Month: November 2022

Since there is more to life than politics – thank God! – I will touch on a few silver linings in our post-election milieu, and then move on to a weightier, non-political topic.

And because I might not be writing a second column this holiday week, I’m cramming this slightly longer column with even more insightful and entertaining digressions than I usually do.

You’re welcome. 

Or I’m sorry, if you’re one who thinks my columns are too long!

Okay, so one small bright side of this disappointing election is that Biden has been strengthened by the lack of a red wave, and seems determined to run for re-election in ’24.  I don’t think the Dems who are really running things can allow that, but it will be fun to watch all of the shooting inside the tepee (HA! #wemustneverstopmockingher) that goes on in the next year. 

They need to ditch Biden, but they also have to ditch the most common line-of-succession replacement for him, Que Mala.  And if you think it’s going to be popcorn-rific to watch them dump an old white guy who doesn’t want to go, wait until you see the fratricidal fireworks when they try to dump the first double-minority gyno-American VP in history!  Fun!

More importantly, I see more chaos and problems for the Dems, because their far-left fringe – which, perversely, is also their mainstream in DC – is taking the wrong lesson from their narrow defeat this month.  They are going to tack even farther left, which is neither where the country nor the majority of actual Dems in the country are. 

It’s also helpful that the person stepping into Pelosi’s ossified sandals is Hakeem “not Olajuwon” Jeffries, a far-left, race-baiting election denier.  The race-baiting doesn’t really set him apart from the rest of his party, most of whose members double-majored in Marxist theory and racial arson in their woke colleges.

But the election denying is a pretty sweet irony, and one which a minimally competent GOP (here’s crossing my fingers!) should hang around his perfidious neck every chance they get.  

For years he’s made ever more outrageous claims about Trump having stolen the election in 2016, being a fake and illegitimate president, etc.  You know, the way treasonous domestic terrorists – who should be hunted down, imprisoned and possibly executed – do.

(Having said that, given the incomprehensible lack of a red wave and the re-election of repugnant incompetents [Fetterbiden, Whitmer, Hochul, Hobbs, etc.] nationwide, it’s hard to be confident that horrible leftist candidates will lose, no matter how horrible they are.)

Even on the GOP side, there are also some glimmers of hope.  The red states – especially Florida, Texas, Iowa and Ohio, among others – provided salutary examples of good governance, conducting elections that were transparent and orderly, with the votes actually counted on election day! 

Zelden in blue NY managed to help flip a lot of House seats in his state, and DeSantis shepherded a mini-red tsunami in his state that should be a model for all red or reddish states going forward.

Even Kevin McCarthy – and I’m holding my breath to see how he performs as majority leader – is saying some encouraging things, such as that he will throw Swalwell, Schiff and Omar off of key committees.

Which is the least that a sane nation should expect, really.  It’s an embarrassment that even after Swalwell was banging Fang Fang, he was still allowed access to secret materials, and Schiff has been caught lying and abusing his authority on various committees dozens of times.  It’s a pitiful joke that either Swalwell or Schiff would ever be associated even tangentially with any committee that had “intelligence” in its title.

And Ilhan Omar is as vicious an anti-Semite as Rashida Talib, or whichever weird-beard jihadi is currently leading Hamas or Hezbollah.   

Plus, when the Dems kicked Marjorie Taylor Greene (who, to be fair, said a lot of stupid things, though she can’t hold a candle to any of the dumber Dems in congress, stupid-statement-wise) off of a committee, the GOP warned them they would regret establishing a precedent “in which the majority dictates the minority party’s committee assignments.” 

Enjoy reaping what you’ve been sowing, you arrogant, short-sighted socialist jerks!

But enough about all that.  This holiday week is meant to be a time when we set aside our political and other differences, and savor the finer, more important things in life.

Things like, say, football. 

Of course I don’t mean soccer.  Because a benevolent God gave us hands for a reason, and that reason is to stiff-arm an opponent, or grab his facemask if he’s stiff-armed us, or punch him in the throat when we’re on the bottom of a pile. 

Or to hold, throw and catch a ball, obviously. 

A game so perverse that it requires players to willingly forsake God’s great gift of hands in favor of kicking at a ball like a hand-less idiot seems almost – yes, I’m going there – blasphemous. 

Sure, feet are fine.  But do you know who else has feet, and could easily play a rudimentary kicking game? 

Monkeys.

And before you can object that monkeys also have hands, get out of here with that.  Monkeys have hands only in the sense that John Fetterman has cognitive ability.  Have you ever seen a monkey playing a violin concerto, or writing a hilarious political column with his so-called “hands?”

You have not.  So get back to me when you’ve got a couple of opposable thumbs, Dr. Zaius!  (Yes, that’s a trenchant Planet of the Apes reference.  Let’s see your average macaque come up with that!)

Where was I?

Oh yes.  

Because I’m a straight male who identifies as a straight male – not that there’s anything wrong with non-straight males… unless they don’t identify as males, in which case, get well soon – I love both college and pro football.

And after having lived more than three decades in a college town that has given the world both Tom Petty and the Fightin’ Gators, I’m very proud of my adopted hometown, and even more appreciative of SEC football in particular.

Have I spent many happy moments outside the Swamp (the great one, not the filthy, godforsaken one in DC) sitting cross-legged in front of the three statues of UF’s Heisman winners, Spurrier, Wuerffel and Tebow, you don’t need to ask, because you already know the answer?

If that sounds like I take this stuff a tad too seriously, I’ll counter by saying that those three are only my SECOND favorite trinity.  So I’ve got that going for me.

Anyway, my topic for today is Saturday night’s South Carolina – Tennessee game, which was amazing.  The unranked and three-touchdown underdog SC team defeated #5 TN by scoring 9 touchdowns!  I didn’t have a dog in that fight, but I always love a good underdog story, and this was a great one.

I especially love details like this:  The SC stadium has an incredible lighting system, with a giant horizontal superstructure built around and above the top of the stadium.  They’ve also got an apparatus for firing off multiple volleys of fireworks to celebrate each home-team touchdown.

Before Saturday’s game, the smart money said that they didn’t have to worry about firing too many volleys in their game against mighty Tennessee.  But they scored TDs on each of their 5 first-half possessions, firing double-volleys into the air each time. 

When they scored the first couple of second-half TDs, I noticed that they were firing only one volley each time.  And as they scored the final touchdown late in the last quarter, giving them 63 total points, they had no fireworks left, and had to be content with a potentially seizure-inducing light show.

That’s the beauty of SEC football: you can go into a game against a national powerhouse as an extreme underdog, and at the end of the night, your biggest problem with the game plan is that you run out of enough fireworks to celebrate your scores!

But more than any of that, I learned something new that has made me very happy.  It’s about the South Carolina pre-game team introduction, and the unbelievable cognitive dissonance-creating matching of music and lovably risible team traditions and mascots.

Many college football programs incorporate music into their in-game and pre-game routines.  Queen’s “We are the Champions” and “We Will Rock You,” are played often (some say too often) during games, as are the mesmerizing dirty guitar opening bars of AC/DC’s “Back in Black.”  More satisfying are Wisconsin’s playing House of Pain’s “Jump Around” and Florida’s playing Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” both during the break between the 3^rd and 4^th quarters.

Best of all (IMHO) is Virginia Tech’s use of Metallica’s sonic assault “Enter Sandman” as their players enter the stadium.  Over 80,000 people in the stadium – fans, the band, cops and EMTs, ROTC students in uniform, grandparents who risk breaking a hip – are pogo-sticking up and down as the music builds to a crescendo.  For a couple of minutes, the stadium registers on seismographs.

If you can watch that and not feel anything, you’re as dead inside as Joe Biden’s frontal cortex.

Which brings me to South Carolina’s pre-game ritual, which I’d never seen until Saturday night.  Rather than opening with an iconic rock guitar anthem, the good people of South Carolina have chosen – I swear I’m not making this up – Richard Wagner’s musical version of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra.”

If you think you don’t know that music, you do.  It was most famously used in Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”  It’s iconic, and portentous, and evocative of a somber, awe-inspiring, incipient apocalypse.

So South Carolina plays that music, while rhythmically synchronized flashing lights fire off around the stadium, and cheerleaders roll an elevated, black-draped contraption out onto the field.  And at the climactic moment, they drop the black panels to reveal the South Carolina mascot in a cage:

A guy in an absurd rooster outfit, who then starts gyrating and kicking with his comically oversized, puffy yellow bird feet.

I laughed so hard when I saw that, and I had to watch it three more times to appreciate all of the nuances.  How many ways do I love it?

At least four.

1. The SC real-life mascot is a fighting rooster.  Which is already a little weird.  There are many inspiring birds in sports iconography: teams all over the country are called the eagles, or the falcons, or the hawks.  Baltimore went all Edgar Allan Poe with the Ravens.  Auburn’s War Eagle is the best.

But a rooster?  Even though roosters are known for being belligerent – the spurs on their legs can do a lot of damage if you get too close – they don’t have the majesty or gravitas of a falcon or an eagle.

2. What is the name for the actual bird mascot at SC?  “Sir Big Spur.”  Which is great!

3. But it gets better, because a particular subset of roosters that are trained to fight are called “Gamecocks,” which gives the team its official name.  And that, of course, has given birth to a thousand funny, politically incorrect references, from “Go Cocks” apparel to the student seating section of the stadium, which is called the Cock Pit.

(In fact, until recently the women’s teams were called “the Lady Gamecocks.”  Which in these days of creepy dudes dominating actual females in female sports might have created a too-disturbing mental picture.)

Yes, I’m nearly 100 years old, and a refined scholar and a gentleman.  So you’d think I’d be above juvenile [game]cock-related humor.

But you’d be wrong. 

In fact, in a PC age when various sports teams are meekly changing their names, and the Redskins played for several years under the generically neutered moniker of “the Washington Football Team,” I appreciate even more the way that South Carolinians have steered into the [game]cock skid.

(By the way, if you’re looking for a good title for a gay porno movie – and you definitely should not be – you could do worse than that last phrase.)

4. The chicken-suited mascot’s name?  “Cocky,” of course.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen something more quintessentially American than the opening of that football game on Saturday night.   The juxtaposition of iconic high culture from two dour Germans and the unselfconscious joy of tens of thousands of people rocking a stadium in celebration of a grown man in a suit that looks like Foghorn Leghorn and Big Bird had a baby, before playing God’s favorite game?

Priceless.

Yes, it’s silly, and trivial, and more than a little goofy. But in a world in which we’re led by dimwitted narcissists, and when a huge number of my countrymen just said the country is on the wrong track and then voted for more of the same, I relish the visceral pleasure of an innocent, joyous celebration.

Does it hurt that each rocking stadium at gametime is also a sea of mostly red voters, or that you could count the number of America-hating 1619-project fans in all such stadiums on one hand? 

It does not.   

I am thankful for a lot this Thanksgiving – the chance for time with family, to concentrate my mind on everything we enjoy in life now, and on goals for the future.  As always, I am very grateful that CO created this site and gave me the chance to rant and mock, and also to get to know all of you in CO nation, and to take part in our now years-long buffet of conversation, commiseration, celebration and commentary.  

Not to mention juvenile humor and snarkery. 

So as you approach this holiday, please join me in also being thankful for the turkey that will grace our tables, and for that other symbolic, great American fowl:

Cocky, the ridiculous South Carolina mascot.

Fetterman/Cocky the Gamecock, 2024!

Now that the GOP has at least secured a narrow majority in the House, I can finally ease up on my medicinal bourbon consumption.  (It turns out there’s a fine line between “problematic” and “medicinal.” Who knew?)

As the worst-case scenario gloom – i.e. the prospect of the Dems still controlling both houses of congress – has lifted, my thoughts have turned to family, Thanksgiving and Christmas.  I’ve been making good progress on converting my old garage into an organized, air-conditioned and heated workshop, and my conversational German practice has been going well.

I’ve also been cheered by generous CO nation member and all-around good egg Ivy Shafer, who hit the tip jar on my web page hard this month.  So thanks, Ivy!

Of course I’m still paying some attention to politics, and looking for silver linings in this early winter of our national discontent.  

One such glimmer of hope came today.  After lo these many centuries in power, Imhotep Pelosi has finally announced that she is stepping down in January.

So when the blessed day arrives and she hands over the gavel, her face an expressionless amalgam of botulinum toxins and the mysterious results of the embalmer’s art, she will turn and shamble over to a seat in the house chamber, trailing a strand of her burial cloth behind her.

Because of course she’s not leaving the House.  I mean why would she, after a mere 2342 years in power?

So the innocent residents of Washington (if there are any left) will still have to be frightened by the frequent cries of tourists who accidentally encounter her: “Aiieeee!  The mummy walks among us!  Kill her with fire!”  

To make things more complicated, when the Fetter-Biden lumbers out to take his oath, I fully expect new shrieks of, “Aaiiieee!  The monster has escaped the castle.  Get the pitchforks and torches!”

I saw a headline on RedState this week that brought with it a sobering realization.  It read, “Delusional Maniac Teases Run Against Trump in 2024.” 

Sadly, I was quickly able to make a dozen reasonable guesses as to whom the titular maniac in that headline might be.

By the way, for my money, Titular Maniac is hands down the worst of the 70’s sexploitation slasher movies.

(I know, that one was beneath me.  But dammit, it made me laugh when it popped into my head.  And after that midterm I’ll take laughs from wherever I can get them.)

My first instinct was that the delusional maniac in question was probably Liz Cheney.  But then I thought of ex-president of the world Stacy Abrams.  Then Gretchen Whitmer.  Then Gavin Newsom, Joe Biden (RIP), and Que Mala.

Asa Hutchinson – the actual delusional maniac in this story – wouldn’t even have made my top 30 list of Washington no-talent imbeciles likely to believe him/herself worthy of a presidential run. 

Again, it’s not a good sign for our country when someone calls one of our high-profile national politicians a delusional maniac, and we cannot even narrow down the list of pols that that label could apply to.

Finally, as regular readers know, I love a running joke.  In general, I think if a joke is funny the first time, it gets really tired the fourth or fifth time around.  But if you stick with it and keep hammering it, it starts becoming funny again. 

Thus the familiar lines I return to again and again, ad hilarium.  (That’s right.  Not “ad nauseum.”)  #wemustneverstopmockingher.  The Cadaver in Chief.  Imhotep Pelosi.

In that vein, I’ve been ending most of my columns for the last several years with a mock suggestion of “Avenatti/ Dullard du Jour, 2024.” 

It’s been my small way of reminding everyone that a few years ago, a bunch of the Dems and MSM talking heads became temporarily priapic over the transparently phony Creepy Porn Lawyer, touting him as a potential presidential candidate, despite his evident unfitness to do anything but pander to hateful leftists and steal from gullible porn stars.

But now that Avenatti is in the can for four years, I’ve given up on his chances to top the Dem ticket in ’24.  But thankfully, at least one prominent lefty has put forth a worthy successor to pick up Avenatti’s banner of terribleness.   

I give you MSNBC’s Katie Tur.  As in, “Katie Tur said something really insightful today.”

Said nobody ever.

Katie and superannuated hack Andrea Mitchell (Oh how I miss Rush, and his distinctive, nasal pronunciation of “Andrea Mitchell!”) were so giddy with the non-red-wave mid-term results that they got out over their straight-jackets with some presidential candidate speculation.

Sorry, that’s “skis.”  They got out over their skis.

Honest mistake.

Tur stated “Fetterman, as a nominee at some point for president” could be a possibility. “I know there’s some variables, obviously, but I just, you know, what he did in the super-red, deep-red parts of Pennsylvania… it makes you wonder about his future.” 

Yes Katie, we all should wonder about his future.  As in, will he ever regain cognitive and speech functions enough to do an even minimally competent job as a senator in the future?

But Mitchell, who is old enough to know better – and to BE better, for that matter – went right along with Tur, pointing out that after spending “a lot of time covering this race, and with Pennsylvania politics, going back some decades,” she was impressed with the way Fetterman performed.  She pointed out that he did better than both Trump and Biden in PA.

The former point should be a wake-up call to PA voters, and the latter is a well-deserved insult to Biden.

So as we begin to look toward the 2024 campaign (shudder), I give you…

Fetterman/Katie “the terrible” Tur, 2024!

Let me say up front that I think the country owes a big debt of gratitude to Trump.  Not only did he spare us the hell-scape of a Hillary presidency, he governed much more conservatively than anyone since Reagan.  You all know the record – 3 originalist SC justices, cutting taxes and regulations, booming economy, energy independence, a less-porous border, no foreign wars, etc.

I was very skeptical of Trump in ’16 and voted for him with trepidation.  But his performance won me over, and I voted for him enthusiastically in ’20.  I’m not sure that election was “stolen” from him, but I’m certain that it was rigged, in many ways (the MSM tying him up in hoax scandals, suppressing the Hunter laptop, holding back news of the vaccine until after the election, etc. and etc.), and I completely sympathize with his justified outrage at the way he was treated.   

I share that outrage.

Having said all that, Trump has significant flaws (as do we all), chief among them a huge ego and impulsive lack of discipline.

In general, I don’t hold the former against him too much, because I don’t think that anyone without a big ego ever becomes president.  Obama, for example, literally said that his election would begin the healing of the earth and the receding of the tides, and that he thought he knew more about any subject than his advisors/specialists.  He also built fake Greek temple columns for one of his rallies, and he bragged about having a pen and a phone, so he didn’t need to deal with trivialities like the democratic process.   Etc. and etc.

Ego can sometimes motivate one to achieve worthy goals, as it often did for Trump at his best.  If he had enough common sense to know how a strong economy works, and thus governed conservatively, should I really care whether he helped the economy get stronger because he wanted people to succeed, or because he wanted a glowing name in history for presiding over a strong economy?

Sure, it would be nice if a leader really behaved out of selfless devotion to country.  But since that’s pretty rare, I’ll take the one who does the right thing, even if he’s doing it for mixed reasons.

I look at most human endeavors the same way.  Great writers, artists and musicians produce great books, art and music for a variety of reasons: to get women, to get rich, to get famous, to share a gift with the world.  As long as we get great books, art and music from them, I don’t particularly care whether their motives were high, low or mixed.  (Spoiler alert: 99% of humans’ motivations for working hard at anything are mixed.)

But a huge ego can be devastatingly counter-productive when combined with lack of discipline.  Trump bashing Dems and critics when they had no legitimate point was a thing of beauty and a joy to behold; his bashing Rosie O’Donnell for being fat, or McCain for having been captured was counter-productive and small.

Many times – and much more since the 2020 election – Trump’s ego has led him to hurt his party (and, I think, the country) in the service of personal grudges.

Biden was able to do much of the terrible damage he’s done because we lost both GA senate seats in the 2020 run-offs.  We lost both contests – in a reddish state – by very small margins, and Trump’s focus on how he’d been screwed rather than on getting out the GOP vote did not help.

Kemp in GA and DeWine in OH were the strongest gov candidates in their primaries – and both won on Tuesday – but Trump held grudges against both and did what he could to sabotage them. He put Dr. Oz over the top in the PA primary because of personal feelings, rather than any evidence of electability.

Worst of all, IMHO, have been his recent attacks on DeSantis.  To give any GOP governor a caustic nickname at a rally three days before the midterms was purely selfish.  (Why would he even be talking about GOP polling about primaries for the 2024 race when he’s supposed to be rallying the base to kick some Dem butt on 11/8?)  To continue taking other shots at RDS this week – along with Youngkin! — can be explained only by Trump’s personal insecurities.

One of the virtues of Trump’s fighting style was that rarely started a fight, but he was a quick counter-puncher.  But RDS hasn’t attacked Trump at all, and Trump is lashing out anyway, and in a way that cannot help the conservative cause.

This pains me to write, because again, I think Trump accomplished a lot in his presidency.  And after the weak-tea invertebrates who wouldn’t even take their own side in a fight whom the GOP had been running – Romney, McCain, even W, though I admire a lot about him – Trump demonstrated the value of joining the fight and punching back.

But you want to punch your opponent — not the referee, the ring girl, and your own corner people!

DeSantis has a solid conservative record that combines the best aspects of Trump’s guts and combativeness, without the negative baggage.  DeSantis has picked the right battles – over covid lockdowns and mask mandates, illegals being shipped into Florida, CRT and wokeness in schools, etc. – and he’s waged them as a disciplined, happy warrior.

I know that whoever we nominate, the Dems and MSM (but I repeat myself) are going to demonize and smear him, and they’ll do their best to give RDS the Trump treatment, too.  But I trust DeSantis more than Trump to withstand those attacks and strike back judiciously.

Finally, from a Machiavellian, practical viewpoint, I’ve got to look at the cost-benefit of both candidates.

Trump’s negatives are baked in; he’s got what CO called “a titanium ceiling.” Whether we like it or not, around 40-45% of the American electorate hate his guts, and will never vote for him, no matter who he is running against. 

Even if he kept all of his earlier support – and after the last week, and his bad-optics attacks on the best-performing GOP candidates on 11/8, he won’t – his path to winning in 2024 is not promising.

He has already run against two of the weakest opponents since the fall of Rome.  He managed to thread the needle and narrowly defeat the repugnant and unpopular Cankles McPantsuit in 2016, and even in the best-case scenario he fought to a draw (or possibly a super-narrow victory, absent fraud) with the demented, deceased Brandon, the second-most unpopular nominee in history in 2020. 

For what it’s worth – and remember, I’m the guy with the defective wizard hat and the clouded-over crystal brain – everything I’ve seen of DeSantis tells me that he’s got a lot more upside than downside. 

Though it would pain me to lose a fantastic governor, I’m hoping he runs in 2024.

Avenatti/Fetter-biden, 2024!

Well, obviously my wizard hat is on the fritz, my crystal brain has some kind of wiring issue, and my gut has betrayed me.  I expected a red tsunami, and we all know how that worked out.  

Many conservatives are now looking for someone to blame, and there are a lot of candidates.  Feckless Rinos, lying Dems, Trump, bad GOP candidates, a corrupt MSM, suspicious poll malfunctions in AZ, pollsters who couldn’t pick the winner of a one-horse race, and on and on.

There’s probably some truth in each theory, because there is plenty of blame to go around.

For example, many have pointed to bad GOP candidates, and said Walker and Oz lost (though Walker could still prevail in a run-off) because of their manifest flaws.  And yes, if the GOP had nominated better candidates in those cases, they may have won.   

But are Rafael Warnock (a phony, unqualified and racist “pastor” who preaches racism while he’s also evicting poor blacks from his shady, church-owned real estate) and John Fetterwoman (a hulking combination of life-long failure, leftist extremism and crippling cognitive dysfunction) better candidates?

The latter is especially hard to understand, because PA has voted for years like a purple state, which means that a moderate – on either side – should get way more votes than an extremist on either side.  In which case a mushy moderate quasi-conservative like Oz should get a lot more votes than a far-lefty like Fetterman, even without the stroke.

And if bad candidate quality were the reason so many GOPers lost, how can we make sense of Kari Lake, Tudor Dixon and Lee Zeldin all losing to absolutely awful candidates?

Yes, the pollsters were terrible, again!  But for the first time, they were terrible in the opposite direction, over-estimating GOP performance, as in races where Bolduc, Zeldin, and Dixon were supposed to be tied, but lost by close to double-digits.    

There is so much in this election to be confused by.  But let me suggest a theory that none of us really want to hear: Many, many of our fellow citizens voted for Democrats, despite claiming to dislike the policies that those Democrats have been pushing, and while fully knowing that those Dems have pushed those policies. 

I know.  That doesn’t make sense to me either.  But hear me out.      

It’s a core part of human nature to want to blame the other side when things aren’t going well.  In years when the federal government is split, with one party holding the White House and the other in charge of congress, partisans easily do that.

Conservatives with a GOP congress blame the Dem president for everything bad, and lefties with their president and a GOP congress blame the congress, and vice versa. It’s an easy and a natural argument to make, for both sides.

But for the last two years, one party has been in total control of the government. And for the last year and a half, including all the way up through election eve, the vast majority of American voters have told pollsters that they hate the results.

Biden’s overall presidential approval is in the low 40s (among the lowest of the last half century), and his approval by independents – the group that has determined election outcomes in the last half-dozen cycles — on election eve was 28%!  The other most reliable election outcome predictor is the right track/wrong track number, and that is around 33/66 – again, one of the lowest recorded numbers in more than half a century! 

Those two numbers alone should guarantee a disastrous outcome for the president’s party.  When you add the fact that the Dems have had total control of the WH and congress, you remove the only reasonable counter-argument for why they would get the slap on the wrist they got, rather than the Tyson-ian beat-down that those numbers should portend.

Tens of millions said that the biggest issues for them were inflation, the economy, crime and the border.  And then many of them voted for the party and the politicians who have demonstrably increased inflation, harmed the economy, increased crime and flooded the country with illegals by opening the border. 

After a couple days to sift through the data, I still don’t understand it.   I’m going to be interested to see what smart people on our side come up with in terms of analysis or explanation, but in the meantime, I’m still wrapping my head around the idea that millions of people who are disgusted by Dem policies gave them only the mildest of rebukes.

But the Simpson coat of arms has a Latin motto on it, which I am not making up:  Nil desperandum.  Which means “never despair.”

And even though these are the times that try cautious optimists’ cautious optimism, let’s look at the silver linings on Tuesday’s gray cloud.

Three of the most obnoxious Democrat candidates were soundly thrashed on Tuesday.  President of Earth Stacy Abrams is once again Governor of Nowhere, Beta O’Rourke became a three-time loser by losing a butt-kicking contest to a man in a wheelchair, and Charlie lost to RDS by 20 points!  (I could have lost by less than that, and my closing statement would have been, “Please vote for Ron DeSantis.”) 

For the first time in over 40 years, the congressional leader of a party — Sean Patrick Maloney – lost his seat.  To make that even sweeter, his seat was in a blue district in the blue state of NY! 

Barring some real long-shot reversals, we are going to have a majority in the house, which means that we’ll have a check on Biden’s worst impulses, and in January we’ll get to see the Speaker’s gavel torn from the desiccated mummy hands of Imhotep Pelosi.

And then there’s Florida, the state the tsunami did not forget. 

How do I feel about my adopted home state of over 30 years, you ask?

If I may paraphrase the Canadian national anthem, “O, Florida, our home and native land, true patriot love, in all thy sons command!”

Not only did RDS and Rubio beat their opponents like rented mules, we also turned Miami-Dade red, added 4 house seats (single-handedly giving the GOP a big chunk of their congressional margin of victory nationwide), and achieved super-majorities in both state houses. 

After barely edging out a meth-head, gay-hooker-enthusiast opponent by only 30K votes four years ago, DeSantis won this time by 1.5 million votes! 

THIS is how the entire national election was supposed to look.   

Which brings me to some closing thoughts on a debate that has begun among those of us at CO nation, and around the country: Trump or DeSantis in ‘24?

Since this column is getting long, I’m going to save my thoughts on that for Monday.

I closed my column this past Monday by referring to our long, dark night of the political soul, and hoping that the dawn would begin to break on Wednesday. 

Unfortunately, the demented Fetter-biden staggered out of his fetid cave and saw his shadow.  So while I still believe that springtime is coming, it looks like we may have two more years of winter.

In the meantime, we’ve got to gather around our digital campfire, bind our political wounds and comfort each other, and keep that fire burning until 2024.

And with the powers vested in me by the great and powerful CO, allow me to deputize you all as honorary Simpsons (malfunctioning wizard hats and all) with these solemn words:

Nil desperandum, people!

As we face the long-awaited election, I have two ways of looking at the various races: with my gut instinct, and with my brain.  Both are giving me contradictory input.

My brain tells me to try to honestly consider poll numbers, because the human tendency toward confirmation bias – I’ll seek out and cling to info that I want to be true, and overlook/dismiss info that I don’t want to believe – leads to self-deception and heartbreak.

But my trusty martino oblongata also tells me to take all polls with an entire shaker of salt.  The national polls over the last three cycles (2016, 2018 and 2020) have been more inaccurate than I remember them ever being before, so it’s hard to put a lot of faith in them.  

Many of them are obviously biased, partisan push-polls, meant to shape the election rather than accurately report on it.  Others that might not be consciously partisan are either sloppy or lazy, or both, as when they report on the opinions of three different groups – all adults, registered voters, and likely voters – as if they were interchangeable.

As I understand it, those groups consistently behave differently.  “All adults” are always farther to the left than “registered voters,” who are farther to the left than “likely voters.”  In the last three cycles, the “likely voters” have been much closer to the final outcome than any other groups, which makes perfect sense. 

Given that, I can’t think of a legitimate reason why any pollster would even survey the first groups or cite their opinions within the last week or two before the elections.  And yet many of them do.

For example, on Friday I was watching Bret Baier reporting on a Fox News poll, and the storyline was that Oz and Walker have almost caught up to Fetterman and Warnock.  Which struck me as strange, since I’ve been reading that both GOP hopefuls have had slight leads for over a week.

Then I looked at the bottom of the screen, and saw it: “poll of registered voters, taken between 10/26 and 10/30.”

So the poll was between 5 – 9 days old – in a fast-moving environment in which both states have been trending toward the GOP – and surveyed registered voters, whom Fox knows to be skewed to the left by at least a couple of points.

Polls like that – the old saying goes – should not just be put aside lightly.  They should be thrown with great force. 

As an outsider and an amateur, my impression is that the Real Clear Politics method – they aggregate a bunch of polls and report on the average of them – is probably more accurate than most individual polls.  At least they give a clearer sense of the trends in public opinion.

But as soon as I’ve said that, it sticks in my craw.  Why should we toss a bunch of polls that we know are outliers and very likely skewed into the entire data base?  Wouldn’t doing so necessarily erode the accuracy of the aggregate?

So I looked at an intriguing page on the Real Clear Politics site, which showed a ranking of the track records of the biggest multi-state polling outfits, in two separate listings.  One displayed the accuracy of pollsters in just the 2020 presidential and senate races, and the other displayed the average accuracy of the pollsters in the presidential, senate and governors’ races, in the 2016, 2018 and 2020 races.

Both seem valuable to me.  The 2020 ranking shows the accuracy of pollsters last time around, and the other one shows who was best over the last three cycles.

The accuracy rates varied a little, but there is also a lot of consistency in both lists.  Of the 18 pollsters ranked on the 2020 list, Monmouth was 18^th, Quinnipiac was 17^th, and CNN was 16^th.  Of the 23 on the three-election averages, Quinnipiac was last, Monmouth was 18^th, and CNN was 15^th. 

So why are those pollsters even in business anymore?  Why would anyone take them seriously when they screwed the pooch consistently, over three cycles?

There are a lot of familiar names in the bottom half of both lists: NY Times, Marist, ABC, Fox and PPP.  

Four pollsters were in the top 5 of both lists:  Trafalgar (tied for #1 in 2020, #5 on average), Susquehanna (tied for #1 in 2020, 4^th on average), Insider Advantage (#3 in 2020, # 2 on average) and UMass Lowell (#5 in 2020, #3 on average). 

So my brain says to pay attention to the best of the polls, and the RCP averages.

But my gut says to tweak that data , to take into account what I feel confident about, even though I can’t put any numbers to it.

For example, I know that the Dems have been metaphysically horrible over the last two years.  They’ve screwed up foreign policy, domestic policy, the border, the economy, and covid response.  Biden is dead, Que Mala is brain dead, Mayor Pete likes dudes but is lousy at his job, Kewpie Doll KJP likes chicks but is lousy at her job.

The entire Dem leadership is a drunken Halloween party gone terribly wrong: a Mummy (Pelosi), an Indian (#wemustneverstopmockingher), a guy in drag (“Admiral” Rachel/Richard Levine) a Valley Girl cheerleader (AOC), the Creature from the African-American Lagoon (Maxine Waters), Lurch (Kerry), drunk uncle (Schumer), Sea Biscuit (Hillary), the Thing (Jerry Nadler), a human whoopie cushion (Eric Swallwell), the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse (the Squad), and Michael Strahan in drag (Stacy Abrams).    

So these people cannot (please God!) hold on to either house of Congress.

Also, I’m not convinced that all of the GOP momentum in the last several weeks is what the pundits say it is: a significant shift in public opinion, right at the end.  Their candidates have been bad all along, and the state of the nation now is only slightly worse than it was in the spring and summer.

So my gut tells me that the latest polls are finally beginning to show a more accurate version of reality, mostly because a poll’s reliability is judged by its final numbers, rather than its numbers from earlier in the year.  

In addition, late deciders generally break against the incumbent.  Especially in this cycle, when virtually nothing has been an October-surprise-style news story that worked in Dems’ favor, I would expect a significant GOP advantage in late-breakers.

Finally, while the accuracy of polls has been questionable at best, they’ve been consistent in one way: they’ve always erred in favor of Dems.  I recently read that on average, polls have given Dems 3-4 points more than they actually got in recent elections. 

So my hunch is that I should add 3-4 points in most races to the GOP contender.  If that hunch is accurate, then the neck-and-neck races are actually GOP wins, and the slightly trailing GOP contenders might actually be neck-and-neck.

Predictions

While I don’t have a crystal ball, I do have my crystal brain (hat tip to Adam Carolla) and my purple-felt-embossed-with-gold-stars wizard hat, which I’ve retrieved from its bullet-proof Lucite case just for this occasion.

As soon as I lowered the wizard hat onto my head, the mists parted, and I realized that my gut is more optimistic than my brain. So here are my slightly bi-polar predictions:

Senate:  

Brain – GOP ends up with 53 seats; Gut – GOP gets 55 or even 56. 

GA and PA – Walker and Oz are mediocre candidates, but Warnock and Fetterman are worse

OH, NC and FL – once GOP leaners are now comfortably Red

NV and WI – once tight races are now R + 2-3

NH, AZ and WA – formerly long-shots, Bolduc and McMasters are only down 1, and Smiley is only down 3.  If the polls are off by 2-3, two of these three races – possibly all 3! — could all break our way.

House:

RCP gives a range of between 14 – 48 GOP pick-ups, which is a comically large spread.  It’s like saying, “Next year we’ll earn between $100 and $1 million.”

Considering that the Dems are throwing money into what should be deep blue districts, and the GOP is too, it doesn’t make sense that the wave won’t at least double the low-end estimate. 

Brain – we pick up 34 seats; Gut – we pick up 40

Governors:

Brain – GOP picks up 3 seats; Gut – we pick up 5, and possibly even 6 or 7

Kemp stomps Abrams in GA, DeSantis drives all before him in FL, Abbott savors the lamentations of the Beta male in TX. 

Lake (AZ), Michels (WI) and Lombardo (NV) win by more than the narrow margins that RCP has for them.  

RCP has Whitmer winning by 4 in MI and Hochul winning by 6 in NY, but the former is the Wicked Witch of the Mid-West, and the latter is the Wicked Witch of the Northeast, and my gut tells me that we may just drop a house on both of them.

RCP has Grisham (D) in NM and Walz (D) in MN both up by 4.  But if my adjustment of adding 3-4 to most GOP candidates’ totals is accurate, my gut says we’ve got a puncher’s chance.

Okay folks, it’s time to cowboy up, and prove my gut right.    

Get out there and vote!

It’s been a long, dark night of the soul, but tomorrow the dawn can begin to break.

Since every sensible writer in Christendom is talking about Tuesday’s election races – and since I’m not smart enough to come up with anything they’re not already chewing over – I thought I’d wrong-foot you, and discuss two other stories.

First, I’d like to give a sincere tip of the hat to my second-favorite Supreme Court Justice – no one can top Clarence Thomas for me – Samuel Alito. 

Regular readers may remember that I wrote a couple of columns in June and July about the clear thought and strong writing from Thomas and Alito in the guns and abortion cases.  (If you are interested and haven’t read them, you can go to Martinsimpsonwriting.com and scroll back to the last column in June and first in July.)

Now we come to this week’s court hearings of affirmative action cases, and my heroes are back at it again.  Both justices reduced the pro-AA lawyers to stuttering incoherence, though to be fair to those lawyers, they were trying to defend an argument that is logically and morally indefensible.

At one point, Alito asked how the discriminating colleges decide what metrics to use for determining ethnic heritage.  The poor lawyer had to admit that they rely on self-reporting from the students.  Then Alito took him down a rhetorical path filled with roots to trip on and rakes to step on.

And the lawyer tripped over and stepped on every one.

Alito asked if having just one minority grandparent would allow a student to claim minority status.  The lawyer said, “Yes, we rely on self-reporting.”  Alito said, “All right.  One great grandparent.”

The lawyer sounded like someone explaining how boys can really be girls.  “If that person believe that that is the accurate expression of their identity…”

Alito said, “One great-great grandparent.  Are you going to make me go on?”

And the point was made: the current discriminatory system is arbitrary and irrational, and wide open to illegitimate manipulation.

And then he brought up the mastodon in the room. 

As in, the Pale Powhatan.  The Albino Apache.  The Translucent Tonto. Grandma Squanto herself.

That’s right, people: Slammin’ Sammy Alito went full Lizzie Warren on their arses! 

“It’s family lore that we have an ancestor who was an American Indian.”  [The lawyer stammers something about, “in that circumstance…it would not be accurate…”]  “Well, I identify as an American Indian because I’ve always been told that some ancestor back in the old days was an Indian.”

The lawyer finally had no other option than the last resort of the leftist official: tell the truth.  “Yes, so in that circumstance, it would be very unlikely that that person was telling the truth.”

Yes!  Yes it would. 

Finally, and maybe for the first time ever, Elizabeth Warren’s face must have been really and truly red!

#alitomustneverstopmockingher

On another subject, I have one other note to add to my recent thoughts on the Paul Pelosi attack. 

Pelosi’s attacker was mentally ill and in this country illegally, in a Democrat-run state that has been obsessed with making sure that the police are powerless to stop people in both categories from committing crimes.  That obsession made the attack possible.

To be clear, I am very sorry that Pelosi was attacked, and I pray that he will make a full recovery.  Any injury at 82 is scary, and being struck by a hammer is serious no matter the age or condition of the victim.

But as I’ve written before, it would be a much fairer world if the people who pay the price for the Democrats’ horrendous crime-encouraging policies were the Dem politicians and the most committed of their supporters.   

If they insist that illegals must be allowed to flood the country, those illegals should be funneled straight to deep blue areas at least, and straight into the yards and houses of the rich/extremist Dems if possible.  If car jackers are to be immediately released, release them as close to the garages of Dem pols as possible. 

If recidivist, predatory criminals must be put back on the streets, put them on streets as close to the pro-criminal Dems as possible, so that their future victims will be those who worked hardest to get them back on the street in the first place.

If not for the actions of his wife and her political party, Paul Pelosi would never have been attacked, because the whack-job, hemp-peddling BLM enthusiast would have been deported back to his native  Canada.

Which would have been a win-win.  First because he would have been Black-Face Trudeau’s problem.  (And that is one fascist creep who deserves more problems.)

Second, because the whack-job would have inflicted on the world much less of his gross nudism, since freezing temperatures are not congenial for uncovered genitalia.  Especially male genitalia, which I am reliably informed, begins to mimic female genitalia, in terms of becoming… um… internalized.

(If you just thought of California Governor Newsom, there’s a reason.)

As we head into this weekend – which we pray will be the last one before our partial deliverance from the gloom, despair and cultural sclerosis of malevolent leftist rule – I thought it might be fun to see what CO nation’s predictions for Tuesday are.

I haven’t run this by the Great and Powerful CO, but maybe he can put up a thread where we can all post our predictions?

I know:  it feels like making overly sunny predictions might somehow jinx us, and we don’t know how much we can trust any polls after they’ve been so erratic and flawed in the last several cycles.  And in close contests, how confident are we that there won’t be cheating and shenanigans?

But I’d like to hear what you all are expecting on Tuesday.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, these prayers aren’t going to pray themselves, and this bourbon isn’t going to drink itself, and I’ve got a column of my predictions to write by Monday morning.

It’s been a long 16 years under Brandon the Incontinent, but Tuesday is coming.

I know I just posted a column yesterday, but multiple readers asked for my take on the Pelosi attack story, and I’m always flattered that anyone cares enough to ask.  (I realize that you’ve got many choices in deliverers of political analysis and snarkery, and I appreciate that you follow the CO site and read my columns, too!)

So here are my trigger-warning-accompanied thoughts on the MSM coverage of the Pelosi attacker, which I have tried to soften and sugarcoat for my high-class, clean-cut readers:

Our “journalists” are mostly degenerate scumbags.  

They are nothing more than mendacious, ethically desiccated hacks in service of leftist causes generally, and the Democrat party specifically.  I don’t know how they can look at themselves in the mirror, or sleep at night, or live with their choice of profession.

I’d sooner trust one of Hunter Biden’s bargain-basement hookers if she told me that she loved me before I’d trust anything coming out of the mouth of any reporter at any of the networks.

When I think of the high ethical standards typical of our partisan press, I always think of Nina Burleigh, a former White House correspondent for Time magazine covering the Clinton White House, as well as a frequent contributor to every leftist rag you’ve ever heard of (HuffPo, Salon, Rolling Stone, WaPo, NYT, Salon, Slate, etc.).

Burleigh’s most significant contribution to the history of journalism is her archetypally perfect summary of the viewpoint of an enlightened leftist journalist.  To wit, her infamous quote, which I swear I am not making up, after covering Clinton’s rape-tastic gropey-ness for 8 years: “I’d be happy to give him a b*** j** just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”   

So, yeah.  That’s the kind of strong, empowered lefty feminist I think of when I think of our political press.

But in the 72 hours since Paul Pelosi was attacked, the desperate MSM has behaved in ways that make “Knee-Pad Nina” (nickname copyright by me, right now) look like the Virgin Queen of Chastity Island.

Never mind that leftist pols and celebrities have been spouting inflammatory, violence-urging language for the last 6 years straight.  (You can give examples as well as I can: Melting-Face Maxine Waters’ exhortation to “get in their faces in public,” Tim Ryan’s “we’ve got to kill MAGA supporters and target them,” Pelosi’s daughter and a dozen other Dems’ variations on “Rand Paul’s attacker was right,” slutty old Madonna’s fantasies about blowing up the Trump White House, etc. and etc.) 

And never mind that a bunch of leftist dimwits and mentally ill people have acted on their inflammatory language: 

• The Bernie bro who shot up the GOP softball game and nearly killed Steve Scalise.
• The afore-mentioned would-be murderer of Rand Paul.
• The disturbed young man who travelled cross-country to try to kill Justice Kavanaugh. 
• The adult idiot who a month ago murdered a young Republican by running him down with his car because he thought the kid was – in Biden’s favorite phrase, after “mmm, your hair smells good, little girl” – “a Republican extremist.”
• The dozens of anonymous, cowardly infanticide-enthusiasts who have torched or vandalized many pregnancy centers.
• The mobs of cowardly antifa and BLM rioters who murdered, looted, vandalized and torched their way through many American cities for months in 2020.  

Again, I could go on with more examples, and so could you.

Even though the MSM knew the pattern of commonplace and widespread leftist political violence –and the comparatively extremely rare pattern of right-wing political violence – within 24 hours of the attack on Pelosi, they had jumped to the immediate conclusion that the attacker was a right-wing MAGA extremist.

Here is the evidence they had to go on:

He is a long-time resident of Berkeley, California.  (Yes, THAT Berkeley.  The hotbed of MAGA fanatics.)

He is a maker of hemp “jewelry.”  (I’m looking at my hemp wedding ring right now.  It says, “Co-Exist.”)

He is a nudist.  (I don’t have to tell you about those Heritage Foundation dinners, with their “no tie, all tail” debauchery.)

He most recently lived in an old hippie school bus covered with mostly crazy and/or left-wing slogans, parked outside his ex-girlfriend’s house.  (I’m sure that describes the living arrangements of most of CO nation.)

His girlfriend goes by “Gypsy.” (The top three most popular conservative women’s nicknames?  Gypsy, Saffron, and Fang Fang.  True story.)

Look, we all know that this guy is a drugged-out and/or mentally ill loon, or both.  To the extent that he has any coherent political thoughts at all, they are more left-wing than right, but they are irrelevant to his depraved and violent actions.

The leftist media spinners’ brigade knows that too. But they’ve sold their souls to a failed and destructive ideology, and they’re desperate to turn the tide of the red wave that is going to hit them (please God!) next Tuesday. 

And just when we think they’ve sunk as low as they can go, they take a hit of mouthwash, strap on the knee pads, and try to sell the story of the right-wing, Berkeley-ite, nudist hemp-peddler whose deranged behavior was caused by his devotion to Trump.

Those poor, benighted idiots are in an even worse position than Nina Burleigh was in.  Because they’ve debased themselves completely, and they STILL got Hillary-slapped by the Dobbs decision.

And now they’re facing what looks like the loss of both houses of congress, with their dignity tattered, and their reputation left in ruins.

And a really bad taste in their mouths.

Avenatti/Knee-Pad Nina, 2024!

I have four quick stories to comment on today.

First up, Elon Musk’s takeover at Twitter makes me very happy.  He’s got his quirks, and he’s no conservative.  I think he paid too much, and he’s going to be battling uphill against an entire lefty media machine in everything he does there.

But he appreciates freedom of speech, and he’s putting his money where his mouth is, so I’m rooting for him. 

I normally don’t celebrate people losing their jobs, but I will happily make some exceptions:  leftist politicians, some lawyers, Tony Fauci. 

But nobody deserved a good firing more than the top dogs at Twitter, and their smug little mini-me woke censors/employees.  Musk immediately fired CEO Pagan Narwhal (I’m not going to waste time looking up his actual name), and the arrogant bully in charge of their Big Brother speech suppression team, Vijaya Gadde.  (Oddly enough, I think “Vijaya” is Hindi for “John,” and her last name is pronounced “Gotti.”) (Or it should be.)

I loved reading all of the pseudo-brave tweets that a parade of hateful lefties posted after Musk took over, to the effect of, “I’ll stay on here speaking truth to power until Fuhrer Musk throws me off!”

Their clueless obliviousness is inspiring!  After they’ve spent years censoring and cancelling everyone who disagrees with them, they are dumb enough to: 1. Act morally outraged at the prospect of being given the same treatment, and 2. Not understand that our side is not like them, and won’t kick them off. 

We don’t want to silence people who disagree with us.  We actually like a free marketplace of ideas, and a healthy debate.  Their ideas have been failing since 1917, when the Russians first established a Marxist theocracy, and we like nothing better than watching them expound and expose their self-refuting ideas repeatedly.

And to the extent that some of our beliefs and ideas are wrong – and because we’re human, that will regularly be the case – a vigorous back-and-forth will help us discover the error of our ways.  And then we’ll trim our sails and change course accordingly. 

In the meantime, it’s fun to watch the squealing of the wokesters, as they prepare to depart.  Don’t let the door hit you on your non-binary butts, kids!

2. The lead-up to the mid-terms is getting more and more enjoyable.  

I know that the left and the MSM (but I repeat myself) will try to get away with as much cheating, fraud and propaganda as they can, but the last 21 months of their total control have been so horrific that I don’t think they can escape the well-deserved whipping they’ve got coming.

It’s especially satisfying to see the way they’ve so misjudged the most important issues to most Americans.  In the leftist bubble – which must prevent any independent thought from escaping more than a black hole prevents light from escaping — the most pressing issues are pronouns, trans-ing as many kids as possible, January 6^th, and abortion.

They can’t believe what a non-event their January 6^th show trials have been.  They really seem not to know that regular people watched leftist mobs vandalize and destroy thousands of buildings and assault thousands of people all over the country – doing literally billions of dollars of damage, and killing several dozen innocent citizens – for over half a year in 2020.

Compared to that, the vast majority of Americans recognize that several hundred yahoos acting like idiots and doing some damage during a three-hour mini-riot at the capitol is a bad thing.  But when they hear it called worse than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, they roll their eyes and turn the channel.

Thus fewer Americans tuned in for the 1/6 clown show than watched the semi-final Korean soccer league match between Busan and Incheon.  (Go Snow Dragons!)

In normal America, most people laugh at those who declare their own pronouns, and are befuddled by the obsession over the idea that there are dozens of genders. 

When I asked my college students what all of the elements of “LGBTQIA+” even stood for, not one of them could give me a straight answer.

Boom!  Dad joke, when you least expect it!  

3. After the Fetterman debate debacle, I need to know about Pennsylvanians and how they vote, in order to understand how that Herman Munster with a goiter got to be their senate nominee in the first place. 

And it has nothing to do with the stroke.  God bless him, and I hope he recovers.

But he had a terrible resume before that.  As I understood it, he was the mayor of Braddock, a very small, very poor town in PA.  Less than 2000 people live there, and he won his first term as mayor by receiving 149 votes – one more than his rival.

He stayed for three terms, during which time the town lost about 1/3 of its population.  Unemployment and crime both went up.  He continually failed to pay his own taxes, and ended up with more than 30 tax liens, and was sued by the school district twice.  He also was a serial no-show at council meetings, skipping at least 53 of the supposedly compulsory sessions.  

His mayoral salary was $150 per month.  He had a roof over his head only because his mom and dad gave him a $50k yearly allowance until he was 49 years old, and his sister sold him a house for $1.

His wealthy parents sent him to Harvard, but he was basically a failure in life until he was almost 50.

Then he got elected lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania.

How?!  Seriously, who did he defeat to win that position?

Then he somehow won the Dem senate primary this year, AFTER he had his stroke.  Again: how?  He was a complete failure, with far-left views, before the stroke. 

Afterwards, he was a complete failure with far-left views who couldn’t think clearly or say things.

How would you like to be the person he beat in the primary?  That guy had to be sitting in a bar, drinking with both hands while the tv behind the bar showed Fetterman’s forensic Gotterdammerung (I’m loving German!) with Dr. Oz.

If his friends are anything like my cousins, they’d be mocking him the whole time.  “HA! That bumbling dope beat you!”

Seriously.  There are 13 million people in PA, and they only have two US Senators.  How could the Dems not find anyone more qualified to run than John freaking Fetterman?!    

4. Let me end with one of my favorite topics: a criminal getting what’s coming to him story.

This one comes from Arkansas, where just after midnight on October 13^th, cops spotted a moron who they later identified as 38-year-old Christopher Gaylor driving a motorcycle with no license plate on it.  They later learned that his license was suspended, and the bike was unregistered and uninsured.

When they hit their lights, he took off, leading them on a chase that topped out at 100 mph, before he reached a residential area and dropped the bike and ran.  The cops pursued him on foot, and one of them hit him with a taser.

Hilariously, Gaylor was somehow carrying a gallon of gas in his backpack, and when the taser hit that, he exploded in a fireball.  He survived and is expected to make a full recovery, so if you can find the video online, it’s worth watching. 

I recommend that you get some popcorn, and watch it with the Benny Hill theme song playing.   After the initial explosion, he gets up and runs a few steps, then executes a pretty good example of the old “stop, drop and roll” routine.

Unfortunately for him, that doesn’t put out the fire, so it becomes more of a “stop, drop, roll and set some of the surrounding grass on fire” situation.

Fortunately for him, the cops grabbed a fire extinguisher and doused him a few moments later.    

The RedState story called Gaylor “Captain Kerosene,” which is pretty good.  I was thinking of a throw-back to an old Dan Akroyd SNL skit about dangerous Halloween costumes: Johnny Human Torch.

Gaylor was a white guy, but right now I’m guessing that he’s either red (in which case he could move to MA and challenge Lizzie Warren in the next Senatorial election — #wemustneverstopmockingher) or black (watch out, Cory Booker!). 

But say what you will about the wisdom of driving an unregistered, unlicensed motorcycle and carrying a gallon of gas on your back while you run from cops with tasers.

Christopher Gaylor would still be a better candidate for a US senate seat in Pennsylvania than John Fetterman. 

Happy Halloween everybody!

Avenatti/ Human Torch Gaylor, 2024!