June 2024 – Martin Simpson

Raddatz Ambushes Grandma Squanto, & a Poop-Related Story from France (posted 6/24/24)

You won’t believe what I saw during a Martha Raddatz interview on ABCs “This Week” show on Sunday…

…is a sentence you will never see me write, because I would never intentionally watch an MSM show on a Sunday. Or any other day.

However, I do follow a lot of conservative websites and podcasters, and they often bring interesting stories that happened on lefty agitprop shows to my attention. So…

You won’t believe an excerpt from a Martha Raddatz show that appeared on Redstate Sunday! Her guest was Lizzie “Grandma Squanto” Warren, and the interview turned into a real “man bites dog” stunner.

Or should I say a real “white guy scalps Indian” story, in this case?

Normally, Raddatz is a typically biased MSM hack. You may remember when Obama’s administration bungled the Benghazi bombing, with then-SecState (shudder) Hillary Clinton as their point person.

She was questioned in congress about how several Americans ended up dead, and why her department was caught so flatfooted, and what they knew of the attacker’s intentions before the killings. Her infamously dismissive retort – “What difference at this point does it make?” – has been cited ever since as a particularly tone-deaf and maladroit performance.

So how did Martha Raddatz write about Hillary’s behavior during that questioning? She praised the Cankled One as “at times combative, charming, disarming and clearly ready for a fight.”

I tried to do a search for “instances in which Hillary Clinton has ever been ‘charming’?” And my computer began to vibrate, and then to smoke and hum. I threw my body over Cassie the Wonder Dog to protect her, just as the computer exploded into a buzzsaw of plastic shrapnel.

I don’t like to use the word “hero” to describe myself (even though members of CO Nation are doing so constantly, and who am I to fly in the face of public opinion?), so I won’t.

But I will say that the world is a much better place with Cassie in it, and that because of me, she didn’t become another victim of Hillary Clinton’s murderous incompetence. So you’re welcome, everybody.

Where was I?

Oh yeah: Martha Raddatz. She didn’t just call the most charmless harpy this side of Maxine Waters “charming,” she also called her “cool.” I’m not kidding. In May of 2012, Raddatz started a story on Clinton with the words, “Let’s face it, Hillary is cool.”

Two years later, she responded to news that Chelsea Clinton was having a baby by saying these words – which I swear I am not making up – to an ABC panel: “Very important question: What do you think Hillary Clinton should be called as a grandma? I say maybe ‘Glam-Ma.’”

Ooh, I guess it’s too late to give you a “may vomit in the back of your mouth” trigger warning. Sorry about that.

Anyway, I’m sure that when Liz Warren sat down with Raddatz for an interview, she was expecting the Native American version of a bunch of softball questions tossed over the middle of the plate. But Raddatz came out loaded for bear.

Or at least for a forked-tongue Pale-Faced Powhatan. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Raddatz correctly said that there have been more than 6.9 million apprehensions at the border under Biden, and only 2 million under Trump, and then asked, “What did the president do wrong?”

Warren was clearly caught with her deer-skin loincloth down (#neverstop), and stammered out, “No, this isn’t about what the president did wrong.” Then she launched into the ridiculous talking point that Biden was powerless to close the border because he didn’t have the necessary resources, pointing the finger at Republicans who “blocked [the faux comprehensive immigration “reform” bill], blocked it, blocked it, blocked it.”

Raddatz forcefully cut her off: “But Donald Trump didn’t have that either, Senator. He didn’t have that either, and there were [only] two million during his entire term.”

Lizzie squirmed, wiggled and lied for the rest of the interview, but it was the second most shocking thing I’ve ever seen on ABC’s “This Week.”

The most shocking thing was that for the first time in my life, I’ve seen Elizabeth Warren with an actual red face!

If I had told you that I had a poop-related story today, I bet that you would guess it would involve one of two angles:

1. Oh no, what world leader has our Cadaver in Chief defecated on now?

2. Have things in San Francisco gotten even worse somehow?

But no. I’m bringing you a foreign pooping story from the put-upon citizens of France.

The Olympics are going to be held in Paris this summer, and a swimming marathon and the swimming portion of a triathlon are planned to take place in the Seine. That choice has been controversial, because the Seine is not super-clean. But the French government is spending $1.5 billion to clean it up in time for the games.

Because everything else is going perfectly in France. Jihadi immigrants have not turned whole areas of Paris into no-go zones for police, for example, and French Jews are not being harassed, threatened and attacked there. So why not toss a billion and a half bucks into the river?

Unfortunately, that effort is not going so well, with bacteria and sewage levels in the Seine still being found at “alarming” rates.

So the French people knew just what to do. They might not be very good at some things – minding their own business, standing up to jihadis in their midst (or to Germans on the march) – but they are excellent at one thing: protesting.

Do employers want people to work more than 30 hours per week? Are various unsustainably high government benefits on the chopping block? Is anyone suggesting that shutting down an entire nation for the month of August to allow “workers” to take a break from their brutal, 30-hour work weeks might be un peu too much?

The French will hit the streets!

This time around, though, they’ve gotten more creative. Because they’re mad about the filthiness of their capital city’s river, some French wag created a website and a hashtag to promote a mass protest calling for thousands of French people to literally poop in the Seine.

The protest was supposed to happen on June 23^rd, but I haven’t found evidence of how many people showed up. As of Saturday, though, the story was getting huge media coverage, and many Frenchmen were vowing to bare the derriere and drop le deuce to show their politicians what they think of them.

My first thought was to wonder why San Francisco hasn’t filed a copyright violation claim to stop the protest, since they have trademarked fecal-related public events. But I’ll bet that they’re kicking themselves for limiting themselves to only poop-coating streets, parks and businesses, but not bodies of water!

Still, if someone’s not printing up, “I [poop emoji] Seine-France-isco” t-shirts right this minute, they’re leaving money on the table.

On the one hand, I question the wisdom of protesting the poop levels in the Seine by… greatly adding to the poop levels in the Seine.

On the other hand, French president Macron and the mayor of Paris have promised to swim in the Seine before the Olympics start, to prove how clean it is.

And when I think of what our politicians – the Squad, Joey Gaffes and Que Mala, the entire national Democrat party – have been putting us through for the last four years, can I appreciate the karmic opportunity to do to our politicians what they’ve been doing to us?

Can I really smile at the thought of that? Can I?

Well, I am an Ameri-can, aren’t I?

Hamas delenda est!

PWFEs Threaten Dem Electoral Success, & in Florida, Hostage Taking Doesn’t Pay (posted 6/21/24)

Before I get started, I want to thank readers for the kind comments on “my visit with mom” column on Monday. I feel a little sheepish at the remarks on what a good son I am though, for two reasons.

First, we’re lucky that mom’s personality has not changed, as I’ve seen happen with some Alzheimer’s patients, whose demeanor deteriorates as the condition progresses. But mom is still her adorable self, so I’d have to be a Hunter-Biden-level d-bag to not love her back and treat her well!

(Regular readers may remember a story that sums up mom, from after a small stroke she had last year. She was still unsteady on her feet when she came home, so Rhonda told her that she was going to sleep in her bed with her the first night, in case she needed to get up in the middle of the night. Mom was a little confused, but said, “Okay.” Then, a minute later, she asked, “Did you have a bad dream?”

That’s our mom, crushing it at motherhood, whether at 25 or 85!)

Second, my sister and her husband live with mom, and have since they sold their house and mom sold hers shortly after dad died. They bought a house together, and they’ve been with her full-time, so they deserve the real credit for helping her and caring for her. To the extent that that can be a burden – and it is often one of the joys of life, too – they have come through.

So I feel lucky to be able to stay with her as often as I can, both to give them some time away and to spend precious time with mom. But I also feel a bit like a divorced, non-custodial dad: I get to be the “fun one” who takes the kid to Disney (pre-grooming, pre-leftist Disney) and buys her presents and then leaves the day-to-day work to the custodial parent.

Still, I didn’t get a chance to respond to the comments on Monday’s column, and I do appreciate them.

And now, onto the usual shenanigans…

As in many past elections, the Democrats’ chief obstacle this November is going to be PWFE. Which, of course, stands for “People With Functioning Eyes.”

It’s a time-honored tradition for the Dems to be selling some version of “believe what we tell you, and not your lying eyes.”

Remember when Bill Clinton would be doing a campaign photo op at a BBQ restaurant, and he’d be proclaiming how much he loved CAW CAW and he didn’t have sex with “that woman,” but you’d notice that as he was talking, he was squeezing the butt of the nearest waitress?

Or when they told us that Obama was a post-racial Light-Bringer, but you noticed that he was a smirking narcissist who hated whitey?

Or when they told you John Kerry had gravitas, and that Pelosi was a canny operator, and that Liz Warren was an Ojibwe Princess?

But you noticed that Kerry was one of those tree-people from Lord of the Rings, and Nancy Pelosi was the mummified remains of Nancy Pelosi, and Liz Warren was as white as the lead singer of an Edgar Winter cover band performing a Pat Boone medley in a hockey arena in Stockholm?

(#wemustneverstopmockingallofthem)

Those were your pesky functioning eyes, making trouble for the Dems.

But this year, the PWFE are a threat to the leftist narrative on more fronts than usual.

This cycle, they’re telling you that crime is actually down, but you’re watching that report on CNN in your hospital room, because you can’t change the channel, because you’re in a full-body cast, because you forgot to run serpentine to your car in a parking lot, and were thus set upon by a bunch of criminals who beat you to within an inch of your life.

They’re telling you that inflation is under control and that Bidenomics is working, but you’re at a diner eating a breakfast that you had to take out a HELOC to pay for, and you’re looking at the prices at the gas station across the street and wondering if there is a skateboarding commute in your future.

They’re telling you that the border is secure, but as you channel surf, you keep seeing what you think is a panoramic scene of an endless column of weary Jews trudging out of Egypt in The Ten Commandments. But then you look closer, and see that it’s Arizona, and there are zero Jews in the crowd. In fact, many of them are demanding iPhones and debit cards in Spanish, and others are muttering about “death to the infidels.”

And the guys who jumped you in the parking lot were speaking every language BUT English, and one of them was wearing an “I [heart] MS-13!” t-shirt.

They’re even telling you that their plans to spend billions on wiping out homelessness are working wonderfully. But you can’t help but notice that Go-pro video of the streets of every blue city looks like a cross between footage from Revenge of the Living Dead and a casting call for extras to play the close friends/meth-y hookers in an upcoming biopic about Hunter Biden.

But perhaps the Dems’ biggest challenge with PWFE during this election year involves their candidate for president. Whom, your functioning eyes are telling you, appears to be possibly dead.

Or at least dead-adjacent.

Lefty hacks have been trying to counter that accurate impression of Biden’s public deterioration. Their first talking points were that whatever Joe looks like in public, behind closed doors the guy is sharp as a tack. You should see him! He speaks five languages, knows all the state capitals, the guy is aces!

But even sycophantic lefty late-night hosts ridiculed that idea, and they had to give it up.

So now the brain-trust at the DNC has come up with the most ridiculous gaslighting effort ever, focused around their newly coined phrase “cheap fakes,” which they use to describe video of Biden that evil Republicans have somehow manipulated to make him look bad.

Of course, the term is a variation on “deep fakes,” which are actually a thing. It turns out that if some tech geek/evil sorcerer has a sample of someone’s voice and image, they can create a fraudulent video of that person appearing to do or say offensive things. (I’m not sure how computers work.)

I fully expect them to unleash such fake videos of Trump as an October surprise. Sure, they will later turn out to be fakes, but not until after the election, when they hope it will be too late to undo the damage. (Just like the bogus 34 “felony convictions” will certainly be overturned… after the election.)

But while deep fakes are real, and troubling, “cheap fakes” don’t exist. And pretending that they do is incredible stupid, even for a party with AOC in it.

They tried to suggest that the GOP has edited or cut video of Biden to give the false impression that he’s a doddering old man. But everyone has copies of entire videos, and they immediately played them – unedited – in what turned out to be full-color, panoramic, high-def Doddervision™.

By now, the Dem talking heads can’t even offer a rationale for what they’re saying. The sapphic Kewpie-doll spokesperson just shakes her curls and waves her arms and repeats, “Those videos don’t show what the bad-faith GOP says they show.”

Disturbing cartoon character James Carville grimaces and sneers and says, “Come ahwne son, yuh can’t bleeve them rotten Reepublic-uns and their lahs about Joe Biden! He’s fit as a fiddle, and they-uh goin’ round sayin’ he old and feeble? That dog won’t hunt! They just a bunch of lah-ers, thas whut they are. Joe Biden cud go f’teen rounds with Mike Tyson any day and twice on Sundy, ah’ll tell you whut! These ain’t the droids you lookin’ fur!”

And then you watch the video, and notice that Biden has the stiff gait (and giant shoes) of Frankenstein’s monster, and the vacant stare of Frankenstein’s monster, and the youthful vigor of Imhotep Pelosi.

And the verbal dexterity of Frankenstein’s monster.

It’s desperate, and it’s not going to work. Because of PWFE.

Let me end on a more positive note, with a story from my regular category called “Celebration of Excellence.”

This one happened in Florida in February, and you can find it on the great website of the ex-cop who calls himself Donut Operator. It’s the story of a recidivist criminal in Fort Myers – his mugshot looks like the rare combination of aggressive-looking and pot smoker – who decided to rob a bank in what Donut rightly calls “the least f**king around state in the country.”

This guy’s bank caper doesn’t go well – unexpectedly! – and he ends up facing a dozen cops in flak vests. He’s got a knife and is holding two hostages, and pulls them very close, and stands between them.

While one cop talks to the Biden-voting (I’m guessing) perp and tries to get him to give up, a sniper uses a fellow cop as a tripod to balance his gun on, just in case. (Belt and suspenders, people.) Unfortunately, the criminal is wedged between the hostages, and there’s a computer monitor in the sniper’s line of fire.

But a computer monitor, for that sniper, is just like the truth for a leftist.

Irrelevant.

So when the bad guy puts the knife against his female hostage’s throat, the sniper puts a round through the computer monitor. And then, microseconds later, through the bad guy’s forehead, just above and between his eyes.

Annnndddd… down goes bad guy! Down goes bad guy!

Weirdly, the computer still had a functioning blue screen… with a neat bullet hole in the middle of it.

Florida gave the sniper an award for that shot – see the “least-f**king-around state” comment above – and the hostages were unharmed.

Still, the bank robber did lose his life. So we should all probably say a prayer…

for the computer monitor.

Hamas delenda est!

My Week in Tennessee, & Good News From Other Nations (posted 6/17/24)

As you read this, I am on my way back home, after a great visit with my mom. (To see a pic that captures her essence, see the main page of this site, where she is wearing a party hat and laughing, and I am wearing a stylish turkey hat, even though it’s not Thanksgiving.)

We drove many hundreds of miles on tiny, winding roads through the beautiful, gently rolling landscape of south central Tennessee, and ate at a bunch of small-town diners.

We saw the burial site of Meriwether Lewis (we could use more guys like him today) on the Natchez Trace Parkway, tried to chew two of the hardest gumballs in Christendom that came out of a machine in a county courthouse in Pulaski, and drove through many tunnels of trees on roads that made me wish I still had a motorcycle.

It was sunny every day, but we didn’t do much walking, because it was hotter than Florida. Seriously, it was in the mid-90s every day. It’s almost enough to make me think that Al Gore was right about global warming.

But then I remember that that guy couldn’t pick the winner of a one-horse race, and he couldn’t tell the truth to save his life. And he’s no more a scientist than Lizzie Warren is a Cherokee. (#youknowthething) (#neverstopneverstoppingmockingher)

One of the advantages of traveling with mom is that she doesn’t remember that I’d taken her to some of these places before. She continually said, “I’ve never seen this place before; it’s really pretty.” She was always right about the second part, and in a way, she was right about the first part, too.

I took along a Bluetooth speaker, and we listened to a lot of George Jones, who was always her favorite. She remembered that he had a problem with alcohol, and asked how he was doing with that, and I had to break it to her that he died ten years ago. He made it to 81, but when she asked me if he died because of booze, I told her that it probably didn’t help.

And yes, the next song of his that came up in the rotation was “If Drinkin’ Don’t Kill Me.”

We got to laughing, and I told her that she was probably only still around because she laid off the sauce when she turned 70. (She’s a sweet little Baptist in good standing, and has never taken a drink, as far as I know.)

We did a lot of wandering, and I had to constantly reassure her that I knew where we were. (Because of my phone’s GPS, I wasn’t really lying.) We traveled such scenic lanes as Yokley Creek Road, Cathey’s Creek Road, and even Sheboss Road. Which, it turned out, was gravel.

All in all, we had a good time together. She would lose track from time to time, but she was still the mom, and she asked me if we were lost and if we had enough gas, and told me when I was driving too fast.

And because I’m still a juvenile at heart, I’d drive a little faster, and honk for no reason, and tell her that we were about to run out of gas and die of starvation on lonely Sheboss Road.

Every time I saw rolls of hay in a field I’d point and loudly say, “Hay!” And every time she’d fall for it, and call me a jerk, and then punch me in the shoulder and laugh like when she was young, and dad was still alive, and they were both amused and exasperated by their goofball son.

She’s already forgotten most of this, and I know we won’t have her with us much longer, but this week did my heart a lot of good. And I hope that when she wakes up again after this life is over, she remembers this week as well as I do.

As you might guess, I’ve only caught bits and pieces of the news over the last 5 days. But I did catch the WNBA story on the CO site about classless Angel Reese’s latest dirty play against Caitlin Clark.

It occurs to me that – after the three joyless Joys (Behar, Reid and Gray), and the angry Whoopi (Goldberg) and darkly malicious Sunny (Hostin) – we now have a new contender for most ironic name.

Because whatever else she is, Reese appears to be far from an Angel.

Following the good news from Israel I wrote about on Friday came the grim news of 8 IDF soldiers killed in a recent battle. In a way, that bitter loss is another testament to Israel’s goodness, because those young men were only lost because of risks Israel is taking to minimize deaths among Gazan civilians.

It’s a heartbreaking price to pay, and one that I think nobody has a right to ask for. I hope that the Jewish state will ignore its critics – including those in the UN and here – and do whatever it needs to do to wipe out Hamas.

To end on a more positive note, I’d like to praise two other foreign leaders who are shining examples of what we need more of in our country: Argentina’s Javier Melei and Canada’s Pierre Poilevre.

In only six months in office, Melei has brought an amazing amount of drastic and wildly successful changes to Argentina. He has the most purely conservative agenda in this hemisphere, cutting government (he moved to eliminate 9 of 18 ministries on his first day in office) and deregulating the economy to an unprecedented extent.

Recent stratospheric Argentinian inflation rates have dropped dramatically, and early results of his governance have been very positive. He’s up against a long record of corruption and incompetence, and his ultimate success is far from certain. But he’s acting boldly, and doing the right things.

And all while displaying a self-deprecating sense of humor, and rocking the sweetest mutton chops since the Civil War!

Meanwhile, in Trudeau’s dysfunctional Canada (aka, America’s evil Top Hat), Pierre Poilevre has been giving a master class on how to kick journalist arse and advance conservative policies that could turn that benighted polity around.

Yes, he’s got a problematic name, a toxic mix of hard-to-pronounce and French, which needs to be changed forthwith. I looked it up, and of course “Pierre” translates to “Peter,” and “Poilevre” translates to “rabbit pelt.” So there’s no help in trying to Anglicize his name. Better to just start from scratch and pick out a strong, impressive moniker.

I suggest “Martin Reagan,” but I’m open to suggestions.

Anyway, he’s been handling the horrible Canadian MSM – unbelievably, apparently as terrible as our MSM – like a boss for a long time. You probably remember his sarcastic dismemberment of an interviewer who insulted him about how critics say he’s too Trumpy, in which he called him on his bullSchiff and took him apart at the joints, all while eating an apple and without raising his voice.

Well I’ve seen a new excerpt in which he dismantles a different journalist (with a very suspicious French accent, if you ask me), who asks how he can disagree with Trudeau (who is definitely NOT Castro’s illegitimate son, so stop asking) and his plan to “create 5.8 million houses by 2031.”

P-squared starts by pointing out that, “I don’t disagree. Math disagrees.” And then he rattles off facts like they were paddles and Trudeau’s dishonest plan was AOC’s juicy booty. (Her words, not mine.)

“Trudeau is already missing his target by more than 50%; the Canadian government spends more of their housing budget on government bureaucrats than on people who actually build the houses; in the last nine years, the average rent for a one-bedroom was $973, and now it’s $2000; 1/3 of the cost of every newly built home in Ontario is government permits and taxes – that’s more than we spend on the labor to build the home.”

He summarizes: “Has [Trudeau] spent a lot of money on housing programs? Yes! He’s spent $89 billion on housing affordability and the result is that housing costs have doubled. The problem is that he’s putting money into bureaucracy. Government bureaucrats don’t build homes. Private sector builders do.”

Then he ends with his plan, which is to incentivize municipalities and regional governments to cut red tape, government fees, and permits so that builders can actually build. He would tie federal funding in each area to the number of houses built, instead of to how many government bureaucrats they hire and support.

And everyone who has been longing for common sense conservatism for years goes full Meg Ryan in the diner scene in “When Harry Met Sally.”

More, please. And please God, let’s see some of that here in the States after November.

Hamas delenda est!

Good News from Israel (posted 6/14/24)

I’m continuing to have a good visit with mom, taking her to a lot of pretty, small Tennessee towns, so today’s column will be a little shorter than usual. (You’re welcome, readers who say my columns are too long!)

Today’s theme is good news from Israel.

The IDF continues to impress, despite receiving constant, dishonest abuse from the EU’s and America’s biased MSM.

In some of the toughest urban warfare in decades – mostly due to Hamas’ continual violations of the Geneva Convention and basic morals, via hiding among civilians and storing war materiel in hospitals, schools, mosques and other civilian locations – the IDF has produced a nearly unbelievable low civilians-to-combatants-killed ratio of around 1.5 to 1.

Ratios of around 10 times that amount are pretty typical, and the Israelis have paid a high price in their own losses to fight with such restraint and precision. And yet their media coverage has continued to prove that we don’t hate the media nearly as much as we should.

Last Tuesday the IDF used a targeted missile strike to kill Taleb Sami Abdullah, a Hezbollah field commander, in southern Lebanon. On Wednesday, a bunch of Hezbollah big shots gave a bunch of threatening speeches about how they were going to kill lots of Jews, and they fired 200 rockets into Israel, which started some fires, but didn’t kill anyone.

Annnndddd…

Israel killed a top Hezbollah commander in another strike in Lebanon on Thursday.

The bad guy in question was Hashim Safi Al Din, the Hezbollah number 2 man. (And never has the adjective “number 2” been more appropriate.) Al Din was with a dozen or more other terrorists in a two-story building in Lebanon.

I’m assuming that the IDF turned that into a zero-story building, because the end result was a baker’s dozen of dead terrorists, including Al Din.

So Al Din is Al Done (HA!), and one observer noted that, “The powerful elimination worries Hezbollah members.”

I’ll bet it does.

Meanwhile, in the same week, Israeli troops discovered an entrance to a Hamas tunnel inside a child’s bedroom in Rafah. They recovered a trove of weapons and explosives from the tunnel. The operation is the latest of what Israel calls its “precise, intelligence-based, targeted operations” inside Rafah.

A few days before that, an Israeli strike took out Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists hiding at a United Nations school for displaced Palestinians in central Gaza. Media reports from “local officials” and “UN sources” – both common euphemisms for “anti-semitic/pro-terrorist hacks” – report that the strike killed more than 30 people, including 23 women and children. And probably soulful poets and Amish Muslims.

Israeli sources – who have not been consistently lying their arses off for 80 years straight – said that there was a Hamas compound inside the school containing 20 to 30 fighters. Many of those non-women, non-children, non-soulful poets were killed. And wise people everywhere said “good riddance to bad hummus.”

As is often the case, the great Babylon Bee summed up the leftist attitude toward Israel’s latest successes in two hilarious stories about the recent rescue of four of Hamas’s hostages:

“Gaza Health Ministry Confirms 8 Billion Dead in Israeli Hostage Rescue” and

“Ilhan Omar Calls for Day of Mourning Over Hostages Rescued.”

Hamas delenda est!

Hunter Convicted, Brihana Joy Gray Fired, Pro-Hamas Protestors are Inexplicably NOT Arrested at the White House (posted 6/12/24)

My posting today is a little later than usual because I’ve made the trek back up to Tennessee to spend a week with my mom, while my sister and her hubby take a vacation. I was unable to bring my better half along, but Cassie the Wonder Dog is with me, and we’re going to savor the extra time with mom before she turns 86 next month.

She’s still hanging in there, and though the Alzheimers continues to take its slow toll, she’s still the world-class mom who raised my sister and I, and I’m going to make some more good memories with her this week, even if only one of us remembers them!

Speaking of slow erosion, how about the state of our nation, five months before the election?

Everywhere I look there is more evidence that we don’t hate the media enough.

Exhibit A is Hunter’s conviction, which answered an intriguing rhetorical question: If you’re a Biden, exactly how guilty do you have to be in order for a Delaware jury to find you guilty? The answer is breathtakingly, obviously guilty.

But you may have noticed that the MSM were immediately ready with a take on Hunter’s verdict that was so wrong that if the Olympics introduced a new triathlon combining point missing, false equivalence and mendacity, it would have easily won gold.

They painted Hunter as a victim, trivialized his gun charges while ignoring the even more serious, daddy-implicating crimes for which he wasn’t charged, and claimed that his conviction somehow proved that Trump is wrong to say that his own conviction was illegitimate.

Taking the last point first, the gulf between the two cases isn’t just apples and oranges, it’s artificial apples and real felonies.

If Trump’s disputed bookkeeping entries had been crimes (which they weren’t) they would have been misdemeanors, and the statute of limitations would have run out on them years ago. But a corrupt DA and a corrupt judge used a tainted jury pool and even more tainted witnesses to magically create a raft of felonies out of air even thinner than Obama’s skin.

Conversely, Hunter flagrantly broke several gun laws. And oddly enough, the same Dems who for 50 years have been screaming for tougher gun laws and enforcement now think we should let drug abusing gun nuts off with a slap on the wrist. If they happen to be Bidens.

Even more oddly, the same establishment media who helped rig the last election by insisting that Hunter’s laptop was a Russian fake managed to ignore the biggest bombshell of the short trial: the FBI’s admission that it was Hunter’s all along.

Exhibit B: Ode to Joy

Last week the racist and antisemitic “journalist” Brihana Joy Gray finally got fired by leftist outfit The Hill, and like a thousand flowers in spring, the schadenfreude bloomed. You probably don’t know who she is, because why would you?

She’s the kind of charmer who spouts Hamas talking points and anti-American and anti-Semitic tropes (America is irredeemably racist, 9/11 happened partly because the US is too close to Israel, etc.). So if you did know her, you’d think that since she’s an obnoxious, black female leftist, she must be un-fireable, right?

So did she. In November of 2020 she tweeted, “Some people are so obviously mad that I can’t be fired.”

Then on 6/6/24… wait for it… she tweeted, “It finally happened. @thehill fired me.”

Immediately, the countdown to her trashing her ex-employer and playing the brave martyr card began. 3… 2… 1… “There should be no doubt that The Hill, like every other corporate news media in America, suppresses speech.”

THERE it is! Some meme-ster immediately dropped the hammer on her, posting a screen shot from a local news report. At the top of the screen the words, “Quote From Man Stabbed.” Below that, in quotation marks, “What are you gonna do, stab me?”

The straw that broke the Jew-hater’s back came last week, when she was interviewing the sister of a young woman kidnapped and still being held by Hamas. Gray kept trying to turn the interview toward criticizing the IDF and Netanyahu and Israel, while the woman kept turning the focus back to her poor sister.

As she made an impassioned plea for Gray to believe the Jewish women who have been abused by Hamas, Gray rolled her eyes and sighed with disgust, then cut her off abruptly. “All right, thanks for joining.”

Stay classy, BJG!

By the way, what is it with women named “Joy” being the most joyless humans on earth? From Joy Behar to Joy Reid to Brihana Joy Gray, there is no joy amongst the Joys.

Speaking of antisemitic freaks, did you see the pro-Hamas bigots launching an insurrection at the White House? I remember when coup attempts like that would send hundreds of peaceful grandparents to jail pending trial for years at a time. But apparently wearing a terrorist tablecloth on your head – you say Yasser, I say No Sir! – grants you immunity from treason charges.

The latest outrage took place on June 8^th, when mobs of pro-terror loons surrounded the White House, threw smoke bombs and chanted hateful, non-rhyming chants. Julio Rosas also reported from the scene that the protesters “formed a mob and chased U.S. Park Police and Secret Service out of Lafayette Square after officers apparently tried to arrest someone.” He noted that law enforcement was forced out of the park and retreated to “the boundaries of the protest.”

Which begs an obvious question: Are we all out of rubber bullets, belt-fed weapons and robot flamethrower dogs?

Because I’ll bet those would work in this case, and I for one would pay handsomely to watch the Pay-Per-View of lightly toasted anti-semites fleeing for their lives, before being knocked to the ground, hit with fire extinguishers, and then cuffed and stuffed into windowless vans to take them to prison.

Also, one of the most prominent banners carried by the cowardly, masked Nazi-emulators featured a quote from “Al Qassam” (which means “Hamas” in terrorist),” Jihad of Victory or Martyrdom.”

If that’s our choice, let’s go with Door #2.

Hamas delenda est!

Biden Storms Normandy, Biden-flation Makes Fast Food a “Luxury,” WAPO Flounders & “Innocent Gazan Journalist” Holds Hostages (posted 6/10/24)

As a Christian, I feel like God communicates with me in many ways, such as through the Bible, and church services, and joyous moments with family and friends. Even through his creation, as I was reminded of as we drove through some of the beautiful landscape of Colorado last week.

But He’s never spoken to me in an audible voice.

However, this last weekend He seemed to come pretty darn close. And what did He say to me?

“Hey Martin, do you believe that I can ever give you more targets for mockery than you can handle?”

To which I replied, “Well, I’m just a mortal man over here, and—”

“And a hilarious one, and one of My personal favorites. And by the way, you’re welcome for the strength of 10 men, and the smoke-show of a wife, the two great daughters and the Wonder Dog, all of which I have graciously bestowed on you.”

What does one say to that? “For which I can’t thank you enough. And thanks also for the gift of mockery, which so far has seemed sufficient to keep up with the stream of mockable targets—”

But He interrupted again. “Hold my wine chalice, and watch this!”

And a thundering Voice said, “Joe Biden at Normandy, Hunter Biden on trial, WAPO implodes, creepy anti-Semite Brihana Joy Gray fired by The Hill, the MSM scrambles to cover for Hamas, the Nashville trans-shooter’s writings leak out, the two best politicians on earth are a weird-looking Argentinian and a French-Canadian. Should I go on?”

And I was humbled.

So buckle up for another three-column week, because I am just as God made me, and I’m mocking as fast as I can!

To start with, I cannot confidently say that the President of the United States did NOT poop his pants at Normandy. That’s where we are today, people.

Biden’s team sent him off to D-Day ceremonies hoping to get the kind of inspiring performance on the 80th anniversary that Reagan gave on the 40th. Unfortunately, Reagan is dead, and so is Joe Biden. So we got the usual shaky walking, and slurred talking, and lots of gaffes.

Sadly for the national Dems, they wanted the Gipper, and they got the Tripper. And his power-hungry wife looked even more like a dead-horse-whipper. (And Hunter got the stripper!)

I’m here all week, people. Try the veal.

As sad as it is to say, Biden’s rickety performance at Normandy at least temporarily distracted from some of his troubles at home. It’s easy to forget, for example, that he’s in a legal tug-of-war over incriminating audio tapes.

I’m old enough to remember when Nixon was forced to turn over tapes of WH conversations. (Well, not really. I was alive then, but not paying attention to such boring events.)

Now Biden is doing something similar – fighting to withhold the audio tapes of his interview with Ben Hur – though he’s got a compliant and complicit justice system backing him up, so he has no fear of impeachment, despite having done much shadier things than Nixon ever did.

In defense of Biden, the transcripts of his interview are already out there, as they weren’t in Nixon’s case. On the other hand, reading the words of a demented old man’s ramblings doesn’t have the same visceral impact as listening to them… which is why his taxidermists are fighting so hard to keep them from the public.

But it’s interesting how history repeats itself. Nixon was finally doomed by the famous 18-minute gap in his tapes. (Everyone assumed that he’d erased some damaging conversations.) But you know that if you added up all of Biden’s silences – as he stared off into space, made multiple tortured attempts to think of a word or remember a point, or just sat like a zombie, before muttering “anyway…” – you’d have a hell of a lot longer silence than 18 minutes!

In a sane world, a crack team of caregivers from Visiting Angels (sing it with me: “America’s choice in home care”) would have carted him away years ago, leaving Que Mala to step in and start sinking piers, alienating allies, destroying the budget, and generally blowing all opportunities for success like they were Willie Brown.

Too soon? Okay. Withdrawn.

Speaking of corrupt politics, prosecutors just spent a week proving that in addition to being a dirtbag par excellence, Hunter Biden is undeniably guilty of some perjury and gun violations that carry penalties of more than a decade in prison.

So he’ll likely get the key to the city in DC, and have his child support debt to the ex-stripper further reduced. It’s a good thing for him that Lady Justice has a blindfold on, because now she can’t even ID him in a lineup as the one who’s been groping and assaulting her.

From the “Unexpectedly” files comes this story from the late, great Golden State: after only two months of Ken-Doll Newsom’s $20 an hour minimum wage law, CA’s fast-food restaurants have already cut 10,000 jobs! For just one example, McDonalds has cut hours, raised prices and moved to more automation.

Say it with me, people: UNEXPECTEDLY!

Perhaps the most depressingly revealing fact is that in a recent survey, “78% of consumers say that fast food is now a ‘luxury’ purchase.”

Great job, leftist micro-managers! You’ve turned your cities into third-world hellscapes, you’ve transformed one of our great actors into a hateful, raving old coot (I’m looking at you, DeNiro. Yes, I’m looking at you. Who else would I be looking at?), and you’ve taken the God-gifted natural paradise of California and made it Tijuana north.

And now you’ve managed to reduce the most prosperous population in the history of the world into a bunch of Dickensian orphans who can’t even afford a mediocre junk-food meal. Well done!

Let’s close on a few happier notes, starting in Schadenfreude Corner:

You may remember recent stories about how the Washington Post has been in a shallow doom spiral lately, and now the doom curve is getting even steeper, and the crisis even more entertaining.

New management came in last week and fired the Executive Editor Sally Buzbee. The new CEO then had a meeting with the woke staffers to announce that he was bringing in three experienced guys (one of them from the Wall Street Journal) to try to turn things around.

Then he went through the paper’s dire situation, which most of them had to already be aware of, at least in general terms: revenues have cratered, web traffic is down by half in the last several years, and the paper lost $77 million last year alone.

So naturally, the staffers recognized the crisis facing them, recommitted themselves to doing honest journalism, and vowed to do everything they could to return the paper to viability.

HA! I kid because I love.

What they actually did … wait for it… was whine about diversity at the paper!

Unexpectedly!

They pointed out that Sally Buzbee had female genitalia, while there wasn’t even a single vagina amongst the four toxically male new big hires! And also that many of the staffers who have been laid off as the paper began sinking beneath the waves were non-white, non-straight, sexually eccentric people of color!

So obviously they all need to be re-hired and given raises, to be paid for out of the obscene profits the paper is absolutely not producing, because the whole rotten racket is going down like Que Mala at a promotion meeting with Willie Brown.

Before the opposition can move to strike, I withdraw that hilarious yet inappropriate analogy.

But I’d be hard-pressed to make up a more damning indictment of the MSM than the scene of a CEO warning that the WAPO needs drastic, immediate changes to save it, and a bunch of coddled J-school malcontents threatening to call HR because they’re being triggered by the insufficient attention being paid to their DEI concerns.

Finally, we got some much-needed good news out of Israel this weekend, when the IDF’s brilliant raid freed four hostages from the clutches of Hamas.

And of course we also got the very telling reactions from our national Dems and their co-religionist pro-Hamas protestors. Everyone’s mad about the dozens – or hundreds, or no no, wait, THOUSANDS – of innocent Gazans killed during their rescue.

Even numbskull Que Mala, after a muted, rote expression of happiness for the hostages, quickly assured the world that “we mourn all of the innocent lives that have been lost in Gaza, including those tragically killed today.”

Of course, they don’t mention that Hamas is responsible for kidnapping and holding the hostages in the first place. Instead they focus on the damage to the Gazans among whom the hostages were hidden.

“They were unarmed civilians in their homes!” wail our MSM and leftist leadership.

To which I say, doing my fantastic Clint Eastwood impression from Unforgiven, “They should have armed themselves, if they were going to hold innocent hostages in their houses.”

Even more infuriating is that an evil Al-Jazeera “journalist” named Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad was holding three of the Israeli hostages in his own house! (Actually, his name is Abdallah Aljamal. But you say “Abdallah,” I say “Hamas.” Let’s call the whole thing off.)

This story reminds us that we need to view all claims about the vast majority of “innocent civilians” in Gaza with a very wary eye. Because reliable polling suggests that over 70% of residents support Hamas and celebrated October 7^th.

And now we find that a “legitimate” “civilian” “journalist” – I’m about to run out of scare quotes – turns out to be a Hamas-supporting collaborator. He used his home to hold innocent hostages, thus exposing his whole family and neighborhood to justified military action from the IDF.

And it turns out that several members of his family were reportedly killed, either because they were there in that legitimate military target of a home, or because they tried to prevent the rescue of the hostages. Either way, they reaped what Hamas has sown.

And as to all of the Hamas terrorists and their sympathizers who died in the rescue raid, good! Wrap their bodies in pigskin and bury them in a garbage dump where IDF K-9 dogs – beautiful dogs! kosher dogs! – go during training to relieve themselves.

Annnnndddd… I haven’t even gotten to half of the stories on my list. So I’ll talk with you again on Wednesday.

Hamas delenda est!

The National Dems Have the Reverse Midas Touch (posted 6/7/24)

You don’t have to look very hard to find a story that illustrates how everything our national Democrats touch metaphorically falls apart, and in a way so obvious that if it were written in a novel, it would seem too ham-handed to be believable.

In fact, a few minutes of surfing around the net brought 3 such stories to my attention in the last week.

First there was the pier was the Biden administration’s brilliant solution to address the need for food in Gaza. Never mind that the best way to help the Gazan civilians who aren’t terrorists (however many that is) would be to support Israel fully and encourage them to destroy Hamas ASAP.

And never mind that Israelis were already letting tons of food into the Strip each day, and that Hamas was promptly stealing it all and then selling it to the starving citizens that they obviously don’t care about.

Because as is always the case with those terrorist thugs, Hamas has gotta Hamas.

I think Disraeli said that. Or maybe it was Metternich, or Von Clausewitz, or CO. I know it was one of those smart guys.

Anyway, Biden spent a third of a billion dollars to build the pier, and after a few delays it was put into place, and was used to deliver food for several days. Rumors that that food was promptly commandeered by Hamas thugs go without saying. (See Disraeli/CO above.)

Annnnndddddd… high winds and heavy seas damaged the pier and partially sunk it, along with driving aground four US vessels operating there. Three of our service members were injured, one critically, and the Israeli navy had to help us retrieve our beached vessels, and the pier was taken to an Israeli port to be repaired.

Isn’t that the Biden administration story in a nutshell?

“But what about on the domestic front?” nobody is asking. Because everybody knows.

Let’s look at one move that almost always works for the Dems: giving taxpayer money to their pet interest groups to buy their votes. In this case, it’s the student loan “forgiveness” program, which is actually the “stick working people with the bill for other people’s bad educational choices” program.

But that name doesn’t poll as well.

In an effort to boost Joey Gaffe’s image, one prominent Democrat posted a heartfelt “thank you” on X last week, in the form of a screen shot of his college debt balance now being reduced to zero.

Annnnddddd… the stunt crashed and burned like a rickety Iranian helicopter falling onto Solyndra headquarters in the middle of a Sam Bankman-Fried speech.

Because the Dem in question was St. Paul, MN mayor Melvin Carter, who makes between $130-$170K per year. Normal Americans immediately ratioed him into next week, pointing out that his employees and fast-food workers are now paying off his student loans. One wise guy commented, “So much for the rich paying their fair share.”

On top of all that, the story also reminded people of Biden’s boast that when SCOTUS blocked him from “canceling” student debt, he did it anyway. (Because nothing is more important to him than the rule of law!)

And it reinforced the old truism of Leftist economic policy: Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he’ll say, “No thanks, just keep giving me a fish every day.”

But if an immediately sinking pier and a rich guy getting money from the poor aren’t sufficiently clear metaphors for the Biden administration, I’ve got a New Jersey story for you that should do the trick.

It’s the tale of Congressional Black Caucus member Donald Payne Jr., who had a brush with death in April, suffering a heart attack and complications from diabetes that put him into a coma for two weeks.

Well, it wasn’t so much a “brush” with death as it was a “high-speed, head-on collision” with death. Because he died on April 24^th at the age of 65.

Annnndddd…

…last Tuesday he eked out a narrow victory in the Democrat primary, scraping by with 99.9% of the vote.

I’m not making that up. The Democrats had already elected a brain-dead congressman from NYC (representing Juicy-Booty Americans everywhere), and a mostly dead president, and now a completely dead congressman from Jersey.

At least now we can look forward to Biden making a campaign stop in New Jersey this fall, during which he will say, “And I want to thank Congressman Donald Payne Jr. for his support. I couldn’t win without the help of great Americans like Donald, no joke! Where are you Donald? Stand up and let us give you a round of applause!”

And at the end of that speech, will the Cadaver-in-Chief reach out and shake Donald Payne Jr.’s hand?

You’re damn right he will.

Hamas delenda est!

The Moral Confusions of the National Democrats (posted 6/5/24)

Today’s theme is moral inversion.

Not to be confused with cranial-rectal inversion, which is a common phenomenon on the left. (See: “let’s defund the police so that crime will go down,” or “if a dude puts on a pair of ruby slippers and taps his heels together while saying, “I’m a girl,” he’s a girl.)

One example of moral inversion is the way national Democrats deal with the statute of limitations, which is the legal principle setting a time limit after a crime, during which charges must be brought. It’s a reasonable rule, because as time goes by, evidence is lost, witnesses die and memories fade.

Dems have provided several great examples of why a statute of limitations is necessary. When the left wanted to stop Brett Kavanaugh from getting onto SCOTUS, activist/loon Christine Blasey Ford came forward to accuse him of raping her decades ago.

Unfortunately for lovers of distorting the constitution, Ford was a little fuzzy on the details. Details such as where it happened, and who else was there, and what town it was in, and what year it occurred.

I’m not kidding. She couldn’t remember the YEAR. Which is all you needed to hear to know that she was full of (Adam) Schiff. Because anyone who had any really bad experience in high school – never mind something as traumatic as being raped! – can tell you the year it happened.

In fact, many people recall their teenage years mainly through the disasters: freshman year was when I broke my arm; sophomore year was when my folks got divorced and Beth broke up with me; junior year I totaled dad’s car and got chlamydia; senior year I voted for Bill Clinton. Etc.

Of course, Kavanaugh wasn’t charged with a crime; the Dems were just trying to smear him to keep him off the court.

But even though Ford turned out to be a lemon (ha!), the Dems were undeterred. Last year the corrupt NY Dem party passed a law that temporarily got rid of the statue of limitations, specifically so that E. Jean Carrol ( I’m guessing that the “E” stands for either “eccentric” or “erratic”) – a fruitcake who makes Blasey Ford look almost high-functioning by comparison – could accuse Trump of sexually assaulting her almost 30 years ago.

Or maybe more than 30 years ago. Because she too could not even pin down the year when the phony assault supposedly happened. At one point she said that it was definitely a specific year in the 1990s because she remembers wearing a designer dress that came out that year. Except that when someone looked it up, it turns out that the dress didn’t exist that year. D’oh!

But never mind. The Dems trashed the law, and got their false accusation turned into a civil conviction against Trump.

And then last week, the Dems found a judge and DA so corrupt that they once again broke the law by charging Trump for mis-classifying business records – misdemeanors on which the statute ran out in 2019, if they had actually happened in the first place.

But they zapped those dead charges back to life – much as they do with Joe Biden’s earthly remains before a public speech – and turned them into 34 transparently illegitimate felony convictions.

So the Dems are happy to trample the statute of limitations when it serves their purpose. But how do they regard the statute when it can be useful to them? As the most sacred of legal principles, of course.

Enter addict, dead-beat dad, and dead-brother’s-widow-jumper Hunter Biden. Among his many apparent crimes are some serious actions of corruption and bribe-taking from foreign governments, most of which implicate his corrupt dad (and our current Cadaver-in-Chief).

Those crimes would be relatively easy to prove in court, partly because of the mountain of evidence against him, and partly because a jury would have to believe many patently unbelievable things to acquit him.

Things such as that a shady Ukrainian energy company paid him $80K per month purely for his expertise in Ukrainian energy – even though he couldn’t find Ukraine on a map, and all he knows about energy is that snorting a bunch of cocaine off a hooker’s rump gives you A LOT of it.

“So Martin,” you are not asking, because you already know the answer, “when is Hunter’s devastating trial on those serious crimes going to start? I thought he was only facing relatively paltry gun and tax evasion charges.”

You’re right, of course. Because Merrick Garland – and say what you will about the Chinless Cartoon Turtle Mitch McConnell, but he kept that creep off SCOTUS! – Toobin-ed his way through the first three years of Biden’s term.

And just when he got around to considering the slam-dunk case against Hunter, wouldn’t you know it? That pesky statute of limitations had run out.

To quote the mobster who whacked Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, reporting the news to DeNiro: “That’s that. And we couldn’t do nothing about it.”

So when it’s one of their guys, they use the statute to evade the consequences of their crimes, and when it’s someone from the other side, they misuse the statute to convict on non-existent crimes.

THAT’s moral inversion.

Media figures and “journalists” are especially skilled at moral inversion. Stories about the rights of women and girls to be safe from disordered men using their showers and bathrooms are called stories about “trans rights.” Abortion is called “women’s health care.” Jill Biden is called a “doctor.”

Another recent example – which also fits perfectly into my column category of “you don’t hate the media enough” – comes from Mannheim, where a cop was stabbed to death. Two of the MSM headlines were as follows: “Officer dies after being repeatedly stabbed in attack at anti-Islam rally in Germany,” and “Officer Stabbed During Attack at Far-Right Rally Dies.”

Now if you had the miniscule IQ or the gullibility of an Ivy League grievance studies major – or of AOC, just to pick a random juicy booty (her words, not mine) out of a hat – you might jump to a conclusion. You’d focus on the key words – Germany, Far-Right, anti-Islam rally, cop gets stabbed – and figure that the Germans were reverting to aggressive form, and menacing the adherents of the Religion of Peace™

But nope! The stabber turned out to be a radical Muslim from Afghanistan.

UNEXPECTEDLY!

Also, Yay, diversity!

Tragically, the deceased officer died largely because when some Germans jumped on the terrorist who had already stabbed people, the cop and others yanked the Germans off of the terrorist, to protect him.

After which he turned on the cop – who was holding down an innocent German at the time – and fatally stabbed him in the back.

Ugh. Rather than end on that dark note, I’ll give you one final example of moral inversion, along with an example of how to think clearly.

Before I left for Colorado, the Iranian president – a mass-murdering jihadi sadist named Ebrahim Raisi – died in a hilarious helicopter crash in the mountains, along with several of his weird-beard co-religionist co-conspirators.

The guy was called “The Butcher of Tehran.” And not because he cheerfully provided the kind of tomahawk pork chops and ribeye steaks which all good meat-eaters appreciate.

So how did NBC describe him in the sub-head of their story on the crash? As “a hard-line conservative cleric.” Because of course they did. Because they suck.

And how did the Biden administration respond? By issuing a State Department statement offering its “official condolences” for the death.

To see how a government official should actually respond to the much-deserved death of a smelly terrorist leader, I refer you to Trump’s announcement of the death of ISIS chief Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom our special forces – and military dogs! – raided and killed.

If you haven’t seen it before, you must watch Shane Gillis’ hilarious four-minute recounting of Trump’s epic, trash-talking speech that night. The most famous line from it is that al-Baghdadi “died like a dog.” But my favorite moment is one that Gillis highlights.

Trump acknowledged that Baghdadi likely had a suicide vest on, and talked about the way our special forces guys went in through a wall with a robot and military dogs. “They used dogs… beautiful dogs.”

And then he mocked Baghdadi, praised our troops and our dogs, and then mocked Baghdadi some more.

THAT’s how you announce the death of a terrorist!

On a related note, I can only hope that the IDF is deploying dogs in Rafah right now.

Beautiful, Jewish dogs.

Hamas delenda est!

Our Colorado Trip, Trump’s Show Trial, and DeNiro’s Sad Decline (posted 6/3/24)

Let me start by saying that I’ll make this a three-column week, because I miss you all after having spent another week on the road, and not writing anything.

We all had a great week in Colorado, and crammed a lot into it. We set my daughter up in Boulder, and she was actually giddy about the natural beauty of the area, the much cooler temps and drier air, and the university, her roommates, and her mentoring professors.

We left her there on Sunday, and then met up with my two cousins, and took a whirlwind tour of national parks and beautiful scenery. We saw Pike’s Peak, the Great Sand Dunes, Royal Gorge, Canyon Lands, Mesa Verde and Arches. We drove the Million Dollar Highway and saw the picturesque towns of Durango, Silverton, and Ouray.

In Glenwood Springs we drank in the saloon beneath the room where Doc Holliday died, reportedly of TB, but possibly of Covid. (He wasn’t vaccinated, and cute little guy Rachel Maddow tells me that that’s a death sentence.)

We didn’t have time to stop by Leadville. Which was disappointing, because I was hoping to meet Kenny Koch’s brother Tim and his wife Vicki at their High Mountain Pies pizza place there. Next time, I hope.

But I did get to see a cigar store Indian at one of the mountain towns we went through, which reminded me of Lizzie Warren, and that #wemustneverstopmockingher.

As I am on most vacations, I was pretty much cut off from the news, and in the day and a half I’ve been home, I’ve tried to get caught up.

One odd thought occurred to me, as I skimmed through the coverage of the end of the Trump show trial: in recent years I’ve often imagined going back in time and showing my younger self what has become of people I used to look up to and admire, especially those who have taken shockingly horrific turns in their lives.

The all-time leader in that category is (of course) Bruce Jenner.

If I could visit 14-year-old me in my small Illinois farm town in 1976 – as I sat in front of a Wheaties box with his picture on it, reading a Sports Illustrated account of his Olympic exploits – and try to explain “Caitlyn” Jenner today, I don’t know which one of us would be more discombobulated.

(Young Martin: He cut off his WHAT?! And he’s calling himself WHO?)

But last week, another former hero is giving Bruce a run for his money in the “how far have they fallen” derby: Robert DeNiro.

DeNiro has always been one of my favorite actors. He was amazing in Godfather II, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas. He was in some great, iconic scenes: playing Russian roulette with Walken in The Deer Hunter; his slow burn as a small-time hood before shooting Bridget Fonda in Jackie Brown; as Capone with the baseball bat in The Untouchables. Even his under-rated comic turn with Charles Grodin in Midnight Run.

I know that like so many other celebrities, he’s been an irrational lefty for a long time. He’s engaged in obscenity-filled screeds about Trump at award ceremonies, and ranted ridiculous warnings about the hellscape that Trump would create if he ever becomes president.

As if Trump was not the president in the recent past, during the least hell-scapey administration of the last 30 years.

But his disgraceful performance at the Trump trial is a further sad step on a downward spiral. Jenner’s penectomy was less disgusting than DeNiro’s apparent lobotomy. I can’t remember the last great movie he was in, or the last time he was great in a movie. It’s all “Meet the Fockers” lately, and as the late Joe Biden used to say, “Not a joke.”

When I heard the news of Trump’s “conviction” on Thursday, it made me madder than I thought it would. In view of all of the corruption and reversible errors during the trial, I thought that I’d been prepared for that verdict.

The case was ridiculous in the first place, and not moving it to a jurisdiction where you had some chance of finding a non-Trump-hating jury pool was a bad sign. Then it came out that “Judge” Merchan’s daughter has raised millions for Dems, and he himself had donated three small amounts to Biden’s campaign and other leftist activist groups dedicated to stopping Trump.

Then the trial starts, and the star witnesses are a porn star who admits she hates Trump, and will never pay the $500K a court has ordered her to pay him, and a convicted perjurer who admits to committing a much more serious robbery against Trump than Trump was charged with in this case.

The charges are misdemeanors on which the statute of limitations has run out, the predicate crime (necessary to allow revising the old misdemeanors) is not even named until the defense has closed (!), and Trump is not allowed to call a former head of the FEC who would testify that even the original misdemeanor charges are illegitimate because Trump didn’t violate campaign finance laws.

But I keep coming back to the judge. I did a little research, and the guy earns over $200K per year and is worth an estimated $10 million, but when he decided to contribute to partisan leftist causes, he only ponied up a total of $35!

The man sold out even the appearance of his professional objectivity for less than the price for one pair of the special shoes that Joe Biden has taken to wearing in an effort to keep him from face-planting every time he walks across the White House lawn!

You can’t make this up. Our opponents are cartoonishly corrupt, and I’m just praying that most voters are half as outraged by this travesty as I am. Even though I was a DeSantis supporter, I have already been willing to crawl over broken glass to vote for Trump in November.

Now you could put that glass into a moat full of napalm and rabid piranhas and set the whole mess on fire, and it wouldn’t keep me from the ballot box. All I have to do is think about Biden, Bragg, Cohen, Stormy, “Judge Merchan” and the whole rotten lot of them, and my mind immediately goes to DeNiro’s Capone when he found out that Elliot Ness had captured one of his shipments of booze.

I paraphrase his great rant, hand gestures and all:

“I want you to find these guys and I want them DEAD! I want their families DEAD! I want their houses burnt to the GROUND! I want to go there in the middle of the night and p*ss on their ashes!”

I know. It’s a movie. And I’m not actually advocating violence.

But I would like to see all of those little Fockers get what they’ve got coming to them.

Biden Depresses College Grads, Germany isn’t Fond of Jews (again!), and Media Matters Fires “Journalists” (posted 5/24/24)

I just got home from our trip to New England last week, and now we’re flying out to Colorado tomorrow.

As I mentioned in a past column, my youngest daughter is going to Boulder for a 10-week research program in astrophysics. (She’s focusing on planet formation and other things I don’t understand, and if this summer goes well, she might be applying to CU for a PhD starting next August.) So my wife and I are using our little brainiac’s summer gig as an excuse to take her out and move her into her summer apartment, and then spend 5 days seeing various beautiful parts of God’s creation.

The two cousins with whom I take regular road-trips are going to meet us in Boulder, and the three of us will be temporarily civilized by the presence of my better half. (Our adventures in the old Caddy convertible on Route 66 in 2021, circumnavigating Lake Michigan in 2022, and last year’s re-tracing the route our families took 90 years ago to migrate from Kentucky to Illinois can all be found on Martinsimpsonwriting.com.)

I’m going to try to post from the road, but I can’t promise anything. As usual, too much is going on, so I’ll hit a few things that crossed my radar this week.

I’ve been simultaneously depressed and encouraged by the dumpster fire that Trump’s NYC prosecution has devolved into. Depressed because the existence of these cases shows how corrupt our justice system has become, and because there are at least some low-info voters out there who vaguely believe that he must be guilty of some bad stuff if he’s facing so many charges and trials.

But it has been amazing to watch just how badly the trial has gone for Bragg’s bozos. I can’t think of two worse prosecution witnesses than a porn star who can’t keep her mouth shut (but not in a good way), and an oily conman like Michael Cohen.

Stormy could offer no relevant testimony to the case at hand, and her appearance in the trial made plain the corruption of the wildly biased judge. He should obviously have recused himself, if for no other reason than that his daughter runs a lefty consulting firm that has raised millions for Democrats, and her resume includes being “Director of Digital Persuasion” for Que Mala’s 2020 presidential campaign. I swear I am not making that up.

Maybe it’s just me, but that sounds A LOT sleazier than Stormy’s resume, which boils down to “banging strangers on camera for cash.” In fact, I think Stormy and the judge’s daughter have a lot in common.

The daughter handled “digital persuasion” for a dingbat who slept her way into a career, and Stormy, though I have never seen any of her greatest hits, has a filmography that I’m willing to bet is replete with more than a few digits and a hell of a lot of persuasion. (Not to mention a long line of Willie Brown types, even though they might be credited only as “Pizza Delivery Man 1” and “Horny Boss.”)

And then Michael Cohen slithered into court, and he made Stormy Daniels look like Mother Theresa’s more pious sister. The climax (you’ll pardon the expression) of his testimony was admitting that in addition to his other convictions for perjury, tax evasion and campaign finance violations, he also stole $60K from Trump!

That’s larceny, and it is several standard deviations more serious than the (bogus) bookkeeping infractions that Trump is being prosecuted for.

Good job, NY judicial system. You’ve all covered yourselves in glory!

Speaking of stomach-turning corruption and incompetence, who is the genius who invited our Cadaver in Chief to give a graduation speech at Morehouse?

Even if the typical graduation address now begins with a morose land acknowledgment (“You should all feel guilty for throwing four years of frat parties on the sacred burial grounds once owned by the Ojibwas and the Indigenous Warrens…”) (#wemustneverstopmockingher), they usually quickly turn to a bunch of banal happy-talk.

“You graduates are the future. Your education has prepared you to go out and blaze new trails. The world is truly your oyster!”

But not the late Joe Biden. He hollered his way through a Jeremiad that must have had half the graduates contemplating whether they could fashion their tassels into nooses and put themselves out of their misery.

“What is democracy, when black men are hunted for sport every day by MAGA-hat wearing gun nuts? White people hate you, and America blows, and you’re all victims. Now get out there and suffer, until things get so bad that you gladly accept the sweet release of death, probably at the hands of a lynch mob.”

I’m paraphrasing. But only slightly.

Seriously, what kind of decision-process leads to inviting Joe Biden to inspire your graduates? Were all the less-depressing speakers unavailable? (“Well, the Unabomber and Dr. Jack Kevorkian are both dead, Paul Ehrlich is in his 90s and doesn’t travel, and Greta Thunberg wants too much money. So I guess it’s Joe.”)

But lest you think our country has the stupidity market cornered, consider the Germans’ latest masterstroke.

One of the most corrupt parts of the thoroughly corrupt UN – the competition is tough, what with terrorist and communist countries on various “human rights” commissions, and UNRWA funding and supporting Hamas – is the “International Criminal Court.” (Insert your own “You misspelled ‘kangaroo’ jokes here.)

This sleazy convocation of hypocrites – we are thankfully not a member nation of the ICC, though I’m shocked Joey Gaffes didn’t sign an executive order making us join – pretend to adjudicate disputes and war crimes claims. Yet they somehow don’t issue arrest warrants for the most evil dictators or terrorists in the world.

But now they are on the verge of issuing such warrants for Bibi Netanyahu and Israel’s defense minister, for the “crime” of fighting the terrorists who slaughtered their civilians and now hide behind civilians. The ICC is set to issue the same kind of warrant for the Hamas top terrorist Yahoo Serious, too, which is obviously just a fig leaf to allow them to try to arrest the Israelis.

(If they had wanted to issue an arrest warrant for the chief Hamashole, October 8^th might have been a good time to do so.)

So a German spokesman for Chancellor Olaf “Sergeant” Scholz (“I know NO-THING!”) has warned that his government will arrest Bibi if he enters Germany. Every EU country has submitted themselves to the ICC, so they would presumably all arrest Israeli leaders. (Which is reason enough for us to cut off all formal ties to the EU and the UN immediately, IMHO.)

It’s galling enough that the other European nations would agree to this. (Though they do have a history of cooperating with the Germans, especially when it comes to identifying and turning over the Juden.) But Germany? Where it has only recently become legal again to own a copy of Mein Kampf ?

Way to steer into that reputational skid, Germany! (Please tell me that this press release came out of Nuremberg!)

But let’s not end on a down note. Because some good things are happening, too.

For example, even in Portland – where AOC would be close to the median IQ – the numbskull voters might finally have hit rock bottom, and made the first baby step toward digging out.

For four years, they’ve had a Soros-funded (i.e. pro-crime) DA called Mike Schmidt, who was elected with 77% of the vote. Once in office, he resolutely declined to prosecute BLM and Antifa thugs as they rioted and destroyed the quality of life in that town.

Unexpectedly!

But on Tuesday, the voters fired Schmidt, giving Nathan Vasquez a 17% margin of victory over him. Vasquez is still a Dem (of course), but he’s promised to get tough on crime, and if he does, we should celebrate. Soros poured a bunch of cash into Schmidt’s re-election campaign, and he lost big.

In a similar karmic beat-down, a bunch of angry leftist hacks at MMFA – “Media Matters For America,” though that “F” should really stand for something else – no longer work at Media Matters, having been laid off yesterday.

When Elon bought Twitter/X, MM went on a slander campaign targeting his advertisers, falsely charging that he was posting racist material that would hurt their companies. Elon is suing MM and is likely to win, and as their fortunes decline, they’re starting to cut employees.

Ironically, you can read their whining and wailing on… wait for it… X! (HA!)

For example, one fired guy says, “Unfortunately, I have been impacted by the MM lay-offs… and am now open to any research/analyst roles, specifically regarding RWM narratives [I’m guessing that stands for “Rotten White Males?”] on DEI [ooh, I know this one: “Didn’t Earn It”], education, and LGBTQ+ issues.”

Another one, a guy named Alex who gives his pronouns under a picture of himself in some kind of pink feather boa, says, “I got laid off from MMFA today, proud of the 5 years of intense work I put into fighting right-wing hatred.”

Oh, you brave boy or girl, fighting the good fight against those nasty right-wing meanies!

If I weren’t such a classy, high-brow gentleman, I’d quote someone named “OneFineJay,” who posted a response to the list of whining ex-MM employees.

Oh, who am I kidding? Let’s give OneFineJay the last word:

“MMFA layoffs? #schadenboner”

Hamas delenda est!