Mayor Pete, 2 Dems’ Reactions to Crime, & Changing the End of My Columns (posted 2/20/23)

Today I’ve got three topics: Mayor Pete, two Dems’ reactions to crime, and a note on changing the end of my columns.  So let’s get to it.

Mayor Pete looks terrible yet again.  I know it’s been said a million times – or possibly just this once — but Secretaries of Transportation are just like offensive linemen in the NFL: the less you hear about them, the better. 

(Quick, can any of you name any Transportation Secretaries before this guy?   Have you forgotten Frederick Amtrak, or Johnny Boeing, or Carlyle Chrysler?  See!  Those are all made-up names, and none of you knew that.  And there’s no reason you should have.)

The only time in a game when you hear the lineman’s name is after a 56-yard touchdown run is called back because of a holding call on the hapless, should-be-anonymous lineman.

Similarly, when have we heard Mayor Pete’s name?  When he ran for president, it turned out that he had not done a good job of filling potholes in Indiana.  (I know that may sound like some kind of gay slang, but it’s a real thing.)  Then he was defeated in the primaries by Joe Biden. 

If that wasn’t shame enough, he became Sec Trans (again, not an odd sexual reference, but the accepted abbreviation for his job title), his only qualification being his sexual preference, since he had no job experience involving transportation since playing with choo-choos when he was a kid.  (And the pothole thing, which I guess is transportation-adjacent.  And a negative.)

Then he takes office, and we have the biggest supply chain cluster-schtup in our history.  And where was Pete?  AWOL from work for months, so that he could take his time to not breast feed the baby he didn’t carry or deliver, and to fight off the post-partum depression he didn’t experience, since he was never involved pre-partum or even mid-partum with a baby. 

The kicker was that nobody even knew he’d been away from the job for months, or missed him in any way!

By comparison, I retired from my professor job 9 months ago, and the university is still flying the flag at half-mast over it.  Faculty have stopped publishing, students have become listless and directionless, and the football team had a lackluster season.  (Half-time pep talks were met with players muttering things like, “How are we supposed to go out there and give 110% when Dr. Simpson is gone?” And, “Yeah! Plus he made Shakespeare interesting, while at the same time being a hilarious genius!”) 

I can’t even go to a local supermarket without wearing a ball cap and a big fake Ron Swanson moustache as a disguise, and if anybody recognizes me it spreads like wildfire, and the next thing you know it turns into a big, “O captain, my captain,” scene from Dead Poets Society. 

But Mayor Pete takes 4 months off, and it doesn’t leave a ripple.  Then he gets back and starts emoting about how roads are racist, and construction crews have way too many white folks on them.  (Has he ever seen a construction crew?  And the Village People don’t count, because only one of them was a construction worker.)

And now a huge environmental disaster of a train derailment happens, and he leaps into action and writes a tepid press release about it… 11 days later.

Before you criticize that, though, remember that he may have been stuck at home for 10 days, struggling to produce nourishing milk out of his not-at-all-female chest.  Which sounds really, really hard.

This guy has been, literally, a train wreck. 

And even though the hapless Biden administration has not produced anything close to the political equivalent of a 56-yard touchdown run, Joe did recently manage to shoot down a defenseless, slowly drifting spy balloon.  And then he went full Leroy Jenkins (Google it), blasting everything in the sky for a week.  (Score so far: Illinois balloon club 0, Crazy Eddie’s Buy-here/Pay-here car lot balloon 0, one very confused high-flying American eagle 0 – USAF half-million-dollar missiles, 3!)   

That was the equivalent of the Biden administration finally getting a first down, but only on a penalty.  And then the giant Jumbo-tron at one end of the stadium flashes up a big picture of Pete’s gay-guy-cosplaying-as-Mad-Magazine’s-Alfred-E.-Neuman face.

And the entire left side of the stadium groans.  

From incompetence, we move on to incarceration.  As in, “Why don’t many Democrats want to put criminals in jail?”

Two stories illustrate the bad and the good.  First, in Oakland a 48-year-old woman named Jennifer Angel started a bakery in 2008, and has worked hard to keep it going, especially during the harsh lockdowns of the last few years.  (Guess which party runs Oakland?) 

Earlier this month a couple of thieves stole her purse as she was getting into her car.   She chased them to try to get the purse back, but she got caught in the door of their fleeing vehicle and dragged for 50 feet, dying of her injuries the next day.

It was definitely a tragedy, and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.  But what made the story unusual is that after her death, her friends and loved ones released a statement touting Angel’s longtime activism, which involved being both an anarchist and social justice warrior.

The mourners’ statement contradicted itself.  Early on it said, “We know Jen would not want to continue the cycle of harm by bringing state-sanctioned violence to those involved in her death [because she] did not believe in carceral punishment.”  But it closed by saying, “We wish for Jen’s legacy to be one of deep commitment to safety and dignity for everyone.”

It doesn’t make sense to say that you are committed to people’s safety, while saying that you don’t want the criminals who prey on them to be stopped and put in jail.  Just as it doesn’t make sense to be an anarchist business owner, since anarchists don’t believe in private property or state action to prevent theft, beliefs which would preclude her from objecting to anyone looting her business or stealing her purse.

While the criminals who victimized her are primarily responsible, Jennifer Angel’s ideology also contributed to her own death.  If they have long criminal records (as is almost always the case in soft-on-crime, Dem-run cities), her activism played a role in keeping them on the streets, where they could steal her property and murder her.

And while it might sound almost admirable (in other contexts) to be willing to die for your political beliefs, there is nothing noble about subjecting future victims – who probably have not signed on to your naïve and foolish ideological death wish – to your same fate.

Judging from her friends’ statement, no lessons have been learned so far.  I don’t know how many people signed that statement, but I wonder how many more of them will have to be victimized before the survivors begin to question their destructive ideology?

But lest you think that all lefties have lost their minds on this issue, let me remind you that it’s always the 90% of total morons who give the other 10% a bad name. 

Take, for instance, Dem congresswoman Angie Craig, from Minnesota.  She was recently attacked in DC  (ruled by guess which party?) by a thug who followed her into an elevator, punched her, and started choking her.  She threw her cup of hot coffee on him and got away, and he was caught and arrested.

(If she lived in a state that recognized the second amendment, she could have started putting bullets in him, starting with the groin and moving up.  That way, he wouldn’t be back on the streets in a nanosecond, and she wouldn’t have spilled her coffee.)

It turns out that the 26-year-old creep had a long criminal resume (Surprise!) that included indecent exposure, assaulting a cop, theft, and B&E.  He committed 12 known assaults before attacking Craig.

Craig, God bless her, told CBS news that she’d like to see people like him put in jail.  “I was assault number 13 on his record, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that there’s not a 14, a 15, and a 20.”

Miraculously, the CBS reporter didn’t immediately call her a racist and spit in her face. 

However, the Dems running DC did the next best thing, because this is how the story ends: “Despite the city’s crime crisis, the District of Columbia City Council voted in January to force through revisions of the district’s criminal code in an effort to soften penalties on violent crimes and reduce penalties, even for those accused of violent crimes like murder or sexual assault.”

They say a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. 

It’s too late for Jennifer Angel, but Ms. Craig, please allow me to offer you some literature from Adam Smith, Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson, along with a recommendation to check out the good people here at Cautious Optimism!

One final note: Regular readers will know that I love a good running joke.  (For example: #wemustneverstopmockingthecaucasiancherokee.)

For a while now, I’ve closed my columns with a consistent joke, ending each one with a tongue-in-cheek evocation of the next Dem presidential ticket.  During the Trump years, I listed, Avenatti in the prez spot, and a name taken for each column in the VP slot.  (That was to mock all the MSM pundits who slobbered all over the sleazy porn lawyer, touting him as a worthy presidential candidate purely because he hated Trump as much as they did.)

Since Avenatti is now in the joint for a while, I switched to the next most empty Democrat suit, ending my recent columns with “Fetterman/[Different name here], 2024!

But since Fetterman was recently hospitalized, and has now checked in to Walter Reed with obviously serious physical and mental problems, it doesn’t feel right to continue taking shots at him in each column.

Don’t get me wrong.  He is still an awful politician who had no business running for Senate – in a horrifically bad campaign – and his election is an indictment of the voters of Pennsylvania, the soul-less cynics running the Democrat party, and his awful wife who helped put her husband in this position.  (Not to mention the PA GOP and GOP voters, who couldn’t blow out such a clearly unqualified oaf.) 

But he’s a human being, and he’s going through something terrible now.  To be going through it surrounded by despicable party hacks and a self-serving spouse without the compassion you’d show for a sick animal is heartbreaking. 

So I’ll pray for him, and wish a pox on his heartless political masters, and move on to a new column closing, which involves picking a different creepy leftist. 

Therefore, I give you…

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Alfred E. Buttigieg, 2024!