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.
Martin Simpson 