Month: November 2023

We’re starting our Thanksgiving early this time around.  Katie and her husband Ryan flew in to south Florida several days ago, and they’ve been visiting with his family there.  They’re coming here tomorrow, and then our youngest will get home from school on Wednesday, and we’ll have our Thanksgiving a day early, because Katie has to fly back to Denver on Thanksgiving day.

We appreciate the chance to be together for this holiday, even if it takes some schedule-juggling to do it.  I hope that you all have a great holiday too!

Today I’m going back through some stories that fell through the cracks for me in the last week or two.

First up, several developments in the “Israel responds to 10/7 genocidal attack” story, in descending order of grimness:

You’ve probably seen the poll asking “Palestinians” in both the West Bank and Gaza how they feel about Hamas and the 10/7 attacks.   (It was conducted by a group called “Arab World for Research and Development,” for what it’s worth.)

If you believe the MSM and leftist line about Gaza, you’re probably breathing through your mouth, and following along with this column using your finger on the screen, while you slowly mispronounce each word out loud.  But that’s not relevant right now.

What is relevant is that if you believe the MSM and the leftist line about Gaza, you think that Gaza is full of innocent, vaguely Amish/Sunni pacifists who hate Hamas, and who only want to live freely with their Jewish neighbors in harmony and brotherly love.

If that’s you, prepare for a rib kick of reality, followed by a groin kick of truth, and then an uppercut of “what the hell were you thinking?”

Because it turns out that 76% of “Palestinians” view Hamas positively, and 75% view the 10/7 attacks positively. 

You may be thinking that polls are often unreliable, and that their results can be skewed by the way they are worded, and I’m right there with you.  And the question about the 10/7 attacks was not worded along the lines of, “How much do you support the brutal attack on babies, the elderly and hippie chicks by the cowardly goat-molesting Hamas terrorists?”

(By the way: fact check true.)

That might have driven the positive responses down a bit.  Especially when you consider that the question was actually biased in the opposite direction.  Here is the exact wording, which I am not making up: “How much do you support the military operation carried out by the Palestinian resistance led by Hamas on October 7^th?”

They’re not terrorists, they’re “the resistance,” and they carried out a “military operation.”

You know, like when Napoleon led a cavalry charge through a nursing home, sabre-ing off the seniors’ heads, or when Hannibal ran his elephants through a maternity ward, or when American airborne troops dropped behind Nazi lines on D-Day and then raped and murdered their way through a crowd of German girls dancing at a rave to the irritating “music” of Kraftwerk.

So sure, maybe the dishonestly positive phrasing bumped the positive responses up a few points.  But there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that around three-quarters of Gazans are more like the ghouls who desecrated the bodies of murdered Jews in their street celebrations on 10/7, than like the peace-loving “oppressed” of the leftist imagination.

It’s very hard to do what’s necessary in war when you don’t recognize the nature of your enemy.  Fortunately, most Israelis recognize the malicious pathologies of the Gazans, and they’re doing what it takes to wipe out Hamas.

Which is the best path forward for teaching average Gazans how to recognize and reject those pathologies.  So I wish them Godspeed.     

Meanwhile, in LA, a group of Hamas enthusiasts did not react well when Jewish actress Gal Gadot screened a 43-minute film compiled from footage recorded by Hamas terrorists and their Israeli victims and witnesses on 10/7.

Those protesting the film were mostly peaceful.  If by “mostly peaceful” you mean that they started multiple fights and screamed hateful things until they received not nearly enough pepper spray, IMO. 

One ironically humorous detail was the venue where the peaceful fighters did their best to intimidate and censor people: The Museum of Tolerance!  You can’t make this up.

I detect a subtle pattern going on here.  The Hamas fanboys (and fangirls, and fan-theys) in LA were not outraged because the footage was some kind of propaganda that cast Hamas in a falsely negative light.  The film just relayed the terrorists’ actual behavior, and from their own point of view.

Similarly, the brave lady who runs Libs of TikTok has been attacked mercilessly by leftists for spreading propaganda that falsely casts leftists in a negative light.  But she simply searches TikTok for videos made by leftists that accurately portray their lunatic beliefs and behavior, and re-posts those videos for everyone to see.

And now, the left is attacking Mike Johnson for releasing ALL of the video from January 6^th, screaming that letting people see what actually went on that day will convince them of a false, conservative narrative.

Why, it’s almost like these people really don’t like the way the truth conflicts with their political ideology!

Speaking of the truth ruining a perfectly good fable, a Muslim fella named Hesham Ayyad ended up in a hospital in Northridge, Ohio last month, where he told a harrowing tale of violent Jewish folks perpetrating a hate crime against him.  Hesham said he’d been walking home from lunch when a lunatic driver raced toward him, yelling, “Kill All Palestinians!” and “Long Live Israel!” before hitting him and driving away.

CAIR was on the case immediately, putting out pics of Hesham in a neck brace in the hospital, decrying systemic Islamophobia, and demanding a hate crime probe.  

Annnnnndddd… it turns out that Hesham got his injuries in a fight with his non-Jewish, non-stunt-driver brother, Khalid. 

But hey, you can’t blame CAIR for believing his hoax, can you?  I mean, considering the well-known Jewish obsession with racing around in fast cars and all.  Who can forget the driving exploits of Moishe Andretti, Herschel Earnhardt, and Itzhak Waltrip, just to name a few? 

Wait a minute… my crack research staff just handed me a bulletin.  It turns out that “Hesham Ayyad” is Arabic for “Jussie Smollet.” 

Huh. 

Since we’re on the subject of hoaxes, I’ll give you one more.  This is the tale of a Canadian “celebrity” (c’mon) named Buffy Sainte-Marie, a singer with a long career, and the most famous indigenous person in Canada.  She claimed to have been born on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan and adopted by a white family as an infant. 

She had a few things going for her, claimed-indigenous-identity-wise.  She actually looks a little Indian (unlike a certain Tilda-Swinton-looking Massachusetts Senator I could name) (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and when she wore an animal-skin hat with bead earrings, she could pass.

On the other side of the ledger?  Her name is “Buffy Sainte-Marie.”  Other than Buffy Bull (Sitting Bull’s second wife) and Buffy Horse (Crazy Horse’s niece), I can’t think of a single Indian woman ever named “Buffy.”

Oh, and also, there’s that birth certificate that turned up, showing that she was actually born “Beverly Jean Santamaria” to Albert and Winifred Santamaria.  No, not of the Piapot Santamarias – of the English and Italian Santamarias. 

So cue the sad indigenous hollowed-out musical gourd, I guess?

In closing, the Babylon Bee has a great video out now.  This one deals with the most compassionate way we can deal with our aging parents, and with all that’s going on with my mom these days, it gave me some good ideas.  I’m going to show it to her on Thanksgiving, and knowing her, she will find it hilarious.

The video is here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFeNSB66PY0

Have a great Thanksgiving everybody, be thankful for all that you have, and as always…

Hamas delenda est!   

To all who have passed along kind words, thoughts and prayers for my mom, I really appreciate that.  I don’t want this column to become one big over-share fest, but I did want to give a quick update.

She’s done very well since her stroke, though a slight speech slur is still there, especially when she’s tired.  The effects of her relatively early-stage Alzheimer’s are also exaggerated when she’s tired, and especially when she first wakes up.  But her bone-deep kindness is untouched, even as her memories are eroding.

After her hospital visit, my sister decided to sleep in mom’s bed with her on her first night back home, because she was still unsteady on her feet, and we were worried she’d fall if she got up in the night to go to the bathroom.  Not long after falling asleep, mom woke up and turned to Rhonda, looking a little startled to see her there.

Rhonda said, “I’m sleeping with you tonight.”

And mom said, “Oh, okay.  Did you have a bad dream?”

That’s my mom. 

And sure, she’s becoming mentally compromised, and she slurs her speech, and she sun-downs pretty regularly.  But would she still make a much better president than Joe Biden, right now? 

Damn straight!  And not just because she would have me as an advisor.  

Turning to current events , there’s a lot to criticize the GOP over, but I’m going to hold off on that now.  Mostly because I’m trying to maintain my optimism, and there is actually a lot of good news out there, if you look for it.

For example, the news out of Israel is mostly good, and on many fronts. 

On the battlefield, the IDF is showing Hamas how much easier terrorist life is when you’re attacking babies in cribs and hippie chicks at a rave, rather than actual Israeli soldiers.  They’ve been blowing up tunnels and killing terrorists, and they’ve taken control of the main hospital in Gaza, under which Hamas cowards hid a major base and weapons depot.  (Which, the Geneva conventions say, is a war crime.)

By the way, if you’re not following the conservative humor site The Babylon Bee, you should be, because those guys are a national treasure, and they’ve been hitting the ball hard lately!

Two recent sample stories:  Over a pic of the gigantic pro-Hamas rally in Trafalgar Square, they posted the headline, “80 Years After Hitler Failed, Nazis Finally Seize London.”  Amid fake quotes from elderly Nazis with tears of joy in their eyes after hearing chants of, “Death to the Jews” and “Final Solution,” the story has the London mayor warning British Jews of the dangers of engaging in “Nazi-phobia.”

A second story has a Hamas spokesman claiming that all the AK-47s found in the Gaza hospital were “strictly for medical use:” “By confiscating these weapons, they are depriving sick children of the life-saving medical care that these rifles, rockets and bombs provide.  Death to Israel, thank you.”  

Perfect!

On the PR front, things are going poorly for Hamas, too. Of course the terror-supporters and Jew-haters in the UN and our media and on our campuses have pulled their hijabs over their heads, and are wailing about the genocide the IDF is carrying out… by killing terrorists who started this war by carrying out a wave of genocidal attacks. 

But those malevolent freaks are revealing who they are, and simultaneously making themselves look ridiculous.  Every rally and protest they hold is marked by hateful, rhyming chants, ugly threats and bigotry, and clashes with any police who even marginally try to enforce laws.

A few pathetic pseudo-Jewish groups have also joined in – “Jewish Voices for Peace” is one, and its members didn’t even know how to properly wear the religious garments they put on as costumes.  One obese female identified herself as a “rabbi,” and joined famous anti-Semite Rashida Tlaib (she’s as lovely on the inside as she is on the outside) in calls for a cease-fire that would only give Hamas breathing room and time to re-arm. 

Those people are about as Jewish as a ham sandwich with a side of bacon under a Christmas tree, and they’re not fooling anyone. 

By comparison, Israel-supporters have conducted themselves remarkably well.  If you only watched the MSM, you probably don’t know about the gigantic pro-Israel rally that took place on the Washington Mall on Tuesday.  Nearly 300,000 people attended, waving American and Israeli flags and being all peaceful and stuff. 

And – I’m just calling balls and strikes here – even mentally compromised Frankenstein body-double John Fetterman behaved well!  He draped himself in an Israeli flag, thus driving tons of lefties out of their “minds” on social media afterwards.

And while I’m not usually one for draping yourself in a flag, considering Fetterman’s usual outfit – in which he cosplays as an unemployed basement dweller in a hoodie, gym shorts and crocs – the flag was a huge improvement.

Early reports indicate the following stats from the pro-Israel march:  Number of injuries or assaults: 0. Number of genocidal chants: 0. Number of Wishing Death on others: 0. Number of vandalism incidents: 0. Number of a-holes wearing masks to hide their evil words and deeds: 0.  Number of evil words and deeds: 0.

I’m also glad to see the way Israel has been resisting calls to let up on Hamas, including from our Cadaver in Chief.  By the powers of my magical, conical wizard hat, I am now privy to Biden’s phone call with Bibi Netanyahu:

Biden:  Hello?  Is this Bebe Neuwirth?

Bibi:  No, she was Frazier’s wife on Cheers.   I’m Bibi Netanyahu.

Biden: What?  Oh yeah.  Okay, listen, I’m gonna need a geese tire from you.

Bibi:  A what?

Biden: You heard me.  A cheese spire.  I mean… a fleece liar.  You know… you know the thing.

Bibi: Do you mean a “cease fire?”

Biden: Yes!  That’s it.  I’m gonna need one of those.

Bibi: Yeah, we’re not going to do that.

Biden:  Why not?  My boss Barack tells me that those therapists aren’t so bad.

Bibi: Therapists?  Do you mean “terrorists”?

Biden: Don’t get smart with me, B.B. King!

Bibi: It’s Netanya—oh, never mind.  Listen, I’m pretty busy, so why don’t you have some ice cream and take a nap, and we’ll keep killing jihadi murderers over here.

Biden: Ooh, lint small-hut trip is my favorite!

Bibi: Do you mean “mint chocolate chip?”  Okay, it’s going to sound like I’m hanging up now…

And, scene.

In other news, some Dem politicians have been taking it on the chin lately, in very satisfying ways.

You probably don’t remember Buta Biberaj, but she was the Soros-funded soft-on-crime Loudon County prosecutor who went after the father of a girl raped by a “trans” student in a school bathroom.  When the father raised his voice during a school board meeting where corrupt educrats were trying to cover up the rape, he was charged with disorderly conduct, and Buta wanted to prosecute and jail him.

Even though she out-spent her opponent 10-to-1, she narrowly lost her re-election earlier this month.  She spent the week after the election disputing the vote total.  Which, as you may remember, makes her – insert scary organ sting here – an ELECTION DENIER!

But rather than bankrupting her and throwing her in jail for many years, Virginia officials patiently waited while the truth sank in: Biberaj finally accepted that the voters had thrown her Buta out of office!

I saw another story headline this week that began, “Stacy Abrams hardest hit…”  So I naturally clicked on it, expecting to see the rest of the headline: “… by anti-tank RPG.” 

But no, it was about MLB scheduling the 2025 All-Star game in Atlanta, despite all the leftist whining and boycotting over the voter integrity law passed by GA in 2021. 

Because if there’s one thing the Democrat bosses hate, it’s integrity in general.   And if there’s one thing they hate even more?  Voter Integrity.

Regular readers know my fears that if Trump is our nominee and appears to be likely to beat Biden, the Dems will suddenly “discover” that Biden died in the fall of 2020, and they’ll give him a proper burial, and then bring Gavin Newsom in to defeat Trump.

Well those fears have been eased a bit this week, when Newsom maneuvered himself into a lose-lose situation by cleaning up San Francisco before murderous Chicom dictator (the Left’s favorite kind of world leader!) came to visit. 

I say lose-lose because had Ken Doll been unable to clean up the filthy city where he used to be mayor, it would be yet another example of Democrat unfitness to govern.

But when it turned out that he could clean up Syringe City (Theme song: “I left my heart… in Feces Cisco”), the act of doing so just proved to Californians that their misery is fixable, and that the Dems who run that state literally don’t want to fix it. 

The message is clear: Forcing a leftist dictator to run a garbage gauntlet and navigate poop drifts would embarrass us; forcing you peons to do that every single day is perfectly acceptable to us. 

And when Xi has been gone for a week and the Third World ambience has returned?  Those GOP ads write themselves, and they make Empty Haircut a little more beatable, even against Trump. 

Finally, the execrable America-hating Megan Rapinoe’s soccer career is over, and the last chapter was a thing of beauty.

In the opening minutes of her final game, she was lightly jogging, far away from the action – she was the one on the very edge of the screen, with the purple hair and the hate-stink coming off of her in waves –when she went down with what turned out to be a torn Achilles. 

Her team went on to lose – but are there really any winners in a soccer match? – and afterwards she blamed God for not existing, and thus not preventing such a great person as her from suffering such a humiliating and yet hilarious injury.  In her own, incoherent words, “If there is a god, like, this is proof that there isn’t.”   

I’m no theologian – though compared to Megan Rapinoe, I’m St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis all rolled into one ruggedly handsome ball of Solomonic wisdom – but I think I see God’s hand in this. 

Because I believe that He has a great sense of humor.  (It’s the only reason I can think of why I’m one of his particular favorite fallen humans.) 

And I like to think that he extended his invisible hand down to earth, and while Megan was wandering around the soccer rink – or whatever it’s called – not even close to a “play” (or whatever they call it in soccer) He oh so lightly touched her Achilles tendon, snapping it and giving her one final humiliation on the national stage before she retreats into well-deserved obscurity.

Now THAT’S funny.  And though God doesn’t need to hear it from me… I heartily approve.

Now if only He would do something about Ilhan Omar.  And Cory Bush.  And Adam Schiff, Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, Joy Behar, Joy Reid…

Hamas delenda est!   

As you read this, I’m on the way back to Florida from Tennessee.  A day after my mom’s mini-stroke, she had another one, and spent Thursday night in the hospital as a precaution.  So I drove up to spend some time with her, arriving just as she got back from the hospital.

I had a great time with her, my sister and brother-in-law.  Mom once again bounced back quickly, and was walking around and taking care of business, albeit with a little weakness on her left side.  She was in great spirits, though her speech is still a little slurred, especially when she’s tired.  Her prognosis is good; her blood pressure is lower again, and the tests she had done show no brain damage.  She’s meeting with the doc on Tuesday, to follow up and set up some speech therapy, and maybe some physical therapy too.

But we laughed as much in the last 48 hours as we ever have.  We talked for hours, about everything, and my sister and I developed great comic impressions of mom’s slight speech slurring.

I know: that sounds terrible.  Maybe you need to know my family, but mom laughed until she was crying, and all three of us had to catch our breath multiple times.  The only normal one there was my bro-in-law Jimmy, and he just shook his head, watching us carrying on like lunatics.

There’s nothing like family, and I appreciate the good wishes and prayers you all have sent along for mom this last week! 

So this column will be a little shorter than usual, because I just have a few notes on stories that I saw before I got the news and headed north on Friday.

First up, the Miss Universe pageant was recently bought by a dude who thinks he’s a woman, and the contest was won last year by another dude in a dress.  Which is great, because people are really ready for unattractive guys to elbow aside actual women – with their yucky feminity and their .7 waist-to-hip ratios – in beauty pageants.   

Annnnnndddddd… they’ve filed for bankruptcy.  The boy/girl boss says that the pageant is experiencing a “liquidity problem.”

I’m no international beauty pageant expert – although my wife and both daughters could win a series of them – but I don’t think they’ve got a liquidity problem, but a rigidity problem.  

As in, half of the “girls” in the last bathing suit competition had visible erections.

Next, it’s been said that “violence is never justified,” which is a companion-piece to the bromide, “War is Never the Answer.”  That last statement is obviously wrong.  For example, when either, “Hitler?” “Hamas?” Or “Communist Invasion?” is the question, then war is the best answer, 3 out of 3 times.

Similarly, violence is often a solution – and even the optimal response – if you or someone around you is being attacked or menaced.    

An illustration of this truth could be found last week in the student band section at a Texas Southern football game.  I know, it’s a cliché because it’s true: just like drug cartels and biker gangs, college marching bands have a fearsome reputation for their routinely horrifying acts of violence.

This story was no different. 

So the marching band is playing in the stands, and some moron is relentlessly heckling a tuba player in the middle of a song.  Because, I guess, tuba hecklers gotta tuba heckle?  The jerk is holding some kind of a beverage (I’m guessing not orange juice) and he’s screaming in the face of a dedicated tuba-ist.  (Tuba-er?)

After at least a solid minute of this in the video that I saw (and for all we know the heckling could have been going on a lot longer at that point), the intrepid tuba-nator – without putting down the tuba, mind you – threw four right jabs of varying quality.

None of those punches would make an onlooker think that maybe a retired Mike Tyson has joined the tuba section at Texas Southern.  But in Tuba Man’s defense, you may have noticed that no heavyweight fight in history has featured two big guys trying to turn each other’s lights out while carrying a tuba in their off hand.

Though if that’s ever done in a pay-per-view, I’m in!

Anyway, the fourth jab laid the heckler out flat.  (The non-orange juice may have been a factor.)  And  my man on the tuba got right back into the song.  (“Where was I?   Oh yeah… blat blat, blat blat, etc.”)

The story says that the incident is being investigated… I hope as part of an evaluation process for potentially awarding the tuba guy with the Texas Southern version of a meritorious service medal.

But for now, I salute you, Texas Southern Tuba Player. 

And if I may suggest a new motto for the school’s tuba section: “Tex-Southern Tubas: Playing some brass, and handing out naps!”

Finally, you’ve probably seen the story about the fed-up guy in Panama who shot two arrogant environmentalist narcissists who had been blocking a freeway for many days, at a cost of $80 million per day in lost revenue, in addition to putting people’s lives in danger who might require medical help. 

Tragically, the two road-blockers died, and the shooter is likely to face heavy consequences.  And while the kind of entitled idiots who engage in these kinds of stunts deserve a butt kicking, they don’t deserve to die. 

But I think that this incident makes a larger point: when government purposely does NOT do its fundamental duty of enforcing law and order, the people will eventually be forced to do it, and many people are not going to like the results. 

This is an extreme example, but we’ve seen others, as when leftists and corrupt media (but I repeat myself) attacked and smeared Kyle Rittenhouse as the embodiment of a white supremacist vigilante.   Never mind that they were 180 degrees wrong, as usual – Rittenhouse was no vigilante, and the four violent criminals he shot in self-defense were all as white at Liz Warren (#wemustneverstopmockingher). 

But he never would have been forced to shoot those creeps if the Dems who ran Wisconsin and Kenosha hadn’t totally abdicated their responsibility to protect law-abiding citizens and their property from marauding mobs of violent leftists.  Those mobs did all kinds of damage to Kenosha homes and businesses in the days leading up to Rittenhouse’s famous degenerate-eradication incident, and the cops did nothing to stop them.

So the next night, when they were doing it again, some citizens resisted, in acts of completely justified self-defense. 

If our corrupt and negligent government continues to do more of the same, expect more of the same from law-abiding citizens, especially if the police are made to stand down in the face of the anti-Semitic thugs – to pick just one example – that we suddenly find among us.

If they keep it up, they’re going to find themselves confronted with an army of Rittenhouses and Texas Southern tuba sections, and they are not going to enjoy the outcome!

Hamas delenda est!    

I’m back, people!  If you read my column yesterday, I was pretty down about Trump running away with the nomination, and then likely to lose to Newsom next November (in my humble opinion… and worst nightmares).

Then I got a call from my sister in Tennessee, saying my 85-year-old mom had a stroke yesterday. 

It turned out to be a very minor one – she had a blood pressure spike to 190s over 140s, and gave us a scare – but she was back to normal within a half hour.  She’s got some new meds and my sister is watching over her and keeping her hydrated, and she’s got an appointment with her doc on Monday, and we’ll be up to see her ASAP.  (Sooner, if it’s warranted.)

You can see a pic of my adorable mom with me (from maybe 10 years ago) on my homepage at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  She was a great wife to dad, and is a great mom to my sister and me, and she’s living right.  Her early-stage Alzheimer’s is starting to rob her of parts of herself, but she’s enjoying her life and she’s not afraid to die, knowing that she’ll be with Christ, and my dad and her folks, and that my sister and I will be along shortly.  (That circle will be unbroken, is what I’m trying to say.)

And suddenly I can see all of the political sturm und drang in perspective, and grant it its proper importance. Which is: some, but not that much.

So I’m going to get back to one of the things God made me for: mocking idiots and their bad ideas.  In fact, I’ve got four good news points to send you into the weekend with a smile on your face:

1. Israel is kicking the crap out of Hamas, and that’s enraging bad people all over the world, including on our campuses and in our House of Representatives.

As of 11/8, Hamas has lost control of northern Gaza, as Israel has opened temporary corridors allowing thousands of Gazan non-combatants to flee from the north.  Israel has been bombing terror tunnels and stacking up terrorist bodies, including a number of high-profile commanders responsible for major parts of the cowardly massacre of unarmed civilians on October 7^th. 

An unknown number of “Palestinian” “civilians” have also been reported killed, but those numbers are always inflated by lying Hamas mouthpieces.  Of those who actually have died, many were undoubtedly Hamas terrorists, and many others were their supporters.  (Quick tip: If any of the dead were those who celebrated the 10/7 massacres and spit on or otherwise defiled the bodies of the raped and murdered Israeli women paraded through Gaza’s streets, they bought their ticket, and now they’ve taken the ride, and good riddance to bad hummus.)

The blame for the remainder of actually innocent Palestinian dead lies entirely with Hamas, who has been purposely committing the war crime (cited in three different articles of the Geneva conventions) of using civilians as human shields. 

Lovers of freedom everywhere should be celebrating the fact that so many Hamas terrorists and commanders are now in hell, where demons are administering pitchfork suppositories left and right. 

There’s still a lot left to do, though, in Israel and here. Because a mob of terrorist-supporting “Palestinian” protestors stood outside the White House and tried to climb the fence there (i.e. INSURRECTION!) If the Dems had any moral consistency, they’d be screaming, “Fire at will to protect our precious democracy!” Meanwhile, their cowardly jihadi allies outside the WH were screaming, “Allahu akbar.” 

You may remember that delightful bloodthirsty slogan from when the 9/11 terrorists screamed it as they flew planes into the World Trade Center, or when other terrorists screamed it as they sawed Daniel Pearlman’s head off, or when other terrorists screamed it when they raped and slaughtered Jewish women and children a month ago, or when…

You get the picture.  Also, other pro-Hamas scumbags climbed up on a statue of Ben Franklin and draped a filthy keffiyeh on his head.  That’s the terrorist headpiece worn by terrorizing terrorists as they howl, “Allahu akbar” and murder children to celebrate every “Genocide Tuesday” and “Intifada Wednesday” and—

You get the picture.  Can I ask why we don’t have cops in the streets, using shotguns to fire beanbags into the groin of any Hamashole who tries to vandalize statues of our founders?  (Talk about “aim small, miss small,” by the way.)  And why don’t we have capital police using belt-fed weapons to clear the White House fence of hateful attackers? 

Are we running short on shotguns and machine guns?  Because if so, I’ll bet the fine denizens of CO nation could start a Gofundme and raise some cash for that purpose in short order.    

And while I’m dreaming up a wish list of anti-terrorist actions, did you see the stories of the top three Hamas bosses who are worth a collective $10 billion?  They’re living luxurious lives in mansions and extravagant hotels in Qatar, Turkey and elsewhere, while the “Palestinian” people live in (mostly self-imposed) squalor.

I’ve always loved the stories of how the Mossad sent hit teams all over the world to kill the evil terrorists who murdered Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, and I’ve read dozens of fictionalized versions of those kinds of hit squads giving terrorists their just desserts.

Is it too much to hope for that some teams of Israeli special forces bad-asses are even now being deployed to terminate those Hamas billionaires?  And if they are, can I please request that they throw at least one of those monsters off the top of a mile-high hotel in Dubai, just so the last thing the terrorist hears is, “Now you know how it feels to be a gay guy in your awful cities!”  

2. In other happy news, high-profile leftists all over the country are reaping what they’ve been sowing.

For example, a few years ago evil gnome George Soros funded the election of leftist New Orleans DA Jason Williams, who promptly started declining to prosecute 65% of all criminal cases in NO.  Shockingly, car thefts increased 104% in 2022. 

And then, last month, as Williams was walking his 78-year-old mother to his car, two thugs carjacked them at gun point.  Thankfully, his mom was unhurt.  Unfortunately, he didn’t get even the light pistol-whipping that his own corruption called for.  Still, he’s now a crime victim and he lost his car, so that’s a start.

For another (hilarious) example, a hateful “Palestinian” racist woman in Indiana – I’m not saying she’s related to Rashida Tlaib or Ilhan Omar, but I’m not saying she’s NOT related to Tlaib or Omar – intentionally drove her car into what she thought was a synagogue, telling the cops that she did it on purpose, because she’s a black-hearted anti-Semitic piece of crap.  (I’m paraphrasing.) (But not by much.) 

What’s hilarious about that?  The building she damaged actually belonged to a skeevy group of the Black Hebrew Israelites, a group of racist black loons who put the Star of David on their clubhouse, which then attracted one of their fellow rabid Jew haters to mistakenly attack their den of stupidity. 

If only all involved had been present and heavily armed, they could have opened fire on each other, and made this the feel-good story of the fall!     

3. Speaking of opening fire, we’ve still got the 2^nd amendment, and armed thugs are getting shot down or run off all over the place.

For example, an unassuming little Vietnamese guy identified only as “Tien” owns a pawn shop in Texas. (Yes, I spent the last half-hour trying to come up with some kind of comic reference for that.  The closest I came was, “Tien easy pieces” or “Tien Little Warrens,” but couldn’t make those work.) (Still: #wemustneverstopmockingher) He’s got Vivek’s hair, and a passion for sellable gold and jewelry. 

Recently two armed thugs came into his store.  (MSM accounts don’t mention their race.  So guess.  Then watch the video, and give yourself a gold star.) As soon as they got inside, they pulled their guns.

But Tien was packing, and he fired first.  Because: Texas!

Tragically, neither would-be thief was perforated.  But they both fled, leaving a trail of urine (and, I’m guessing, Democrat mail-in ballots?). 

When Tien talked to a reporter afterwards – I like to think he did so after blowing smoke away from the barrel of his pistol – he said, “I think the cash business, the gold business, seems to be an easy target for them, or so they think.  But it’s not.”

Ooh, I got it!  “No need for Tien Commandments, because Tien only has one: DON’T SCREW WITH TIEN!”  Boom!

An even happier story happened just before Halloween in a suburb of St. Louis, when Javion Bibby and Ronnie Jewett (undoubtedly two more of those super-dangerous white supremacists the late Joe Biden was always warning us about) put on ski masks and tried to carjack a citizen who turned out to be armed.

Aaaannnnnddddd… Javion’s a speed bump and Ronnie runs away, and then is caught by the cops, and now faces murder charges, since his buddy got killed during a crime he participated in.

Hat tip to the local Democrat justice system, who saw to it that even though both criminals were violent recidivists and part of a dangerous carjacking ring, they were out on the streets to practice their hobby of multiple bullet absorption.  Well done!

4. The partial manifesto written by the Tennessee murderer who targeted a Christian school has been leaked, and that’s a very good thing.  Because it revealed what our censorious leftist elites always try to hide: the killer was a textbook example of toxic leftist beliefs.

She was a sexually confused “transgender” Christophobe, a hateful anti-white racist, and a big believer in the class hatred that typifies the Left ever since Marx.  She ranted about the “little blonde crackers” whom she slaughtered, and about their “white privlage” (so close on that spelling!), and their “fancy khakis… backpacks…and [cars].”

The story is so sad, but a tiny silver lining was that the cops on the street were so much better than their bureaucrat bosses, who have covered up and lied about the killer’s motives.  Fortunately, while she wrote, “Ready to die,” the TN cops were commensurately ready to kill her. 

If only it could have happened quicker.       

Finally, I’ve got a book recommendation for CO nation.  If you haven’t read Elmore Leonard’s novels before – or watched the great tv series Justified, based on them – you’re in for a treat.

I’ve been re-reading several of them lately, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.  The guy writes amazing dialogue, and as a writer, he’s who I want to be when I grow up.  (I know: I better hurry!)  The protagonist of Justified, Raylan Givens, appears in Pronto and Raylan.  I’m just finishing the latter now, and it contains four separate plotlines that would each be enough to sustain a great novel, and the writing is like cut and polished diamonds: every word is perfect.  

And once again, I’m struck at the unfairness of life.  Elmore Leonard is dead, as is Vince Flynn, Robert B. Parker, Tom Petty, John Prine and my dad, among others.

Meanwhile, Noam Chomsky is 100-something, Joe Biden is still alive (sort of), Liz Warren is still on the warpath (#wemustneverstopmockingher), and Bernie Sanders is still… doing whatever it is he does. 

And Nancy Pelosi – the Botoxed Bakenrenef  (you try pulling an alliterative name of an ancient Egyptian that goes with “botox” out of your arse, you think it’s so easy) – has now outlived dozens of Pharaohs, thousands of kings and emperors and shoguns, and 40 US presidents.  And she continues to haunt our nightmares with her horrifying rictus grin.   

On the other hand, my sweet mom is still alive, and Hamas murderers are dropping like flies.  So we’ve got that going for us.

Have a great weekend. Go Israel!  And still and always…

Hamas delenda est!

As I draft this on Wednesday afternoon, I’ve been looking through analyses of yet another GOP under-performance in another set of off-year elections yesterday, as well as the latest from the Trump trial, and am feeling considerably less than cautiously optimistic about our chances next year.   

I’m not going to watch the GOP debate tonight, because life is too short to spend time watching the prospect of the party stumbling forward into a replay of the loss in 2020.  I’ll watch the shorthand analysis of the debate from some political commentators I trust, or at least as much as I can stomach of it. 

Perhaps you fine folks in CO nation can buck me up and show me where my following thoughts and analyses are wrong?  Because I really hope that they are!

1. Trump’s chances next year: 

I fear that the bogus and infuriating trials that the corrupt Dems will be putting him through this year and next are going to make him susceptible to the Lenny Bruce syndrome. 

Full disclosure: Bruce was before my time, and from what I’ve seen of his old recordings, he wasn’t my cup of tea, and his material hasn’t aged well.  But he was widely influential on generations of comics who followed him.

At the height of his fame Bruce became embroiled in an obscenity trial.  His last months of gigs (he overdosed at 40) were famously depressing, because he took to obsessively focusing on the ebbs and flows of his trial, going so far as to read trial transcripts on stage.  Audiences became restless and turned away, for the obvious reason: a comedian’s job is to make people laugh, and regardless of the merits of his case (obscenity and speech laws changed dramatically not long after), they weren’t there to witness legal battles.

I’ve said it many times: the four cases against Trump are completely partisan hackwork, and the fact that they are even happening is an indictment of the outrageous corruption in our courts and media.  (The only charge among them that is legitimate at all is the “he disclosed classified documents,” and that is only the case because Trump threw away the presidential get-out-of-jail-free card by confessing his guilt on tape – “I could have declassified these as president, but I didn’t.” – in an act of undisciplined foolishness.) 

That being said, if the past month is any indication, we’re going to see a ton of Trump in and out of court and ranting at and about witnesses, judges and the rotten system.  It’s likely that just about everything he rants will be true – just as the charges against Lenny Bruce didn’t stand the test of time – but that’s not going to help him in a general election.

People go see a comedian because he’s supposed to make them laugh.  Persuadable voters support a presidential candidate because they want him to win and govern well.  I don’t see how obsessing over trial transcripts on stage is going to advance that goal.

My overall take on this election is far from unique: every Dem and GOP nominee – regardless of who it is – starts with around 40-43% of the vote, and elections are won by winning the persuadable non-hardcore base voters in between those two set-in-stone voting blocs. 

Biden is a uniquely awful candidate, presiding over a horrifically dysfunctional and unpopular administration.  If he remains the candidate, the best strategy for any GOP nominee is to keep the focus on Biden.

Trump is a uniquely polarizing candidate, eliciting near-worship from his committed base, and the fiery hatred of 1000 suns from everyone on the center left, and too many in the mushy middle.  If he is the candidate, the best strategy for any Dem nominee is to keep the focus on Trump. 

Trump is constitutionally unable to stay out of the spotlight, even moreso now that he’s going to spend months on end in court, and will likely focus much more on his own legal persecution than on Biden’s manifestly disastrous presidency.  

Biden, on the other hand, is constitutionally unable to appear, um,  biologically viable. (He’s shuffled off this mortal coil!), which means that staying out of the limelight is right in his wheelhouse. (There’s no place farther from the limelight than a coffin in a White House janitor’s closet.)

That’s the route he took in ’20: hiding in the basement and making minimal appearances or speeches.  I expect he’ll do the same this time around, including refusing any debates with Trump, since Trump refused to debate in the GOP primaries.

In fact, Biden’s argument on that point would be even stronger than Trump’s.  Trump said that he is so far ahead of the other contenders that they aren’t even legitimate rivals, and he’d have nothing to gain by debating them (sadly, it appears, fact check: true).  But Biden can easily claim that Trump isn’t a legitimate opponent (the MSM will do their best to bolster this lie), and claim (correctly!) that he has a lot more to lose than to gain by debating Trump.

Obviously, a candidate in a very tight race has a lot more incentive to duck debates – if he can get away with it – than someone with a big lead.

And if Trump tries to generate righteous anger to shame Biden into debating, he’s going to be accused of rank hypocrisy.  (Once again, sadly: fact check true)  Unfortunately, that’s a weapon that he put in the Dems’ hands, and I won’t be surprised if they use it, even if Biden isn’t the eventual nominee.   

2. The results yesterday:

 It’s not fair to blame Trump for the nationwide GOP losses yesterday – as never-Trumpers are itching to do – but I also think that two of what I think are three contributing factors are bad signs for him, though always-Trumpers will fight that assertion tooth and nail.

First, it looks like abortion once again hurt us in OH and elsewhere, and I don’t know how to react to that other than throw up my hands in frustration and even despair.  It’s hugely disheartening to see how many people will eagerly perform a cranial-rectal inversion on themselves to avoid facing the clear truth that late-term abortions are infanticide. 

Not to mention how many leftists and moderates insist that the federal government must dictate 98% of our life choices (what kind of car we can drive, what kind of lightbulb or toilet or stove we can buy, whether can protect ourselves with a gun, what schools our kids can go to, etc.), yet are horrified by any legal authority preventing them from aborting a viable baby in the womb.  I don’t get it, and all I know to do is pray for them, and keep trying.

But this abortion issue is probably one that favors Trump’s more moderate position than it does DeSantis’ 6-week ban.  (I think the RDS take is the morally correct one, but it appears to politically hurt us, even though we could largely mitigate that by clearly messaging it correctly.)

A second problem was the way the Dems out fundraised and outspent us.  IMO, Ronna Romney-McDaniel (I for one won’t let her drop that “Romney”!) has once again botched the primary tasks of an RNC head, i.e. supporting strong candidates and raising tons of money.  

And while spending isn’t everything – wisely spending is important, and candidate quality matters, as when Hillary vastly out-spent Trump in ’16 and got her adipose hindquarters handed to her anyway – it certainly helps, especially when deployed on get-out-the-vote infrastructure.  And Ronna did not do that.  Again!

She is another head-scratcher for me, re: Trump.  I think he endorsed her for the job in 2016, and I know that he endorsed her to stay in the job after the ’18 mid-term losses and the disappointment in ’20.  Then, after the dismal failure in the ’22 midterm – when Harmeet Dhillon challenged her – Trump stepped aside and let them “fight it out” without his endorsement. 

I don’t get that.  Dhillon famously supported and defended Trump in the aftermath of the ’20 election, so he couldn’t say she’d been disloyal.  

One of the things I like about a businessman brand is that if somebody isn’t doing a good job, he fires them.  (Unlike in our gov’t, where failures keep getting promoted.  See: Biden, Joseph Robinette.) So after Ronna performed so badly in 3 consecutive election cycles – the last one disastrously so! – I don’t understand why Trump didn’t support Dhillon.

And thus we have yesterday: one more very winnable slate of elections in which the RNC head raised less money than the Dems, and we once again underperformed.

Not Trump’s fault, but not the best moment of another hand-picked endorsement of his, either.

As to the high-profile KY governor race, I don’t agree with Trump critics who blame him for Daniel Cameron’s losing a close race to Dem Andy Beshear.  But I do think that the result should give pause to those who may have over-estimated the power of Trump’s endorsement, too.

I don’t follow KY politics closely, so I could be wrong about this.  But I’ve been reading a writer at RedState who calls himself “Bonchie” (? Come on, man!) and who usually gives a pretty honest, conservative bounce on issues that I do follow.  He’s not a Trump-basher, but his take is that Cameron seemed to over-rely on Trump’s endorsement: 

“If you lived in Kentucky, you were bombarded with ads and social media posts that centered on one thing and one thing only: Being endorsed by Donald Trump. In fact, Cameron began his general election campaign by taking a shot at Ron DeSantis, who had endorsed one of his opponents, proclaiming the “Trump culture of winning is alive and well.”

“Cameron didn’t spend the waning weeks of his campaign being his own man, making a forceful case to voters. Instead, he spent it talking about a Trump tele-rally and releasing videos from Trump while emblazoning “Trump-endorsed” on every piece of media he could find.”

Again, I don’t think you can say his loss is Trump’s fault; in fact, Bonchie’s take is more a critique of Cameron than of Trump.  But Cameron appeared to be an attractive, young, black candidate in a red state in a time when the Democrat party label is at low ebb nationally, and he was in a neck-and-neck race.  Yet Trump’s endorsement didn’t put him over the top.

By the way, I mean no offense to my always-Trump friends here, but admit it: if Cameron had won, Trump would be tweeting and truthing and shouting from the rooftops that his endorsement was the deciding factor in Cameron’s historic, beautiful and earth-shaking victory.   (Now that Cameron lost, I’d bet my house that Trump will be saying that the outcome had nothing to do with his endorsement.)

Having said all that, I will end on the encouraging note of some recent polls that show Trump having a lead in 6 of 7 battleground states against Biden.  I still don’t think that Biden has more than a 50/50 chance of being the Dem nominee, and I know that trusting polls – especially a year out! – is foolhardy,

But at this point, I’ll take any glimmer of good news from wherever I can get it! 

I’ll try to shake off this gloom, and come back with a column with my usual tomfoolery tomorrow.

Hamas delenda est!

Because crooked politicians have been up to no good, as usual – creeps gotta creep – I could write my usual Monday column on their sleazy behavior.

I could write about how Sam Bankman-Fried, probably the largest donor to Democrats in the 2022 election cycle, was convicted on a raft of fraud charges, which the execrable MSM managed to report on without ever mentioning his huge donations to Democrats.

Or I could write about how Stacy Abrams (D-irigible) says that anybody who doesn’t like Que Mala is both racist and sexist.

Or about how the mortal remains of Joe Biden (He’s pining for the fjords!) has been linked to thousands of emails he sent under various pseudonyms (such as Cornpopslayer@aol.com,  Flatline@ukraine.com, and c’monman@whereamIrightnow?.com.)

But I’m not going to do that.  Because for the last week I’ve been in a contemplative mood, and I’ve been struck more and more by how inexplicably shameless our prominent people and public institutions have become. 

Day after day, I see people caught in shocking scandals, and nothing happens to them.  The squad members blatantly support terrorists who have just committed acts so vile they’d make the Nazis blush, and their party – with majority Jewish support in elections – makes no move to censure or expel them.  The president’s son Hunter is filmed taking hard drugs while cavorting with hookers – the videos are available anywhere! – and admitting to scores of felonies, and his dad still takes him to public events.    

On the right, too, we’ve known for almost a year that George Santos is a ridiculous conman and sociopathic liar, and he’s still in congress.  Lauren Boebert is filmed giving a stranger a handy in a movie theater, and nobody says boo.  

So today I have a few rambling thoughts on the subject of shame. 

I’ll be the first to admit that shame can be destructive.  In Victorian times, many people were driven into self-hatred after they engaged in what we now call “Toobin-ing.”  (And if you know Jeffrey Toobin’s biography, that incident probably wasn’t even in the top three behaviors that he has to be ashamed about!) 

In cultures such as Japan, businessmen whose companies have a bad quarter have been known to kill themselves out of shame.  Similarly, one of the darker aspects of social media has been revealed in stories of adolescents whose tormentors bully them online, making them feel ashamed to the point that they commit suicide.  (And for those bullies, Uncle Jesus had strong opinions, involving millstones tied around necks.)

But even though mis-directed or undeserved shame can be destructive, appropriately felt shame is a necessary response – and corrective – to bad behavior.  I believe that we need more shame in our national life. 

It fell out of fashion for a long time, roughly coincident with our loss of a predominantly Judeo-Christian ethical framework.  In its wake came Freud and a therapeutic culture that saw shame mostly as an unhealthy inhibition on our instincts, and something to resist and overcome.   Too many therapists in recent decades adopted a goal of raising a patient’s self-esteem, but they reversed the natural cause and effect involved.

Rather than seeing self-esteem as something that comes as a result of achieving goals and behaving properly, they believe that instilling unearned self-esteem in a patient will then cause him to behave well and become successful.  (Some revealing psychological studies predicted the kind of bad outcomes this approach would produce, when they revealed that one group of people with unusually high self esteem is criminals.) 

A focus on this same kind of self-esteem building in our schools and media has exacerbated the problem by adding two other mutually interacting dysfunctions: nurturing and rewarding a sense of victimhood, and medicalizing most bad behavior.

You can see the results everywhere.  When a criminal is caught, he immediately starts playing victimhood bingo: the deck was stacked against him because of his race, or his sexual orientation, or his poverty.  He never knew his dad, and his mom was never around, and all of the influences in his neighborhood were negative, and he was high or drunk when he committed his crimes, and he had a low IQ. 

There’s a little bit of truth in all of those points, but they all avoid the central truth of personal responsibility. 

Lots of people of all races grew up in bad neighborhoods, but most of them didn’t become career criminals.  Lots of people are poor, but they don’t become thieves.  Lots of people have low IQs, but they just run for congress. 

Rapists will tell you all about how women treated them badly and rejected them (Join the club, buddy.), and about their “disease” of sex addiction.  (Oh, you find women attractive and want to have sex with as many of them as possible? That sounds contagious!).  Obese people will tell you about their screwed up metabolism and food addictions. (Donuts and ice cream taste amazing?  The hell you say!)

Lazy people will self-diagnose their chronic fatigue syndrome, and bad students their ADD.

All of these diagnoses are lacking the same thing: an appropriate sense of shame, and the possibility of changing your ways and overcoming your flaws that come with it.

If you look in the mirror and see a victim of food addiction, sex addiction, chronic fatigue and poor impulse control, you’ll likely feel fine about yourself, and maybe seek a disability check for these conditions.

On the other hand, if you look in the mirror and see a gluttonous, horny, lazy criminal, you’ll likely feel ashamed of yourself.  But if you’ll use that shame at motivation, you’ve got a better shot at becoming the better person you could be.     

Our nation’s institutions are shot-through with this same kind of pathological and destructive shamelessness. 

Journalism can be a noble profession, with an ethical code that stresses finding and telling the truth as conscientiously and completely as you can.  So why are most members of our media such shamelessly lying hacks?

Reporters from our most prestigious papers won Pulitzer prizes for writing endlessly about the Russian hoax which turned out to be completely false.  None of them produced any soul-searching mea culpas, and none of them returned their Pulitzers.

For several years they wrote about covid: that it naturally originated from bats or pangolins, or possibly bat/pangolin orgies; that masks and six feet of distance and new vaccines stopped it dead; that new treatments which were first used 15 minutes ago were scientifically certain to have no negative long-term side-effects; that Fauci was a saintly truth-teller.

None of them resigned in disgrace, or admitted how they’d gotten everything so wrong.  Many of them are gearing up for lockdowns and mask mandates again, just in time for next year’s elections.

Our FBI and intelligence agencies used to be widely respected, but they’ve spent several years covering up obvious crimes of leftist politicians, while lending their imprimatur to ridiculous conspiracy theories about pee tapes and Steele dossiers.  Dozens of “intelligence officials” pimped out their own credibility to lie about Hunter Biden’s obviously authentic and incriminating laptop being a Russian fake.

Our universities used to be the gold standard for scholarship.  A degree from an Ivy League school connoted respect and the promise of career success.  Academia stood for free speech and free inquiry; science degrees brought technical innovation and life-improving advancements; liberal arts programs transmitted an appreciation for the great accomplishments of the West.

Now I wouldn’t send Cassie the Wonder Dog to an Ivy league school, even if she got a free ride, and even though she’d be a shoo-in for valedictorian.  Our liberal arts programs have been contaminated by tribal hatreds, fashionably contemptuous political dogma, and a disdain for America and the West.  Even hard sciences are being corrupted by idiotic identity hires who argue that math is sexist and physics is racist.  The good people trying to do honest scholarship are fighting an uphill battle against armies of mediocre social engineers. 

Our politicians used to be— Okay, check that.  Politicians have always been eyed with some distrustful wariness, and rightly so.      

But I’m old enough to remember when parents would tell their kids, “You could someday grow up to be president!”  If I heard that now, it would be damning with faint praise at best, and fighting words at worst!

Okay, that’s a lot of ranting.  But I’ll end with this modest proposal: let’s start bringing back shame.

Let’s follow the lead of that apple-eating bad-ass Canadian politician, and shame every “journalist” who tries to ask a loaded, dishonest question.

Let’s make a list of journalists who ran with Hamas’ lies about the hundreds of dead children at the Gaza hospital that was never hit by an Israeli rocket, and whenever they ask any question about Hamas’ war, require that they first admit their mistake and apologize.

Let’s bombard university presidents and regents with demands to denounce Hamas, and their own students’ anti-Semitic vandalism and attacks on Jews, and put pressure on those who have been donating to their endowments if they won’t.   

So many of our elites have been acting shamelessly, and if their consciences have become so cauterized that they’ve become numb to shame, let’s help re-train them to feel it.

It will be good for them, and good for the nation and its future. 

Hamas delenda est!

Now that I’m back home and into the normal swing of things again, I’m going to briefly mention a few stories that I hadn’t gotten to, before moving on. 

First, I really like what I’m seeing out of Mike Johnson as Speaker so far.  His first official move was a hat-trick:

–he supported Israel (which is manifestly the right thing to do)

–he put up a stand-alone bill that split the aid to Israel off from yet more aid to Ukraine (which I don’t think is necessarily wrong, but which requires much more scrutiny)

–and he proposed a perfect way to “pay for” it (nothing in DC is truly paid for by anyone other than taxpayers) by taking the unspent cash that was earmarked to hire 87,000 more locusts – er, IRS agents – to harry and harass said taxpayers. 

To top that off, he got a dozen Dems who aren’t insane enough to have “I love Hamas” tramp-stamps to sign onto the bill.  So now the Dems in the narrowly divided Senate will have to go on the record by either passing the bill or passively aiding Hamas.

And when an aide wakes the Cadaver in Chief (He’s joined the choir invisible!) and reads the now-bipartisan bill to him, Biden will face a dilemma:

“Do I do the right and popularly supported thing, even though it gives the GOP a win and angers the jihadi, Jew-hating, pro-atrocity wing of my party, or do I…  do I…  you know.  You know the thing.  What was I…….. Anyway…”   

But I still don’t care for Matt Gaetz, who is very lucky that the bonehead GOP’s three-week rake-stomping contest ended with them accidentally making what so far looks like a good pick for Speaker. 

IMHO, it was the height of hubris for Gaetz – who has a mixed record on conservative issues – to let his personal pique at McCarthy lead him to overthrow a reasonably effective GOP speaker in a narrowly divided House with no plan or alternative speaker in mind to replace him. 

Whoa!  Before any of my more always-Trumpy comrades throw rocks at me, I ask you to remember two facts:

1. Gaetz voted with 100% of the Democrats and against 96% of the Republicans on that issue.  (As bad as many in the GOP can be and often are, they have NEVER collectively been as terrible as the wretched hive of scum and villainy that makes up 100% of the Dems in congress.)

2. McCarthy was Trump’s hand-picked choice for Speaker, getting his full-throated endorsement earlier this very year.  So unless you’re suggesting that Trump would disloyally throw his former ally under the bus, or that he exhibited poor judgment in an endorsement—

Oh, wait.

The only other thing that I wish would have come out of the speaker fight was raising the bar on the number of GOP votes required to throw a speaker out.  It’s a recipe for continuing chaos to allow only a tiny rump caucus of 4% of GOP members to topple a Speaker.  If you can’t get at least a quarter or a third of your party to support you (and your Democrat allies) in an overthrow, you need to think twice.

This time it was supposedly 5 “conservatives” who took down the speaker.  (I’m not buying it, especially since the most conservative members, including Roy and Massie among others, voted to keep McCarthy.)  But we all know that there are way more than 5 mushy GOP moderates in the House. 

Do we REALLY want to give a tiny number of those people the ability to throw out our Speaker anytime they get mad about anything at all?        

Second, Jamaal Bowman took a plea and paid a fine for pulling a fire alarm in a lame attempt to stop a House vote.  Sure, that’s a ridiculously lenient punishment for trying to disrupt the legitimate functions of the congress, which the left has been telling us since 1/6/21 constitutes high treason and insurrection, and is thus worthy of years in prison.

But we can see to it that this incident will eternally besmirch his reputation. 

Now Bowman has joined the ignominious ranks of Democrats whose obituaries will begin by referring to a solitary moment in their lives of such sublime stupidity and/or dishonesty that they will be a laughingstock forever.

He takes his place beside Hank Johnson (D-uh), the dope who feared that adding more personnel to our military base in Guam might make the island tip over,

…and Eric Swalwell, the idiot who fell for Fang Fang the Chi-Com who promised to love him long time,

…and Liz Warren, the winner of “Miss Cherokee Cheekbones of 1976” (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Third, a Canadian member of Parliament (and, God willing, the future replacement for Black-face Trudeau) with the ridiculous name Pierre Poilievre provided a textbook example of how to wrong-foot a simpering, bad-faith, leftist “journalist.”

The biased hack rolled out the usual dishonest question-framing: many people say that you’re an extremist populist who is taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book, and appealing to voters’ emotions with ideological language, blah blah blah.   

But P-squared didn’t let him get away with any of it, challenging every bogus charge:

Hack Journalist (HJ): Many people say…

Double-P (DP): What people?

HJ: I don’t know, some people.

D-P: Well you asked the question, don’t you know who?

HJ: homina homina. They say you’re a populist—

D-P: What do you mean by that?

HJ: I guess that you use emotional language—

D-P: Like what?

HJ: I guess like “left wing” and “right wing”—

D-P: I never really talk about left and right.

HJ: Anyways, they say you’re taking a page out of Trump’s book—

D-P: What page?  Can you give me a page?

By the end, the poor jerk was left stuttering and staring at the ground, and when P-squared finally asked him exactly what his question was, all he had left was, “I guess, why should people vote for you?”

It was an “emperor has no clothes” moment for the interviewer, and the exposure was NOT a good look for him. 

And Pierre did it all while casually eating an apple! 

That doesn’t sound very impressive, but when you watch the video, it is incredibly cool.  He ate that apple the way tough guys in old movies used to smoke a cigarette: it simultaneously gave him something to do with his hands, and a way to demonstrate an insouciant disdain for his opponent.   (It reminded me of an old joke: “Don’t smoke, kids. …unless you want to look really, really cool!”)

The only thing the apple didn’t allow him to do was blow smoke in the guy’s face.  But I guess he could have finished the apple at the same time he finished off the “journalist,” and then beaned the guy in the head with the apple core. 

All of our candidates should study that video, and then start carrying an apple with them everywhere, waiting for the chance to rhetorically de-pants the first lefty smear-artist who tries to ambush them.    

Speaking of morally ugly self-exposure, it’s been instructive to see how completely academia has revealed itself to be a home to some really terrible, anti-Semitic terrorism enthusiasts and bigots.  From tearing down posters of kidnapped Jews to screaming genocidal slogans to attacking Jewish students on the streets and in libraries, the academic left has revealed their rotten core more effectively than a thousand conservative jeremiads could ever have done.

Regular readers will know that I retired from academia a year and a half ago, and look how it’s plummeted downhill since then!  I’m not saying that my leaving was the lynchpin moment that led to this academic catastrophe.  But I’m not saying my leaving was NOT the lynchpin moment, either. 

But either way, we should do our best to remember this month, and bring it up whenever a clot of professors start to lecture us on the sins of the West or the virtues of their blinkered multiculturalism.

October 7^th should be as shameful a day for them as National Fire Prevention Day is for Jamaal Bowman, or Indigenous People’s Day is for Lizzie Warren.  (#neverstopmocking!)

I’ll end on a happier note, as is my wont: in three of these United States, conservatives are on a roll.

In Florida, DeSantis (the most principled and consistently conservative governor and prez candidate) has won another court victory over the ACLU in his battle to ensure election integrity and fight voting fraud. 

In Wisconsin (according to a Gateway Pundit story you should check out), the GOP is pushing a raft of voting integrity measures: permanently banning illegal absentee ballot drop boxes; requiring proof of citizenship to vote; preventing partisan Clerks from illegally “curing” improperly cast absentee ballots; and removing nearly a half-million names of voters who have moved, died or are otherwise questionably registered to vote.

These are the kinds of arduous, unglamorous tasks required to root out the increased corruption in our recent election cycles, and every state and national GOP body should be pursuing them as hard as they can!  I hope that Trump will also use his bully pulpit to highlight and support these efforts, because complaining (justifiably) that the election was rigged last time is a hell of a lot less effective than actually doing something tangible to stop the steal next time!   

In fact, we’ve seen the results of that kind of work in Jeff Landry’s gubernatorial win in Louisiana.  Landry was widely expected to get a plurality but not a majority in the “jungle primary” there, requiring another runoff election.  But he won an absolute majority, giving the GOP a victory over the only Dem-held governor’s office in the deep south.

One factor was Trump’s endorsement of Landry, in a deep red state where that helps a lot more than it did in less-red states in the last several cycles.  Another factor was Landry’s strength as a candidate (unlike, say, Herschel Walker in GA, or Dr. Oz and Doug Mastriano in PA).  Perhaps as important were smart GOP efforts (led by former Trump campaign officials) to both target voter research and ads, and encourage early voting the way the Dems have been doing in recent cycles. 

More please!   

Hamas delenda est!

I’m back from my trip north, and I can honestly say that while I missed CO nation and following this site every day, it’s also been nice to get away, and walk in some woods, and hang out with family for a while, ignoring all of the Hamas-holes and other political weasels infesting our national life. 

In the middle of the visit, the two cousins and I took a meandering trip from central Illinois up into Wisconsin. We drove north and west on small country roads, through fields of dry corn and soybeans being harvested, and patches of woods that were at peak color.  We ended up following the Rock River for a while, near Dixon (hometown of Ronald Reagan, peace be upon him), and hiking through some wooded hillsides surrounding a huge concrete statue of Black Hawk, or at least an idealized Indian figure named after him.

[Insert your own joke featuring a non-idealized, non-Indian figure like Liz Warren here.] [#wemustneverstopmockingher]

Just south of the Wisconsin border we spent an afternoon in the hometown of my favorite under-rated president, US Grant.  We toured an interesting little museum there, and had a great time in that picturesque little town.  From there, we followed the Mississippi River up into Wisconsin.

We stayed one night in Prairie du Chien (which sounds a lot better than “Dog Prairie”), then crossed the Mississippi into Iowa the next morning and stopped at Effigy Mounds National Monument, a forested area covering almost four square miles of high ground overlooking the river.  We hiked up into some woods where the leaves were so yellow they almost hurt your eyes, and enjoyed some great views.

From there we drove to Pike’s Peak, Iowa, which provided more great views of the valley where the Wisconsin River flows into the Mississippi. Which reminds me…

Regular readers may remember my travelogue of our trip on Route 66 from Chicago to LA several years ago, during which one of the linguistic themes that arose involved various “devils.”  A crazily crooked bridge in Missouri was called “Devil’s Elbow;” a funky museum of barbed wire (the “devil’s rope”) in Texas; dirt devils swirling across the floor of a desert valley in Arizona; more pot smell (“the devil’s lettuce”) than you’d expect in Oklahoma, and so on. 

Well one theme that popped up during this trip – arising from how many small towns have very familiar names – was “not that one.” 

For example, in Illinois we drove through or by Oregon (not that one), and Compton (definitely not that one).  In Iowa we were very close to Harper’s Ferry (not that one), and we saw Pike’s Peak (not that one).  In Wisconsin we passed by Sparta (not that one) and Oregon again (still not that one), and at the beautiful capitol building in Madison, we saw a cool statue of a bad-ass Norwegian guy named Hans Christian (not that one) Heg, who came to Wisconsin in the 19^th century, and died fighting slaveholding Democrats at Chickamauga on September 16^th, 1863.

As always, traveling brought many small delights.  I saw a perfectly named liquor store in Prairie du Chien – where, if you over-indulged you could end up… dad joke landing in 3…2…1… sick as a chien (sorry).  It was called, “Pour Decisions,” and my compliments to the owner.

In an old building in La Crosse, a restaurant’s neon sign had the words “lousy service” – also in neon – below it.  So don’t complain that all advertising is false advertising.    

During our drive along a river road up through Wisconsin we stopped at four different sites marking battles in the Black Hawk War, a typically poignant tale of tragic events that seem like they could have happened a thousand years ago, rather than unfolding over just five months in 1832.  One site’s marker reported 10 dead on both sides in one encounter, and I couldn’t help but think that that is just a typical couple of weekdays in Chicago.         

We were lucky enough to hike along five different rivers: the Illinois, Vermillion, Rock, Apple and Mississippi.  (The Mississippi is the biggest – surprise! – but I think the prettiest might be the Rock.)  And even though I love Florida, there’s something about Fall in the north that always gets to me.  After we came out of the woods at Effigy Mounds, the wind momentarily picked up, and all around us yellow and orange leaves filled the air like a heavy snow, and I was right back in childhood.

All of the sensations are so familiar.  A brisk chill in the air and the occasional sounds of birdsong and smells of woodsmoke nearby.  Walking along a sun-dappled path, the tannic acid scent of a carpet of fallen leaves crunching underfoot, and I’m thinking of trick-or-treating in a plastic Captain America mask (the rubber band holding it on my head snaps off by the fourth or fifth house!), and half-forgotten hayrack rides that ended in drinking hot apple cider and roasting marshmallows. 

And all of it the sweeter because of the knowledge that it won’t last long.

When I first read Shakespeare’s Sonnet 73 later in life, the first four lines immediately rang true, despite the archaic verbiage: “That time of year thou mayst in me behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/ Upon those boughs which shake against the cold/ Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

I first read that when I was relatively young, and aging was a theoretical concept for me.  Now that I’ve entered my 60s – I can’t believe it either! – the final couplet hits like a hammer blow: “This thou perceivest, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well which thou must leave ere long.” 

Yes! 

And ouch! 

And then I got back home, and started catching up on events in our country and in the Middle East, and I couldn’t help but think of Shakespeare again, and the lines from The Tempest: “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

Of course the jihadis are screaming about their precious human shields – er… children, and about Israeli “war crimes.”  (Because I guess no one has explained to them that accidentally killing civilians who are used as human shields in front of legitimate military targets is NOT a war crime, while using civilians as human shields to protect military targets IS a war crime?)

And of course Hamas sympathizers around the world and in our own cities and campuses are lying their heads off and chanting from the genocide hymnbook.  (“From the river to the sea, we will make the land Jew-free!”)

And of course the MSM “journalists” are covering themselves with shame, as per usual.  They’re calling terrorist cowards “fighters” or “resistance,” and churning out as much false moral equivalence as they can.  Poor KJP – she favors the fairer sex, so don’t pay attention to what a dullard she is – even had to backtrack after she responded to a question about the festering anti-Semitism being revealed in the West and America with an oblivious, “Yes, we’re as worried about rampant Islamophobia as you are!”

The false story about the “Israeli” “attack” on a “hospital” was pitch perfect, and we need to make sure to bring up that novelty exploding cigar of a narrative every time our lying media and lefties (but I repeat myself) get hysterical about Israel fighting back against Hamas.

For several days, empty/talking heads all over the world repeated the breathless morality tale of how the evil Jews “intentionally” rocketed the hospital, leaving a mountain of “500” “dead” “Palestinians” – who by some miracle were all women and children.  Many commentators even used the fact that the rocket “killed” “so many” as evidence that it had to be from the Jews, because only their rockets could cause that much damage.

(I’d go on, but I have now used up my weekly quota of scare quotes.) 

Then it quickly came out – documented six ways to Sunday – that the rocket was fired by Hamas, that it didn’t hit the hospital but a parking lot next to the hospital, and that it killed only around 10-50.  (And I’m willing to bet that at least some of those casualties – while they likely have the genitalia of small infants – were actually big, brave Hamas terrorists.)

Other than that, they got the story exactly right!  

Ugh. 

Given all that, and even though Biden served up his usual mush of stuttering, slurring equivocation, he at least mumbled a few of the right talking points, and we’ve got some carriers in the Gulf. Which is about the most we can expect, given what a low-down, chien-faced pony soldier (HA!) our Cadaver-in-Chief is.

It’s good to be back, and I’ve missed you, CO nation.  And I trust that in my absence none of you have forgotten…

Hamas delenda est!