Month: March 2024

How Did Squatting Become a Thing in the US? (posted 3/27/24)

Today’s topic is squatters. 

I’m not sure why there are suddenly a spate of stories about squatters in the news, but I’m sure of one thing: allowing strangers to help themselves to other’s houses is a big red flag warning that society is rapidly deteriorating.

At the risk of sounding like an old guy saying, “In my day, this never would have been allowed to go on,” let me say – as a youthful, vibrant 60-is-the-new-40 guy, “In my day this never would have been allowed to go on.”

But the issue isn’t just chronological, it’s also geographical, cultural, and political. 

I grew up in a series of small towns in Illinois, and while I can’t imagine someone forcing their way into one of my relatives’ houses and claiming it for his own, I can somehow exactly imagine the reactions of my uncles, dad or grandpa — and possibly my grandma, and one of my orneriest aunts – if that had ever happened.

It would go exactly like this: 

10-year-old me (bursting through my grandpa’s screen door):  Gramps, some guy let himself into Aunt Carol’s house and says that it’s his now!

Grandpa (putting down his mason jar of corn liquor): How big is he?

Me: Why?

Grandpa: Cause I need to know whether to get my axe handle or my gun.  Also, call your dad, Bob, Ray and Bill, and tell them to meet me at Carol’s.  Oh, and call Doc Johnson, too.

Me: Why?

Grandpa: Cause none of us went to medical school, so we don’t know how to patch up gunshot wounds or remove axe handles from arses.

And, scene.

But again, it’s not just chronological.  It’s also geographical – I’ll bet there’s no rash of squatting in rural areas or red states, unless it’s in a big blue city in a red state – and cultural – it’s not happening in areas with lots of cohesive families and an appreciation of the second amendment.

The umbrella stretching over all of those factors, though, is politics.  Squatting can only happen in an area where soft-on-crime, anti-gun, and coercive, sclerotic, big government policies have taken hold and created a backwards moral system that punishes law-abiding citizens and rewards law breakers.   

The contrast is clear from two recent examples.  You have probably seen the story of the middle-class Brooklynite who inherited her mother’s house, but found several squatters living in it when she went there.  So shooed a couple of them out and barely finished changing the locks when a third squatter barged back in, insisting that he lived there.

When she pushed back, he called the cops, and they ended up arresting her for changing the locks on her own house, and told her she’d have to go through landlord/tenant court to get him out.  Which will take months or even a year and cost her tons of money, while the deadbeat squatter just laughed.  

Meanwhile, in the free state of DeSantis-land, things went a little differently when a recidivist Biden voter (I’m guessing about that. But I’m also right.) named Brandon Harris was serially breaking into homes.  He had at least 17 prior arrests, plus multiple outstanding felony warrants at the time. 

As the cops headed for the neighborhood, one homeowner shot at Harris several times, but tragically missed.  The cops arrived and arrested Harris, and the local sheriff gave a press conference shortly afterwards. 

I swear I am not making up this exact quote from that Sheriff’s press conference:

“As to the person… we don’t know what homeowner—which homeowner shot at him.  I guess they think that they did something wrong, which they did not.  If someone is breaking into your house, you’re more than welcome to shoot him in Santa Rosa County.  We prefer that you do, actually.  So whoever that was, you’re not in trouble.  Come see us. We have a gun safety class we put on every other Saturday.  If you take that, you’ll shoot a lot better, and hopefully you’ll save the taxpayers money.”   

Yes!!  If Trump hasn’t settled on a VP pick yet, may I suggest this guy?

As a small-time landlord, this issue is especially personal for me.  Over the last 25 years, I’ve managed to buy and fix up three rental houses.  They’ve slowly appreciated, and now they constitute the bulk of our retirement income, and an inheritance for our daughters. 

I would never have bought them if I thought that after years of patience, work and hassle, some lazy grifter could squat in one of them, and I’d be forced to wage a court battle and watch while he tore up the place for months on end.  I’m not a violent person… but I’d be willing to learn.  

And then the cops would arrive, and I’d have to try to come up with an explanation for how the squatter fell down the stairs and impaled himself on that axe handle.

In that sense, the leftist instinct to empathize with and go easy on criminals leads to many Kyle Rittenhouses, and a lot of other vigilante action.  Bad government incentivizes vigilantes, and when it does, my sympathy is with the vigilantes. 

If you don’t like that – I’m talking to you, progressives who are very concerned about the civil rights of “protestors” (often rioters) – you need to support your police.  Fund them, train them, give them moral and legal support, and yes, hold them accountable when they behave badly.

But without funding and community support, the police will absent themselves – either actively, as when they quit or retire, or passively, as when they stay in their cars and allow social rot, especially in neighborhoods where they know they’ll be attacked by the politicians and populace no matter what they do.

I can’t see myself ever living in a blue state – to paraphrase an old joke about Texans, “I wasn’t born in Florida, but I got here as soon as I could.” – but if I were forced to (because of family or some other exigency) I sure wouldn’t invest in real estate there.   And because many millions of wise Americans feel the same, they are leaving blue states and counties for red ones.

As that shift happens, the quality of life in blue areas, on many fronts – crime, taxation, unemployment, lousy schools, etc. – is deteriorating.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Cause and effect, reaping and sowing, schadenfreude and karma – they all work, and they are mortal enemies of leftist governing philosophy. 

In the meantime, Florida just passed an anti-squatting law.   It preserves the rights of legitimate tenants to legally contest evictions, but in obvious squatting situations, it enables cops to immediately evict squatters and charge them with crimes.   Ron DeSantis is going to sign it shortly, and it goes into effect on July 1st. 

Man I hope we can someday have that guy as our president!

Hamas delenda est!

Stephanopoulos Shames Himself, A Criminal Brings a Hammer to a Gunfight, and Bibi Tells Biden to Stick It (posted 3/25/24)

The ridiculous stories are coming at us so fast that I might have to make this another three-column week.  No promises, but I’ll do my best.

We Don’t Hate the Media Enough

This story is already two weeks old, but I have to mention it: George Stephanopoulos put on a truly shameless display when he interviewed Nancy Mace on his sleazy Sunday morning show. 

He opened with a clip of Mace talking about her rape when she was a teenager, and then attacked her for supporting Trump, whom GS dishonestly said – 10 times! – had been found “liable of rape” against the crackpot E. Jean Carroll.

Mace fought back and repeatedly played the victim card – rare as it may be, she was actually justified in this case for doing so!  But I wish she had really attacked GS directly, because he certainly deserves it.  I wanted to hear her say something like this:

“George, are you telling me that I shouldn’t support a candidate just because he’s been accused of rape?” (Wait for him to give a smug, self-righteous reply.)  “Well didn’t you coordinate the vicious attacks on Bill Clinton’s numerous sex assault victims, including Juanita Broaddrick, who credibly accused him of raping her?  And didn’t you call those victims “nuts and sluts?”  And didn’t you refer to their true accusations as “bimbo eruptions?” 

“And by the way George, you know very well that Tara Reade has credibly accused Joe Biden of doing to her exactly what Jean Carroll said Trump did to her, except that Reade knows the year it happened, as well as the day and the place and the details.  Since her charge is so much more credible than Carroll’s, will you agree to denounce Joe Biden right now, and urge your dozens of viewers to refuse to vote for him, since you strongly disapprove of rapists?”

Ugh.  If our MSM weren’t thoroughly corrupt, they’d never hire someone like GS, and if he had a conscience and even a scintilla of self-awareness, he’d never be able to attack a rape victim on air, after he’s spent decades pimping for Clinton and Biden.

To follow that story up with a little schadenfreude chaser: Trump has filed suit against ABC News and GS for defamation.  Those suits don’t usually succeed, but Trump’s might have a chance, since GS repeatedly said that a jury found Trump “liable for rape.”

Unfortunately for him and ABC News, and even though the Carroll jury were biased hacks who bent over backwards to pretend to believe her, even THEY couldn’t go as far as GS claimed.

They answered 10 charging questions in their verdict.  The first one read, “Did Ms. Carroll prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, that Mr. Trump raped Ms. Carroll.”

Their answer, and I quote, was “No.”

So here’s hoping that Trump beats George like he’s going to beat Fani’s fanny.

Stupid Criminals

Today’s Stupid Criminals story has a little mystery to it, because I found two media stories about it, but one says that it happened in Trenton NJ, and the other in Muskegon County, MI.  So let’s just look at what the stories agree on:

At 2:00 a.m., Citizen-of-the-Year candidate Andray Ingram, 34, used a hammer to break into an apartment and assaulted the resident there. Then he tried to enter the main home that apartment was attached to.  He broke the ring camera with the hammer and made it inside, before the owner greeted him with a pistol.

Shortly after that, cops arrived to find Andray with a brand new hole in his chest.  He was taken to a local hospital, where he joined the choir invisible. 

The moral may at first seem obvious: Moron Brings Hammer to Gunfight, Goes Down Swinging.

But I think the lesson is more complicated:

Hammer vs. Unarmed resident; Hammer Wins.

Hammer vs. Ring Camera: Hammer Wins.  But…

Hammer vs. Pistol; Armed Homeowner Wins.  

In other good news, the Israelis ignored Tony Blinken, Que Mala and the Biden administration’s strongly worded letters telling them to leave Hamas alone now that they are trapped and one the edge of defeat in Northern Gaza.  (You know, like the allies left Hitler alone once we had him trapped in Berlin, or the way we left the Japanese alone once they had pulled back to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

Instead, the IDF raided the al-Shifa hospital over the weekend, killing 170 terrorists and capturing 480 more.  They also “located weapons and terrorist infrastructure in the hospital.”  (You know, the way your local hospital will also be a staging place for jihadi lunatics, RPGs and AK-47s.)

Israel also said that it killed Fa’aq Mabhouh – a guy whose name sounds like a verb followed by a direct object – whom it identified as Hamas’ “head of internal security.” 

According to NPR, though, “The Government Media Office in Gaza said Mabhouh was in charge of the coordination between tribes and UNRWA to bring humanitarian aid into northern Gaza.” 

They say “tomato,” I say “tomahto.”  And by now, I think we all know what Hamas calls “humanitarian aid,” don’t we? 

Anyway, I’ll always remember Fa’aq as the guy whose name I will NOT spell out phonetically, because I’m a gentleman.  If I weren’t so gentlemanly, I’d be tempted to speak for all of us when I say to the “Government Media Office in Gaza” (which, oddly enough, is Arabic for “NPR”), “Fa’aq Mabhouh, and the horse you rode in on!”

But I am a gentleman, and I know that hearing about the deaths of so many terrorists can hurt the tender feelings of many of our leftist brethren and cistern, let me rephrase what happened in a way that will ease their minds:

“Women’s health care in Gaza was defended by IDF medical personnel who surgically removed 170 tissue masses at the al-Shifa hospital.  These “parts of a woman’s body” ranged in age from 57 to 165 trimesters.  You are now free to shout these abortions.”    

Sorry.  My crack staff tells me that “cistern” was the wrong word to use in the last sentence, and that I should have used “sistren.”  I apologize for the mistake, and will happily amend my last paragraph to replace “cistern” with “septic tank.”   Mea culpa.

Celebration of Excellence

Finally, I highly recommend to you the Daily Wire’s new 8-part video series by Bill Whittle on the history of the Soviet Union, called “An Empire of Terror.”  I’ve only watched the first episode and the first five minutes of the second, and it is stellar.  The production values are high, and it provides a great re-cap for people who already know the outlines of the story.

It really brings alive the heartbreaking cruelty and malice at the heart of all top-down central control schemes (99% of them leftist), and the shocking extent to which those evil forces worked in Russia.  And for those who have only learned about the story in public school – i.e. those who have barely heard of it – it will be a gut-wrenching revelation.

Whittle knows how to tell a story by starting with some intriguing details, and then providing a Paul Harvey-esque “the rest of the story” payoff. 

For example, the second episode begins with the story of a train carrying a devastating biological secret weapon that left Switzerland for Germany and then on to Russia in November of 1917.  Whittle reveals that Lenin was on that train, then cites a haunting 1929 quote from Churchill: “The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons.  They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus…”    

Whittle hammers home the point: “Lenin was not carrying the weapon. Lenin WAS the weapon.”  

The comparison of communist ideology to a plague bacillus is chilling, but it might even be understating its destructiveness!  In the 14th century, the Black Plague killed no more than 30 million people at the most, while communism killed 100 million people in just the last 87 years of the 20th century.  (And the actual plague never imprisoned, tortured and immiserated tens of millions more, the way the commies did!)

You need to subscribe to the Daily Wire to see the entire series now, but I think most conservatives would benefit from supporting the Daily Wire.  They have some great writers/speakers (Andrew Klavan, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro among them), and they make docs (What is a Woman?) and comedies (Lady Ballers) that Hollywood wouldn’t touch.

They are even making wholesome cartoons for kids to counter the agenda-driven, grooming weirdos at Disney and elsewhere.  

So check out “An Empire of Terror,” if for no other reason than to say, “Fa’aq Mabhouh!” to Disney and the MSM.

Hamas delenda est!

Dems Create a Bloodbath, a Racist Movie Bombs, Planet Fitness Implodes, & Tim Tebow Rules (posted 3/22/24)

We’ve got a full line-up of stories, so let’s start with a new category, with a hat tip to Red State for the title:

You Don’t Hate the Media Enough

One of the most despicable traits of our mainstream media is the bad faith way that they take a quote wildly out of context, and then pull their dresses over their heads and launch into a performance art piece of faux outrage. 

One example would be when Sarah Palin referred to “targeting” vulnerable Democrat candidates for House and Senate seats, and the MSM pretended to believe that she was soliciting hitmen to kill Dem candidates, or something.  

Maybe the most famous example was when Trump joked in a 2016 speech that maybe the Russians could find and turn over Hillary’s lost emails.  It is still hard to believe that the Democrats were mendacious enough to pretend that he was collaborating with the Russians, and to use that obviously humorous quip as the basis for a presidential impeachment!

They were at it again this week, this time pretending that when Trump used the word “bloodbath,” he wasn’t discussing dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.  Even though the quote came from the middle of a speech about… wait for it… the dire financial ramifications of allowing the Chicoms to attack our car market.

No, the Dems cried havoc, and let slip the whores of war. 

Wait, that’s not right.  I meant the dogs of war.  Or was it the dog-faced pony soldiers of the presstitues of the MSM?

Anyway, everyone from Imhotep Pelosi (Aiiii! The mummy walks among us!) to every Dem pol and media talking head in sight started ranting about how Trump was calling for a genocide, or something.

Of course multiple conservative web sites immediately cited Merriam Webster’s definition of “bloodbath,” one meaning of which is “a major economic disaster.”

(Like, for example, the dire ramifications of allowing Chicoms to attack our car market.)

And they also quickly produced a series of news clips featuring dozens of Democrats and MSM “journalists” (but I repeat myself) using the word in exactly the same way Trump did.

Ugh!  As this category suggests, whenever we think we might really hate the lying media, we must remember that we STILL don’t hate them enough.

But I’m not a hater.

A mocker and a sarcastic critic, sure.  Guilty as charged.  But I’m no hater.

Therefore, I’m going to give our leftist opposition a fantastic tip to make their “journalism” less pathetic:  If you’re going to insist that the word “bloodbath” be taken literally – which is incredibly stupid, but hey, you do you – then it must be used only when there is literally blood involved. 

Here are a couple of examples:

“Democrats defund police; bloodbaths ensue in major blue cities.”

“Democrats open our borders to hordes of foreign criminals; bloodbaths ensue.”

“Taxpayer money is used to fund Planned Parenthood abortuaries all over the country; it’s a bloodbath every day!”

You’re welcome, Democrats.  Now please re-think your life choices.

Today in Schadenfreude Corner, I’ve got a quick bit of movie news.

If you’re not a low-down whitey-hating racist – and I know that you aren’t – you probably missed the promotional push leading up to the opening last Friday of the movie, “The American Society of Magical Negroes.”

And your mental health is better for it.  Unfortunately for me, part of my heroic role here at Cautious Optimism is to subject myself to various political assaults on the American project so that you don’t have to. 

I won’t lie though: I did not watch this movie.  But I did read two reviews, and then I watched the trailer. (On an unrelated note, if there are any opthalmologists in CO Nation, can you tell me how long the burning and blurred vision that comes after splashing bleach in one’s eyes usually lasts?  Asking for a friend.)

The premise is that white people are so maliciously racist that they are a constant threat to innocent black people, requiring blacks to condescend to their white fragility.  The mentor to the protagonist sets the table in the first minute of the trailer, when he asks his protégé, “What’s the most dangerous animal on the planet?”

Just as the kid starts to answer, “Sharks,” the mentor interrupts him with, “White people…when they feel uncomfortable.”

Get it?  It’s not a racist screed played ironically as a horror film, or an acerbic social critique. 

It’s a comedy!

(I’m reminded of an old Gilbert Gottfried routine in which he imagined the pitch meeting to persuade tv executives to greenlight “Hogan’s Heroes”: “It’s about a bunch of allied prisoners in a concentration camp during the holocaust.  And it’s a comedy!”)

So this insulting mess of a film opened in 1,146 theaters nationwide on March 15th… annnddd… it bombed!  It brought in a pathetic $1.3 million on its opening weekend, and that total included a huge drop from its first day to its second.    

Even more shockingly, it only got 31% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, even though the critics famously give virtue-signaling extra points for woke themes in movies.  Any film focusing on a transgender handi-capable person of color fighting the patriarchal forces of white, straight America is usually spotted 60% right off the bat (10 points for each of those checked boxes). 

So for even lefty critics to only give this mess 31% speaks to what a horrible abomination it is.  (For comparison, the critics gave Rob “Meathead” Reiner’s Christophobic “documentary” “God and Country” 88%!)    

To put it another way, if you added the earnings from the Meathead movie and this racist trash together, you wouldn’t even have enough cash to hire renowned Ukrainian energy expert Hunter Biden to lobby his dear departed daddy for one single month!  

Speaking of financially disastrous decision-making, I’ve got a new entry in the “Unexpectedly” category:

The Planet Fitness chain of gyms recently started coercing their employees and customers to cater to the desires of sexually confused “transgender” people. 

The business produced an operational manual that required employees to use “names, titles and pronouns” of strange sexual narcissists, and threatened to fire them if they wouldn’t do so. 

The manual also acknowledged that some customers might “feel uncomfortable” with people of the opposite sex sharing showers and bathrooms with them, but insisted that, “This discomfort is not a reason to deny access to a transgender member.” 

And just to demonstrate the company’s Orwellian bona fides, the manual said that this deranged coercion was meant “to foster a climate of understanding consistent with the Judgement Free character of Planet Fitness.”

Got that?  “Judgment Free.” 

But if a normal woman and her teenage daughter undress and head for the showers after a workout, and they notice some naked dude with heavy mascara and a beehive hairdo sitting in the locker room staring at them while he’s trying to make balloon animals with his phallus? 

If they object, you know that the “understanding” commissars at Planet Fitness are going to judge the hell out of them for being transphobic bigots!

Anyway, late last week the Planet Fitness manual hit social media.

Annnndddd… their stock price plummeted 8% immediately, shaving $400 million off the company’s value.

UNEXPECTEDLY!  (Also: more please.)

In Stupid Criminal news, I’ll take you to the big open space where our southern border used to be for the story of a guy who might be the dumbest criminal I’ve ever written about.  (And I’ve written about the Biden crime family!)

This charmer is a 22-year old Lebanese named Basel Bassel Ebbadi.  (He’s the terrorist so nice, they named him twice!) He was caught by the US Border Patrol in Texas on March 9th. 

And even though I’m wary of disclosing sensitive tactics involving our national security, I’m going to disclose one clever forensic technique our border agents used to trip up ol’ double-Basel:  They asked him – and this is a quote – “What are you doing in the US?”

And he said, “I’m going to try to make a bomb.”

(Rumors that he then slapped his forehead, said “D’oh!  I mean, I’m here to seek political asylum,” have not been confirmed.)

Further fiendishly ingenious questioning tricked Basel-squared into admitting that he had “trained with Hezbollah for seven years… and guarded weapons locations for another four years.”  And also that he planned to set off his bomb in New York City. 

So a Hezbollah terrorist came through our porous border with plans to blow up part of New York, and the only reason he was caught was that he was dumb enough to confess when he was asked one question.  (This guy is so dumb that he’s been called “the AOC of Jihadis.”) (By me, just now.)

And ABC and CBS did not even mention this story on their flagship morning and evening news shows on Sunday and Monday, while NBC did give it 45 seconds on Monday night.  (Remember: we don’t hate them enough!)

Let’s end with a new and inspiring example of the Celebration of Excellence.

Thirty-seven years ago, a married missionary couple serving in the Philippines were pregnant with their fifth child when the mother suffered a life-threatening infection that required strong drugs which threatened her pregnancy. Doctors advised her to abort the baby because he likely had birth defects because of her severe illness, but she chose to have the child.

That baby was Tim Tebow, who would grow up to become the greatest college football quarterback ever, in my unbiased opinion (Go Gators!), winning two national championships and a Heisman trophy. 

But as good of a player as he was (did I mention he went 4-0 against FSU?), he’s a better man.  He’s been a fine example of Christian faith, raising money for various charities, including the pediatric cancer center at our home-town hospital where my daughter got her first nursing job.

(“Hey Martin,” you might be asking, “was she nominated last week for a state-wide nursing award in Colorado?”  Yes she was, in fact.  Thanks for asking.)  

Ten years ago Tebow started a foundation that puts on an annual “Night to Shine,” a coordinated

series of world-wide “proms” for kids with Down Syndrome and a variety of other disabilities.  (Watch a few of their videos online if you don’t mind getting choked up.)

In the cynical and debased world we live in, it’s hard for me to watch even Tebow without wondering in the back of my mind whether he’s too good to be true and authentic.  But I was glad to see him speak in front of our congress earlier this month (I know: talk about “pearls before swine!”) in support of a bill to fund rescue teams to identify and rescue child sexual abuse victims.

I know that the government can screw up everything it touches, but this is a truly good cause, and I’m going to look into this bill, and I hope that it does what its sponsors want it to.

And I’m glad that his parents brought Tim Tebow into this world.             

Hamas delenda est!

A New Category for my Columns: Jerk of the Month (posted 3/20/24)

First, let me thank everyone for the congratulations on our anniversary; you all are too kind.

As I mentioned on Monday, I’ve got a new category that will be featured in many future columns.  I’m calling it “Jerk of the Month.” 

I was going to call it “Jackass of the Month,” but upon reflection, the jackass is a useful animal, and one that has been put through enough degradation already, having been hijacked by Democrats as their party mascot. 

I pictured some poor jackass in a barnyard, being harassed by the other animals:

Cow: Hey Jerry, is it true that Anthony Weiner, AOC and Adam Schiff are all your guys?

Jerry (the jackass, shaking his head wearily): I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m not one of them.  They just picked me as their mascot.

Pig (oink-chuckling): Sure they did.

Jerry (to the pig): Hey Randy, aren’t Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg two of yours?

Pig (looking offended):  That’s just mean!

Jerry: Meaner than associating me with Imhotep Pelosi, or Adam Schiff?

Clydesdale horse: Take it easy, Jerry.

Jerry: And what about you?  Hillary Clinton is one of yours, right?

Clydesdale: Whoa, whoa.  Just because she’s got our ankles doesn’t make her a Clydesdale! 

Jerry (to a nearby chicken): What are you looking at, General Tso?  Eric Swalwell is one of yours!

Chicken:  Fang Fang is one of mine.  We’ve got nothing to do with Swalwell.  That guy smells worse than Randy.

Pig: Hey!

Jerry:  See how that feels?  (noticing a white Jeep Cherokee parked in front of the barn)  And what about you?  Would you like it if I insinuated that you’re related to Elizabeth Warren?

Jeep Cherokee:  That’s not funny! You can see that I’m white, Jerry. 

Jerry (narrowing his eyes): Exactly.  #wemustneverstopmockingher

And, scene.

Where was I?

Oh yes.  My first nominee for Jerk of the Month is a Palestinian Canadian – I picture a guy screaming, “Death to the infidel, eh?” – named Ahmed Kouta. 

He got a nursing degree in Gaza, and he made his latest trip there from Canada not long before the Hamas attack on Israel; now he’s apparently stuck there.  He’s got around 250K followers on Instagram, where he calls himself “Prince Kouta.”

He’s not a strong candidate for Jerk of the Month because he calls himself a prince – though if there were a competition for “douche of the month,” calling yourself “prince” would likely get you on the medal stand – but because of a video he put out on March 17th.  While the video is only 2 minutes long, it contains a weapons-grade blend of arrogance, bad faith and whining.

Elsewhere in his social media Ahmed has been wailing about how the innocent, sainted “Palestinians” are starving to death, all because of the evil Jooooosss.

But this video is basically an unboxing video of a MRE – “meal ready to eat” – that the USA has been air dropping for the citizens of Gaza.  He shows his audience the contents of the MRE, one at a time.

“Martin, does he get excited, and express his thanks to the American people for giving his people this life-sustaining aid?” you are not asking, because you know that he wouldn’t be a candidate for jerk of the month if he did that.

He starts by saying that the MREs have been airdropped to Gazans courtesy of the American defense department.  “This is the airdrop they drop on us… and then all the airstrikes that they also hit us with.”  

Already I wish the MRE had hit him on the head.

He pulls out one packet and shows it to the camera; it’s crackers.  Then a packet of applesauce.  Then gum. Then something that he looks at, and tosses aside, saying, “I don’t know.  We don’t see this here.” (That bag was actually a heater; the user adds water, which creates a chemical reaction to produce heat.)  Next is an energy bar, and “French vanilla,” (?) then cashews, then peanut butter.

Then the video cuts to a little later, after he’s opened and tried each of the packets in the MRE.  And he says, “Overall, it’s one of the worst meals I’ve ever had.  I literally ate a piece of everything, because… imagine I’m fasting all day, hungry, haven’t eaten anything, and then I came to eat this… nothing.  Only the peanut butter tastes like our Canadian peanut butter.”

“Everything else?  This whole meal is like a 2 out of 10. Not even a 1 out of 10, actually.  This is torturing us more than it’s being ate.”

My first thought was that someone should treat him to a little waterboarding, followed by hooking up part of his anatomy to a car battery, followed by playing Dylan Mulvaney’s music video for him on a loop.  (Don’t look it up, CO nation!) 

And then he could be asked to complete a survey asking him to rate those tortures, as compared to the “torture” of being given free food.   

Ugh.  MREs are routinely given to our soldiers in the field.  (By the way, the life of any one of them is worth more than the collective lives of every malicious anti-Semite in your entire social network, Princess!)  They are designed to not spoil or rot, and to provide life-sustaining nutrition in challenging environments. 

I’ll grant that a MRE doesn’t sound like a gourmet meal to me, and I probably wouldn’t choose to eat it, if I had a lot of other options.

On the other hand, I do have a lot of other options.  Because I’m not a hateful little b*tch who supported a bunch of terrorist scum who gang-raped and slaughtered a lot of defenseless civilians, bringing down a righteous drum of karmic whup-ass on me and my vile co-religionists, which means that I’ll never have to rely on my innocent victims to feed my sorry, unrepentant arse.

So I’ve got that going for me.

As one commenter on the video said, “If you’re rating humanitarian aid on a scale of 1 to 10, you don’t need humanitarian aid.”

Yep.   

Another commenter pointed out that Kouta only showed the snacks that come with the MRE that he held up; the main course was “vegetable crumbles with pasta in taco style sauce.” 

Which means that in addition to being an obnoxious ingrate, Kouta is also either a liar, or else someone stole the main course out of his MRE before it got to him.  Now who could have done that, I wonder?

Well, Kouta accidentally gave us a clue in the middle of his moan-fest.  When he first displayed the MRE, he said, “It comes for free, but in the end we still have to buy it.” 

That’s right.  The American taxpayers provide you with free food, and then the noble jihadis in Hamas steal that food, and extort you into paying them for it.  But the Americans and the Jews are the bad guys?

Got it.     

On behalf of the American people, I apologize, Ahmed.  We’re going to get our best chefs right on the task of providing you with the kind of delicacies that your sophisticated palate demands.

In the meantime, might I suggest that there is an alternative source of protein in Gaza for you right now?  We call it “terrorist crumbles with diced shrapnel in taco style sauce.”  Don’t think of it as cannibalizing the corpses of Hamas fighters, think of it as “consuming a Canadian-peanut-butter-esque substance.”

And if some of the servings you can scrounge might have gone bad after a little too much time in the sun, don’t worry, because the IDF is preparing some more for you right now.

Bon appetit, Ahmed, and congratulations on your nomination for Jerk of the Month!

Hamas delenda est!

Hur Wrecks Biden, Fani & a Subway Criminal Wreck Themselves, & I Celebrate My Anniversary (posted 3/18/24)

I’m tempted to open today with some comments on Hur’s testimony last week about Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.  And if I were to do so, I’d mention how many of the Democrats made complete fools out of themselves during the hearings, blatantly lying about what Hur said in his report… while he was sitting right there to refute them!

I might hypothetically call special attention to Pramila Jayapal (and not just because an anagram of her name is “liar pajama play,” because that is obvious to everyone) who read from a prepared stack of lies.  When she said that Hur’s “investigation resulted in a complete exoneration” of the late Joe Biden, Hur interrupted to contradict her. 

She immediately started talking over him, repeating that, “I’m going to continue with my questions.” (Of course, she wasn’t asking any questions.)  Irritated when Hur insisted on making his point, Jayapal repeated, “You exonerated him.”

And Hur corrected her, mid-lie, again: “I did not exonerate him.”

That’s when Jayapal gave the most obnoxious smirking glare and insisted, “Mr. Hur, it’s my time. Thank you.

If I were commenting on the hearing, I would have to momentarily return to a fixture of my past columns – the Simpson Face Punchability Index (SFPI) – to note that normally Jayapal has a SFPI of 78 (in the middle of the “resting Hillary-face” zone), but during her pathetic “it’s my time” comment, her SFPI spiked to 94. 

Which equates, as regular readers may remember, to a situation in which even Mother Theresa would be unable to stop herself from instinctively slapping the dishonest smirk off her face.  

And I would probably – if I were to comment on the hearing – point out that my favorite part of Hur’s interviews was when Biden went off on a long, rambling tangent about his Corvette (I swear I am not making this up) and – in the words of an actual, official document of the United States – “made car noises.” 

But I’ve decided not to comment on those hearings.  Because we need to do everything we can to be sure that Biden remains on the ticket until election day.  So I think he’s doing a great job!

And by the way, I missed the Hur testimony, which I’m sure was not worth watching.  Instead, because it’s pollen season in north Florida, I washed our cars that afternoon. 

And you should have seen the strange look my wife gave me when she came out and caught me in the driver’s seat of her car, yanking the steering wheel back and forth and going, “Vroom!  Vroom!  Look at me, I’m the leader of the free world!”  

I will instead start my column with a few observations about the judge’s bizarre ruling in the Fani Willis case on Friday. 

The judge read his findings, pointing out the long list of damning facts proving that Willis and Nathan Wade broke every legal rule except coveting thy neighbor’s oxen… before explaining that if Wade left the case, Fani could remain!

Lots of people are already pointing out the logical inconsistency of finding that Willis and Wade both behaved unethically, but then ousting Wade and allowing Willis to stay.  (And by the way, where is the old-school, oppressive patriarchy when you need it?  Shouldn’t the system have condemned the adulteress and let the dimwitted man-wh*re stay on the case?  It’s almost like we don’t live under the yoke of misogynistic oppression after all.)

This decision fits a troubling pattern of bias, in which judges admit to finding clear evidence of guilt and misconduct – as when Comer basically said that Hillary was guilty in the illegal server and secret documents case, or when Hur found that Biden clearly stole and mishandled secret docs for decades – but still allows the leftist in question to escape consequences. 

But this might be one of those “God works in mysterious ways” situations.  Obviously, if the outcome had been that Willis got tossed out on her Fani and no other corrupt leftist prosecutors could have been found to take up the case, that would have been better.

But if the case is to go forward, the best-case scenario is that Fani stays in the seat (HA!), since she is so thoroughly discredited.  And judging from her terrible performance so far, I’m sure that she’ll be be-clowning herself even more.  She has already shown the emotional stability and maturity of a conceited junior-high girl, and that was BEFORE she got publicly and rightly humiliated for a solid month. 

There’s no one more angry and incapable of rational behavior than a mean girl who got pantsed in front of the whole school.  So her future mis-steps should provide plenty of entertainment.

In today’s Stupid Criminal Story, I give you the tragic tale of Dajuan Robinson, 36, who got onto the NYC subway last week with a bad attitude and a gun in his backpack.  (I don’t watch MSNBC, but I’m assuming that they’ve already reported that “Dajuan” is a very common name among White Christian nationalists.) 

Anyway, Dajuan goaded a 32-year-old man to fight, and then lunged at him, pushing him down and punching him several times.  When a woman on the train pulled out a knife and stabbed Dujuan twice in the back, he interrupted his attack to pull a gun from his backpack.  Then the other guy fought with him, got the gun away from him, and shot him with it.   

This is obviously a happy-ending story, but not just because a violent creep got shot with his own gun.  How about the average New Yorker who jumped in and stabbed the guy first?  Most observers in such situations usually either cower, or pull out their cell phones and narrate the action like low-IQ ghouls. 

Even better, a Brooklyn DA has said that the shooter won’t face charges!  I know: pick up your jaw and read that again.  A DA in Brooklyn said that somebody who defended himself against a violent perp won’t be prosecuted!  Now if someone can just tell that DA about the Daniel Penny case! 

In fact, the great Babylon Bee had a hilarious Penny story on 3/6, with the headline “With Daniel Penny Arrested, NYC Forced to Deploy National Guard to Protect Subway.”  The best lines in the story are faux-attributed to Governor Hochul: “We desperately need the Guard to come do exactly what we arrested Daniel Penny for doing.  Civilians have become too afraid to confront violence on the subway, for reasons we cannot determine.”

Unfortunately for Dajuan Robinson, that might be changing.

In other news, I’ve considered adding a few new categories to some of my future columns, one on stories about our horrific mainstream media (I’m thinking of a title phrase I saw on another conservative website: “No matter how much you think you hate the MSM, it’s not enough.”)

The other new category will be offering nominees for “Jackass of the Month.” And because I love you all, I’m going to write a short column on Wednesday with my first nominee for that award.

I know: I spoil you.  And you’re welcome.

Finally, I leave you with a self-indulgent choice for my latest “celebration of excellence” category.  And the subject for this one is… drumroll please…

Me!

Because 38 years ago I sold my motorcycle and my shirt, and moved to Florida to get a PhD in English.  A week later, I met a blonde smoke-show of a Norwegian goddess who was so out of my league it was ridiculous.  She was charming and witty and kind… and did I mention her incandescent hotness?  

I mean, I couldn’t even look directly at her.  I had to poke a hole in a shoebox and look at her through that, like an eclipse!

That night I went home and took a self-inventory. 

I look like I look (i.e. nothing to write home about), and my net worth was a used black Mazda GLC with no AC (in Florida!), a “Most Improved Player” high school football trophy, and a couple of particle-board bookcases full of cheap paperbacks.  Not only that, I was starting a degree that within 5 years’ time offered the possibility of earning well in excess of $18,000 a year!   

Sure, I had a razor-sharp wit and the strength of ten men (because my heart was pure), but most people were not overly impressed by that. 

I cannot describe the unlikeliness of me landing her!  “Drawing to an inside straight” doesn’t begin to touch it.  “Outkicking my coverage,” is inadequate.  Winning the lottery is closer.

As it happened, 30 years later Randy Newman wrote a lovely song that describes my situation perfectly.  It’s called “She Chose Me,” and you should go listen to it right now. 

It’s got strings and a piano and a French horn, and it starts with these lines: “I’m not much to talk to, and I know how I look/ What I know about life, comes out of a book/ But of all of the people, there are in the world/ She chose me.” 

And 35 years ago today, in the First Lutheran Church in Gainesville, FL, in perhaps the greatest feat of marrying-up in human history, I got Karen Ludwigsen to be my wife. 

Happy anniversary, sweetheart!

Also, as always, Hamas delenda est

Deadspin Dies, Stupid Criminals, & Celebrations of Excellence (posted 3/15/24)

First up today is Schadenfreude Corner:

You might remember the leftist sports site Deadspin because of its senior writer Carron “Karen” Phillips.  He’s a lovely little whitey-hater who managed to work race into many of his stories over the years, culminating five months ago when he smeared a 9-year-old Kansas City Chiefs fan as a racist for wearing “black face” at a game.

Of course the kid wasn’t wearing black face; he was wearing the team colors, both red and black.  He was also wearing an Indian headdress, which allowed Phillips to go for the vaunted “racial arsonist two-fer,” accusing the kid of “[finding] a way to hate black people and Native Americans at the same time.” 

You don’t have to search Phillips’ entire oeuvre to see if he has ever expressed outrage at a certain albino-adjacent Massachusetts Senator who has parlayed the actual use of “red face” into a lucrative academic and then political career.   (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Because of course he hasn’t.  Besides, he doesn’t think that kid was “hating” Indians any more than he was “hating” blacks.

The idiotic leftist fixation about Indian sports mascots has always driven me crazy.  Everybody knows that you pick sports mascots because of their positive qualities. 

That’s why teams with animal mascots pick animals admired for their strength or ferociousness; you’ll see tons of lions, tigers and bears, but no weasels or skunks.  Bird mascots include eagles, hawks and ravens, but no pigeons or vultures.

And the same goes for human mascots, obviously.  Minnesota didn’t pick the Vikings because they hate big, blond white guys.  Towns didn’t pick Oilers, Packers or Steelers because they despise working stiffs.  And the “Pittsburgh Pedophiles” didn’t narrowly edge out “steelers” in a naming competition!

So the many Braves, Chiefs and Indians in sports are compliments, not insults.  And even though I can see that “Redskins” may have been a little much, I think Washington screwed up by not just re-naming the team the Warriors.  They already had an iconic helmet with a big “W” on it, for crying out loud. 

Where was I?  Oh yeah.  Carron/Karen Phillips is a racist jerk, and Deadspin is a woke enough outfit that they hired and supported a jerk like Phillips. 

Aaannnndddd… this week Deadspin was sold, and every staff member there was immediately fired.

HA!  I can only hope that there is a factory that makes racist dog whistles and is looking to hire a tester, because Carron/Karen would love that job.

Except that he’d get fired within a week, since every single sound he ever hears sounds like racism to him.

So learn to code, Carron!         

In the “Stupid Criminals” category, I bring you the tale of New Yorker Sheldon Johnson, a career criminal and drug dealer who was sentenced 25 years ago to 50 years in prison, for what news reports coyly describe as “attempted murder and assorted other offenses.”  

Because Johnson committed his crimes in New York, where the Democrats in charge spend most of their crime-fighting energy on trying to send Republican presidential candidates to the electric chair for taking out giant real estate loans and then paying them back with interest, he appealed to Alvin Bragg and Governor Hochul for clemency.

In his letter to Bragg, his first paragraph demonstrated how he has taken full responsibility for his crimes: “I am a product of systemic racism; intergenerational incarceration.  A product of trauma, the school-to-prison pipeline and crack-era Reaganomics.”

Got that?  His grandpa went to Alcatraz in the 1930s, and then when Johnson was a freshman he took a left out of the cafeteria and instead of heading to Biology he got into the prison pipeline, plus Reagan got elected. So what chance did poor, young Sheldon have?

Naturally, Hochul gave him clemency and let him out last May.  He got a job as a counselor for at-risk teens in the Queens public defender’s office, and received fawning attention from the usual leftist suspects, who touted him as a great success story. 

Aaannnnndddd… a week ago police responded to a wellness check call at the Bronx apartment of Collin Small.  The cops found Johnson in Small’s apartment.  They also found Small’s torso and feet in a garbage bin, and his legs, arms and head in the freezer.

They took Small to a hospital, where he’s listed in stable condition.

HA!  I kid.  He’s dead. 

The cops arrested Johnson and started an investigation that found, and I quote, “Smalls and Johnson were in Sing Sing prison at the same time, and it is believed that there was animosity between them.”

Good lord, I hope so!  Because if Johnson murdered and dismembered Small and they were besties, I don’t want to know what Johnson would do to someone he felt animosity for!

“Okay, Martin,” you may be saying to yourself, “you’ve established that Johnson is a criminal. But is he a truly stupid criminal, as your entertaining new column feature suggests?”

Oh ye of little faith.  I hadn’t gotten to the part about how Johnson got caught yet:

First, Johnson killed Smalls in an apartment building, with a gun.  And no, the gun was not equipped with a silencer.

In fact, several neighbors reported hearing two gun shots, followed by a man saying, “Please don’t, I have a family!” followed by several more shots.

The building superintendent then checked security camera footage and saw a man walking in and out of the apartment multiple times, and changing clothes each time.  For one trip he wore a plaid golf cap and pushed a plastic, wheeled storage bin. 

For the next trip he wore a different jacket and a fisherman’s hat – because nothing is more common than a guy in the Bronx following his golf outing with a fishing trip – and carrying two bags.  (News reports don’t specifically describe them as “foot-sized bags,” but I think we know.) (And ditto on the “torso-sized storage bin.”)

On the third trip he wore a puffy coat, sunglasses and a blonde wig.  (I hope Bragg has added a second-degree cultural appropriation charge for that wig!)

Yet even though he’s a master of disguise, the superintendent somehow figured out that something was up, and called the cops.

So great job, New York Democrats!  If you’d kept Johnson inside, Small would be alive today.

I mean, unless he was foolish enough to take the subway, in which case he probably would have been shoved onto the tracks by a violent psychopath and dismembered anyway. 

So just never mind.

Finally, I have two entries for my “Celebrating Excellence” category:

Two weeks ago, a Senate Bill signed by Ron DeSantis last year went into effect at my alma mater, and UF ended all contracts with DEI vendors, closed its DEI department and fired all staffers who were employed in DEI positions. 

As a liberal arts professor for 30 years, I cannot tell you how difficult that is to believe.  As far as I know, it’s the first time a university DEI department has been shut down anywhere in the country. 

I know that many schools will continue to fight this, especially after DeSantis is out of office, and he is certainly hated by many academics all over the state right now.  But if you can judge a man’s character by the nature of his enemies, DeSantis has given conservatives one more reason to admire him.

Man, I hope we can have that guy as our president some day!

But we don’t just find excellence in humans like the best governor in the nation.  We also find it in our animal friends.  And no, I’m not referring to Cassie the Wonder Dog and her much-deserved place in the Canine Hall of Fame.

I’m referring to the site of a Scottish shepherd, “Seanthesheepman,” which I recommend you all check out.  Regular readers will remember that one of the highlights of our trip to Scotland last summer was a highlands visit with a shepherd and his amazing border collies.  Sean is not the same guy we saw, but his site is great. 

It features his great Scottish accent, lovely highlands scenery, and a lot of cool Scottish sheep.  But the stars are the collies, and they are gorgeous and brilliant.  Some of my favorite videos feature a dog-cam – a camera mounted on the dog’s shoulder to give a dog’s eye view as he trots and sprints around the countryside. 

If I ever need a quick pick-me-up, there are several videos that will always do the trick.  There’s the edited coverage showing Hillary supporters going from ecstasy to agony on election night in 2016, and videos of great music, and ones showing servicemen and women homecomings, and surprise twin birth announcements.

But there’s nothing quite like watching a dedicated dog sitting stock-still on an ATV seat one second, and then on a signal, leaping off and tearing across a field in a graceful blur.  They’re obviously doing what God made them for and men trained them for, and I’m convinced that watching them is good for your spirit and your blood pressure. 

Have a great weekend everybody!  

Hamas delenda est!

Introducing New Column Features (posted 3/13/24)

As I was plowing through material these last several days, I’ve realized that I might want to institute a few specific, recurring features in my columns, because so many stories fit familiar patterns.  Here are a few categories I’m thinking about:

Schadenfreude Central – for stories in which bad actors receive their just desserts, to our delight

Stupid Criminal Stories – similar, but sometimes with tragedy mixed in

Unexpectedly! – for stories about the easily predictable outcome of a terrible leftist policy, reported by clueless dolts who were somehow shocked by that outcome.

Celebrations of Excellence – as an antidote to the many stories of incompetence and imbecility, I’ll highlight skilled, talented people doing great things, to help maintain our cautious optimism.

Not every story that catches my interest will fit one of those categories, of course.  And I’ll always have time for some interstitial mockery of various boneheads – Mexican president Al Sisi can see the pyramid where Imhotep Pelosi grew up from his office; Liz Warren is as white as the crowd at an ABBA cover band performance in Stockholm (#wemustneverstopmockingher), etc.

So here’s a first try.  I’d appreciate any feedback, and if you have suggestions for other categories, please share them.

Schadenfreude Central

If there’s one thing we all know about AOC – aside from the alleged juiciness of her booty, according to her – it’s that much like Wile E. Coyote, she is a super-genius.  In December of 2020, she shared some of her deep thoughts in an online post reacting to defund-the-police activists who had confronted politicians in public spaces:

“The whole point of protesting is to make people uncomfortable.” She argued that only by causing discomfort can activists get “traction,” saying, “To folks who complain [that] protest demands make others uncomfortable… that’s the point.”

Well, last weekend AOC was in a public space – going to a movie with her low-T boyfriend – when some obnoxious protestors started following her through a building and down a street.

They had cell phones out, and kept haranguing her.  “We love Hamas!  We insist that you call Israel’s self-defense a horrible genocidal war crime.  Call it genocide!  Say it!!”  (I’m loosely paraphrasing.)

AOC, because she always supports protest for social change, said, “Great job guys!  Thanks for speaking truth to power, because people like me need to be held accountable, even if it makes us uncomfortable.  I will happily parrot whatever you want me to say, and then pose for selfies with you.  Also, do you think these jeans make my booty look juicy?”  (I’m loosely paraphrasing.)

HA!  I kid.  What she actually did was yell, “You’re lying!” at them, and shake her finger in their faces.  She also complained that they were going to edit her response “totally out of context,” then said, “It’s f—ed up, man!  And you’re not helping these people!  You’re not helping them!!”

To a normal viewer, it almost appeared as if she doesn’t think obnoxious protestors have the right to make HER uncomfortable.

And I’ll admit it: the protestors were obnoxious.  The “male” was wearing a covid mask (in 2024!) and looked to be well into the second trimester, and the female had crazy eyes, and they both spouted the kind of aggressive pro-Hamas propaganda that invites a good face punching.

In other words, they’re AOC’s kind of people…as long as they’re harassing Republicans.  But like all socialists, she doesn’t like it when the proles turn on their betters.   

Did that make you uncomfortable, AOC? 

That’s the point.

Stupid Criminal Stories

Antoinette Baez worked for Safeway grocery stores in California for 22 years, but last year she got fired.  Guess why.

No, it wasn’t for shoplifting.  And it wasn’t for showing up late, or sleeping on the job, or wearing a MAGA hat.  And no, it wasn’t for pooping in the aisles.  (This is California we’re talking about, so that’s not as far-fetched a scenario as it might be in a sane state.)

She was fired because a lazy bum of a shoplifter tried to waltz out with several bags of groceries she didn’t pay for, and Antoinette grabbed one of the bags.  The shoplifter pushed and shoved her, but then gave up and left without stealing anything. 

Three days later, Safeway fired Baez.  Because they’ve got a policy that no employees can touch a shoplifter or pursue them to prevent their thieving, which they claimed Baez violated, even though she never touched the thief.  A judge has miraculously sided with Baez, and she won a judgment for her back pay, though they haven’t offered her her job back.

Her lawyer said, “Safeway’s a food bank for thieves.  The moral of the story is that it makes way more sense to steal from Safeway than to work for Safeway.”

Yep.  This is why you can’t have nice things, Californians.

And in this case, the stupid criminal isn’t the shoplifter, because she faced no consequences for her crime.  The stupid criminal is whoever is making corporate policy at Safeway.   They should be paying a civil penalty to Baez in her upcoming wrongful termination suit.

Hopefully before they go bankrupt for being criminally stupid.

Unexpectedly!

The leftist residents of Austin, TX voted to cut funding for their police department in 2020.  Annnnndddd….

“The city has been plagued by police staffing shortages and longer 911-call response times since.”

Unexpectedly!

The top cop in Austin reports that they’ve had two contracts fall through, they’ve lost more officers than they’ve hired for each of the last 6 years, and 40 officers filed retirement papers at the same time after the leftist city council “voted to scrap a 4-year contract that the city had already agreed to in principle.”

Residents have reported taking a Lyft to a hospital after a car wreck because nobody answered 911 calls, and the crime rate has gone way up.  Even after the state legislature forced Austin to restore police funding – proving that Texas is still a sane state, even if the idiots in Austin have lost their minds – the officer shortage persists.

It seems like in a town where residents dislike cops and don’t want to pay them, cops are reluctant to take a job there.

Unexpectedly!    

Celebration of Excellence

Normally I am annoyed by people with ridiculous names, just on general principle.  But I am happy to make an exception for Nayib Bukele. 

In fact, I put his name in an anagram maker, and found that those same letters spell “Beanie Bulky.”  And I know how to pronounce that, and it makes me laugh.  So with all due respect – but I really mean it this time! – I will refer to Bukele as Beanie Bulky from now on.   

When B-squared was elected President of El Salvador four years ago – an office that nobody would seek were their cojones not bulky (see what I did there?) – it was the most dangerous country in the western hemisphere.  He was elected specifically to crack down on the violent criminal gangs that had tormented and destabilized the country. 

And he actually did it.  Through a combination of tough crackdowns, limited negotiations with gang leaders, and canny moves to set gang members against their feckless leadership, Bulky has made El Salvadore the safest country in the Western hemisphere, and won re-election with over 90% of the vote last month. 

And that’s not a Saddam-esque “everyone voted for the dictator because they’d be killed if they didn’t” sham vote total.  The people recognize that BB has hammered the criminals and kept the citizens safe, and they rewarded him accordingly.

No one knows if this will last, or if the criminals who run so much of Central America will make a comeback.  But for now Bulky Bukele has provided an encouraging example for neighboring nations. 

The ACLU doesn’t approve of all of his methods (shocker!), and he’s walking a dangerous tightrope.  But when push comes to shove, his instinct has been to favor the rights of law-abiding citizens over those of the criminals who prey on them – unlike, for example, California or Austin.

And I’ll bet the new El Salvador model is looking pretty good to the beleaguered citizens of large parts of Third-World-adjacent blue cities like San Francisco, Chicago and New York.

So three cheers for Beanie Bulky and the long-suffering citizens of El Salvador!    

Hamas delenda est!

More SOTU Thoughts, Rare Good News out of Cali, & RuPaul Gets Schooled in Virtue Signaling (posted 3/11/24)

This might have to be a three-column week for me, because the pace of odd political stories is increasing.  So here goes.

Because I have a weak stomach, I limited my live exposure to Biden’s State of the Union speech, but I’ve read some more excerpts and coverage, and have a few more thoughts. 

To start, I don’t know why any Supreme Court justices still come to the SOTU.  Only six of the nine showed up this time, but that’s still six too many.   There may have been a reason for the highest court to be on hand for the SOTU back in the day, but ever since Obama lied about a recent ruling and insulted them to their faces in 2010, they should have all stopped attending.

When Biden brought up abortion, he addressed them directly, and – unexpectedly! – both angrily and incomprehensibly.  This is a transcript, which I only wish I were making up: “With all due respect, justices, women are not without electric–…electoral power, excuse me, without electoral or political power.  You’re about to realize zzhh ow mush (which I think was supposed to be “just how much”)…

I put the ellipses in at the end because it seems like Biden stopped there, and that’s not a grammatical end to a sentence.

I actually do like prefacing a statement with “with all due respect,” because what follows is inevitably never respectful.  Which makes the point pretty artfully: I’m going to treat this next point about someone with all the respect it is rightfully due, which is none at all.

I’m going to try to start working that phrase into my columns more often.

Biden used that phrase in his typically hostile way, but he showed that he doesn’t even know how to threaten correctly.  His point seemed to be that since women have so much electoral power, the justices will regret opposing them – even though judges are supposed to interpret the law, not react to political power – before he ends with what he wants to be an ominous warning about the electoral consequences of taking a supposedly unpopular position.  

Does he think SCOTUS judges are elected?  Because if so… yikes!

Thankfully, all of the justices gave him the stink eye – even the three far-left ones – and the awkwardness of insulting people who are restrained by decorum from punching back cannot have played well with anyone who’s not already a hateful far-left loon.

Especially since the Dems played to their stereotype throughout the night.  In a speech full of lies, they weren’t perturbed at all.  But the one time when Biden accidentally told the truth – calling Laken Riley’s murderer “an illegal” – they became outraged!

And then Biden, because his spine is made of melting ice cream, apologized for calling an illegal alien murderer “illegal.”

Also, is everybody else as confused as I am about his comments about “Lincoln” Riley? 

I don’t mean the part about how he couldn’t get her name right, even when he was surrounded by people with big buttons with her name on them.  

I mean what he said next: “But how many thousands of people being killed by illegals?” 

What?  That’s not a sentence, and it doesn’t make sense.

It could mean something like, “How about all the many others who are being killed by illegals? Why don’t we say their names?”  And if that’s what he meant, more power to him!  Let’s start publicizing the names and stories of ALL the innocent Americans robbed, raped or killed by the millions of unvetted illegals the left’s open border is responsible for.

Or it could mean, “There AREN’T thousands of others being killed by illegals.”  In which case, the entire sentient world cries, “Malarky!” And let’s loose the hounds of fact-checking. 

All that being said, I do see two positives that came out of the SOTU:

1. Biden missed a great chance to get his speech off on a good foot: a bunch of pro-Hamas protestors block his car on the way there and he didn’t run them over.  He should remember that at the end of your life (which for him came around 3 years ago), it’s not the things that you did that you regret, so much as the things you didn’t do. 

And he didn’t order his driver to run over those Hamas-holes.

That would have been such a win-win!  Every normal American would cheer as the hateful little narcissists went careening off (or under) the car. Plus, Biden couldn’t get in any trouble for any deaths or injuries, because his attorneys could use the precedent of the Hur defense: you can’t charge this guy, because he’s obviously out of his gourd!

2. The MSM and Dem hacks  (but I repeat myself) have been out touting his SOTU like crazy, pointing to a positive reaction to the speech in polls.  (Though as a columnist on RedState pointed out, it was the smallest positive rating of any SOTU since they started being rated.)  They’re able to do so because the bar had been set so low that Biden managed to trip and fall forward over the metaphorical sandbag of the super-low expectations.

Which is great for us, because as I’ve said before, our best hope is that Biden does just well enough to stay in the race, and not get swapped out for anyone with higher ratings than him.  (And there’s only one person in the solar system who is NOT in that category, and her name rhymes with Shamala Sharris.) 

On another topic, beleaguered California has at least gotten a little bit of good news this past week: two of the most egregious leftist pols in the country – and that is saying something – both lost primary contests this week.  Horrible whitey-hater Barbara Lee and staff-abusing dim bulb Katie Porter both went down to highly entertaining defeats on Tuesday.

Lee had left her long-time House seat to run for Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.  You may remember Feinstein from the way she spent her last months on earth under her daughter’s conservatorship, because she was non compos mentis — and yet well enough to be a Democrat US Senator.

Great job, California voters! 

At 75, Lee was clearly too old to run again, and yet she did so anyway.

I’m sorry.  My crack staff is telling me that it’s not her age, but her IQ that is 75.  Sorry about that. 

Her age is 77.  So, yeah.  Too old to run for office.  (We’re making an exception for Trump, but only because he’s 27 years younger than his opponent.)

Katie Porter was running for the same Senate office.

You may remember her for sitting in front of a white board full of gibberish and speaking nonsense, or perhaps for abusing her staff the way Hillary did Bill, when behind closed doors and after the newest young secretary burst out of Bill’s office, running away at full speed and furiously rubbing her bottom.

Well, in a race in which the top two contenders go into a run-off, Babs Lee came in fourth, and Katie Porter came in third.  And in even better news, Republican Steve Garvey came in second.

The bad news is that he’s up against Adam Schiff, and it’s California.  So Pencil-Neck will almost certainly be the new Senator from CA, and Californians will continue to get what they’ve voted for, good and hard.    

Still, we need to take good news wherever we can find it in those big blue states, and at least we had the pleasure of watching two horrible leftists leave their House seats and then get humiliated in their attempt at the Senate.

Speaking of arrogant lefties getting what’s coming to them, even if you appreciate normalcy, you probably have heard of RuPaul, who is a famous drag queen.  You know, the same way Liz Warren is a famous drag Indian.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

On March 4th, RuPaul announced that he had launched an online bookstore called Allstora, which will NOT ban books, in protest against conservatives’ rabid desire to ban books.  Even though conservatives have not been trying to ban books, which would involve trying to stop a book from being published.

No, conservatives are just weirdos who don’t want taxpayer money being spent on gay – or straight! – porn for school libraries.  Unbelievably enough, they really don’t want their kids reading any books that include graphic details about how to sexually service creepy older people.

Even though, with all due respect, that describes the first several chapters of Que Mala’s political autobiography. 

Anyway, RuPaul tooted his own horn (and I don’t know gay slang, so if that’s a euphemism, I apologize) by saying that his fabulous new bookstore would be “a marketplace for all books and all stories.”    

Annnnndddd…  within one day of being opened, RuPaul’s bookstore started getting hit by an avalanche of protests and requests to “ban” books.  But break out your sad trombone – again, that sounds like it could be gay slang, so mea culpa? – because it turns out that all of those protests came from… wait for it… “progressive” book banners! 

Unexpectedly! 

And a few days later, RuPaul tucked his tail between his legs (sorry for that mental image) and caved, agreeing to put scary red warnings on books by conservatives, and even agreeing to remove some books by some firebrand conservatives such as Elon Musk. 

Who, as you might have noticed, is not even a conservative. 

So great job, self-styled “defenders of democratic values.”  You’ve made the point obviously clear: the intolerant people who want to dictate what others read are… leftists!

Hamas delenda est!

The SOTU Speech, & What We Should Do Between Now & November (posted 3/8/24)

Well, there’s an hour and twenty minutes that I’ll never get back.

Oh, who am I kidding?  I popped in and out of the SOTU for maybe a total of 10 minutes, my rule being that as soon as my gag reflex threatened to kick in and offload some of the bourbon (mmmm, brownest of the brown liquors) that I had been consuming – as fragments I have shored against my ruin – I tuned out until the urge to purge receded.   

(That’s right, trenchant references to Lionel Hutz and T.S. Eliot in the same sentence!  Suck it, other columnists who dare not attempt such a rhetorical stretch!) 

While I’m tooting my own horn, I posted a column on Wednesday featuring my imagining of Joe Biden preparing for a speaking engagement.  If you haven’t seen it, scroll back to Wednesday afternoon’s posts, and give it a quick read.  I’ll wait….

I know: it wasn’t super-hard to predict, but did I nail it or what?  The confusion, the slurring, the physical stiffness.  The ridiculous shrinkflation issue.  And I knew he’d be screwing up names – I had him calling Rocky Balboa “Rocky Road” and the Cookie Monster the “Cake Moose” – but I didn’t get the square on the Biden Bingo card for “Lincoln Riley.”

(Which is pretty funny.  One Republican whips the Dems and frees their slaves 160 years ago, and he’s still living in their heads rent-free!)

If I missed anything, it was by under-estimating the amount of sustained anger Biden was capable of; I expected a few bursts of “get off my lawn,” quickly trailing off into Cocaine Mitch-esque short-duration catatonia. 

But whatever drug cocktail they’re giving Brandon to keep him upright for 81 consecutive minutes must be some strong stuff.  So good for him.

I mentioned several years ago that I’d prefer that we get rid of the SOTU entirely.  It’s always an insufferable cavalcade of imbecility and phoniness: a laundry list of your stuff (which is all great!) and the other party’s stuff (they’re wrong about everything!), followed by ridiculous promises that no one thinks that you’ll keep. 

And ooh, there’s a couple of guys/gals/children/oldsters in the crowd whom I’d like to use as political props!  I’ll point to them and ask them to stand up, unless they’re in a wheelchair or paralyzed as a result of one of the other party’s stupid and destructive policies.  Then I’ll scold the other side for paralyzing their sorry arses.

Bah! 

As in most things, we should handle the SOTU the way the Founders did: write your message in a short document – we’ve bought a new batch of muskets, we’re accepting bids to build a few federal buildings, there’s a boll weevil problem in Mississippi, but the sorghum crop is coming along nicely – hand it to a guy on a horse, and slap the horse’s rear end to send him off to carry it to be read in the House.

Beyond that, I didn’t find a lot worth commenting on.  Of course Biden lied and dissembled and argued in bad faith, as I think most people expected him to.  I don’t think that anything he said will be remembered for long, as much as his affect, which was 100% angry old man. 

In that sense, it reminded me a lot of his Reichstag speech in September of 2022, minus the ominous red lighting and the two Marines flanking him, wishing they didn’t have to be there.

I don’t know how that behavior is not a huge political mistake for Biden.  His poll numbers are bad, and his best asset is Trump’s high negatives among independents and moderates.  So he should be trying to go all kinder and friendlier, to draw the moderates to him.   To the extent that he attacks Trump, his tone should be more in sorrow than in anger.

Instead, he’s scolding the nation, calling everybody who has ever considered voting for Trump unpatriotic fascist deplorables.  And he’s shaking his bony fist and hollering like Grandpa Simpson.  “In my day, we got 20 hectares to the hogshead, and that was good enough for us!  Also, we really fixed the Kaiser’s wagon!  No joke!”

If I had the Trump team’s ear, I would say that in the wake of this speech, I think we should do 4 things:

1. Set up a website with a daily updated count of crimes committed and costs imposed by illegals.  (Make it like the debt clock that some pols used to put up, when they pretended that either they or we were troubled by our rising national debt.)  

Keep a tally of the total number of crimes, along with highlighting the worst of the worst.   Also give numbers on how much we’ve been spending on their schooling, healthcare, prison, welfare benefits, etc.

We’d have to handle it carefully, with many statements about “not all illegals” (aggravating as those are), because we alienate winnable voters if we attack all immigrants, or defuse the blame and take it off the open border policies that are causing all this chaos. 

2. Try to get Trump to take as low a profile as possible, and keep the spotlight on Biden and his policies.

3. Focus on get-out-the-vote efforts, and stop telling people to NOT vote by mail and/or early!  (Dammit!) The Dems are great at that, and they will be again, and if we don’t fight fire with fire, we are going to under-perform in November.

4. Start preparing for Biden’s replacement nominee, because I’m increasingly certain that he will not be the nominee in November.  His poll numbers are too low already, and they’ve got nowhere to go but stagnant or down.  And his physical and mental deterioration are too obvious to be hidden, even by the dedicated gaslighting asshats – or yes, asslighting gas hats – in the MSM and Democrat party. 

The national Dem coven – er, brain trust – can see this just as well as we can.  If you and I are getting more confident that if Trump can manage to even minimally control himself, he’ll win against Biden in November, the Dems know that too.

So they’re going to switch him out, most likely in the summer or at the convention in August. And when that happens, Trump instantly goes from being the younger guy with the lower negatives in the race to the old guy with the highest negatives. 

Therefore, our best course is to keep hitting not only Biden, but the entire far-left Democrat establishment and their terrible policies.  (“It’s not just Biden’s open border, it’s the Dems’ open border; it’s not just Bidenflation and Bidenomics, it’s the economic results of Dem policies.”)

That way, when the Dems swap Biden out, we won’t be totally wrong-footed.  We can just slam the desperate, unprecedented, flop-sweat-infused decision to switch candidates at the 11th hour – and also slam the racist and sexist Dem party for pushing Que Mala aside too! – and quickly pivot to targeting the entire Dem party:

“Changing the frontman for your horrific policies won’t make any difference in the outcome.  Ken Doll Newsom is just Biden with a pulse.”  Or “Big Mike Obama is just Biden with linebacker shoulders.” Or “Hillary Clinton is just Biden with cankles and a terminal case of Resting Beeyotch Face.”

Etc.    

There you have it.  Please print this column out, hand it to a mounted GOP party official, and tell him to get it to Mar-A-Lago, stat.  Then slap the rear end of his horse to get him started.

But first, look carefully to be sure that no Dem congresswomen are around.  Because if the horse’s flanks look too juicy (not my words)… that might not be a horse.     

Finally, in my Wednesday column I suggested a Secret Service code name for Biden (“Flat Line”), because I often amuse myself by thinking up code names for various administration figures. For example:

Que Mala: “Word Salad”

Jill Biden: “Juco”

Liz Warren: “Edgar Winter”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Janet Yellen: “Keebler”

Merrick Garland: “Bullet Dodged”

So as we move into the weekend, let me invite all of you in CO Nation to share your secret service code names for prominent Dems, or Republicans, for that matter.

Hamas delenda est!

Some Weird Stories, + A Weird Naming Challenge (posted 3/4/24)

First up this week, one of my favorite elected conservatives of the last several years is Virginia Lt. Governor Winsome Sears, and I like her for many reasons, some more trivial than others.

On the trivial side, I love the name “Winsome.”  It’s an old-fashioned word – it means “attractive or appealing in appearance or character” – and it fits her very well.  It reminds me of the old Puritan practice of giving their kids “grace names” that indicated virtues they hoped the child would display.  Old fashioned examples include Prudence, Charity or Temperance, but a few survive today, including Faith and Hope.

(My wife and I chose “Emily Grace” for our second daughter’s name, and I’m glad to say that today, on her 22nd birthday, she has not made that middle name sound ironic!) 

Sidebar: I just looked up some examples of eccentric Puritan names, and came across this example that I feel compelled to share with you: “Praise-God Barebone, a lay preacher who became a member of Oliver Cromwell’s last Parliament in 1653, named his son “If-Jesus-Christ-Had-Not-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned.” 

Try writing that on a check!  The writer of the article followed that strange name by observing, “He went by ‘Nicholas.’” 

I’ll bet he did.

On the more serious side, Sears also joined the Marines, and I’m very thankful that she is providing a much-needed example of a high-profile black woman who is smart and dignified, and is worthy of the influential job she has. 

Unlike Fraudulent Fani Willis, dim-bulb anti-Semite Claudine Gay, Jussie Smollett-protector Kim Foxx, or disgraceful hack Letitia James, to name just a few.

Well, there’s now one more reason to admire Sears.  Because she made an honest mistake in a legislative session last week, and then gave the most aggressive “apology” ever for it. 

It happened when Sears was presiding over the legislature, and a sexually confused male senator who calls himself “Danica” asked a routine point-of-order kind of question.  In the process of answering it, while looking through some papers and after calling him “senator” twice, Sears said, “Yes sir,” and then confirmed the answer. 

Now to be fair to Sears, “Danica” is about as feminine as an enlarged prostate, and asked his question in a voice you might hear coming from a barrel-chested high school football coach with a buzz cut urging his d-line to give 110% in the game on Friday night. 

But no matter.  Because upon hearing that, “Danica” flounced out of the room in a huff, and pouted out in the hallway, causing several recess breaks in the proceedings.

Hey, credit where credit is due: that was the most authentically female reaction from a trans dude that I’ve ever seen.

A sexist would say!  I kid because I love!

Anyway, Sears gave an aggressive quasi-apology, which boiled down to, “You know that I didn’t mean to hurt your little feelings, so why don’t we all grow up and get back to business.”   

Still, I don’t like the idea of apologizing at all when you’ve done nothing wrong, a judgement that was immediately confirmed when a bunch of whiny Dems stomped their feet and insisted that such a horrible act can never be forgiven.

If I were advising Sears, I’d tell her to take the podium again and say this: “Since I’ve learned that using traditional English pronouns might cause some fragile House members to have a panic attack, I’ve decided that from now on, I’m just going to point at anyone with a question and describe him or her so that there’s no confusion.”

Then I’d tell her to point to “Danica” and say, “You there, with the linebacker shoulders and the five o’clock shadow in the blue Donna Karan dress, what’s your question?” 

Speaking of sexually confused obnoxious people, Scotland – the land of some of my ancestors – has really dropped the ball (so to speak) on treating sexually confused criminals appropriately.  Which I learned by reading about the case of Andrew Burns, a “notorious prisoner” with “a reputation as one of the UK’s most violent inmates.”

Well Andy is going by the name “Tiffany Scott” these days, and he was going to be transferred to a women’s prison last year, before that was put on hold in the wake of the Isla Bryson scandal.  Which you and I have never heard of.

So I did a little research, and discovered that “Isla” is another dude, and a serial rapist, and he was temporarily housed in a women’s prison, until sane Scots got wind of it and objected.

Still, the Scottish justice system and media seemed determined to cater to Andy/Tiffany’s ridiculous delusions.  They called him “she” and “they” in reporting, and referred to him as “Tiffany Scott” rather than his real name.  After being imprisoned for a long series of violent crimes, prison officials agreed to his demand to be called “Mr. Mighty Almighty.”

Then when he claimed to be transgender so that he could be moved to the victim-rich environment of a women’s prison, the prison bosses took his claim seriously, and started calling him “Tiffany.”

Good lord, man!  You guys used to be a bunch of haggis-eating bad-asses!  You were so tough that the Romans built Hadrian’s Wall and then stayed on their side of it!  You’ve gone from William Wallace (Freedom!!) to Dylan Mulvaney. 

Fortunately, there’s a happy ending to this depressing story, because “Tiffany” died last Thursday, before ever getting into a gals’ prison.  No cause has been released yet, but since he was only 32, I’m going to guess suicide. 

But if his cause of death is determined to be ovarian cancer, I will never stop laughing!  And I will take back everything I’ve ever said about transgender dudes.

Speaking of happy endings, new media reports on Saturday claim that CNN is “on the verge of an epic collapse,” with the “struggling network desperately trying to get out of its death spiral,” beginning with huge pay cuts to its “big name” anchors as their current contracts end this year.

If the report is right, Jake Tapper and Chris Wallace are both getting $8 million per year, Wolf Blitzer is getting $15 million, and Anderson Cooper is hauling down $20 mil! 

With the network getting its lowest-ever ratings, the good news is that those contracts don’t end until after the November election.  So we’re going to have those hacks to kick around for that long at least, with the extra satisfaction of knowing that their audience is so small that their propaganda is going virtually unseen! 

In one last refreshing bit of news, even far-left NYT writer Nicholas Kristoff has admitted on MSNBC that if we air-drop food aid into Gaza, Hamas is just going to steal it.  As part of his commentary, he also said that Israel has stopped the corrupt EU-weenies in UNRWA from controlling food aid delivery because it turns out that at least 12 members of that motley anti-Semitic crew actually participated in the genocidal attacks on October 7th!

One of the most frustrating things about watching the blatantly biased, anti-Semitic MSM coverage of the Hamas war is the obscene moral equivalence they try to apply to Hamas and Israel. There are tons of examples that give the lie to that idea:

There is no Jewish equivalent to Hamas’ barbarity.  No IDF troops have intentionally targeted civilians; no Jewish troops have gang-raped and tortured Palestinian women; no Jewish troops have taken a single Palestinian hostage; no huge street mobs of Jews have celebrated the deaths of civilians by defiling the corpses of raped Muslim women paraded through Jewish cities.

And while malicious lefties have screamed the genocidal “from the river to the sea” chant ad nauseum and all throughout our colleges and all over the world, you’ve never heard a single crowd of Jewish supporters chanting, “All throughout Judea and Samaria, all Muslims should die of malaria!” 

But I don’t want to close this column complaining about our egregiously biased media.  Instead, since my research on Puritan hortatory naming practices has inspired me, let me close with a challenge to Cautious Optimism readers:

In your comments to this column, post your own attempts to preserve that naming tradition by giving Puritan names to our current political leaders. 

To start you off, here are a few examples:

Senator “Her-Skin-is-White-as-Snow” Warren (#verilymustweneverstopmockingher)

Vice President “Oh-God-Why-Hast-Thou-Forsaken-Us” Harris

President “He-Knows-Not-What-He-Does” Biden

or

President “Yea-Thou-He-Walketh-In-The-Valley-of-the-Shadow-of—Watch-Out-For-That-Sandbag!” Biden.

Let’s see what you’ve got, CO Nation!

Also…

Hamas delenda est!