Month: July 2022

First, I have to offer a mea culpa for missing a sitter at the net in my column last Friday. 

When writing about AOC’s knuckleheadedness, I mentioned that she had praised her own backside, and also that she had achieved a blackbelt in hypocrisy by whining about a troll annoying her, after she had cheered on the creeps who have been harassing and threatening Supreme Court justices with whom she disagrees.

I did not, somehow, mention that she had pretended to wear handcuffs when she was momentarily detained.  (I think the charge was “Public Jackassery in the First Degree.” But I’m only a humble country lawyer, so I could be wrong about that.)  

I can only blame the meds I was on for my dental trauma that day.  That’s not an excuse, just a reason.

Anyway, my favorite part about that publicity stunt came when AOC was pretending to be handcuffed, and she saw a bunch of her low-IQ supporters.  She forgot that you can’t raise your hand when you’re handcuffed… so she raised her hand (in a raised-fist salute) when she was pretending to be handcuffed.

Cue the sad trombone.  And bring forth the dunce cap for our most entertaining congress-doofus.

A few quick gun stories:

In Minneapolis last Wednesday, a man named Andrew Sundberg fired a number of shots into the apartment of Arabella Foss-Yarbrough and her two kids, leaving holes in the door and several walls.  Cops showed up and tried to talk him into disarming and surrendering, but he refused, and they eventually had to shoot him dead.

Despite his name, Sundberg was a black man, adopted by white parents.

So naturally, BLM protestors paraded around his neighborhood, protesting his death.  They put candles and flowers on the sidewalk, and loudly denounced racism.

That was too much for Arabella, who came out and counter-screamed at the protestors, “This is not okay!  My kids have to deal with this now… they almost lost their lives.  There’s bullet holes in my kitchen.”

Morons in the crowd, rather than feeling rightly ashamed of themselves, heckled this traumatized woman.  Several of them yelled, “You’re lying!” and “Shut up!”  One idiot, when Arabella said that she and her kids were almost killed, repeated, “You’re alive.”  

I have a rich fantasy life.  And before you ask, it does not have anything to do with AOC’s allegedly large booty.

No, in my fantasy, Arabella would have raced up to that jerk and kicked him directly in the groin (small target, I’m guessing), and as he writhed on the ground, she would have said, “You’re alive, aren’t you?”  Then she could have kicked him in the ribs, followed by punching him a dozen times, stopping between each well-deserved shot to ask whether he was still alive.

Then she would have waded into the crowd like Christ vs. the Money Changers, and sent the entire sorry crowd of racial arsonists running for their lives. 

Like I said, rich fantasy life.

But there was one gun story this week that I didn’t have to fantasize about.  This was the case of a would-be mass murderer in an Indiana mall.  He came out of a food court bathroom armed with two rifles, a pistol and over 100 rounds of ammunition, and started firing, killing three and wounding two.

He would have racked up a huge body count, if it weren’t for Elisjsha Dicken.  Despite his ridiculously spelled first name (c’mon, parents!), Eli was carrying a Glock handgun, and he was not Dicken around.  (I know: you’d think that one was beneath me.  But nope.)

Within 15 seconds of the gunman opening fire, Eli fired 10 times, scoring 8 hits and helping the gunman win the latest round of the “assuming room temperature” challenge.

And yes, you read that right: Eli started firing within 15 seconds.  At the 15-second mark, most of us in that situation would still be in the “let’s focus on maintaining control of my bowels” phase. 

So naturally, Eli was hailed as a hero…

…except in some corners of the left.   The cackling boneheads on the View, for example, got their granny panties in a bunch at the very thought of a good guy with a gun actually stopping a bad guy with a gun.

Joy(less) Behar called Eli’s taking out the trash “a lucky moment.”  Sunny Hostin also didn’t care for the way Eli saved the day: “He had a gun permit but he wasn’t supposed to be in the mall with a gun.  So he broke the law, even though he was a good Samaritan.”

Good lord!  Would you rather Eli had left his gun at home, so there would be 20 or 30 or 40 victims, Sunny? 

And in fact, it wasn’t illegal to have his gun in the mall, even though the mall had signs posted that they didn’t want guns in the mall.  Careful observers may have noted that the mall’s signs did NOT keep the bad guy from bringing 3 guns into the mall, including 2 long guns!

So I’d suggest that the mall owners quietly take their signs down, and thank God that Eli ignored them.

It wasn’t just the crone crew at the View who objected to Eli being called a good Samaritan.  A bunch of low-info lefties objected, but my favorite was CBS (Indy) traffic anchor Justin Kollar, who noted that in the relevant Bible passage, the Samaritan helped an injured man.  “I cannot believe we live in a world where the term can equally apply to someone killing someone… my God.”

And we can’t believe that someone who should be telling us if I-65 is backed up south of downtown thinks that we are interested in his Biblical exegesis.   

Also, most of us think that stopping a mass murderer is actually a good thing.  So why don’t you stick to reporting on the stalled Prius in the breakdown lane on 465 north, Skippy.  

One final happy note from this past week: the January 6^th show trials had their last prime-time presentation for a while on Thursday night.  The ratings aren’t in yet, but I’m sure that both viewers were glued to their sets.

I haven’t been following closely, but as I understand it, not much new info has arrived.  Trump reacted badly, a small number of his supporters reacted badly, and the Dems are shameless showboaters.  Yep, got it, and duh!

Meanwhile, Liz Cheney has so beclowned herself that her only chance to win her GOP primary would be if she were running against Genital Warts.  (And that would probably have to go to a re-count.)  Unfortunately for her, she is running against an actual GOP woman, so she’s going to get stomped. 

On the other side of the aisle, Bennie Thompson is STILL claiming that the January 6^th protestors killed a cop!  Which poses the eternal dilemma: is he stupid, or a liar? 

It would be one thing if Bennie was reporting on the death toll from the leftist/BLM/antifa riots of 2020.  If you tried to pin down how many they murdered, you could easily be off by one or two, since around several dozen were killed.

But in this case, the number killed is zero!  So being off by one is pretty significant.

Also, you’re one of the leaders of the brain-dead brigade carrying out this circus, and a hypothetical murdered cop would be by far the most significant result of that three-hour Armageddon! 

And the random citizen on the street who has followed this “trial” as much as it deserves – i.e. for 1-3 minutes – can tell you that the only one killed in the riot/protest was tiny, unarmed Ashley Babbitt. 

Somehow her white privilege did NOT make her bulletproof, as we’ve all been promised by racial arsonists like Bennie Thompson.  (Boy am I glad I learned that BEFORE I tried to knock over a liquor store.)

And yet Big Ben appears to not be aware of that.

Stupid or liar?  As in so many cases involving national Dems, I’ve got to go with both.

Avenatti/ Genital Warts, 2024!

One more time, let me thank everyone for the well wishes for my newlywed daughter and her new husband, now in Colorado.  After I posted a pic of her in her wedding dress last week, I thought I’d post one of her at age 3 or so, showing her patriotic spirit and holding a flag.

If you look at that pic – now up at Martinsimpsonwriting.com – and conclude that my wife and I were indoctrinating her early about the virtues of our great country, you’re not wrong!

But now that her honeymoon is just starting, the rest of us have to face the fact that our national political honeymoon with the Biden administration ended around… 19 months ago, if my math is correct.

As usual with this administration, it’s hard to sift through the various weekly dumpster fires and train-wrecks and choose ones which to talk about.

For example, Joey Gaffes has had the kind of week we’ve (sadly) come to expect from him.  He went to Israel and talked about “the honor of the Holocaust.”  Oops.

His best moment – seriously – was when two female Holocaust survivors started to get up to greet him, and he had them stay seated, and knelt down to talk to them.  Which was sweet.

Plus, he managed not to sniff either of their hair.  So, win/win! 

In fact, he pulled off the hat trick, because part of the ceremony was for him to “rekindle” an eternal flame at the Holocaust memorial, and he did that without setting himself or the Holocaust survivors on fire.   I’m sure that most long time Biden-observers would have taken the over on that bet!

Then he came back home for a rest, and then flew back to meet with the Saudi ruler, to beg him to produce more oil. 

Which we desperately need, because Biden’s first priority in office was to cripple our ability to produce our own oil, while also calling the Saudis a bunch of low-down dirty dogs to whom he’d never give the time of day.

Oops.

So now Joe’s puppeteers – er, caretakers – I mean, ADVISORS! – had a dilemma.  Because of the self-inflicted wound of their own idiotic policy, they had to go and kiss Saudi butt.  Which already was not a good look. 

But if Biden shook hands with the top Saudi, that would make for a terrible photo op, especially after Brandon’s tough talk about how he’d give that oil-soaked monster the ol’ Corn Pop treatment if he ever saw him.

So – prepare to be shocked – the Biden brain trust made a bad situation worse, by combining the worst possible choice – they’d fist bump, not shake hands! – with the worst possible excuse: We’re worried about covid, so a handshake wouldn’t be prudent. 

Never mind that a fist bump makes for a worse photo op than a handshake would have, since it is an oddly more informal and friendly gesture. 

The fist-bump pic looked like it should have been captioned, “Bro! You’re awesome!  Gnarly job on dismembering that dissident dude!”

“But Martin,” you’re not asking, because the answer is obvious, “hadn’t Biden just hugged and kissed those nonagenarian Holocaust survivors the week before?  And wouldn’t the covid threat to them be worse than the covid threat to young Prince Scimitar from shaking his hand?”

Yes.  Yes it would. 

And that’s reason #146,582 why Joe Biden is our worst president ever.

But Brandon wasn’t finished.  He accidentally announced that he had cancer, which he blamed on the fact that Delaware is such a hell-hole that it rains oil there. 

Then, despite the fact that he is double-vaxxed and double-boosted, he got the wu flu.  Which he has explained many times is an epidemic of the unvaccinated.

I tell ya, if he wasn’t already dead, I’d be really worried about his health!

But this week, two other lefty boneheads gave our posthumous prez a run for his money — one a perennial favorite, and one a previously unknown academic.

The academic was Berkeley professor Khiara Bridge, who appeared before a Senate committee discussing the ramifications of the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

I’ll admit that I had some bias when I first saw her testimony.   Berkeley professor – strike one.  Multiple nose rings in someone over 19 years old – strike two.

Then, everything that came out of her mouth – strikes three through nine, and the side is retired! 

She was about what you’d expect.  Arrogant, incapable of intelligent argument, and yet totally unaware of how condescending and moronic she sounded.

The third time she used the trendily dumb phrase, “people with a capacity for pregnancy,” GOP senator Josh Hawley asked the obvious question: do you mean “women?”

And from then on, Hawley played “Captain Obvious” to Bridge’s “Professor Oblivious.”

In response to Hawley’s basic question, Bridge excreted this response, which I swear I am not making up: “Many women, cis women have the capacity for pregnancy, many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.”

Ugh.  If there had been someone doing sign language for this event, she could have just continually circled her right ear with her right index finger in the universally recognized indication for, “Cuckoo!”

When Hawley persisted in trying to cut through her commie gobbledygook (I miss Norm McDonald!), she called him transphobic, and said that he was a threat to all of the women with penises out there, or something.

She said that his line of questioning is dangerous, and claimed that 1 in 5 transgender people have attempted suicide. (She appears never to have considered whether this might be because they suffer from a mental illness in the dysphoria family.)  Hawley incredulously asked, “Because of my line of questioning?”  

This is how clueless she is: after several obnoxious, aggressive, simple minded and tendentious responses later, she tossed out a challenge to Hawley, asking, “Do you believe that men can get pregnant?”

When he gave the obvious answer – “No.” – she snapped, “So you don’t think that transgender people exist!”

The self-satisfied smirk on her face is clear: she actually thinks that she’s caught him in a gotcha moment, rather than revealing her own delusional vapidity!

The icing on this four-layer cake of crazy is that dozens of leftist internet sites disseminated this video far and wide, crowing that Professor Nose-Ring had “schooled” Hawley.  THIS is the best they’re capable of. 

As a reminder: This “professor” who can’t tell who has babies was testifying as an expert in… wait for it… reproductive rights!

Well done, lunatic fringe! 

Our other contender for worst leftist this week was our old friend and incompetent bartender, AOC.  (If you had ordered scotch on the rocks in the bar where she worked, you’d have a good chance of getting a drink with actual gravel in it.) 

She had two entries in the low-IQ Olympics in the past 7 days.

First, when some troll-y guy heckled her on the capitol steps, calling her his “favorite big-booty Latina,” she reacted badly. 

Obviously, his comments were rude, and out of line. 

Everyone knows you’re supposed to call her a “Latinx,” not a “Latina.” Duh.

AOC initially tweeted about it, and then showed some rare wisdom by taking it down, explaining, “I posted about a deeply disgusting incident that happened today on the Capitol steps, but took it down bc it’s clearly someone seeking extremist fame.”

But because her egotism and immaturity knows no bounds, she couldn’t help herself, and soon posted part of the video.  In that post, she claims that she wanted to “deck him,” – violence is never the answer, Sandy! – but “I needed to catch a vote more than a case today.”

Because that’s how tough Latinas talk in the mean streets of lily-white Westchester!

I have two favorite parts about this story.  First, in her initial post describing the encounter – before the entire video was posted by the troll and by her – she said, and I quote, ““This guy followed me up the capital saying “look at your juicy a**”, “you***Latina“ & bunch of other disgusting garbage…” 

If you watch the video, he did refer to her “big booty,” called her his “favorite, sexy Latina,” and said that she was “hot like a tamale.”

Again, those comments are rude, and he was obviously trying to get a rise out of her.

But I love that she editorialized to make his comments worse – indicating that he used vulgarity – and to compliment her own rear end.  She is the only one who called her behind “juicy.” 

Paging, Dr. Freud!  You’re needed in AOC’s office.  Bring a notepad and your copy of the Greek myth of Narcissus.

My other favorite part is her breathtaking hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness.  She whined that the capitol police didn’t do anything to stop the troll. “It’s just a bummer to work in an institution that openly allowed this, but talking about it only invites more. Just really sad.”

This from the same smug jerk who only a week earlier had mocked Justice Kavanaugh’s well-founded concern for his family and safety when a gaggle of leftist mouth-breathers began picketing around his house, and one of them traveled cross country to try to murder him.

And when Kavanaugh was stalked and harassed and forced to flee a public restaurant, Sandy tweeted, “Poor guy. He left before his soufflé because he decided half the country should risk death if they have an ectopic pregnancy within the wrong state lines. It’s all very unfair to him. The least they could do is let him eat cake.”

Ignore the blatant lie in the middle of that tweet – this dullard wouldn’t know an ectopic pregnancy from an erector set, and neither one of them is illegal in any state.  She could not care less that a Supreme Court justice had been actually threatened, and is being actively stalked by small mobs of her unbalanced co-religionists.

But when one lone troll – clearly a jerk, but just as clearly no serious threat to her – says something she doesn’t like, she immediately gets her dress over her head in feigned hysterics.

And yes, we get it AOC — we all know how hard that is to do, when you’ve got to tug that dress up over such a large, juicy derriere!  We’re sick of hearing about it.

As for me, I can’t comment on AOC’s posterior.  Because as I may have mentioned in earlier columns, when I first laid eyes on my wife more than 30 years ago, all other women became invisible to me.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t recognize a colossal arse when I see one.   

And I’m looking right at you, Sandy from the block!

Avenatti/ Professor Nose-Ring, 2024!

As I wrote last week, my daughter got married on Friday.  And thank you so much for your generous congratulations last week! (And yes, for those of you who asked: this is the daughter who saved someone’s life in November!)

I had been sick for most of the week before, but I was feeling better on Thursday, and by the time of the rehearsal that evening, I was getting over the last of the fever I’d had. 

From there, things went smoothly.  And though I know this is self-indulgent, I feel like you folks are family, so I’m going to take one column off of commenting about small politics and smaller politicians, and share some details of that amazing experience. 

(If you need more political mockery, or if your heart is three sizes too small, skip this one, and I’ll be serving up some skewered leftists again soon.)

I’m also going to discuss my toast speech, which had me scared and nervous… until the first intended laugh line landed. After that, I was 10 feet tall and bulletproof!

The service itself was beautiful, and the weather held.  Rain had been forecast, but thankfully, the same geniuses who are confidently predicting the exact temperature 100 years from this coming Wednesday – and it’s going to kill us all if we don’t go green NOW! – are usually around 50/50 on the outlook 24 hours from now.

In other words, it was sunny.  Boiling hot, sure – it’s north Florida in July – but sunny.  The venue was a compound of 100-year-old cottages anchored by two Victorians from the 1880s, and some lovely grounds for an outdoor wedding.

There is no parental bias in admitting that my daughter is absolutely gorgeous, and did I lose it a bit when the photographers arranged for the reveal, when I first got to see her in her dress? 

Damn straight.  You would too, if you’d sired such a creature.  Or even if you saw her as you were walking by. 

And curse the day, young single males in CO Nation, because she is now taken!

(I’ve posted a pic of that moment at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  It looks small on my computer, but I’ll engage daughter #2 in some tech help tomorrow, and see if I can’t fix that.)

During the ceremony itself I picked a Biblical text to read and gave a short prayer.  I chose the famous lines from the 13^th chapter of first Corinthians – they’re cliched because they’re true – that start, “Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs…”

(I’ve always thought that that last phrase should be read to us old married types more than newlyweds, because all of us need reminding that keeping “records of wrongs” will take you no place good.  And yet… it’s so tempting!) (Especially when my wife is wrong, like, 74% more than I am.)

(See how tempting?)

Because I’m 100% me, even when that is entirely inappropriate, I actually did feel a passing temptation to start out, “Love is patient, love is kind.  Love is… does not… you know, you know the thing.”

But fortunately, the 100% of me includes .001% that is smart enough to not make my wife murder me in the middle of speaking at my daughter’s wedding.  So I read it straight, just the way God gave it to St. Paul.  And the people rejoiced.

The service was beautiful, and then we moved into the air conditioning for some refreshments. I said grace (with no reference to how much more this food was costing us since a certain political party came to power – I could feel my wife’s hot stare on my neck as I prayed, even though she was supposed to have her eyes closed!), and the caterers served a delicious meal.

And then it was time for the toast speeches.

Two things tormented me when I was trying to write my speech: 1. I had a high fever and an intermittently throbbing toothache (the root canal is this Thursday), and 2. I knew that I was going to get choked up to the point of paralysis multiple times during the speech. 

So even if I put together some passable verbiage, the certain knowledge that I’d be melting into a puddle at some point was pretty daunting.  I had to come up with some kind of verbal break that would allow me to get my legs under me when I found myself overcome with emotion.

The solution came when I was on my third revision on Thursday night.  I had planned to say a few words about my dad, who had looked forward to Katie’s wedding since she was a kid, but who died in 2014. 

Late in his life he began to get very emotional on big occasions.  My sister and I had both discussed how I was following in his footsteps. So I got the idea to mention his weepiness, and then to say that I was tougher than him.

And the line came to me: “So I just want everyone to know that if I appear to be getting too emotional, or maybe even coming close to tears at some point in this speech, it’s only because… of how expensive this all is.”

I went back and forth on this, because I think it’s pretty funny, but some might take it as tacky for the bride’s dad to complain about the cost of the wedding, AT the wedding. 

But I realized what it would allow me to do.  Whenever I got really choked up – and I KNEW I would – I could take a deep breath, and choke out the words, “Oh, this is so expensive!”  If that got a laugh, it would buy me a few seconds to regain control. 

I was really nervous as I started the speech, because if the first line didn’t get a laugh, my strategic bail-out follow-up joke was out too, and I was truly screwed.  But God bless those people!  The first line landed, and I felt a wave of relief.

And sure enough, when I hit a tough spot a few minutes later, I croaked out a tearful, “This is really so expensive,” and that broke the tension.

Near the end, I nearly lost it again, and there was enough water in my eyes that I had to take my glasses off and wipe them.  I said, “It’s not just the cost of the wedding.  I had to buy this suit, and this tie, and these shoes, too.  I’ll probably never wear this stuff again!”

They responded again, and I took a few deep breaths, and took it into the home stretch!

Again, this feels self-indulgent, but I haven’t had time to think or write about anything else for the last week.  For anyone who is still interested and reading this, below is the text of my toast speech.  (I screwed up a few details as I read it – with my two temporary breakdowns – but I got pretty close to reading it as planned.)

Now that things went so well, I truly wish that you all could have been there – and this is the best way I can make up for not inviting you all. 😊 

So please consider this a gift from me to you, on my daughter’s wedding day!

“To preface my comments, I have to explain something:

My dad and Karen’s mom and step-dad have passed, but we feel like they’re here with us tonight. 

Since Katie and Ryan got engaged, my sister Rhonda and I have been talking about my dad, and the way he became so emotional late in his life.  I remember him being pretty stoic when I was a kid, but when he got older, he became very weepy at big occasions.

Of course my sister and I, since we’re part of a well-adjusted family, would mercilessly make fun of him for this. In fact, she did a really hurtful impression of him when he tried to give a “thank you” speech at the 50^th anniversary party that she and I put together for him and mom.  It sounded something like [in a lip-quivering, vaguely Curly-esque sound], “mee-mee-mee-mee-mee.”

So she’s been predicting that I would fall apart during this speech the way that dad would, if he were here. 

Well, I am tougher than my dad.  So I just want to let everyone know that if at some point tonight I appear to be getting emotional, or even on the verge of tears, I want to assure you that that is only because… of how horrifically expensive this all is! 

That’s an inside family joke: we also used to make fun of how cheap dad was. 

So… I’ve had 24 years to prepare a father-of-the-bride speech for my daughters, but to be honest, I’ve been putting it off.  My wife and I have figured… we don’t want them to go away, so maybe if we don’t prepare, they’ll just stay.

But then Katie meets Ryan, and he’s [with air quotes] SO great, and she falls in love, and now I’ve got nothing! 

But despite my lack of preparation, it’s not hard to think of great things to say about Katie and Ryan.

As some of you may know, Katie had a serious health challenge when she was born.  She had two major surgeries in her first 3 months, and spent several long stays in the hospital by the time she was 5. 

But that experience gave her such a heart for kids, and for helping them — so much that by the age of 5, she knew that she wanted to be a pediatric nurse.  That’s amazing. 

Especially when you consider that at 5, I was toggling back and forth between “cowboy” and “secret agent,” with a close third option of becoming Chicago Bears running back Gayle Sayers.

I achieved none of those 3 goals.  But Katie got her nursing degree, and for the last two years she had been the Best Pediatric Nurse in the Southeast United States! (References available after the wedding).  

And since the happy couple is moving to Denver in a couple of weeks, give it until the end of this year, and she’ll soon be the Best Pediatric Nurse in the Mountain West!

You’re welcome, Denver.

The old cliché is true, though: she has grown up so fast!  It seems like just yesterday she was toddling around the house — she had those big eyes and a crooked smile, and somehow her cheeks were bigger than her head! She was the cutest thing we’d ever seen.

And we realized very quickly that she was super smart, so we read to her and helped her learn to write.  And when she was around 2, I thought it was time that I teach her a little Aristotle, and maybe a little Latin, too. 

As one does with one’s toddlers.

So I taught her the logical fallacy of “post hoc, ergo propter hoc.”  And when we had guests over, or were out in public, I’d look into her adorable little face and say, “Sweetie, what’s your favorite of Aristotle’s logical fallacies?”

And she’d say, “Post hoc, ergo procto hoc.”

Which is pretty close for a 2 year old. And then I’d ask, “What does that mean in English?”

And she’d say…[and here I dramatically pointed to Katie.] 

And she blushed and laughed, and said, “After this, therefore because of this!”   

That’s right – it’s a “correlation is not causation” mistake. That’s my girl! 

Soon she was off to grade school – and the day we dropped her off the first time, her mom cried like my dad!  [meemeemeemee!]

Katie loved school and was a great student.  A year flew by, and she was in first grade, and one of her classes had a lesson on international cultures and foods, and each student was supposed to pick a culture to learn about.

Katie picked Mexico.  So grammy and grampy picked up a Mexican-style dress for her in Texas, and on the big day she wore that to school.  When Karen picked her up after class, her teacher said, “I’d never known that Katie is Mexican.”

That’s right: she told her teacher and entire class that she was Mexican! Which was quite a surprise to her Norwegian/English mother, and my hillbilly/German self.

But this might have been an early sign of her method acting abilities, because in 5^th grade, she got the lead role of Marie in her school’s production of the Nutcracker Suite, and she knocked that out of the park!   All parental bias aside: she was poised and knew all of her lines. 

She made the other kids in the play look like amateur, 5^th grader HACKS!

[I clear my throat.] If any of you are here tonight, I’m sorry about that.  But you know I’m right.

Soon she was in high school, where she joined every single club in sight.  She was such a social butterfly, and she never met a good cause or a group of people she didn’t like.  We were always worried that she was spreading herself too thin, but that girl has a motor like I’ve never seen.  

Soon she learned how to drive, and she took to that the same way she took to school work: very properly.  Her hands were always at 10 and 2; she used the side and rear-view mirrors, and she always used her turn signals.

On one of her first test drives with Karen in our minivan, she drove all the way home, and into the garage.   

Not through the garage door — I mean, INTO the side of the garage.

As I was writing a large check to a contractor to re-attach the side wall to the sill plate, I thought to myself, “Well, at least I’m getting some good material for my father-of-the-bride toast speech in the future.”

When it was time to choose a college, she chose the finest university in Christendom: the University of Florida.  I don’t say that to put down anyone here tonight who may have gone to some “safety school.” But c’mon.

Anyway, at UF she joined every single club in sight, including a Christian sorority — Go Theta Alpha!  (Oddly enough, though, she didn’t join the Hispanic Students Association.)

Most importantly, she joined the Gator Marching Band!  And that’s where she met Ryan.  She played cymbals and he played marimba.   

I don’t want to brag, but years after the exploits of Emmitt Smith and Tim Tebow will have been forgotten, people will still talk about the quality cymbal and marimba playing during the Katie and Ryan Gator Band years!     

To sum Katie up: she’s a great young woman, she loves God, she has a huge heart.  And I don’t have to tell you how beautiful she is, because… look at her.

You’re welcome, Ryan. 

Of course I don’t know as much about Ryan’s early days: 

I don’t know if he had normally proportioned cheeks when he was a toddler.

I don’t know if he ever came out to his classmates and teachers as Mexican-American.  

I don’t know if he’s ever ploughed a vehicle into his parents’ house.

I do know that he also became a Gator, which speaks well of his intelligence and character.

Of course no father is generally inclined to think that anyone is worthy of marrying his daughters. But in Ryan’s case, Karen and I have been won over.

We’ve seen how happy Katie is when she’s with him.  He has an easy-going, caring way about him, and he has an important quality in a husband: patience.  

I’ve watched as Katie and her mom have laid out the plans for this wedding in our dining room, the table covered with checklists and color swatches and diagrams – it looked like plans for the Normandy invasion.  

But Ryan played along, dutifully looking interested when I have to assume he was as lost and confused as I was.   He mostly watched, because Katie was in her organizing frenzy, and you don’t want to step into that buzz saw or you’re likely to lose a limb! 

But when she asked for an opinion on something, he would actually have one!  What kind of flowers do you like?  What colors should the suits be?  Does this invitation look better than this one? 

Now if he was actually interested, that’s a good sign – you two will be great together. 

But if he was just going through the motions, because it made her happy to get his opinion, that’s an even better sign.  Because if there’s anything a good husband needs – and write this down, any single men here — it’s to love his wife enough to feign interest in what she wants him to be interested in.

I’d like to welcome Ryan into the family.  He’s the answer to a lifetime of our prayers. 

I’ve been a professor for 30 years, and I’ve seen a cavalcade of bozos and weirdos in my classes, and I shudder to think of Katie with any of them.

In fact, if you’d told me back in the Gator Band days that Katie was falling for a musician, I would have flashed to Axl Rose and a heroin addiction. 

But thank God… it was Ryan, and his marimba!

All kidding aside, there’s an old saying that goes, “When your children find true love, parents find true joy.  Please raise your glasses and join me in a toast to Ryan and Katie Crowe: here’s to your love, and our joy!” 

Ryan & Katie Crowe, 7/15/22

(and for the moment, at Stately Simpson Manor, who cares about 2024!)

So tomorrow is the big day when I don’t lose a daughter, but gain a son-in-law. 

It doesn’t totally feel like that yet, because the newlyweds are moving to Denver in a couple of weeks, where my daughter will start her new job as a pediatrics nurse in a fine hospital there.  For the first time, we’ll be pretty far from one of the girls, and that’s a transition for us as well as for her.

I’m going to be giving a blessing, and a toast, and some short comments at the wedding, and as I’ve started to write and rehearse them, I realize that  — despite my blue-collar Illinois upbringing, and my overall manly stoicism – I am likely to be crying like Adam Kinzinger in a congressional show trial.

Oh, except that my tears will be appropriate to the occasion, and heartfelt, and laced with a combination of patriarchal protectiveness and testosterone.

So, on second thought, they’ll be the opposite of Adam Kinzinger’s mortifyingly fake and estrogenical display.

Anyway, as you might guess, I won’t be writing a column on Friday, and my Monday one might be delayed, depending on the intensity of the aftermath of the big day. 

But don’t think that I am forgetting CO nation, and my obligation to you all!  I’ve still been taking a few notes for a future column.

(Dr. Jill comparing Hispanics to “tacos,” and referring to a “bo-guh-duh” instead of a bodega?  Check. Joey Gaffes stopping in Israel to discuss “the truth and honor of the Holocaust?” Check.)   

Unfortunately for me, I’ve been dealing with some tooth pain for about 10 days, and found out on Monday that I’ll be having a root canal next Thursday, which was the soonest they could get me in.

To complicate things, I’ve also come down with a flu, which started on Sunday and is still hanging on. 

Fortunately, I’m as tough as a two-dollar steak, so I’m going to get past this, and walk my baby down the aisle Friday evening.  If I need to self-administer a few pops of medicinal bourbon beforehand, well, that’s why God invented Kentucky.

I look forward to giving you all an after-action report on the wedding next week, as well as limbering up and taking a few swings at the goofballs who are temporarily ruling us.

Until next time…

Usually I’m in the “poking fun at leftist foolishness” business.   

You might expect me to comment on things like the cue cards that Biden got last week, with helpful advice like, “YOU take YOUR seat,” or “The fork is the one with the pointy things on it.”

Or I might suggest that Hillary Clinton has taken a page from the playbook of Rhode Island Dem senator Tiara Mack, and decided to stand on her head in a bikini and twerk… and that the resulting eclipse caused migrating birds to land in confusion, and drove primitive tribes-people into frightened sacrifices to appease the sun god. 

But this Monday morning finds me in a darker mood.  I was reading an account of the scummy creeps who showed up to harass Justice Kavanaugh at a restaurant, when I saw a notice that James Caan had died. 

Wrong though I know it is, I had a Job-like complaint session with God about the fairness of His universe. 

How are James Caan, Norm MacDonald, John Prine, Tom Petty and my dad all dead, but Bernie Sanders, Imhotep Pelosi, Joe Biden and Whoopie Goldberg still alive?

I mean sure, Caan had a long life, dying at 82.

But Nancy Pelosi celebrated her 82^nd birthday when Persian King Darius was stirring up trouble in the Middle-East in 505 BC.  And Noam Chomsky took her to his senior prom when she was only a sophomore. 

And they’re both still walking around, like a plague of Schiff-spewing locusts!    

I was getting up a real, self-righteous head of steam – How are we going to withstand 30 more months of this cursed Biden?  How have You not smote the entire rabble perpetrating the January 6^th  show-trial and the ghouls attacking pregnancy resource centers with madness, or blindness, or at least some sort of very painful skin condition? – when He played the omniscience card:

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

Ok.  I get it.  I’m as fallen and corruptible as anyone else, and anger is the devil’s cocaine (hat tip to Andrew Klavan). 

And I know that it’s not good for me to repeatedly get as angry as I’ve been getting lately, as I watch the increasingly bullying and violent behavior of many on the left that is seemingly going unchecked.

But when our elite leftists actively encourage thuggish behavior from their supporters, I think our society is moving in a dangerous direction.  One of the few core jobs of any legitimate government is to keep the peace — through a military to deter external enemies, police to catch and punish criminals, and national guard troops to maintain order.

Sadly, the leaders of our political opponents are undermining those legitimate functions.  Their violent, hateful minions went on an 8-month rampage of riots, destruction and looting in 2020, and their PR flaks called riots “peaceful protests,” and their leadership refused to allow police or national guard troops to do their jobs. 

They pushed a “defund the police” movement that devastated the innocent people in the cities they control.  They routinely released career criminals without punishment, creating an unprecedented crime wave.  They illegally opened our national borders to a human tidal wave of poor and desperate people, intermixed with predators and drug dealers, exacerbating a deadly opioid epidemic and immiserating many American communities. 

When a SCOTUS judgment doesn’t go their way, they tacitly approve of leftist freaks trying to murder judges, and explicitly support mobs of a-holes doxing and harassing justices, in their homes, and in public.

And while all of that has been going on, they’re doing everything they can to disarm law-abiding citizens, so that they’ll be completely powerless in the face of this unfolding national disaster! 

This involves politics, but it goes beyond politics.  It’s more elemental than politics.  It strikes at the heart of what it is to be a free man or woman.  When a government abdicates its most fundamental duties, women and men are going to resort to the most basic retaliatory arrows in their behavioral quiver.

For example, when a bunch of arrogant educrats got caught teaching trans ideology, race-hatred and pan-sexual weirdness to a bunch of school children, those kids’ dads were angry – but their moms showed up at school board meetings with claws out, and ready to do some arse-whipping. 

A lot of pale, sweaty leftist school board members yelped for the police and retreated from school cafeteria and auditoria all over this country with their tails between their legs.  And a bunch of soccer moms turned into mama bears; women who’d been voting for Dem idiots their whole lives elected thousands of non-leftist school board members from sea to shining sea. 

And they sent ex-VA gov Terry McAuliffe back to the used car lot or payday lender boiler-room where he belongs.

A bunch of women also got carry permits, and used cute little pistols to put decorative holes in a bunch of toxic-male Biden voters who expected a powerless victim, but found a gunpowder-assisted gender re-assignment instead.  God bless those women!

But as a male, the death of James Caan took me back to an American lodestone meditation on manhood: The Godfather. 

One of Caan’s most famous scenes occurs when he, as Santino Corleone, discovers that his sister has been beaten by her new husband, Carlo.  He flies out of the house in a rage, eventually catching the creep on a city street and administering an epic whipping. 

One highlight of the scene was the moment when Carlo tries to hold on to a wrought-iron fence to keep Sonny from dragging him away, and Sonny bites Carlo’s fingers until he has to let go. Another was Sonny grabbing a metal garbage-can lid and bashing Carlo’s head with it. 

At the end, after he’s kicked Carlo into the street beside a spouting fire hydrant, an out-of-breath Sonny says, “If you touch… my sister again… I’ll kill ya.” 

On one level, every well-raised male knows that this is not how you’re supposed to behave… until it is. 

The proper course of action is to take it to the government, in the form of the cops.  But if that’s not an option – because you’re a mafioso in Sonny’s case, or because you live in a blue city in 2022 under a leftist DA like Boudin or Gascon – you might grab a garbage can lid and a few friends and go looking for Carlo.    

In fact, the movie opens with a great scene that establishes that central theme: a law-abiding Italian immigrant undertaker comes to Brando’s Godfather to ask him for justice.  His daughter was beaten by two American boys, but when he took them to court, the corrupt system let them off without any penalty. 

So he goes back to an earlier social system: the tribal loyalties and rough justice of Sicily.  He pledges fealty to the Don, and the Don reciprocates.  Though the Godfather refuses to have the boys killed, he does give the man his justice, sending a couple of his soldiers to beat them as badly as they beat the girl.

Again, this is not the way things are supposed to work in a civilized democracy.   But I’m afraid that it’s the kind of whirlwind the Dems are going to be reaping if they keep on their current path.

Consider Kenosha Wisconsin, in 2020.  When the peaceful social justice rioters and felons began to torch and destroy that town, the Dems who ran that state and city could have deployed cops and national guard troops to stop them, either before the rioting started, or certainly after the first night of rioting. 

At the end of that first, fiery night, a lot of good citizens in Kenosha saw that their government was not going to do its job.  They didn’t have a godfather, but they did have a network of law-abiding, tax-paying, business-owning friends and neighbors – call them “la cheesehead nostra.” 

They asked for any willing citizens to come and help stand guard over their businesses the next night.  One of the people who responded was Kyle Rittenhouse.   Thankfully, when the thugs came back the next night, the final tally was, “Convicted felons and sex offenders 0, Rittenhouse 3.” 

Of course the national left then went nuts, demonizing Rittenhouse and sacralizing his vicious attackers. 

(My all-time favorite rebuttal line described the fate of Joseph Rosenbaum, the previously convicted pedophile who chased Rittenhouse into a corner, grabbed for his rifle, and was rightly shot in the head:  “He died as he had lived: trying to touch an unwilling minor.”)

But the trial turned into a laugher, with Rittenhouse acquitted and the prosecutors looking like the dopes they are.  The moral for the left that had happily let the riots fester and grow should be clear:

Do you want millions of Rittenhouses righteously shooting your criminal supporters?

Because THIS is how you get millions of Rittenhouses righteously shooting your criminal supporters!

Okay, I know this is getting long, but I’ve been thinking of one more of my favorite movie scenes ever.  This one is from the epic western Lonesome Dove, and involves the great Robert Duvall (as Augustus McRae) and Tommy Lee Jones (Woodrow Call). 

As Duvall and Jones are in a country store, some government troops ride into town, and one bully among them exercises an old-west form of eminent domain: he demands that Jones’ unacknowledged bastard son (Rick Schroder) give up a horse.  When the kid refuses, the bully starts whipping him and yelling.

Just then Jones comes out of the store with an armful of goods, sees the whipping down the street, and his blood is instantly up.  He drops what he’s holding, races down the street on his horse, knocks the other man down, then jumps down and grabs a branding iron and starts bashing the guy with it.

Schroder says, “He’s killing him,” as Jones throws the man headfirst into an anvil, and raises the iron over his head for the killing blow.

But Duval lassos him from horseback, and drags him away.  It takes several seconds for Duval to bring Jones back to his senses.  The soldiers take the half-dead bully away, and Jones gets back on his horse, noticing the crowd of civilians all watching him.

And then he delivers one of the greatest – and most understated — lines in film history: “I hate rude behavior in a man.  I won’t tolerate it.”

If you haven’t seen that scene before, please watch it.  In fact, please join me in a summer resolution: by no later than Labor Day, I’m going to watch both Godfathers (if you say that there’s a third one, you’re dead to me!) and Lonesome Dove again!  

Join me, and maybe I can have CO arrange a live podcast to discuss these great films.

As you can tell from this rambling column, I’m ambivalent on this issue.  There is such a thing as righteous anger, and it can be a force for good in society, especially when powerful people in and out of government thwart good peoples’ cries for justice.

But at the same time, it should sober us to reflect that almost all angry people think that their anger is righteous. 

It’s almost beyond my understanding, but I think that most of the pro-abortion goons who are harassing Supreme Court justices and torching facilities that offer support to pregnant women – which you would not have a problem with, if you were truly pro-CHOICE! – believe that THEIR anger is also righteous.

They are, of course, wrong.  And I’m afraid that if they continue to attack those who disagree with them, they are going to receive some responses which they won’t like, but which I hope will be educational for them.  

So yes, I wasn’t around when God laid the foundations of the earth, and I’m not certain where “turn the other cheek” ends and “do justice and righteousness” begins. 

But I’ve been searching my soul about this, and I don’t think I’m wrong:  we could use millions of men and women in this country who, when confronted with a mob of aggressive, spoiled, petulant narcissists, would jump up and oppose them.

And I know where I’d like to be the next time a bunch of leftist bullies gets a tip and shows up to drive a good Supreme Court justice out of a public place.

Out in front of that restaurant, with a garbage can lid in one hand, and a branding iron in the other.

Because we should hate rude behavior in people, and we should not tolerate it! 

Augustus McRae/Woodrow Call 2024!

Leftist women of color are really letting the Democrat team down lately. 

I know that such a statement can be triggering, especially coming from a pale male like myself.  But hear me out, because I have something you’ll never hear in a Nancy Pelosi press conference, or a cluster-gab on the View, or a teleprompter-assisted mutter-fest from the late Joe Biden. 

And that something is called “evidence.”

Exhibit A: Chicago mayor and life-size troll doll in a fright wig, Lori Lightfoot. 

She’s been terrible on spending, awful on managing city resources, and a racial arsonist.  And she’s presided over more murders than John Wick after the bad guys killed his dog.  (The stats for the holiday weekend in Chicago: 51 shooting incidents, 68 people hurt, 8 killed.) (That’s not counting the Highland Park atrocity – just a weekend in Lightfoot’s Chicago.)

Lightfoot gave a stirring speech on Independence Day.  I couldn’t hear all of her fine words over the sounds of sirens and gunshots in the background, but a transcript has her saying, “The toxicity in our public discourse is a thing I think we should all be concerned about.”

Of course, literally one week earlier, after SCOTUS said — and my Latin may be a little rusty here, “Ixnay on the aby-killing bay.” — Mayor Lightfoot responded with the kind of well-reasoned eloquence we’ve come to expect from her type.

To wit, “F*** Clarence Thomas!!”

A few media outlets picked up on the subtle disparity between screaming obscenity one week and decrying toxic public discourse the next.  One source even suggested that she might be, and I quote, “two-faced” on the issue.

It’s an old joke, but I’ll say it anyway: If Lori Lightfoot had two faces, do you really think she’d go with THAT one?

Exhibit B: Karine Jean-Pierre

Biden’s spokeswoman continues to play the hapless, sapphic Titanic to Peter Doocy’s iceberg in WH press conferences.

She started her tenure – it seems like just 10 years ago, doesn’t it? – by pointing out that her skin is darker than Lizzie Warren’s (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and that she likes the ladies.  And it was all the press corps could do not to hoist her onto their shoulders and parade her out into the Rose Garden chanting, “KJP!  KJP!”

Alas, the frenzied celebration of melanin and scissoring couldn’t last, and eventually questions had to be asked and answered.  And then… yikes!

At first she tried the strategy of listening to a question, then flipping through a notebook full of talking points for 5 minutes, and then reading – literally just reading – a response that had nothing to do with the question.

When that didn’t seem to work so well, she changed it up, by listening to a question, then flipping through said notebook for 10 minutes, then saying, “I’ve got nothing new for you on that.”

And now she’s just pleading ignorance. 

I’m not kidding. 

In the last two weeks, she reported that she hadn’t heard that Macron told Biden that the Saudis have no more oil to pump, and that she hadn’t heard that Biden’s Secretary of the Treasury said that Putin’s invasion was NOT the primary cause of the gas price spike, and that she hadn’t heard Biden’s phone message to Hunter that he was “in the clear” during one of the latter’s Chicom scandals.

To think that I spent years staring at my shoes, while telling teachers that the dog ate my homework or that I was really sick, when I could have just been telling them that I had not heard of the Mayflower Compact or the Pythagorean theorem, and that I’d need to get back to them on the issue of Manifest Destiny. 

Or better yet, I could have just spoken from the heart on how much I like girls! After which I’d close with, “I’d like my “A,” now, and to be carried out into the hallway while the faculty throw rose petals in my path and chant, “Simp-son, Simpson!” 

Exhibit C: Speaking of ladies who like the ladies, basketball player and Russian detainee Brittney Griner  has given Biden one more thing to worry about.  (And he keeps forgetting about the other ones already!)

Before her Russian trip, Griner had the lefty talking points down pat: America is a racist hellhole; the national anthem is offensive; I didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on me, etc. But a little taste of Russian hospitality may be causing her to re-think things, if her letter to the White House can be believed.

But she didn’t help her cause when she showed up for a recent Russian court appearance wearing a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt. 

I’m no lawyer, but I did recently read a Supreme Court case, and I know many Latin words, such as voir dire, ipso facto, and habeas corpus.  (The latter phrase came up just recently, when one of Biden’s worried aides called for a mirror to put in front of his mouth during a trip on Air Force One, whispering, “Check for signs of life.  I think the Big Guy might be a habeas corpus.”)  

So I think I’m qualified to give Britney a little legal advice:  As a general rule, it’s probably not a great fashion choice to show up for a trial on drug charges wearing a shirt emblazoned with the picture of one of the most famous drug takers and overdosers in history on it. 

Maybe a sensible, dark skirt-and-blouse combo instead?  

Exhibit D: Rhode Island Democrat State Senator Tiara Mack.

This is the Mensa member who posted a campaign video of herself twerking, upside down, in a thong bikini.  (And yes, that’s the first time the words “campaign video,” “twerking” and “thong” have ever appeared in the same sentence.)

If you haven’t seen that video yet, DON’T.  Because I’ve already taken the hit for you, and there’s no reason that, like your humble Roving Correspondent, you too should have to wake up in a cold sweat and experience PTSD over a local Rhode Island political race. 

So I’ll just try to paint a word picture, and spare you the risk of needing to therapeutically gouge out your eyes:

The Rhode Island state senator is a woman of color.  When it comes to body type, I will say only that Sir Mix-A-Lot would approve.  (He cannot lie, and other brothers can’t deny.)   

She is wearing a tiny thong that answers the physics question, “How much stress can you put on a piece of fabric before it loses structural integrity and snaps off, producing the sound of a rifle shot, and possibly putting out the eye of an innocent bystander?” (Spoiler alert: the answer is “not one bit more pressure than this, right here.”)    

She assumes a posture in which her head is in the sand, and her exposed behind is out in the open for all to see. 

This is commonly called, “the Democrat in an election year” position.  Or alternatively, “Downward facing Dem.”

Then, she twerks.

What is it with Democrats?  They’ve chosen as their party’s mascot animal the lowly ass.  (Not that the GOP elephant is a lot better.  Is this the best both parties could do, in terms of animal iconography?  Were there no majestic lions or magnificent Cassie the Wonder Dogs available when they were choosing mascots?)   

And their female pols seem to be at their most effective when they rely on their derrieres.  

Chi Com honey trap Fang Fang used her politburo posterior to get info out of flatulent leftist Eric Swallwell.  Tiara Mack has twerked her way into national politics.  And AOC has never been more compelling than when she slapped the words “Tax the Rich” across her tush and wiggled it for the cameras.    

However, I don’t want to be accused of either sexism or racism. 

So I will stipulate that leftist white women (Nancy Pelosi, Liz Warren, Hacky Psaki), leftist black men (Spartacus Booker, Eric “Steadman” Holder), and leftist white men (Chuck Schumer, Adam Schiff) have also risen to the top of their party’s politics by making the biggest possible arses of themselves.

Which is why their potential dream ticket is…wait for it…

Avenatti/Kim Kardashian 2024!

This was a low-key 4^th for the Simpsons.  Our city does the fireworks on the 3^rd, and since we live about half a mile from the university field where they are shot off, we walked there and back for the festivities, and spent the rest of the holiday weekend reading, eating and feeling grateful.

Not so our fellow citizens on the left, apparently.  A quick trip around the internet showed the most vocal of our political rivals doing what they do best: treating our country the way Amber Heard treated Johnny Depp’s bed. 

Breitbart had a nice round-up of celebs airing their malice and grievances.  Bette Midler is still alive… and hates the country.  So is “Meathead” Reiner, and George Takei, and they both concur.

Jessica Chastain used some ironic quotation marks around “Independence” Day and had her picture taken giving a double middle-finger salute.  (Classy!)  Ron Perlman is as attractive on the inside as he is on the outside, and he’s very upset with America.

Several actors I’ve never heard of – Joshua Malina? Kerry Washington? – are also extremely peeved.  Alleged comedian Samantha Bee gave a cheerful shout-out to “every woman who is able to live the life she wants because of an abortion.” 

I’m no life coach – although I’d be as good a life coach as Samantha Bee is a comedian – but I’d say that a good rule of thumb is that if you need to abort your child to live the life you want, you are doing life wrong. 

Also, Samantha Bee must have a show called “Full Frontal,” because that was the tag line for her tweet.  And there’s another mental image that I can’t unsee!

Speaking of which, it looks like Jay Z has REALLY let himself go!  He looked awful in a still shot beneath the hashtag #happybacktoslaveryday.

Oh, wait.  That wasn’t Jay Z – it was unfunny comedienne Leslie Jones from SNL. 

So… good for Jay Z, I guess.  But Leslie… yikes! 

And it wasn’t just spoiled and narcissistic leftist celebrities who despise our country.  Spoiled and narcissistic leftist non-celebs feel the same way. 

The Pima County (AZ) Democrat Party, for example, invited people to come to their “F*** the Fourth” event, distributing a flyer with those words on them.  (They didn’t use the asterisks though, because they are not as dignified as your humble Roving Correspondent.)

When the predictable Schumer-storm ensued, the Dems apologized, agreeing that “the graphic advertising…was in poor taste.”

They couldn’t leave it alone, though, lest the public think that they’re not really down on America.  “Make no mistake, however. We support the event…” 

For most of the outraged left, the main problem with America this year is that the Supreme Court followed the constitution in the Dobbs case.  But several of the illiterati were also mad that Donald Trump isn’t in jail, and that the constitution was written a long time ago by white guys. 

Every Fourth they’ve got new reasons to disdain the country.  For four years running it was Trump.  Also racism, and Pence, and heterosexuality.   Before that it was Bush, and slavery, and inequality, and the environment.

They’re never rebels without a cause, but they’re always rebels without a coherent argument.

But even as I found myself getting angry with them, I realized that they’re already punishing themselves more than anything any of us could do to them.  (Without going to jail, anyway!) 

How would you like to be them?  To wake up every morning — living lives of unimaginable comfort and blessings in the greatest country the world has ever known — and look around yourself, and feel nothing but scorn and bitterness for your country and your fellow citizens?  

I’m so grateful that the world I see looks nothing like what they see!

This Independence Day, I’ve had the opportunity to think about how well things have gone – for me personally, for my free state of Florida, and for our country – in so many unlikely (even far-fetched!) ways that I never could have predicted.

For example, in the winter of 1985, I was finishing up my MA at Illinois State (Go Redbirds!), and didn’t know what my next step in life was.  Going on for a PhD sounded like as good an idea as any, so I went to the university library and looked through some academic catalogues.  (This was before the internet, and the wheel.  But after fire – so I had that going for me.)  

Because it was freezing outside, I gravitated to some schools from the south. And as I flipped through catalogues, I came across the one for the University of Florida, and saw that it was in Gainesville.  And the clouds parted, and a choir sang, as I realized the perfect reason for making such a momentous life decision:

Tom Petty was from there!

That’s right.  I made the biggest decision of my adult life because of Tom Petty and a handful of Heartbreakers.  It was a sign from God!

Actually, I do think that, to this day. 

Because at that very moment, my future wife was sharing an apartment in Gainesville with a married couple from her high school.  The husband was starting in the same UF grad program that accepted me, and he happened to live right across the street from the apartment I rented.  And on our first night of orientation, his wife had their car, so I asked him if he needed a ride home. 

I was going to just drop him off, but as we pulled into their apartment complex, he said, “By the way, a blonde Norwegian goddess lives with us.”

And I said, “It’s funny you should mention that, because I’ve been looking for one of those.” 

And 34 years ago tonight, with the fireworks going off over downtown Gainesville, I asked her to marry me. 

What a freakishly unlikely series of events!  It’s the kind of story that will turn you into a cautious optimist!

A similar lucky break happened for my state, just 4 years ago, when Ron DeSantis ran for governor against Democrat Andrew Gillum.  Florida was a closely divided state, and Gillum actually lead in the polls for most of the race, but DeSantis pulled out a razor-thin win by less than a percentage point.

This despite the fact that Gillum had been a dismal candidate, dogged by ethics scandals, a featherweight political resume, and an all-too-familiar tendency to resort to racial identity politics. (He is black.)    

DeSantis has turned out to be an amazing governor, providing a textbook example of good leadership by doing exactly the opposite of what Dem governors and Biden have done.  Though I am generally loathe to trust any politician – “Put not your faith in princes,” the Psalmist reminds us – I would be beyond thrilled if DeSantis won the presidency in 2024.

Meanwhile, Gillum has proven what a terrible choice he would have been.   In March of 2020 he was found vomiting and intoxicated in a hotel room full of meth, along with a gay male escort who had overdosed on said meth, and had to be rushed to the hospital.  

Oh yeah, and last month, Gillum and an associate were indicted on 21 counts of conspiracy and wire fraud.

That’s the guy who came within a whisker of defeating the best governor in these united states!

Similarly, the long-shot victory of Donald Trump in 2016 was an incredible stroke of luck for our nation.

There’s a lot I don’t like about Trump, but I cannot understand the never-Trumpers who still insist that his election was a bad thing.  Leave aside the existential terribleness of his opponent, and the many successes of Trump’s presidency:  record low unemployment, low inflation, strong economic growth and stock market, energy independence, the Abraham Accords, etc..

If he had done nothing else than appoint Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Barrett to the Supreme Court, his presidency would have been a success.  The incredible run of SCOTUS decisions this term constitutes victories for our country that will be felt for decades. 

But just like DeSantis edging out Gillum, and me closing my smoke-show of a top-shelf wife, it was a very close-run thing!  With the MSM and the GOP establishment against him, and his own high negatives in much of the country, Trump got just enough votes in just the right states to win.

And he couldn’t have done it without help from the most unlikeable candidate in presidential history: the clumsy, off-putting, cringe-inducing, inept, cawing maw of amoral ambition that is Hillary Clinton.  God bless her!

But even with all of that, it was STILL a long shot to end up with the SCOTUS that we have.

When Scalia died (peace be upon him!), Trump was trailing badly in the polls, and we had to depend on Cocaine Mitch McConnell to stiffen his spine – not an easy task for a chinless cartoon turtle! – and resist Obama and the MSM for nearly a year, and not allow Merrick Garland to take the open seat on the court.   

It was the right thing to do, with plenty of precedent to back it up, but with the Dems howling, none of us would have been surprised to see a GOP pol fold.  (And after what we’ve learned from Garland since then, he’s proven to be every bit the extreme leftist in sheep’s clothing that we all suspected.)

And then, RBG died, just in time to be replaced by an originalist judge as Trump was on his way out the door.  Obama and the Dems had tried to get Ginsburg to retire earlier, and if the overwhelming consensus hadn’t been that Trump was going to lose in 2016, she probably would have.

But the stars aligned, and fate smiled on us once again!

Even with everything else going wrong during the Brandon mal-administration, it’s been a joy to watch the outraged howling of the leftists as SCOTUS went on the greatest two-week run in judicial history. 

I’ve especially enjoyed the impotent, small-scale destruction wrought by the pro-abortion creeps calling themselves “Ruth Sent Us,” in honor of their heroine RBG.  Because the irony is delicious!

If RBG hadn’t narcissistically refused to step down in the belief that CAW CAW couldn’t lose, Trump wouldn’t have gotten his third nominee, and Roe wouldn’t have fallen. 

So as it turns out, Ruth Sent US, you pouting, childish, cowardly vandals! 

Here’s to more against-all-odds wins for those who celebrate the 4th, and more heartburn-inducing losses for those who denigrate it!

Avenatti/ Andrew Gillum, 2024!

Last week I wrote about SCOTUS overturning NY’s law against carrying a gun, and I mentioned Breyer’s dissent.  Rather than talking about legal cases and precedents and the constitution, he spent a lot of time on how many guns and gun crimes there are in America.

After reading that, I concluded that he is smart, but detached from everyday life in a way that I think is pretty common among the elite left.  

I’ve heard an old cliché to the effect that “that’s an idea so dumb only a PhD would believe it.”  There’s a little bit of old fashioned anti-intellectual bias in that saying, but there’s more than a little truth, too.  (Cliches don’t get to be cliches unless there is some truth to them.)

In my years of experience with blue collar guys, I can’t think of any who thought that Marxism can work, or that giving the government more control of our lives and economy will end well, or that a man can become a woman, for example.  

But as a liberal arts professor, I know many, many profs who believe the first two, and at least pretend to believe the third.    

Breyer sounds like many academics I know, when he cites the 400 million guns in America, and how many gun crimes are committed, and suggests that the solution is to ban or restrict gun ownership.

This man has 83 years of life experience.  He has degrees from Oxford, Stanford and Harvard, and he’s been a judge for many decades.  But he’s rich, and he’s been living in very safe neighborhoods, surrounded by armed guards for a very long time.  And there are gaping holes in his argument which most of my blue collar friends could spot from a mile away. 

Alito points out one of them: the amount of guns that criminals have and use in crimes are huge reasons why law abiding people want guns to defend themselves! 

I looked through some crime stories for just one week before the ruling came out.  Some of them have happy endings and some are tragic, but all contain obvious lessons that I’m sure Breyer doesn’t understand.

For example, in Austin a juvenile offender and robbery suspect named Jaylyn Reed was released from jail on May 27^th with an ankle monitor on. 

Elitist leftist legal experts thought that the ankle monitor would deter Reed from committing crimes.  Regular people thought that the robber who was let out was going to rob more people.

Within two weeks, Reed cut off the ankle monitor and went on a robbery spree with some thug buddies, committing at least 9 robberies in 5 days.  Until he robbed a couple walking to their car.  The male pulled out his own gun and shot Reed in the leg, and the cops soon caught up to the robbers and arrested them. 

Everyone involved was black, so Al Sharpton kept his trap shut, and I’m sure Justice Breyer never heard about it. 

Meanwhile, while the four armed robbers in Texas were robbing people, a scumbag criminal in Queens, NY called Subhan Zaib was going on a spree of his own.  His crimes became increasingly more violent over a 12-day period, starting with extortion and threats, then property damage, then pulling a knife on a man and threatening him with it. 

Two days later he punched, choked and threatened a woman with a knife in a hotel room.  Three days after that, he forced his way into a church bathroom and tried to rape a woman, and then threatened a man who intervened.

Three days after that, he stabbed someone on the subway.  Then he took two weeks off, threatened an ex over the phone, and went to Baltimore and raped a woman at knifepoint.

The total carnage: over an 8-day period, he was arrested and released without bail 5 times, before he finally raped the woman in Baltimore, and was arrested and held.

Elitist leftist legal experts support non-cash bail, and see him as an unfortunate case who slipped through the cracks.  Regular people think he should have been tried and sentenced to a lot of time in jail after the first incident, and that someone definitely should have shot him before he stabbed and raped those two women.   

In Chicago, leftist Mayor Lori Lightfoot (surrounded by armed guards, and possessor of a face like a river carp which would scare many offenders away even if she was otherwise unprotected) is all for a new policy that forbids cops from chasing suspects who run from them in many circumstances.

Regular people got their hopes up, thinking that when suspects flee, maybe now the cops can adopt a relaxed shooting stance and fire a warning shot between their shoulder blades. 

But no, the cops are not chasing because they’re giving up; they’re letting the criminals escape.  Elitist leftist legal experts are heartened, since they believe that foot chases can be risky, and the cops are probably only chasing in the first place because they’re bigoted racial profilers.

Expect even more crime in Chicago.

In Philly, by contrast, citizens have recently been allowed to get permits to concealed carry.  The highest number of annual permits requested between 2017 and 2020 was 11,814.  As crime continued to rise, the number of permits requested skyrocketed to almost 71,000; many of the permits were requested by women. 

Elitist leftist legal experts thought that criminals would soon be using those guns against law-abiding citizens, and wanted those citizens disarmed.  Regular people thought that that iron was about to get a lot of criminal scumbags’ minds right.

“I wonder who was right?” you are not asking, because you already know.  (Unless you are Justice Breyer, Kagan, or Sotomayor.)

The number of justified homicides against criminals “jumped 67 % from 2020 to 2021,” and 2022 is on pace to produce even more dead criminals in Philly.   

Since that kind of story gives our lefty elites the sads, I have a solution.   Philly media outlets need to find out the ages of all the criminals shot by law-abiding women in Philly, convert those ages to trimesters, and start calling them “very late term, ballistics-assisted abortion care.”

Problem solved.   

I’d like to close this column on a different topic, and with a shameful admission: at various times in my life I have enjoyed the music of Green Day. 

I’ve got pretty eclectic musical tastes, and while I can recognize that classical has a lot more substance than most popular music, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for good blues, jazz, country and folk music, among others.

And there will always be a place in my collection for some mindless, dirty-guitar, three-chord rock songs.  Hence a passing appreciation for Green Day. 

Most musicians are, not to put too fine a point on it, morons.  They don’t typically knock themselves out in pursuit of learning or wisdom – not many of us do – but in practicing and playing and basking in the attention of a young fan base who is no smarter than they are.

Green Day didn’t write any profound songs.  But their lead singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, could write some catchy hooks.  “When I Come Around” and “Holiday” are decent songs.  “Basket Case” is good too.

The latter song in particular showed the kind of self-deprecating humor about their own shallowness that is welcome in this kind of music: these guys are modest about their brainpower, and they’ve got a lot to be modest about.

The song opens this way: “Do you have the time/To listen to me whine/ About nothing and everything all at once?/ I am one of those/Melodramatic fools/Neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it.”

Sadly, as many successful rock stars do, Billie Joe started to feel like he had something to say about politics.  (Following in the brain-dead footsteps of dimwits like Cher, Babs Streisand, the Dixie Chicks, Springsteen, etc. and etc.) The result was the album American Idiot, released in 2004, and mostly focused on how shallow Americans are, and especially conservative ones, such as the titular character of the Bushie. 

The title song was all over the radio, and it became an ear worm for me; I couldn’t get the initial catchy hook – “Don’t wanna be an American idiot” – out of my mind. 

So I made one small change to the lyrics – “Don’t wanna be an American Democrat!” – and transformed a simple-minded piece of pop fluff into a righteous declaration of political wisdom. 

Plus, it’s given me a nice little tune to whistle to myself as I’ve watched the last couple of years of Brandon’s unraveling.  So you’re welcome, anyone who has also gotten that song stuck in your head.

Anyway, I bring this up because Billie Joe is back in the news again.  He was in London when SCOTUS’ Roe v. Wade decision was announced, and Billie – 50 now, and not aging well — announcing a momentous decision to the crowd from on stage: he’s looking for a political separation from his native land.

As a point of comparison, here’s how Thomas Jefferson expressed a similar thought at the beginning of our founding document:

“When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another… a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.  We hold these truths to be self-evident…” 

I’m sure that you can all complete the next phrases by heart. 

Well, not ALL of you.  (“All men and women created … by the — you know — you know the thing.”)

Here’s Billie’s version, screamed at the top of his lungs: “F*** America!  I’m f***ing renouncing my citizenship!  There’s just too much f***ing stupid in the world to go back to that miserable f***ing excuse for a country.”       

My first thought, as I’m sure it is yours: Okay now, don’t be a wuss – do it! 

I’m sick of this.  Every time something goes wrong for the left, a bunch of coddled celebrities threaten to leave the country… and they NEVER do.  Stop teasing us!

Here’s just a partial list of big-mouths who swore they’d leave if Trump won: mf-ing Samuel L. Jackson, modestly talented exhibitionist Miley Cyrus, insufferable dunce Whoopie Goldberg, alcoholic gadfly Chelsea Handler, pudgy irritants Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer, and botoxed illiterate Cher.  

As of today, they are all, tragically, still here.

I just hope that Billie Joe Armstrong will be a man of his word, and beat it.

By the way, the chorus to “Basket Case,” immediately following the lyrics quoted above, starts like this:  “Sometimes, I give myself the creeps.”

Us too, BJ. 

Us too.

Avenatti/ Billie Joe Armstrong, 2024!

I was still thinking about the implications of the SCOTUS guns opinion from Thursday, when the monumental Roe decision came out on Friday.  But now I see a through-line in both cases, so let’s see if I can make sense of that.

First, 3 quick thoughts on the Roe decision:

1. If the pro-abortion side believed their own propaganda, they’d be pretty happy about this ruling. 

They keep proclaiming that something like 80% of Americans are super pro-choice.  But if that were the case, the decision would cause a blue tsunami, since it will make abortion a live political issue in every state, and galvanize the abortion-enthusiast majority.    

Of course, polling on abortion depends heavily on how the question is asked, and I think most people are somewhere in the middle, probably leaning more pro-life when the issue is clearly delineated.  That is, they don’t want abortion completely banned, but they want restrictions to kick in pretty early in a pregnancy.

Only a very extreme fringe subscribes to the pro-infanticide “abortion until the moment before birth” position that many top Dems are revealing themselves to hold.

I think those folks are going to be in for a nasty surprise as the debate unfolds. 

And I think most Dems are decent enough to recognize what a terrible position that is, and to know that their party-line claim about an 80% pro-choice majority is as trustworthy as Bill Clinton at a sorority sleep-over.

Which is why there was no joy in Roe-ville this weekend.  There were f-bombs and angry chanting and a little foaming at the mouth.  And just a few, presentable talking heads, reciting the 80% statistic.

But that’s just whistling past a graveyard.

One with 63 million graves.

2. An inconvenient old interview with Joey Gaffes aired on Friday – on Tucker and all over the net  – which demonstrated how far left the Democrat party has moved on abortion.  Biden told the interviewer, “I do not view abortion as a choice or a right.  I think it’s always a tragedy.”

That’s a fossil from the old days, when Dems said “safe, legal and rare.”  If you’ve been watching for the last 10 years or so – and especially for the last 48 hours – those days are over. 

Now it’s all, “Shout your abortion!” and “Abortion is health care!” and “Won’t someone rid me of this meddlesome child?!”

You’re probably thinking: all of us go through immature phases during which we make the mistakes typical of callow youth, so we can forgive Biden this particular gaffe.    

Except that he made his comments in 2006.  When he was 63 years old. 

I know: how was he not at least 110 years old in 2006?  That was only 16 years ago, and he seems like he’s in his late hundreds now.

But nope.   He was just a spry 63, so we’ve got to cut him a break, because he was caught up in youthful exuberance when he gave that interview. 

You know, the kind of youthful exuberance you feel when you first fall in love, or have your first drink, or… collect your first several years of social security checks.

3. As in many political issues lately, I don’t see how people can avoid noting the huge gulf in behavior that makes our side look better than our opponents’. 

I really don’t enjoy saying that, because I know that we’re all flawed and fallen, and our side has plenty of absolute morons and idiots.  I’m looking at you, Crybaby Kinzinger.  And Mitt. And Susan Collins and John Cornyn and—

The point is, we’ve got some real boneheads and squishes on our side.

But the left is unrelentingly, unrepentantly, incorrigibly, metaphysically awful!  You can see the difference in many different areas.  

When the Tea Party used to have huge rallies, there was never any violence or property destruction or even profanity, and when the rallies were over, the public spaces where the rallies happened were left cleaner than they were before.

The same goes for almost 50 years of protests on the anniversary of Roe: no profane signs, no violence.  Just mournful protesting, and often prayer. 

The only exception was January 6^th, and while parts of that were ugly and worthy of punishment, in scale and scope – only a few hundred people were involved in any violence, which produced no deaths and relatively small amounts of damage, and was over within 3 hours — that doesn’t begin to compare to the dozens of deaths, literally billions of dollars in damage and months-long “peaceful” rioting that leftists indulged in for most of 2020.

When lefties throw big rallies for climate change or Earth Day or Sacrifice to Gaia week, the grounds afterwards are always piled high with garbage.

Have you noticed that when a trial or a SCOTUS decision is expected to go the leftists’ way, state governments don’t have to deploy the national guard, and businesses don’t have to board up their windows, and nobody has to brace themselves for days or weeks of rage?  That only happens when the leftists don’t get their way.

I’ll pick just one example of a leftist celebrity’s reaction to Friday’s SCOTUS ruling, mostly because of how well it represents the overall zeitgeist on that side. 

Quasi-famous actor Michael Rapaport is the kind of person for whom we should pray and wish that he will get well soon.  (See how mature and restrained I can be?  Sure, my first draft said that Rapaport was “the kind of guy who should be beaten within an inch of his life, dragged to the nearest national border and tossed out, with a warning that if he ever comes back, he’ll regret it.” 

“But that’s why pencils have erasers,” I was told during my childhood in the 19^th century.  I guess I can update that to, “that’s why keyboards have a delete button.”)

Anyway, Rapaport posted a series of obscene and incoherent tantrums on Twitter and social media, and in all of them, nary a rational thought was expressed.

My favorite bit was when he referred over and over to the way that evil right-wing Christians “are going to reap what you sew, you sick friends!”  (Of course he didn’t use “friends,” but that’s my gentlemanly way of substituting a different “f” word while recreating the “thoughts” of those without the self-control or vocabulary to express themselves like coherent adults.)  

To which I have two responses:

First, it’s “sow” – not “sew”—you dolt.  You sow seeds; you sew clothes.  What sense would it make to say that you’ll harvest (reap) materials that you’ve stitched up, Mr. Einstein?

Second, do you even know where “reap what you sow” comes from, Mikey? 

Hint: it’s a certain Good Book that usually drives you hateful Christophobes into paroxysms of rage, during which your head rotates 360 degrees while you projectile vomit all over the closest priest. 

So stop quoting the Apostle Paul to us, you theocratic fascist!  

Now here’s the commonality I see in both the Roe and the 2^nd Amendment cases from last week: in both cases, conservatives trust the people to manage their lives and make decisions more than they trust bureaucrats and unelected judges. 

And progressives do the opposite.

In the Roe case, SCOTUS said that the court in 1973 took the issue out of the people’s hands and made up a new law that they imposed on the entire country.  On Friday, they corrected that mistake, and sent it back where it belongs: to the deliberations and decisions of a free people in the 50 states.

I saw a meme on Friday that summed it up well:

Screaming Dem protestor: Unelected judges should NOT DICTATE ABORTION POLICY!!

SCOTUS: That’s literally what we just said.   

In the guns case, arrogant bureaucrats in NY were forced to include in their law that people “may carry” (as opposed to “shall carry,” in more 2^nd-amendment-friendly states), but they added a bad faith “proper cause” test: citizens who wanted to carry a gun for self-defense had to ask a politician’s permission to do so.  

They had to show a proper cause for why they deserved to exercise their right to self-defense.

Thomas backhanded that specious argument, pointing out that we don’t need to show proper cause to exercise our other enumerated rights – to speak freely, to worship as we like, to face our accusers in court, etc.    

To no one’s surprise, the NY bureaucrats consistently disagreed with citizens who thought they should be allowed to protect themselves with a gun.  The plaintiffs in that case, Koch and Nash, were both turned down.  Both of them were law abiding citizens, with no criminal records or mental defects.  Both were well trained in the use of guns. 

Nash was turned down once.  Then, after a rash of burglaries in his neighborhood, he foolishly thought that the increased risk should merit his being able to be allowed to carry.  Just as if he were a free citizen, in a free country. 

But nope.  Those NY pols enjoyed their power trip, and they knew better than Mr. Nash whether he deserved to defend himself.  They turned him down again.

So he joined with Mr. Koch, filed a suit, took it to the SCOTUS, and whipped their arses in court.

Cue Ray Charles (backed by the Voices of Jubilation singers) singing “Oh Happy Day!”   (A piano, a synthesizer, Mr. Ray Charles, and more dashikis than I’ve ever seen in one place.  And watch to the end, when the sharp-looking brother in a tux escorts Charles off the stage.  Goosebumps!)      

Despite all the problems our country is going through, this last week left us all a lot to be thankful for.  Our highest court gave us rulings that states can’t discriminate against people on the basis of their religion (the school case in Maine), and that we have a right to defend ourselves. 

Then on Friday they shredded the emanations and dispelled the penumbras, and gave the issue of abortion back to the people.

Sure, I’d like to give John Roberts a kick in the rear, and I shake my head in dismay at Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan. 

But I’m proud of the three Trump-appointed justices, and I’m especially proud of Alito and Thomas.  And for the first time in a while, I’m proud of our Supreme Court.   

So, I guess… Greatest Pride Month ever!

It’s been a long 17 years, but November is coming!