow bad guys imprisoned or killed or both.  But I am.  And I will.

And this is all you’ll ever see of me.”

Then the following words appear on screen: “If this sounds good to you, contact the CIA.  We’re hiring.”

In June, I came up with a modest proposal to improve our criminal justice system:

“Here is the revolutionary criminal justice reform that is going to kick-start a campaign to create a Nobel Prize for Criminal Justice Reform, and then to unanimously award it to me:

I’m sure that you’ve all heard of the death tax, whereby taxpayers who pay a boatload of taxes on everything they earn and own over decades, and then when they die, the government muscles in and grabs the wallet out of their burial suit to take one more cut before their grieving family settles their estate.

My idea is as tremendous as the death tax is terrible.  I call it, “The Career-Criminal Death Tax,” or CCDT.

You may have noticed that the families of many of the career criminals who have recently died in clashes with police as they pursued their profession of crime-committing have received multi-million-dollar settlements from taxpayers.  (To cite just one example, George Floyd’s family got $27 million.) 

As a legal scholar – I’ve read many John Grisham novels and watched many episodes of Court Cam and Judge Judy – I understand that such awards are often meant to punish police departments for alleged wrong-doing.  But I also know that in many states, when someone with back child support or IRS debts wins the lottery, those debts are often deducted from the lucky, innumerate debtor’s winnings.

Enter the CCDT.  I propose that anytime a career criminal’s survivors get a windfall settlement from the taxpayers, that money should temporarily be held in escrow, during which time it should be used to first pay back all of that’s criminal’s victims, plus the taxpayers’ costs incurred because of the dead guy’s criminal and/or irresponsible behavior.   

For example, imagine a totally hypothetical criminal, with an equally hypothetical $27 mil in his posthumous bank account. 

Now go back through that person’s criminal record, and tally up his victims, from the store clerks, gas station attendants and pedestrians he robbed or assaulted, to the pregnant woman he held hostage with a gun jammed against her belly while his buddies robbed her place, to the convenience store owner where he passed counterfeit bills.

Hypothetically.

The CCDT dictates that each of those victims gets a proportional chunk of that money, up to at least mid-six figures each.

Next, we tally up how many years that felon spent in prison.  We have accounting data to tell us how much per day it takes to keep a convict in a state or federal jail.  So add up those costs, and subtract that from the $27M, and refund it back to the taxpayers.

Next, if the dead criminal spent years getting various types of assistance – food stamps, housing allowance, free public defenders, etc. – total that up, and deduct it from the $27M.  Back to the taxpayers. 

And before you object, I know that there are legitimate reasons to have a social safety net, and that some welfare payments are legitimate, and are not legally subject to reimbursement if someone later becomes a productive citizen.  But if he’s a lifelong creep who only comes into any money after he dies during the commission of yet another crime?

Back to the taxpayers.

Finally, if there’s anything left of the settlement after that, check one more thing: how many kids did that miscreant produce?  If he married the mom and responsibly took care of the kids – HA! – his estate is off the hook.

But for the other 99.99% of the deceased criminals, tally up the amount the taxpayers shelled out to feed, house, and (sadly, often) incarcerate their kids.   Since those kids were the criminal’s moral, legal and financial responsibility, if he happened to come into a windfall because he fought with cops, tased cops, shot at cops, or tried to run-down cops, that windfall should be taxed to extract enough to re-pay the costs for his kids that he didn’t pay in life.

Would I add accumulated interest to those payments, you’re probably asking, as you take notes and prepare to call your elected representatives to urge passage of the CCDT?

Only if there is any money left after all of the above deductions were taken, and only to the extent that every last penny the dead criminal’s family was going to get has been given to his victims and the taxpayers instead.  Then we call it even.

“But how will this make the dead creep’s posse feel?” you are not asking, because who gives a Schumer?

The survivors who sired, birthed, slept with or otherwise shared the destructive trail that the deceased criminal trod might ask this question: “If the victims and the taxpayers get all of the money awarded to our dead jackass son/baby-daddy/dead-beat dad/co-conspirator, it’s almost like we won’t be able to profit from his easily anticipated and probably richly deserved demise at all!”

To which we will say:  Exactly!

So that’s it, people.  Call your elected pols and urge them to pass the CCDT.

In the meantime, I’ll wait right here, anticipating the day when you all burst through my front door, heave me up onto your shoulders, and carry me off to the Nobel Prize ceremony, chanting, “Simpson, Simpson!” all the way.”

In July, President Brandon produced one of my favorite gaffes of the summer:

“Meanwhile, while Que Mala was being muy mal, Joey Gaffes was across town doing a press availability.

So you know that went swimmingly.

As he tried to explain why so many people have resisted getting vaccinated, Biden produced this little chunk of brilliance: “There’s a reason why it’s been harder to get African Americans, initially, to get vaccinated, because they are used to being experimented on — the Tuskegee Airmen and others.  People have memories.  People have long memories.”

Let’s skip right past the irony of a guy who can’t remember the names of half of his cabinet members warning us against the dangers of long memories.

Biden has mixed up – and not for the first time – the black Tuskegee Airmen/pilots who flew in WWII with the black guys who had an STD, and were victimized by the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, during which their conditions went untreated.

In the very unlikely event that he’s reading this column, please consider this a public service from a concerned citizen who would like him to be better at his job:

“Mr. President, you know those guys who are to your left when you’ve stumbled up the mobile airport staircase (which I pray will soon be taking the oath of office as our 47th president) and onto Air Force One?  Those guys don’t have syphilis.  They’re your pilots.

And your degenerate son, with the hookers and the meth and the Chinese cash stuffed in suitcases?

He’s not a pilot.  He’s got syphilis.

You’re welcome.”

Coming Friday: Part 3…

I had a great Christmas, as I hope you all did!  I know that the CO site attracts new readers all the time, so as this year comes to a close, I thought I’d take a look back at my columns from 2021, and pick some of my favorite thoughts from this challenging year.

I’ll break the year up into three parts, and post three “best-of” columns this week.  

In January all of us struggled with the ascendance of the Democrat party to control of the WH and both houses of Congress.  Even in those dark days, I tried to find a silver lining.     

Just a week into the new year, I made a prescient – if I do say so myself — prediction: “The Dems are such horrific politicians that they are going to over-reach and alienate all but their hard-core base, and to the extent that we can have even fair-ish congressional elections in the future, they should be sailing into a serious repudiation in the mid-terms, a la Obama’s 56-seat House bloodbath in 2010.

Biden has one orthopedic shoe in the grave, and Comma La is a human toothache, and all of the faces of the national Democrat party look like the Elephant Man’s family reunion, morally speaking.   They are not going to wear well.

If they were even room-temperature smart, they could do much more damage by posing as unifiers and throwing a few, pitiful bones to the spineless GOP members who always seem happy for even the most meager of scraps.  Instead, they are so driven by their own malice that they can’t help themselves: they’re going to double-down on their frothing hatreds, and pursue their “enemies” (i.e. half of the country).  Anyone who is not a completely lost cause is going to be repelled by that.”

A few weeks later, I didn’t have the heart to watch Biden’s inauguration, so I distracted myself with some analysis of the historical arc of presidential inauguration poetry, and tried my hand at it:

“And by the way, you can track America’s decline through the quality of poetry associated with presidents.  Walt Whitman wrote four poems about the death of Lincoln (among them “O Captain, My Captain” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”) that are still worth reading today.

Gifted poet Robert Frost read his poem, “The Gift Outright” at JFK’s inauguration.

Over 30 years later, mediocre poet (at best) Maya Angelou wrote a mediocre piece for Bill Clinton’s inauguration.  It is justifiably forgotten now, but I remember banal repetitions of “a rock, a river, and a tree.”  Poetry interpretation is subjective, but my take was that Slick Willie liked to take his interns to picnic at a river, where he was hard as a rock and they ended up climbing a tree to get away from him.

But I’m more of a prose guy, so that might be way off.

Anyway, Biden’s inaugural poem was delivered by an unknown young woman, and of course the media is now swooning over her, and she’ll probably get rich and famous over this “poem.”

But, to paraphrase a line attributed to Dorothy Parker, this isn’t a poem to be set aside lightly.  It should be thrown with great force.

Here are three consecutive lines from the poem, chosen at random:

“We’ve braved the belly of the beast, we’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace.

And the norms and notions of what just is isn’t always justice.

And yet the dawn is ours before we knew it, somehow we do it.”

Off the top of my head: “the belly of the beast” is a tired cliché; “beast” and “peace” don’t rhyme; “just is” and “justice” don’t rhyme; the third line changes verb tense in a way that doesn’t make sense.  (By the way, my last sentence rhymed better than anything in this terrible poem.)  Also, there is no referent for the “it” in the last line – what can that line possibly mean?

On the other hand, “knew it” and “do it” at least rhyme, even if they are stupid.

Good lord!  At the rate we’re going, if Comma-la manages to get re-elected in 2024, her inaugural poem is going to start with, “There once was a man from Nantucket.”

I know that some of you are probably thinking, “Sure, Martin, you may be a hilarious genius, an amazing father and husband, and a role model for us all, not to mention a fine figure of a man.  But you’re no poet, and you probably couldn’t do any better.”

To which I say, hold my Scotch and stand back, as I compose a poem – live, right now, this very minute — that is more fitting for the inauguration of Joe Biden than the actual putrid poem above:

Ode to Joe

C’mon man, he’s got a plan.

Look fat–  don’t question that.

You know, the thing,

Ring a ding ding.

He defeated Corn Pop

Zippity boop bop.

Don’t give him a quiz:

He don’t know where he is.

Stay in your lanes

Or he’ll put y’all back in chains.

Even Frank Luntz

Knows he’s a dunce.

Boom!  Admit it: you feel pretty foolish right now for doubting me.  Because that poem has all the hallmarks of deathless verse: the lines all rhyme, it works on multiple levels, and it contains a subtle allusion to Frank Luntz.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, our long national nightmare, just getting started…”

In February, I found one happy-ending story to brighten my spirits:

“In the feel-good story of February, Breitbart’s headline caught my eye: “Accidental Blast During Bomb-Making Class Kills 30 Taliban Fighters.”

It seems that a clot of happy-go-lucky jihadis had gathered in a mosque (where else?) in the Afghan village of Qultaq to learn the finer points of blowing people up.  Even though the crowd included “six foreign nationals who were expert mine makers,” it apparently also included at least one dim-witted lummox who hadn’t yet gotten to the Koranic verses on the subject of, “Don’t touch that wire!”

(Preliminary reports that the dullard in question was one Ahmed al-Biden have not been confirmed.)

The story notes that jihadis fairly regularly experience such mortifying examples of the male scourge of premature detonation. (HA!)  For example, “a similar blast occurred at a mosque in Balkh’s Chahabar Bolak district in August.”

Also in the village of Sikandar Khel, and earlier in the Ghazni district, and in the southern province of Zabul.

So what can we learn from this hilarious vignette?

First, all Afghan place names have apparently been translated from the original Klingon.

Second, one way to promote the idea that your religion is super peaceful might be to stop using your places of worship as combination ammo dumps/demolition schools. 

Third, don’t be discouraged, jihadis!  Remember the sura that goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try– KA-BLAM!”

In March, the lefties of Seattle provided another cause for mirth: 

“Seattle, fresh from months of encouraging subliterate, mouth-breathing Biden voters to destroy their city, has come up with a use for all of the taxpayer money they are saving by not employing cops.  Their DESC – which, though you might assume it stands for “Depraved Execrable Sinister Cretins“ actually stands for “Downtown Emergency Services Center” – has produced two handy flyers targeting a core element of the Democrat voting base: incorrigible drug addicts.

The first flyer advocates smoking heroin, rather than injecting it.  Because – and I cannot stress enough how I am NOT making this up – “smoking is a lower-risk alternative to injection.  Give it a try!”

Yes, by all means, give it a try!

Your city is a burned-out husk, and you’ve lost any chance at employment now that every sane business owner has fled the feral leftist hordes vandalizing what used to be their businesses.  So it’s not like you have anything better to do than smoking some heroin.

But wait!  The second taxpayer-funded flyer proposes an even better way to get your heroin fix than shooting or smoking it: sticking it up your arse.

Again, on my honor as a hilarious genius and a gentleman: I am not making this up.

This actually-existing flyer introduces the charming phrase “booty bumping.”

If you’re anything like me – and what a sweet world that would be! — when you first heard “booty bumping” you probably thought that it was a euphemistic reference to the way in which Comma-La started her political career in CA.  Or, possibly, what the nascent Biden administration has already started doing to the gullible American citizens who voted for Joey Gaffes because they believed he was a “moderate.”

But no.  The flyer educates Seattle-ites that the rectum is “very efficient at absorption.”  So cue the NBC “The More you Know” musical theme on that one.

It goes on to say that introducing heroin into yourself rectally “is a good choice if your veins are hard to hit,” and that, “it doesn’t leave tracks.”

Skid marks, probably.  But no tracks.  So you’ll have that going for you.  

That’s it in a nutshell, folks.  Socrates suggested that the unexamined life is not worth living.  Christ advocates treating others as you would be treated.  The Founding Fathers urged us toward the highest use of our Creator-endowed liberties and faculties.

But the Democrats who run Seattle have their own words to live by: “Sticking heroin up your butt: Give it a try!”

I also took solace in an April story that involved animals and karma:  “[This] story comes to us out of India, the colorful land of unpronounceable and unspellable names, friendly tech support folks who implausible claim to be named either “Andrew” or “Emily,” and hilarious cartoon characters who can no longer be voiced by white actors.  Because racism.

But if I asked you what country you associate with cock fighting – and if anybody even thinks about making a joke about any Dem politician, fundraiser, or supporter who definitely did not kill himself in prison, I will turn this car RIGHT around, mister! – most of you would say “Mexico.”

And then you’d be cancelled.

Because, as I may have mentioned before, racism.

Anyway, it turns out that Indians also fancy the occasional cockfight.  But sadly, there is now one less Indian fan of what, for all I know, they call “the sport of kings” in India.  Because last month, 45-year-old Thangulla “Hello, I’m Andrew, what can I help you with today?” Satish was killed by a fighting cock.

Not because they were in the ring – or the cage, or the pen, or the rink, or whatever they call a cockfighting enclosure in India – as opponents in a bout sanctioned by the ICFA (the Indian Cockfighting Association, duh).

It turns out that Thangulla (and if you just thought “Matata,” you are not alone) owned the bird in question, and was preparing him for the fight by strapping a 3-inch long, razor-sharp blade to the rooster’s leg.

I know: what could possibly go wrong?

Well it turns out that the rooster fatally slashed his owner.  And before I can ask the rhetorical question, “Where would you LEAST like to be slashed by the knife on your fighting rooster’s le—” every male reading this column just shouted out, “GROIN!”

Allow me to introduce a quote from the story by turning toward the big board and doing my Richard Dawson impression: “Survey says…”

“A man who tied a knife to the leg of his rooster for an illegal cockfight was killed after the bird panicked and stabbed him in the groin…” 

Yada yada yada, Thangulla bled out.

This quote should elicit several immediate thoughts:

1.HA!  HAHAHA! HAHAHAHA!

2. If at your funeral, one of your neighbors asks your family how you died, and they mumble, “He suffered a fatal groin injury in a cockfight,” those neighbors are going to wonder if you had badly misunderstood how a cockfight is supposed to work.

3. The bird “panicked” and then stabbed him?  Really?

If you were a rooster and your owner took you for a drive down to the local rooster rink, and you found yourself staring at a ‘roided up rooster who looked like a cross between John Cena and Mick Jagger, and you turned to your owner and said, “Andrew, what’s going on here?”  And your owner said, “I’ll explain in a minute.  But first I’m going to attach these razor-sharp blades to your legs.”

Do you really think your traitorous owner would die because you “panicked?”

Because I’m thinking that the rooster would give his owner the same narrowed-eyed, baleful stare that the giant rooster who regularly fights Peter Griffin on Family Guy gives him right before things kick off.

In other words, I think that it was cold-blooded murder!

Cue the “Etymology Minute” theme song: “And THAT’s the origin of the phrase, to “cold cock” someone.  (Boom!  Dad joke catches you like a crisp jab when your arms were down to protect your ribs.)

Anyway, I hate cruelty to animals, so that story makes me laugh.” 

Coming next: May through July

Well, it’s Christmas week again, and I’m in a great mood! 

I’ve got snowy scenes playing on my second computer screen, and an assortment of brass quartets and Sufjan Stevens versions of Christmas carols playing on a loop.  I’ve been listening to about 15 minutes of the late great Frank Muller reading A Christmas Carol each day.  (Can’t recommend that highly enough.  Use DuckDuckGo – because Google should be avoided when possible — to find it online. You cannot beat Dickens’ words read in Muller’s voice!)

And I’m finding reasons to be joyful at every turn. The advent services at our church have been excellent.  Our college town has quieted down, and I’m getting to do some therapeutically satisfying maintenance work on our old rental houses.  And after a bout of bronchitis, I’m appreciating good health the way you only do when you’re not taking it for granted.

So that’s me: Happy. Grateful.  Looking forward to time with family, and Uncle Jesus.

But hey, our Cadaver in Chief also has his own special holiday message for us all.  And I quote:  “[The omicron] is here now and it’s spreading, and it’s gonna increase.  For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death.” 

Merrrry Christmas!  G’night folks. Drive safely!

Good lord — Lighten up, Francis!

I don’t want to be a — what’s the opposite of Debbie Downer?  Oliver Optimist, maybe? – but give it a rest, you power-hungry old coot.  Yes, omicron is a lot more contagious.  It’s also a LOT less dangerous, which is exactly what you want in a virus.

As of this writing, it has killed fewer people than Alec Baldwin.

Rather than kicking Joey Gaffes when he’s deceased – er, down – I’m going to share a few other current events that are bringing me joy this Christmas season.

And yes, because I’m as fallen as anyone else, these examples elicit the schadenfreude-induced endorphins that come from watching creepy people get their just desserts.

1.If you had asked me to pick something that I wanted for Christmas, but that I would never get in a million years, and if I were in the middle of my fourth Scotch, I might have said this: Give me a video of Hillary Clinton reading the victory speech that she wrote before she fractured a fetlock and went down in an explosion of mud and pantsuit on the final turn of that glorious election Year of Our Lord, 2016.

And because God exists, and He loves me, I’ve received that beautiful, beautiful gift.

I’ve saved it in a folder along with videos of my wedding, Walter Payton’s greatest runs, Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison, and a montage of weeping MSM boneheads announcing Trump’s election.  And I’ve got it cued to the moment when Cankles begins to choke up when she tells her mom that her daughter is now the first female president of the United States.

For the rest of my life, whenever I face a dark night of the soul, I will watch that video.  And I will laugh and laugh.

2. Elizabeth Warren has gone three rounds in a Twitter battle with Elon Musk, and the refs had to step in and stop it. 

Grandma Squanto is so lacking in self-awareness that she imagined that an accomplishment-free grifter like her could somehow best Musk in a battle of wits.  For all his flaws, eccentric Elon has contributed more to society than 10,000 phony Warrens ever could.

Her latest humiliation reminds me of a hilarious video of Warren getting off a private jet – it was wintertime, and I think it dates back to the Dem primaries.  Find it, and you’ll see some prime comedic hypocrisy. 

After lambasting the evil rich for flying in private jets, Lizzie gets off a private jet (of course!) and starts walking with a group of others.  Then she spots the camera out in front and to her right, and she cuts in a diagonal, tucking in behind one of the unknown staffers.  She obviously and purposefully keeps ducking from side to side, always keeping the staffer between her and the camera.

I know what you’re thinking: that’s how it was for the Pale Pawnee’s ancestors if they wanted to survive out there on the prairie.  They’d hunker in behind a buffalo or a horse, and stealthily creep closer to the evil white interlopers – er, cameramen. 

In winter, they would often camouflage themselves by painting their faces a pallid, sickly white to blend into their surroundings.  They were so good at it that unexpecting settlers would often pass right by them, unawares.  “Look at all of this pristine white snow,” they’d say, taking in the surrounding landscape. 

But occasionally one wary Euro-American might say, “Hey, wait a minute!  That snowbank has suspiciously impressive cheekbones, doesn’t it?”

Then, with a bloodcurdling scream of clueless entitlement, Grandma Squanto would leap up, scattering snow from her buckskin dress in a whirl, and charge forward with her three favorite weapons: a sharp tomahawk, an even sharper tongue, and the power of obscenely confiscatory tax rates, which were known to lay waste to the hardiest economy in a matter of mere weeks!

#wemustneverstopmockingher

3. No list of underperforming female pols would be complete without Que Mala, who continues to delight with her mind-boggling ineptitude. 

Her best moment in December would have to be that time when she publicly struggled to understand how to charge an electric vehicle.  It’s not a complicated process, and considering how she began her political career, it is unfathomable that she couldn’t understand it:

You put the male part in the female part. That’s it. Duh!

Watching her constant bumbling makes me long for the days of a real Vice President, such as Dick Cheney.  With nothing more than decades of experience and competence — and one partially open ventricle — that man took on leftists with more energy that W ever managed to.

 And when times were at their darkest, he stood up and did what needed to be done: he shot a lawyer in the face with a shotgun.

And America cheered! 

4. Speaking of lawyers who deserved worse than they got, did you hear AOC and Rashida “as-pretty-on-the-inside-as-she-is-on-the-outside” Tlaib whining about their student loans, and how it’s not fair to expect them to pay them off? 

AOC is not a lawyer, of course.  She got her Econ degree from Boston University… which is reason enough to close BU, dynamite all its buildings and sow the campus with salt to make it unfit for human habitation for generations.  

Seriously.  Hang your head in shame, BU faculty, staff and alumni.  And most residents of MA, while you’re at it, you Ted Kennedy-re-electing knuckleheads.  You deserve Ben Affleck, and that ridiculous accent.

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

Rashida got a law degree, and she is not happy about how much it cost.  But she’s got a solution: you can pay for it. 

During a pitch to cancel all student debt, she ululated, “I worked full-time, Monday through Friday, and took weekend classes to get my law degree.  And still, close to $200K in debt.  And I still owe over $70K and most of it was interest.” 

Ugh. 

Am I saying that Comma-la should try to improve her poll numbers by shooting Tlaib in the face with a shotgun?

Of course not.

She could use a panzerfaust, or a pellet gun, or a sling shot.

Or a crossbow.  Or she could use a catapault to land a giant chunk of stone on her, producing a noxious spray of bile, class warfare and anti-Semitism. Let’s not quibble over the details. 

The point is, shooting the insufferable Tlaib with any sort of device, projectile or implement might not be enough to salvage Que Mala’s dismal poll numbers.

But as they say in the Catskills, “it couldn’t hoit.”

5. Speaking of satisfying violence, you might have missed the story of a Connecticut school-board meeting about wokesters cancelling an American Indian school mascot.  And if you only read the MSM accounts of the incident, you would still miss the truth of it. 

According to the dishonest yahoos at Yahoo, the “board meeting turned violent when a parent punched a board member.”  But if you watch the video – which I recommend – you’ll see something quite different.

Here, I’ll re-write their story for them:  “During a break in the meeting, an arrogant board member – the appropriately named Ray McFall – came down into the audience and got nose-to-nose with American-Indian-mascot-appreciator Mark Finocchiaro, scolding him loudly.  When McFall tried to shove Finocchiaro backwards, he received a right jab in the snout.

Then McFall mcfell.  “Sit down, Gepetto!” Finocchiaro should have said, but didn’t.”

I don’t think either guy behaved perfectly.  But as a general rule, if you aren’t prepared to counter a stiff jab, you might want to keep your hands to yourself.

Okay, I know: for a Christmas column, this outing has had a lot of violence.  So let’s close with an uplifting seasonal offering.

And by “seasonal,” I’m referring to hockey season.

I’ll admit that I don’t know much about hockey.  For example, I didn’t know that Vegas had a pro hockey team called the Golden Knights.  I have heard of the Edmonton Oilers – which, as a fossil fuel fan, I could possibly root for. 

Anyway, Vegas was playing Big Oil right after Thanksgiving, and a fight broke out in the stands.  Which is something that I understand is not unprecedented in that sport.

So a big guy and a small blonde lady were in a lower row, trading words and blows with someone in a row above them.  And in a move that I bet Ray McFall wouldn’t have seen coming either, the lady hopped on one foot, reached down and pulled off her prosthetic lower left leg, and whacked a fellow combatant with it!

Now I’ve never studied any detachable-appendage-assisted martial arts, and I vaguely recall an axiom about not getting into a butt-kicking contest with a one-legged man. 

But that woman has a little thing I like to call “grit,” and I’d like her on my side if a fight breaks out.

After reading all of the odd twists in this column, you are probably asking, “Martin, are you suggesting that this hockey fan travel to DC, and allow Que Mala to pull off her leg, and then club Rashida Tlaib with it?”

That’s EXACTLY what I’m suggesting.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Avenatti/ The Prosthetic Pugilist, 2024!

In recent weeks, half of my attention has been focused on enjoying the Christmas season, and the other half has been taken up by my increasing bewilderment at the way our leftist fellow-citizens seem to have so badly misunderstood one of the fundamental aspects of human nature: criminality.

Sure, we have lately been distracted by how badly they have misunderstood so many other things: The economy.  Foreign policy.  Why countries need borders.  The difference between male and female.  The fact that math, boulders and roads – among many other things – are not racist. 

But Man o’ Manischewitz, does the Left not understand crime!

Many progressives are inordinately fond of theory, much preferring it to messy reality.  (Hence the old joke about the academic left’s commonplace question, “I know it works in the real world, but does it work in theory?”)  And nowhere does this infatuation with theory manifest itself more than when considering crime and criminals.

The left can look at a mob of looters, or gang members pimping out underage girls, or thugs carjacking unresisting senior citizens and shooting them anyway, and not see sharp gradations of good and evil. 

Instead they detect a subtle fog of societal inequities, large historical forces, and systemic unfairness that envelops and overwhelms individuals, robbing them of free will and absolving them of moral responsibility.

Think of how many recent crime stories have induced the left into the most absurd gyrations to try to deny the most obvious truths:

An idiot reporter stands before a block of burning buildings, surrounded by a howling mob of feral Biden voters, and looks into a camera and proclaims, “These protests are mostly peaceful.” 

A gormless prosecutor shows video of three violent felons chasing and assaulting a boy scout with a rifle until he’s forced to righteously shoot each of them, and the moron calls the assailants “victims” and the boy scout the “aggressor,” and his assistant/Chris Farley’s dim-witted doppleganger says that the boy scout “should have just taken a beating.” 

Elected Democrats watch packs of looters vandalizing buildings, stealing electronics and luxury goods, and see a righteous cry for racial justice. 

When video of dozens of smash-and-grab mobs in various big cities have been broadcast for weeks, silly little dullard AOC insists that rumors of such events “have not panned out.”

For many of us, it’s starting to feel like we’re on different planets. 

As a thought experiment, consider a few recent crime story examples.  I’ll give you the scenario, then – using my magical wizard hat to put myself into the mind of a leftist Soros fan – I’ll give you the lefty’s reaction.  And if I can speak for the average, level-headed conservative – and I think that I can – I’ll give you my reaction.

Crime story #1. Last December an antifa thug named Thomas Starks carried an axe into a government building in North Dakota and used it to destroy the door and window of a GOP state senator’s office.  His attack was caught on tape, and he ended up pleading guilty.  While awaiting sentencing, he showed himself to be an unrepentant creep, boasting on social media that he “will always attack fascists.” 

While FBI sentencing guidelines called for 10-16 months in prison for his crime, he instead got probation and a $2800 fine.  The icing on the cake: the FBI gave him his axe back!  (I’m not making that up.)

Lefty Soros fan’s take:  His fine was too high.  After all, he was only fighting fascists, and fascists are bad!

My take: Give him the maximum in prison, and when he gets out, give him his axe back.  Handle first.  So that if he ever approaches a government building again, security will be able to recognize him from a long way off.  On account of his funny way of walking.

Crime Story #2.  Last week the staff of a San Francisco restaurant asked three uniformed cops to leave, after complaining that their uniforms and sidearms made them feel “unsafe.”  Then they bragged about it on social media, declaring their precious eatery to be a “safe space,” where they would grudgingly allow the officers to eat,“when off duty, out of uniform, and without their weapons.”

Lefty Soros fan’s take: Yay!  Power to the people!  Mean old guns make me lose my appetite anyway!

My take: I’m tempted to follow a “when in Rome” attitude, and react as a native San Franciscan might, i.e. dropping a deuce in the middle of the dining room and then aggressively panhandling from every customer in the place.   But I’m a gentleman, and not some degenerate anarchist. 

So I’d just enter that restaurant’s number and address into the SFPD phone system and record a message, to be played in case they ever called the police: “Hello, this is the police department.  We’re sorry to hear that you are in the middle of being robbed, beaten, sexually assaulted, or murdered.  We’d love to come and help you, but unfortunately we wear scary uniforms and carry nasty old guns, and we know how those offend your delicate sensibilities.  So please enjoy being robbed, beaten, sexually assaulted or murdered in a cop-free zone.  And remember: There’s no place like a safe space!”

Crime Story #3:

Right after Thanksgiving a mob of youts went on a mass shoplifting spree at a California mall.  Afterwards, one of the ambitious thieves was running away with his arms full of stolen clothes, when he was set upon by a half-dozen other scumbags, who fought over the booty in an orgy of looter-on-looter crime.

Lefty Soros fan’s take:  That’s so sad!  Those poor children don’t even realize that their real enemy is the white supremacist, capitalist system that is oppressing them.  They should aim their anger at the real villain that’s keeping them down: Trump!  I only hope that none of them were hurt!

My take:  You do you, looters!  That stolen swag is yours, so don’t you dare let any other crooks disrespect you by trying to steal what you stole, fair and square!  Stand up for yourself, and fight to the death!    

Crime Story #4:

On December 8th, a North Carolina man arrived home to find that a thief had been trying to steal a catalytic converter (informally known as a “cat” in auto parts circles) from one of his cars in his driveway.  Unfortunately for the would-be thief, the jack had slipped, dropping the car on him, and allowing him to win the “assume asphalt temperature challenge.”

Lefty Soros-fan take:  Aww!  That poor man was a victim of the ruthless capitalist system that allows some greedy oppressors to amass many catalytic converters, while the have-nots remain converter-less.  I call for protests to shut down the city.  No catalytic converters, no peace!

My take:  Must. Not. Laugh.  (Clear my throat, take a deep breath… don’t think of any dad jokes.)  After all, it’s always tragic when someone loses his lif–  HA!  HAHA!  HAHAHA!  That cat sure didn’t have nine lives!  I wonder if the crook was wearing striped socks, and his legs rolled up like that witch’s when the house fell on her?  HAHAH—cough, cough.  I mean to say… Very sad story.  

All sarcasm aside, it has been infuriating to watch once-great American cities descend into pitiful helplessness, voluntarily and needlessly surrendering to roving bands of thugs and thieves who now attack and loot in broad daylight, with impunity! 

I’d like to blame the feckless and treacherous elected officials who have been allowing this to happen – and I do think that they are culpable.  But the people in those cities have been electing those idiots, often for many years.  

If they could be made to suffer the consequences without also victimizing the sane minority among them, there might be some justice in watching the decay and suffering they are bringing down on their cities. 

But this is Cautious Optimism, and I do see a bright side in the current chaos: these policies are now out in the open, and they are not playing well with most Americans, to say the least. 

The “defund the police” drive was all the rage (literally) only a year ago, but between that and the revolving door of deviants produced by “bail reform,” things have deteriorated so quickly that even many blue state voters are becoming distraught, and support for “soft on crime” policies is receding faster than Brandon’s cognitive abilities. 

I see two possibilities in the next several years, both of which I think would ultimately benefit the country.

The most positive outcome would be for a giant electoral wave of common-sense, tough-on-crime conservative pushback to decimate the Dems in ’22 and ’24, repudiating their failed policies so clearly that they’ll become anathema to any ambitious office-seeker for a generation.

The next best option – which is not without its dangers, but which I’d guess might be slightly more likely – will be for a continued, accelerating sorting of our society into more polarized red and blue areas.

In red states, people will beef up their police forces, and they’ll expect them to fight crime aggressively, and will support them when they do.  For that reason, red staters won’t need to form militias or take any extreme actions.  But enough of them will be individually armed and willing to protect themselves and their property to persuade most criminals to seek easier victims elsewhere.

Such as in blue states, where the undefended stores offer easy pickings, and the restaurants are full of soft eunuchs who are afraid of uniforms and sidearms.

I think the purple states will transform, as their citizens migrate toward one side or the other.  My bet is that most of them will become redder, because I can’t believe that most Americans will react like the cowed and cowering residents of Portland, Seattle or Minneapolis.

I have to believe that if roving mobs of looters, or BLM and antifa rioters, who have had free reign in blue cities try to spread their class and racial warfare to red cities, they’re going to discover a nation of honorary “rooftop Koreans.”

And the self-styled “revolutionaries” — who are used to sucker-punching individuals, terrorizing lone drivers, tearing down inanimate statues, and screaming at cops who are prevented from responding by far-left politicians — are going to learn a hard lesson.

It’s a lesson encapsulated in the words of the nameless philosopher I quoted a few columns ago, who observed an aggressive would-be bully with a baseball bat stop and retreat when she saw her target produce a pistol.

Say it with me, CO nation: “That iron get ya mind right!”

It’s been a long 4 years, and it’s only been 11 months.

This is my favorite month, and I’m already in the holiday spirit.  I’m looking forward to my yearly listening to Frank Muller’s reading of A Christmas Carol, my copy of Andrew Klavan’s new mystery When Christmas Comes should arrive on Tuesday, and I’m drafting our annual Christmas letter. 

Will I be mentioning that my daughter saved someone’s life last month?  What do you think? 😊

I’ll also mention my driving trip from Chicago to LA on Route 66 with two cousins back in May.  If you’re new to this site and are interested, you can read my travel diary from that trip on my page at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  (Scroll down to the bottom right and you’ll eventually find the Route 66 entries.)  

This morning I’ve got a handful of small observations about our fractured yet still great society.  So in no particular order…

There’s now a total of one reason to watch the NBA: player Enes Kantor, who came to the US from Turkey, and just got his American citizenship last week.  If you watch Tucker, you saw the brief interview with him last week, and I saw that the lovely and talented COSE mentioned another interview he did this weekend.  

This guy loves and appreciates this country, takes rhetorical shots at the Chicom dictatorship every chance he gets, and is the polar opposite of whitey-hating narcissist LeBron James.  

Plus, he’s changed his name to “Enes Kantor Freedom,” which is a refreshing change from goofs like Ibram Kendi, who started life as Henry Rogers, but then decided that guilty, low-IQ white folks weren’t likely to listen to lectures on authentic African-ness from a guy named “Henry Rogers.”

I haven’t watched the NBA since the Jordan dynasty ended, but if Freedom’s Celtics ever play LeBron’s Lakers, I’d at least record that, and then watch and savor every minute if the Celtics win.

Jack Dorsey stepped down from Twitter to spend more time on beard maintenance, and to develop his second career as an escaped mental patient impersonator.  Wall Street sent him a great vote of confidence in his leadership: Twitter’s stock price jumped 10% when his departure was announced. 

I love that: You are such a liability that just the act of you walking out the door adds billions of dollars to the company’s net worth!

It’s not necessarily good news though, because his replacement is a bigot with a name that looks like it was produced by overturning a Scrabble board and then randomly turning over letters: Parag Agrawal.

He’s got a few quick strikes against him.  (I mean, other than his name being the sound you make when you’re choking to death on a chicken bone.)  He’s Weird Beard’s handpicked successor.  Last year he scoffed at the idea that Twitter should be sensitive to the First Amendment rights of its users.

And he also produced this hateful quote: “If they are not gonna make a distinction between muslims and extremists, then why should I distinguish between white people and racists.”

Look, Galapagos Narwal (I’m not going to waste time looking back up three paragraphs to check his ridiculous name), “Muslim” isn’t a race, and there are racists in every human group, so it’s actually racist that you would single out one race to denigrate as having a particular causal connection to racism.   

Also, it’s traditional to end a question with a question mark. For example, “How much did creepy racist Pagan Wallaby’s mom hate him to give him that hideous name?”    

So it looks like, “Meet the new doofus, same as the old doofus,” at Twitter.

(By the way, if any of you are trying to put a garage band together and would like permission to use “Galapagos Narwhal” as your band name, you’ve got it.  Just mention me in the liner notes, if those exist anymore.)

Don’t be shocked, but the MSM continue to beclown themselves in Wisconsin. 

After a solid year of smearing Kyle Rittenhouse with lies about him and what happened in Kenosha, they have worked overtime for the last 2 weeks to not tell the truth about the racist, murderous BLM fan who drove through the parade in Waukesha.  The comparisons are so instructive!

Within a few hours of the Kenosha shootings, the empty heads all over the MSM were calling Rittenhouse a white supremacist, and the aggressor who went to Kenosha to kill black civil rights protestors.  (And somehow managed to put shots into 3 white criminals, instead?)  They dug through his social media looking for evidence of white nationalist racism, and the worst thing they could find were posts supporting cops.

So naturally, the Daily Beast immediately ran a headline calling him a “Blue Lives Matter fanatic.” 

But turn to the case of Darrell Brooks and the coverage is just a tad different.  Several MSM pieces referred to his murder spree as “an accident,” and many outlets repeatedly said some variation on the theme that it was “caused by an SUV.” 

And suddenly, Stephen King’s recent unhinged, leftist rantings all make sense.  In his early novel, Christine, an evil, possessed car goes around murdering people.  Obviously, Darrell Brooks got himself one of those possessed SUVs.  Sure, maybe he should have taken precautions after the SUV ran over his baby mama a week before Waukesha, but hindsight is always 20/20.

Once the talking heads were forced to admit that someone was driving the SUV, and that he was a non-white career criminal, they suddenly became strangely incurious about the perp.  Even barely sentient hacks like the typical J-school grads populating CNN, MSNBC, et. al. could have spent 48 seconds perusing Brooks’ social media and found a long and rich history of support for BLM and hatred of all things white and white-adjacent. 

But they cleared their throats and moved on, immediately. 

Hey, remember that time when one white nationalist ran over and killed one person in Charlottesville 4 years ago, and that event has been referenced several billion times since then?  Well a black nationalist just ran over more than 60 people, killing at least 6, which — and you can check my math — is roughly 600% more than the 1 person killed in Charlottesville. 

Now put on a pot of coffee and sit down to wait for the approximately zero MSM references that will be forthcoming about that hateful, black nationalist, BLM-loving mass murderer being a hateful, black nationalist, BLM-loving mass murderer.

In a funny story from America’s Hat, it turns out that there is a Canadian Elizabeth Warren.  

The Maple Leafian-version of our own adorable Land o’ Lakes Butter Maiden (#wemustneverstopmockingher) is a medical researcher named Carrie Bourassa, who had become “the nation’s top voice on indigenous health” based largely on her faux-indigenous background.   

Even though she looks like she could possibly be Puerto Rican, or Mexican, or a light-tanning-bed-Canadian — or a mix of Russian/Polish/Czech, which it turns out she actually is — she started making more and more far-fetched claims about her heritage. 

She began to wear colorfully goofy-looking faux-native garb.  (Think a cross between Ghandi, the Dalai Lama and some Bollywood background dancers, but also carrying a few feathers, for some reason.)  And she started to claim membership in more and more tribes, including the Metis nation, the Anishinaabe, and the Tlingit.

(And if you can think of a word that sounds more like an anti-indigenous racial slur that “Tlingit,” you’re more creative than I am.) 

She opened a 2019 TEDX Talk this way: “My name is Morning Star Bear.  I’m Bear Clan.  I’m Anishinaabe Metis from Treaty Four Territory.”  Which sounds like a word scramble taken from one episode each of South Park and Star Trek the Next Generation.

Then, because Canada apparently has more sane people than Massachusetts does, she lost her government job and professorship for being a complete fraud, and a reprehensible, no-good Tlingit.  (See what I mean?  Sounds awful.)

Meanwhile, Grandma Squanto is still a MA Senator, and can make public speeches without being mocked with vigorous tomahawk chops, and someone doing a passable karaoke medley of Paul Revere and the Raiders’ “Cherokee People,” Cher’s, “Half Breed,” and Charlie Pride’s, “Kaw-Liga.”

Yes, it is “Deep-Pull-From-Lame-60’s-&-70’s-Pop-Songs Monday,” thanks for asking. 

Finally, here’s an obscure story from the crime beat.  A 21-year-old Democrat named Aaron Coleman got himself elected to the Kansas state House of Representatives and took office this January. 

I’m inferring that the Kansas Democrat bench is as thin as the national Democrat bench, because Coleman won election despite the fact that during the campaign, it came out that he had a troubling history in his school years. 

He apparently harassed a lot of girls online, told one girl she was fat and should kill herself, and blackmailed a 13-year old to send him more than the one nude picture of her that he’d gotten hold of.  When she didn’t, he sent her picture to everyone she knew.

Again: this came out DURING the campaign.  And Kansan Dems said, “He’s the best we can do!” 

Well he was arrested for DUI at the end of November.  Which was a problem, because he was out on bond for a domestic battery arrest less than a month earlier.  But it’s not what you are thinking: the battery charge was not against a stuck-up 13-year-old who wouldn’t send him nude selfies, but against his own brother, whom he allegedly “pushed, hit and spit on.”

Before you rush to judgment, consider that there are a lot of good reasons for physically fighting with a sibling: 

1.If he stole your pork chop.

2. If he was eye-balling you.

3. If he groped your girl.

4. If he rooted for FSU.

But this case proves the kid really is a Democrat: he was angry because his brother was going to get baptized! 

Of all the motives!  I mean, at our absolute worst, many of us might shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

But who amongst us would spit on a sibling in Topeka, just because he said, “I’m going to get baptized?”

Aaron Coleman, that’s who. 

And sadly enough, he’s still among the top 10 least obnoxious Democrats in the nation right now!

Avenatti/ Galapagos Narwhal, 2024!

I hope you all had a great holiday!  We had friends and family over (including one of Cassie’s dog cousins), and feasted and enjoyed each other’s company.  During the long weekend we put up the Christmas decorations inside and out, and I am officially excited for my favorite time of year!

I assembled a few last thoughts about the Rittenhouse aftermath, along with a “why I’m thankful for the 2^nd amendment” soliloquy.

First, Rittenhouse:  It usually takes idiotic political plans a little while to blow up in their creators’ faces.  Rent controls often take several years to cripple a rental market; leftist governance can take many years to produce demographic flight to more congenial states.

It took Joe Biden nearly 10 months to wreck our economy, destroy our border, and get Republicans elected in VA and NJ.

But the race-baiting loons on the left who slandered the Rittenhouse verdict got their comeuppance in one long weekend!    

In addition to their myriad inflammatory lies about the Rittenhouse case itself, the Sharptonian left also advanced two virulent slanders of America in general.  The first one was that our racist justice system would never let a black man successfully claim self-defense when he got into a gunfight.  The second one was that our justice system would never convict whites who shoot an unarmed black defendant.

And karma reared back, and immediately smote them with two mighty rib kicks.  Within a few hours of the Rittenhouse verdict, Andrew Coffee – a black convicted felon with a long criminal record who got in a shootout with cops that resulted in a death – was found not guilty in Florida.

Rittenhouse haters carped that Coffee was still found guilty of a gun charge.  But that’s because unlike Kyle Rittenhouse, he is a convicted felon who could not legally possess a gun.  So, yeah. 

Then, just a few days later, three white guys were convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, despite the left assuring us that no white guys would ever be charged, let alone tried and convicted in such circumstances.  The whiny liars started to speculate that there must have been an all-black jury in the case. 

But then – cue the sad trombone – it turns out that 11 of the 12 jurors were white. 

I don’t know much about either case, or whether either jury’s verdicts were fair.  But I do know that the left is taking yet another beating from reality, as American juries just did what the racial arsonists said was impossible.

Next up: the MSM will claim that if a hypothetical whitey-hating BLM career criminal ever purposely drove an SUV through a Christmas parade crowd that is as white as Elizabeth Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher) and killed a bunch of people, he’d never survive the hail of cops’ bullets that would prevent him from ever getting arres—

Oh, wait.  

To add to the schadenfreude, two more prominent leftists weighed in on the Rittenhouse verdict. 

Chicago mayor — and semi-professional Beetlejuice impersonator — Lori Lightfoot said that she respected the verdict…right before she proceeded to Schumer all over the verdict.  She said the judge had put his thumb on the scale. 

Which is strange, considering where her own thumb usually is.  (Hint: not on a scale.) 

She also said that she is “very concerned about what this verdict does,” and suggested that it would allow conservatives “to be armed and dangerous.”  Which is ironic, considering that during her time in office, Chicago’s crime rate has made the days of Capone and the Valentine’s Day Massacre look like an Amish birthday party. 

On the other hand, a core part of her voting base is violent criminals, so if any citizens get the idea that that it might be okay to defend themselves against violent criminals who attack them, that re-election campaign is going to be a little tougher.

Maria Shriver – niece of the late Ted Kennedy, D-Massachusetts (the “D” is for “dirigible”) – thought she should get in on the stupid comments, and excreted this tweet, which I swear I am not making up: 

“I’m trying to take a beat to digest the Rittenhouse verdict. My son just asked me how it’s possible that he didn’t get charged for anything. How is that possible? I don’t have an answer for him.”

To which the only rational responses are: 

1.Mary Jo Kopechne was unavailable for comment.

2. Kyle Rittenhouse WAS charged, you dope.  That’s the part that traditionally comes before the trial.

After first reading her tweet, I thought her son must be a toddler, because I can imagine a question like that coming from a very young child: “Where does the sun go at night?”  “Why was daddy breathing so hard every time he came back from talking to our homely maid?” “Why did the man shoot at those other men?”

But then I started thinking: Shriver has got to be in her 60s, so how old are her sons?

It turns out that one is 27, and the other is 23!  Good lord!  

Unlike Beetlejuice and Shriver – a terrible law firm, by the way – I came away from the Rittenhouse trial with a renewed appreciation of our Second Amendment.  The right to self defense is a precious thing, and we give it up at our peril.

I was reminded of this when I saw a video over the weekend.  I haven’t been able to find it again, so I don’t have a link for you, but it showed a black woman with a baseball bat in mid-argument with another black woman across a city street.  She was agitated and shouting, and she started to cross the street toward the other woman. 

But when the second woman displayed a pistol, the baseball enthusiast suddenly remembered her manners.  She stopped and backed off, saying, “Ya got me on that one.  Ya got that one.”

This is a simple little drama, one so visceral and common sense-laden that it can go without any more comment.

Except from whoever shot the video, who laughed and said some words to live by at the end: “That iron get ya mind right!”

I wish all of the gun grabbers could understand that point.  Yes, our right to carry is in the constitution, and yes, sometimes guns are misused, and yes, some kind of background checks make sense.

But when the chips are down, and cops are many minutes away, and you’re facing some violent POS who is menacing you, it’s nice to be able to display a handgun, and let the would-be attacker reconsider his options. 

Sure, in some cases your attackers may be stupid enough to still press their attack.  In which case, they’ve made the Rosenbaum-ian decision that they’ve raped their last child.  Or the Huber-ian decision that they’d like to try the old, “I see your rifle, and I raise you this skateboard” gambit. 

Or they’ve posed the Gaige Big-Douch-ian question, “Why do I really need two functioning biceps, anyway?”

But in most cases, you won’t have to use your gun, since even the dullest of thugs can calculate those odds.

Because – say it with me, folks – “That iron get ya mind right!”

All of which reminded me of an interesting morality tale from 30 years ago: the tale of the rooftop Koreans.

In the aftermath of the Rodney King incident in 1992, mobs of future Biden voters decided that the most logical response to a verdict that they didn’t like — involving a convicted felon and drunk driving enthusiast being beaten by cops during his richly deserved arrest — was to loot and burn down many of the businesses in their neighborhood.

As they torched one establishment after another, one group of business owners took an unusual course of action.  These were the rooftop Koreans, so called because they were Korean, and they got up on the flat roofs of their businesses. 

One thing they didn’t have was white guilt.  Because, as I may have mentioned, they were Koreans.

One thing they did have: long guns.

I bet that if you don’t remember what happened next, you can probably guess. 

That’s right.  After the roving mobs of future Biden voters destroyed many, many businesses, they arrived at the domain of the rooftop Koreans, and noticed many gun barrels pointed in their general direction. 

And then – it was like a Christmas miracle in April! – the violent mobs transformed into a conga line of well-behaved young gents.  They put their hands in their pockets and whistled a pleasant tune as the filed peacefully past the Korean stores. 

Once they were out of firing range, they then resumed their previously interrupted orgy of rioting and arson.

When the literal smoke literally cleared, the Korean businesses were still standing.  And the Koreans jumped with glee, and high-fived each other, and shouted, “ 그 철분은 당신의 마음을 올바르게 얻습니다”

Which, as you fluent Korean speakers know, is Korean for, “That iron get ya mind right!”

Avenatti/ Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice & Shriver, Esq. 2024!