Month: August 2024

I’m starting out this week in a contemplative mood, partly because of one of the two books I finished this weekend.  One is a thriller by Nick Petrie, The Price You Pay.  If you like Ben Coes and Lee Child novels, you’ll like Petrie’s.

The other one is a biography of Jefferson by Jon Meacham, called The Art of Power.  One of the great things about reading books about other historical periods is that when you’re boxed into your own, claustrophobic, immediate culture – which I am, and especially so during the final stretch of an election – they get you out of your own head, and give you some perspective.

The Jefferson book did that for me, and I thought I’d share a few thoughts about it, before I go right back to our own claustrophobic, immediate culture at the end of this column. 

I’ve read a lot about Jefferson and the Founders, but most of it was a while ago, and it’s disheartening to realize how much I’ve forgotten. The clearest facts that I remembered about him are his genius and his motor; he had such a wide range of interests, and seemed capable of excelling at anything he put his hand to.  He designed all kinds of implements and furniture, and his own grave marker, on which he listed his writing of a Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom and the Declaration of Independence, and his founding of the University of Virginia. 

He had me at “author of the Declaration of Independence.”  Quill drop.

If that wasn’t enough, after the British burned much of DC in the War of 1812, Jefferson’s personal library of over 6000 books formed the basis of the new Library of Congress. 

(By comparison, I’ve written 5 unpublished novels, a dissertation, 10 published short stories, and literally hundreds of running jokes about how Nancy Pelosi is a mummy, and Liz Warren is translucently white.  So I feel like Jefferson and I are kindred spirits, really.) 

And yet, he’s also a reminder of what a mixed bag we fallen humans are, even the greatest among us.  For such a wise man, he could be foolish with money, and at his death he owed between $1-2 million in 2012 dollars, forcing the posthumous sale of his beloved Monticello.  For such a morally high-minded man, as a young bachelor he also pursued and had an affair with one of his best friend’s wives, and as an adult he famously had sex and children with at least one of his slaves, Sally Hemmings.

Oh yeah: he owned slaves, and he didn’t free any of them during his lifetime.  At his death he freed the children he’d sired by Hemmings, but not the rest.

Those facts are incomprehensible to us now, and morally offensive.  And they should be.  But since they’ve been dwelled on exhaustively by too many America-hating educrats in recent decades, too many students can’t rightly see, judge or appreciate the greatness of the man (and the Founders, and our country).  Too many schools teach that what we shared with every great empire/nation in human history until the 1830s – slavery – was unique to (and uniquely terrible in) America, while denigrating or ignoring our uniquely great founding principles and positive impact on the world.

All generations suffer from what C. S. Lewis called “chronological snobbery,” a tendency to accept our current values and harshly judge those of earlier generations.  So while we pat ourselves on the back for acknowledging the evils of slavery or sexism, what do you think people a century or two from now will think when they look back on our current acceptance of transgender ideology and the child mutilation and harm that accompanies it, or socialism and its 100 million plus body count (so far), or violent terrorism when practiced by trendy minorities, or abortion up until the moment of birth?

(A good corrective to chronological snobbery comes from Tolstoy: “Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it.”)

In a related vein, Jefferson’s world provides a useful reminder of how many political “crises” that loom so large in the moment will be utterly forgotten in a very short time.  I find it comforting to think that, God willing, no one will be able to remember Tampon Tim Walz in 8 years.  (Quick, who was Hillary’s running mate in 2016?  See what I mean?)

I found the chapters about Jefferson’s retirement to be the most poignant, perhaps because I’m at that stage of life myself.  He was relieved to be out of the sturm und drang of politics, and happily occupied himself with writing and working on various projects, and on my best days I feel that way too. 

After bitter political feuding with John Adams kept the second and third presidents estranged from each other for over a decade, it took only one fond letter from Adams for Jefferson to respond warmly and renew a friendship and correspondence that lasted until their deaths.

And in a coincidence of history, both men died on the same day.  On July 3^rd, 1826, Jefferson was in and out of consciousness, but wanted to survive to see the 50^th anniversary of the first Independence Day.  That night, he asked those around him several times whether it was the Fourth yet. 

He made it, dying at age 83, at Monticello on the Fourth of July.  John Adams, 90, died the same day in Quincy, Massachusetts.  His last words were, “Jefferson still survives,” even though Jefferson had passed five hours earlier.

Okay, that’s a lot of high-minded talk from a humble bonehead like myself.  So let me give you all the bends by thrusting you back into our current madness for the rest of this column.

It’s been a month since Que Mala has been a presidential candidate/nominee, and she still has not had a “big girl” press conference or taken a single legitimate question.  Of the five major policy decisions she’s made, four them have been disastrous – picking Tim Walz, promising price controls for groceries, proposing to tax unrealized capital gains, and offering $25K of taxpayer money to people who can’t afford a house – and the other one she shamelessly stole from Trump.

I don’t like the “no taxes on tips” idea, because I’m a conservative, and don’t like the government using double standards to pick winners and create losers.  But that is by far the least bad of Kamala’s first five moves, and she should still get lambasted for the blatant theft. 

We can’t let this cackling goon anywhere near the White House!

Speaking of which, I saw some speculation that when Imhotep Pelosi walked out for her speech at the DNC, some toilet paper fell out of her pants leg.  While this isn’t technically a fact check, I’m pretty sure we all know that that was some burial wrapping. 

#Pelosi-D,ValleyoftheKings

Finally, a violent jackass disrupted a “diversity festival” in Solingen, Germany on Saturday, stabbing over a dozen people and killing three. 

Pop Quiz:  Was the mass stabber screaming…

A. “Free Minds, Free Speech, Free Markets!”

B. “A Mighty Fortress is our God!”

C. “MAGA!” or

D. “Allahu Akbar!”

If you get this wrong, you must immediately turn in your Cautious Optimism membership card.

Also, the Germans seem pretty upset about Abdul al-Stabbington.  But they threw a diversity festival, and you can’t say Jihadi the Ripper didn’t bring diversity, can you?

As a nod to my German heritage on my mom’s side, I’d like to humbly suggest a new title for your next festival: “Deutschland Uber Diversity”

I predict fewer stabbings with that one.

Hamas delenda est!

After I heroically watched most of the DNC on Monday night so you didn’t have to – you’re welcome – I must confess that I wasn’t able to watch large amounts of the next three nights.  Because I am just one man.

One man with a heart as big as the great outdoors, and the strength of ten men, and also the toughness of a $2 steak.  But just like Achilles, I have a weakness: a tragically sensitive gag reflex that kept me from prolonged exposure to that televised train wreck.

Okay, I know.  I said “gag reflex.”  While I’m at it, I also noticed that Que Mala has been tight-lipped about policy this week, and that in her goofy speech in Milwaukee she sounded like she might have been drinking something.  Oh, and on Monday night she gave lip service to what a great president Joe Biden has been.

I think I’ve teed that up sufficiently.  So why don’t we just get this over with.  Everybody take a minute and make your own Willie Brown jokes.  I’ll wait.

…

Okay, I hope we’ve all gotten that out of our system.  We’ve seen her swing.  We know her swing.  So let’s not act like children, people.   

While I wasn’t able to stomach much of the convention (stop it!), I did watch some coverage and catch as many snippets as I could stand.  And I think I saw enough to give you my selection of the lowlights of the Democrats’ convention:

1.The entire first night: Joe screamed and slurred his way through a humiliating curtain call, telling all the old and debunked lies and insisting that he is not angry or bitter.  And the other big speakers were Cankles McPantsuit – who delighted the partisans while scaring the crows – and sleazy Jamie “Dick” Raskin.

2. J.B. “the Hutt” Pritzker – Illinois Governor and former actor in the early 90’s cop show “Jake and the Fatman” (Joe Penny played “Jake”) – showed up on Tuesday night, and his appearance was perfect. 

His speech followed Bernie Sanders, which was an odd scheduling choice.  A professional useless person who has never made an honest dime in his life, Sanders used his time to lambaste evil billionaires.

Unexpectedly!

Then Pritzker took the stage – and after Hillary’s appearance the night before, the stage groaned, “No mas!” – and… wait for it… bragged about being an “actual billionaire!” You can’t make this up. 

For those of you who are blessed to not know who Pritzker is, he “earned” his billions the old fashioned way: mommy and daddy gave his wealth to him.  His ancestors started the family fortune in the late 19th century in pharmaceuticals, expanding in the late 20th century into hotels and other ventures.  (Rumors that they also profited from advertising – including painting “Goodyear” on JB and floating him over sporting events – have not been confirmed.)

He’s also, like so many tax-raising leftists, a sleazy tax dodger.  While doing everything he could to tax the crap out of the beleaguered Illinois residents who remain there – CO and I escaped, so suck it, Pritzker! – he pulled a cheap stunt to save himself $5 million of appraised value on his second mansion on Chicago’s wealthy Gold Coast district.

That’s right: his SECOND mansion. Because a guy that size isn’t fitting in just one mansion.  Anyway, the mansions are right next to each other, so JB pulled the toilets out of the second mansion, which made it technically “uninhabitable,” and deprived the city of hundreds of thousands of tax dollars.  Meanwhile, he could still trundle next door and enjoy waddling through the mansion whenever he wanted, tax free.

So just like everything else (fact check: everything but one thing) about the guy, his hypocrisy is colossal!  

3. Barack’s Tuesday speech, which featured what felt like hours of mean-spirited insults and blasting Republicans and Trump voters as the worst kind of people possible… followed by a call for unity in the country!  Compared to Biden’s and Que Mala’s horrible speaking skills, Obama’s superficial glibness gave him a sheen of competence.  But what a small and mean-spirited man he is.

4. Michelle’s speech, in which… wait for it… she played the race card.  Unexpectedly!  I hate bogus charges of racism.  So as you can imagine, I am not fond of that scowling wookie.

She also played the class card, in the supremely hypocritical way that only a social justice leftist can.  She told the story of her mom and dad, who “didn’t aspire to be wealthy.  In fact, they were suspicious of folks who took more than they needed.” 

Gglklgkkkkchuk.

Sorry. Choked on my own bile there for a minute.

So let’s get this right.  Michelle was raised to NOT aspire to wealth, and to look down on anyone who took more than they needed? 

Beeyotch, you’re worth $70 million dollars!  And I guess everyone “needs” a multimillion dollar Netflix deal, right?

Oh yeah, and she lives in a 6 bedroom/6 bathroom mansion in Chicago.

Oops, except that she doesn’t live there anymore.  But she still has it.  Because she NEEDS it.  But in 2017 she and hubby bought a sorely needed 8200-square-foot Tudor mansion – I know: that’s 3 Pritzkers! – with 8 bedrooms and 9.5 bathrooms in a very rich section of DC.

Two years later, sick of being cooped up in the 3-Pritzker-sized DC hovel, the Obamas dropped millions more on 30 ocean-front acres and a 6900 s.f. mansion (7 bedrooms, 8.5 baths) on Martha’s Vineyard.  And they’re rumored to be closing soon on another gigantic mansion, this one in Hawaii.

Got all that?  This sanctimonious fraud just lectured the nation about the virtues of not acquiring more than you need, while she owns 20,000+ square feet of luxury housing, where she can lay her head and Sasquatchian frame down to sleep in any of 21 bedrooms, and relieve herself in any of 24 bathrooms.

And she NEEDS every damn one of them!

Her parents are lucky that they’re both dead, so they didn’t have to see how completely their daughter has rejected the lessons about humility and frugality that they tried in vain to teach her.

5. Epic self-beclowning by the protestors.  A giant IUD, addled women dressing up like birth control pills, beta males getting unnecessary vasectomies, and an RV that served as an abortuary on wheels.  And that’s not to mention the violence and screams of – literally – “We want Hamas to win!”  That’s right: the Democrat brainiacs were determined to put out a life-affirming message of “JOY!” 

And the best they could come up with was hating half of your countrymen, cheering for jihadi terrorists, sterilizing their already mostly sterile males, and killing babies in the parking lot. 

Well done, comrades!

6. Tim Walz.  Ugh.  He’s a socialist wolf in a Midwestern dad’s khakis, and every word he said was a lie, including “and” and “the” (hat tip to Mary McCarthy).  His life story is as trustworthy as Bill Clinton’s pillow talk, and his governance was a horror show. And to top it all off, he mocked JD Vance for having risen above his deprived hillbilly childhood and making something of himself!

Really, Timmy?  That’s what you’ve got? JD joined the Marines, came back and crushed it at Ohio State and Yale, then had some success in business and wrote a bestselling memoir, so that means he’s a fake hillbilly?

No, that makes him the most successful hillbilly in history, you phony creep!

(I mean except for me.  Because I earned the title “Dr. Hilarious Genius,” and landed my smokeshow of a wife and a regular column writing for the creme de la creme at Cautious Optimism.)

7. Bill Clinton.  When I was flipping through the channels and caught sight of him, I thought that Jimmy Carter was somehow making an appearance at the DNC.  Because, yikes!  He does not look good.  And he sounds as bad as he looks.

That guy is the same age as Trump!  But if you were married to CAW CAW, your life force would have been drained from you, too.  And it doesn’t help that his blood type is “STD-positive.”    

I tried to listen to him, but… NOPE.

8. Finally, Que Mala.  She was supposed to be the headliner, but—

All right, stop snickering back there!  I swear, if you don’t straighten up I’m going to turn this column around and go straight back home!

I’m serious! 

Okay fine.  She blew it, is that what you wanted to hear? 

Of course the content was negligible; the parts that weren’t banal pap were a cavalcade of lies.  And her delivery!  Good lord, she manages to combine the worst traits of many people who have very bad traits.

The nasally whine of Fran Drescher.  The stiff gestures of the old Lost in Space robot.  The intellectual heft of AOC.  The charmlessness of Hillary.  The likeability of Hillary.  And the authenticity of Hillary. 

Like all well-raised and reasonable people, I was prepared to dislike this dumpster fire of a convention.  But holy cats, did they exceed my expectations! 

And yes, I guess we all need to act like children just a little bit longer.  Because the nominee’s speech on the final night is supposed to be the climax of a convention.

But what Que Mala did on Thursday night was a textbook anti-climax. 

And we’ve got a little more than 2 months to rally and fight and stop these imbeciles from getting back into the White House!     

Hamas delenda est!

This won’t be a full column – I’ll still have my usual Friday one out tomorrow.  But I want to comment on this before it’s older news that it already is.

Regular readers know that I was (and am) a DeSantis guy, and that I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Trump.  We won’t re-hash that old ground now, but suffice it to say that as much as I liked most of his presidency and much of his skill set, he drives me crazy with his undisciplined, childish and self-harming verbal excesses.    

But when he’s good, he can be amazing!  He’s got a great instinct for counter-punching, and I saw an excellent example of that from him on Tuesday.

He was doing a Q&A after a press conference in Howell, Michigan.  (An act which Que Mala has avoided like the plague!)

When the Harris goat-rodeo corps found out he was going to Howell, they put out a statement about how Howell, MI is somehow a hotbed of KKK influence in these United States, and so obviously Trump is going there because he’s a vicious racist. 

Sorry, that should have been “the Harris campaign,” not goat-rodeo corps. 

Or should it?

Anyway, Fox reporter Aishah Hasnie asked him about Que Mala’s charge that appearing in Howell is inherent racist.  (By the way, many on our side have lambasted Hasnie and the question as typical leftist-hack dishonest reporting.  But my impression of her is that that she’s not a hack, and I think this kind of question is sometimes legitimate: “Your opponents say this about what you’re doing. How do you respond?”)

There are lots of good answers to such a stupid charge, and many of them could be quite verbose, and thus open to a rambling Trump response.

In fact, when I first heard that charge, something didn’t add up for me: Could it be true that a racist organization with its origin in the Democrat deep South right after the Civil War somehow had a vibrant outpost in far-north Michigan, 160 years later? 

So I researched it, and found the following, which Trump could easily have gotten into, saying something like this to Hasnie:

“Okay, let’s have a history lesson about the KKK.  Do you know in what political party it was formed, and who the primary founders were?  The answer is the Democrat party, and that it was started by 6 ex-confederate soldiers, all Democrats, in Pulaski, TN.   Do you know who the first KKK grand wizard was?  Democrat and ex-Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Do you know what Howell’s supposed KKK connections refers to?  A day in 1994 when one local idiot racist held a KKK rally that klan members from outside the community attended. 

How many thousands of klansmen attended, and how much violence and destruction did they cause to the community?  They didn’t cause any destruction; they played loud music from a boombox, waved Confederate flags, and yelled like morons for a while. 

How did such a huge mob of mouth-breathers do so little damage?  Because they weren’t a huge mob.  And even though police forces around the country have traditionally had trouble coming up with reliable estimates of crowd sizes, this one was simple.

Because, and I am not making this up, the horde of white racists attending this high-profile rally was… wait for it… ‘less than a dozen.’” 

So yes, Trump could have done all that, and blasted the reporter with actual facts that demonstrated that the MSM’s “Trump goes to racist-land” story was a despicable lie.

And 38 seconds after he was done, the first MSM story would appear, with the headline, “Trump Excuses KKK Rally,” or “Trump on KKK Rally: ‘No Big Deal’”

Instead, Trump was at his best.  He just walked to microphone and said, “Who was here in 2021?”  Hasnie answered, “Joe Biden.”  And Trump laughed and pointed at her and said, “Thank you!”  And then walked away.

Because the mic he spoke into was on a stand, he couldn’t drop it.  And yet somehow he did.

That’s great Trump!  He sees an opening, he strikes with a lightning-fast jab like the young Thomas Hearns (he was the “Motor City Cobra,” for those of you who think I can’t pull a 40-year-old, geographically appropriate boxing reference out of my conical wizard hat), and then walks away in slow motion, as the building behind him explodes. 

And everybody knows that Que Mala couldn’t have done that on her best day. 

Her answer would have started, in a nasally drone, “Well, racism, in terms of its significance in our country, has a great significance in our country…”  Followed by an entire buffet of word salad, ending in a bone-chilling cackle, and then a whimper. 

What can we take away from this? 

Two things we already knew:  Brevity is the soul of wit. 

And – pardon my French, as we used to say in the late 1800s – the MSM is the soul of s**t.   

More, please, Mr. Trump.  More of this!

Coming tomorrow: my take on the lowest of the low points of the DNC

Hamas delenda est!

I’ve never written back-to-back daily columns before, but I just finished watching big, painful chunks of the first night of the DNC, and I feel like I have to share a few thoughts, if for no other reason than to purge myself of these disturbing sights and sounds. 

First, I love the way Chicago prepared for the convention: by putting up a bunch of fencing and walls to keep the super-peaceful pro-Hamas ghouls from wreaking havoc too close to the convention center.  Because we all know that building walls is really essential…unless it’s to keep literally millions of illegals from flooding across our border.

Then it’s racist. 

They also closed down businesses, boarded up storefronts, and marshalled a big police presence that they somehow never manage to deploy to prevent the four-dozen average weekend shootings in the City of the Hunched Shoulders. 

We do the same kind of thing in Florida from time to time.  But we do that in the face of a looming natural disaster, like a Cat 4 hurricane.

Let that sink in.  In the bluest of cities, the common people know how to react to a huge crowd of leftists descending on their town: as if it were the manifestation of the wrath of an angry God – or, depending on your worldview, a pitiless assault by the blind, unreasoning forces of a Nature that is everywhere red in tooth and claw.

Early in the evening a bunch of little-known speakers made up the under-card of presenters.  I saw AOC take the stage, and listened as she said that, “Six years ago I was taking omelette orders in NYC.” 

And all I could think about was those poor diners, confused and worried as AOC dropped off their orders.  Thinking things like, “Shouldn’t there be cheese in this?” and “I ordered mushrooms in mine, but I got a bottle cap and a lemon twist.” 

And, “Is there supposed to be pink fiberglass insulation in a Denver omelette?”

Second, speaking of natural disasters, I did not know who their first big-name speaker was going to be.  But given that the substance-less theme of their convention is supposed to be joy and good vibes, I did not expect it would be the most aggrieved woman outside the cast of the View, Hillary Clinton!

But then she was introduced – and they might as well have had the fight announcer guy from Vegas, with a hyped-up cry of, “Llllllet’s get ready to GRUUUMMMMBLE!!!” – the arena was filled with the sound of thundering hoofbeats.  I mean, she was really trampling out the backstage where the grapes of wrath are stored!

And then she trundled out to raucous and sustained applause before rolling out a mixture of glittering banalities about Biden, Harris and Tampon Tim, and angry swipes at the bad orange man who sent her cankling off to Chappaqua in 2016.  Of course she made a big deal out of the 34 felony convictions that the corrupt “justice” system in NY pinned on Trump, and I couldn’t tell whether she really believed her own b.s. or not.

The loathsome Jamie Raskin followed her, with an equally bitter, dishonest and unhinged rant.  All you have to know about Raskin is that he voted against certifying the 2016 election, and said that Trump should be impeached as soon as he took office on a ridiculous “emoluments” argument. 

Annnnnnnndddddd… then he led the House show trial that impeached Trump for objecting to the 2020 election rigging. 

(Oddly enough, many people call Raskin “Dick,” even though his name is not Richard.)

Of course, the “star” of the night was the mortal remains of Joe Biden, who was the center of the most bizarre performance by an assassinated leader that has ever happened.

Say what you want about the politicians who murdered Julius Caesar, but at least they imbued his death with a little dignity.  They staged their crime during a respectable event – a meeting of the Senate – in a dignified location – the Theatre of Pompey in Rome – and they gave him a quick death.   

By comparison, the Democrats may as well have beaten old Joe with a lead pipe in a latrine, but only badly enough to mortally wound him.  Then they helped him to his feet, gave him just enough pain meds to keep him alive, and then shoved him out on stage to go through one more ritual humiliation. 

I mean, they pushed his speech back out of prime time, so it wouldn’t end until after midnight, knowing that he’s a guy who goes to bed at 8:30, and isn’t even close to sharp after the early bird special at Denny’s ends at 4:45. 

Of course he gave us more of the usual, slurring, mumbling, then SCREAMING and GESTURING.  Then slurring some more.

He actually brought up – for what feels like the four-hundredth time – the long-debunked lie that Trump called neo-Nazis “fine people.”  Because at long last, senator, he has no sense of dignity.  Or of coherence.  Or of bowel control. 

It was a sad denouement to a skeevy career, and perfectly emblematic of the moral rot in the Democrat party.

It struck me as a perverse inversion of speeches given by much-feared dictators like Stalin or Saddam at the height of their powers.  In those cases, the tyrant came out to thunderous applause, and then basked in it for literally half an hour or more, the length and fervor of the response being commensurate with the abject terror of their audience, who knew that the first person to stop applauding would be led off to torture and death.

In Biden’s case, the extended cheers and applause were equally fraudulent, as were all of the signs and chants proclaiming, “We love you Joe!”  But the cheering goons weren’t afraid of him; they were contemptuous. 

After weeks of trashing him behind his back and mercilessly increasing the pressure on him until he was forced to resign, they condescended to cheer themselves hoarse in a way so transparently false as to be galling to its object.  

Assuming Biden was aware of his surroundings, I can’t think of a more depressing and humiliating fate: to be surrounded by an army of Cassius and Brutus clones in your final moments on the political stage, watching and listening to them sing your praises, while they hold the bloody knives that they’ve mortally wounded you with, behind their backs.

And that’s only night one!   

Hamas delenda est!

I’m in a better mood than I was on Friday, only partly because of spending a weekend with the family and relaxing.  The best way to deal with my increasing disgust with the MSM turned out to be watching a bunch of videos of people’s surprise twin announcements. (Somehow I got there after starting out with Cheap Trick and other 70s and 80s music).

From there I went to videos of grandparents and other relatives finding out that a new baby was named after them, and then to people adopting the kids they’d helped to raise.  After all of that life-affirming, wholesome goodness, the sleazy lying of our feckless journalists faded into insignificance.

It also helped that it’s starting to feel like the Kamala honeymoon might be fading.  I know the MSM will keep tirelessly propagandizing for her and Walz, but I’m seeing more evidence that even they don’t have enough lipstick for this pig, metaphorically speaking.

(And no, that wasn’t a veiled Willie Brown reference.  To quote Trump during the golfing segment of his debate with the late Joe Biden, “Let’s not act like children.”)

It was nice to see even a few MSM outlets point out that Kamala’s economic plan – creating price controls, going after businesses for “price gouging,” and giving away $25K to help anyone who can’t afford a house to get a house – are impractical schemes that won’t work.

By the way, if you haven’t read the CO Economics Correspondent’s piece on the disastrous history of price controls from over the weekend, scroll back and find it, because it’s great.  He zips through 4000 years of history, demonstrating that Que Mala’s ideas would bring the same kind of economic dysfunction as when Hammurabi and Diocletian tried them.

Which is aggravating, because Kamala had only to ask Imhotep Pelosi – who went to high school with Hammurabi – about the topic.  In fact, Pelosi can remember when you get 30 ka of corn for 2 gerah!

(That joke would have killed if you were all ancient Babylonians!) (Don’t forget to tip your maidservant.)

In other good news, JD Vance did a great job under hostile questioning from leftist hacks on the Sunday shows last week, and I’m looking forward to him beating Tampon Tim like a rented mule in their debate.  And if Trump can discipline himself and stick to policy – please God, because we need this! – he should be able to remind people why Kamala dropped out with zero votes in the primary in 2020. 

Speaking of cringy leftist hacks, it was also fun to watch Steven Colbert interviewing CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.  Because when he earnestly said to her, “I know you guys are objective over there, that you just report the news as it is—” he was interrupted by a wave of laughter from his studio audience. 

The laughter caught him by surprise, and it made for a great, cringy moment when Collins asked, “Was that supposed to be a laugh line?” and Colbert accidently told the truth, saying, “It wasn’t supposed to be, but… I guess it is.” 

Ouch!  When you’ve lost the flock of low IQ and low-info sheep in Colbert’s audience, it’s time to give up the pretense, CNN. 

In international news, Israel continues to stubbornly insist on not surrendering to terrorists, and not dying, to the frustrated fury of the Biden administration. 

Additional, hilarious details have just come out about Israel’s missile strike that took out Hezbollah leader Fuad Shukr at the end of July.   Shukr had been so secretive that few confirmed recent pictures of him existed, and he’d been in hiding for nearly 40 years.  It turns out he’d been working in the second story of a seven-story building.

In fact, one of the long-term residents in the building reported that they’d barely seen him there, and that he was, “Like a ghost.”  And now he’s even more of a ghost!

Somehow the Israelis managed to get a mysterious phone call to Shukr, telling him to go up to his 7^th story residence, which is where the missile struck shortly thereafter.

I’d love to know what that phone call was about!  Did somebody in the IDF pretend to be one of his bodyguards, telling him that one of his wives was upstairs cheating on him, and he better come up right away? 

Or maybe a Jewish spy claimed to be a Nigerian prince, and urged Shukr to log on to his home computer so that he could receive millions of dollars that the prince was trying to get out of his country. 

But no matter what that call was about, I hope that in his final moments, Shukr heard the Israeli missile that was about to kill him, and had time to shake his fist and scream, “Jeewwwssss!” like Captain Kirk screaming, “KHAN!”

Speaking of dead terrorists, a top Hezbollah commander named Hussein Kassab decided he’d take a relaxing motorcycle ride through the coastal city of Tyre in Lebanon on Saturday.  Unfortunately for him, Team Yarmulke apparently has a satellite that specifically scans for genocidal murderers on Harleys, because they found him.

And in the middle of his joyride, they used a drone to drop a strike on Kassab-a’s melon.    

Finally, just to remind us that the European and internation media is as sleazily dishonest as our own MSM, they reported that over the weekend the IDF struck a school in Gaza, killing 100 people, and repeating Hamas’ insinuation that most of those were civilians.

But the IDF had done their homework, and they released video and other evidence showing that the former school had lately been used as a compound by terrorists, and that the number of dead were around half what Hamas had claimed.  

They also quickly released information identifying 19 of the dead as Hamas terrorists, followed on Saturday by another list of 12 more dead terrorists from that strike. 

So just like our “journalists” who have been claiming that Joe Biden was healthy and super compos mentis, and that Que Mala is a joyful, non-border czar moderate, the Hamas “sources” insisted that the school in question was full of Palestinian toddlers.

And you’d have to have been fallen out of a coconut tree, unburdened by a cerebral cortex, to believe either one of those groups.     

Hamas delenda est!

This is going to be an unusually dark column for me.   

But before getting started, I want to say that I enjoyed CO’s post celebrating 8 years of this site, and I share in the memories and appreciation expressed in your comments.  I can’t believe it’s been 8 years already; it’s been a source of great joy for me to read and write here, and I look forward to more of the same in the future.

That being said, today’s theme is a twist on one of this column’s repeated refrains: I think I might be coming to the point that I actually DO hate the mainstream media as much as I should!

I should warn you that my thoughts today are probably R-rated, which feels really weird, coming off reading all the kind words and happy thoughts in the reaction to CO’s piece.  Anyway, reader discretion is advised… 

If none of you know the name Nina Burleigh, I wouldn’t blame you.  She’s a run-of-the-mill MSM journalist with all of the right credits: wrote for Time, Newsweek, the WaPo, Huff Po, has taught “journalism” at Columbia, etc.  She even wrote a disparaging book about Trump’s treatment of women. 

In other words, a leftist, gender-feminist hack in good standing.

After she covered the White House in the 1990s, she wrote an article in “Mirabella” – I don’t know either – in which she described being invited to play a card game with Bill Clinton on Air Force One.  By the end of the game, it was clear that he’d been flirting with and ogling her, and her reaction was very revealing. 

She wrote, “We all know when we’re being ogled. The weird thing was that I didn’t mind. There was a time when the hormones of indignant feminism raged in my veins. An open gaze like that, at least from a man of lesser stature, would have annoyed me. But that evening, I had the opposite reaction.”

I’m not making that up.  This professional woman who considers herself a feminist confessed in a public forum that she got all tingly when a prominent man who was well known for treating women like dehumanized sexual humidors turned his creepy gaze her way.  (I know: gross.) 

She even revealed that she’s also a class-conscious snob, because if a man “of lesser stature” than a powerful leftist lech were to show any interest in her, she’d be outraged.  So watch out, bartenders or truck drivers or electricians who might ever encounter naughty Nina: if you so much as look at her wrong, expect to be on the receiving end of one angry lecture about the patriarchy, which is worse than Nazism!

Do you think I’m being too harsh on Burleigh?  Well consider that when Howard Kurtz interviewed her about that should-have-been-mortifying article, she gave him this infamous quote, which in a just world would be on her tombstone:   

“I’d be happy to give [Clinton] a b*** j** just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.”

And I’m sure he’d be happy to take you up on that, Nina.

So you might be asking, “Martin, why are you bringing this offensive story up, on a classy site dedicated to optimism and good cheer?”

Because I am only human, and I’m afraid for my country, and I’ve now moved through disgust and straight into furious.  I’ve always agreed that we don’t hate the media enough.  But I’ve also thought that the absolute depth to which “journalists” could sink was Burleigh’s descent into voluntary prostitution for the sake of politics.

And that’s really an insult to hookers!  Because I’ve been told that some of them have hearts of gold.  And I know that most of them do what they do because they are in desperate straits.  And they do it for money, which is at least an understandable motive!

Not like this rich, educated, powerful woman who would voluntarily debase herself, not for cash, but for the opportunity to abort more children!

Before this year, I would have told you that it would be impossible for journalists to sink any lower than nasty Nina.  Many of us felt the same, believing that the MSM had long ago hit rock bottom.

And the MSM then said to us, “Hold our bottle of mouthwash, and watch this.”

And they spent four years pimping for Joe Biden.  It was bad enough when he was just going arse-over-tea-kettle up staircases and falling over sandbags.  But then he went full comatose, and they insisted that behind closed doors he was a Jeffersonian genius, subtle of mind and capacious in his understanding.  They said that they couldn’t keep up with his vigorous workouts. 

Then the debate happened, and we all saw the corpse behind the curtain.  And we finally understand how Burleigh’s masochistic slavishness could get even worse: by adding necrophilia into the mix!

Ugh. 

Okay, so the MSM’s lying for Biden surpassed the degradation of BJ Burleigh.  But surely THAT would have to be the lowest they could go, right?

NOPE!  They all turned on a dime, threw Biden under the bus, and without missing a beat, turned into slavish cunning linguists for Kamala. 

They sang her praises, in terms just as unbelievable as they sang Biden’s four months ago.  Some idiot even wrote a hagiographic article talking about how carefully she “curates her sentences.” 

Curates!  That’s what a museum staff does with a traveling exhibit of Renaissance art, or Roman statuary, or early Shakespeare folios! 

And you know what you’d never see written on one of those folios?  Gibberish about the significance of the passage of time, or the joys of Venn diagrams, or falling out of a coconut tree and landing on an electric schoolbus!

Sweet, merciful crap!  These hacks are re-typed the Que Mala campaign’s talking points.  She’s not a leftist; she was never the border czar; she loves fracking.  She doesn’t cackle like a lunatic – that’s just “expressing joy.”  Plus she just came up with this great new idea: no taxes on tips!

Her website has not a single policy position on it, and none of them bring that up.  She doesn’t answer a single question or give any of the presstitues the time of day, and they kiss her feet.  She says she MAY deign to schedule an interview a month from now, and they say, “thank you ma’am, may we have another?”

But they still have enough energy to also crawl across the floor to Tampon Tim Walz – the knee pads help – and give him a tongue bath, too.  He’s not a far-left freak who can’t tell the difference between Stalin and Mr. Rogers – who’s to say where socialism stops and neighborliness begins?  Not Mr. Midwest Football Coach Father Figure! 

He didn’t shut down Minnesota for years over covid, and invite sexually confused kids to leave their parents and go to the Land of 1000 Castrations for their free, gender-affirming mutilations.   And he certainly never let mostly peaceful leftist rioters burn Minneapolis for days before sending in a token force of National Guardsmen. 

And speaking of the Guard, remember when A-wol Walz fast-roped into an LZ, his face painted, a combat knife clenched in his teeth and a belt-fed weapon in each brawny arm, as he mowed down Taliban jihadists… in Italy?

Which my handy atlas tells me is 2,985 miles from Kandahar?

I apologize to CO nation for the momentary blackness of my mood, but I really hate these people.  And I’m heartsick that they appear to have a slight lead in this election.  And if our really, literally evil media have their way, these two far-left liars will slither their way into the White House for four more years to do mortal damage to our country. 

I’m sorry, people.  It feels therapeutic to call these people out, but I know that it’s not good for me to be this simultaneously mad and heartsick. 

So I’m going to try not to think about our corrupt and dangerous MSM this weekend.  The wife and I are taking our youngest back down to college for her final undergrad semester today.  When we get back we’re going to have a good meal, and then I’m going to spend my Saturday reading the newest Nick Petrie thriller novel.

At some point in the day I’m going to call up a Cheap Trick song on Youtube, and spend an hour or two letting the song choices that pop up take me down a rabbit hole of the pre-rap music of my youth.  On Sunday I’ll spend a little time in church, read a little Scripture, and ask for forgiveness, and to be able to let go of the bitterness I’m feeling for our political opponents.

And by Monday morning, I hope to have a more positive and uplifting column for you.

But do I expect that this Sunday, the Old Testament lesson might resonate more for me than the New Testament one does?  And will a light dusting of “please smite our enemies in the media” make its way into my prayers?I’ve

Most indicators point to “yes.”

Hamas delenda est!

As usual, there’s a lot going on, but I’m going to take a break from the political horse race.  I’m not going to talk about the Olympics either, other than to note that the two male boxers in the women’s boxing competition beat the tar out of their opponents, and both won gold medals.   

Unexpectedly!  (Also, go friend yourself, Olympic committee.)

Instead, I’m going to make this a Crime Stories Monday column.  I always enjoy a good “stupid criminal” tale, and today I’ve got several that I’ve been saving, along with a couple stories that elucidate leftist vs. conservative reactions to crime.

First up is a story from last fall in Dallas, where a Korean guy named “Kim” (unexpectedly!) owns a small beauty supply store.  The store has been plagued by a lot of shoplifting, and Kim has tried at least one strategy that would work in Korea: public shaming.

The front of his shop features a photo lineup of local ne’er-do-wells who have been caught stealing in the store, with a sign saying, “Best Shoplifters.”  Though I’m not sure he’s got that right, since the really good shoplifters don’t usually have full-color pictures of their big stupid faces caught in the act of stealing plastered all over the store.

But I digress.

This story starts when Kim saw yet another low life trying to shoplift.  (She was wearing what looks like a shower cap and flip flops, so you know that she’s really focused on accentuating her natural beauty.)  And just like AOC and many other lefties with ten-cent heads often tell you, she was just stealing food to keep her children from starving.

Oh no, wait.  This was a beauty supply store, and she was stealing fake eyelashes and lash glue. 

Don’t laugh: everyone knows that wearing a big ol’ set of false eyelashes is one of the best ways to distract from your hideous shower cap.  I mean, other than not wearing a hideous shower cap out in public. 

So Kim confronts Zsa Zsa and tells her to put the lashes and glue back, and she says something like, “Oh no you dih-unt,” and punches him in the face. 

Now I don’t know Kim’s specific lineage – if you can forgive an old white guy’s ignorance, he looks exactly like every other Korean I’ve ever seen – but I’m guessing that he’s related to my heroes, the famous Roof-Top Koreans.  (Those were the guys who got up on their store roofs with long guns when violent mobs of looters approached during the LA riots 30 years ago.  And the mobs became peaceful protestors out for a non-rioting stroll until they got out of sniper range.) (Unexpectedly!)

This Kim apparently never got the memo about how you can’t hit a thief after she steals your lash glue and punches you in the face.  (I think that’s a bit of English common law going back to the Magna Carta.)  Because he gave her a stiff right jab that knocked her out of her flip flops and onto her arse.  He followed up with a spinning right kick. 

Each time I watch that kick, I do my best Bruce Lee impression, saying, “Hoooh ahhh” as his kick catches her shoulder. 

And it’s a good thing he kicked her, because she was in the process of pulling a gun out of her purse, which she fumbled with and managed to fire into the floor before he knocked it away from her.  Kim then laid on top of her until the cops came and arrested her. 

She was charged with first degree armed robbery and held on a $75K bond.  I haven’t been able to find anything else about the story.     

The previous July, in Norco CA, 80-year-old liquor store owner James Cope was doing some paperwork at 2:47 a.m. when he saw a car pull up and four armed thugs jump out with rifles and rush toward the front door. 

Because he is not AOC, Cope didn’t assume that they were there to steal food to feed their children, and he grabbed his shotgun.  When the first thug through the door – a Rhodes Scholar called Rasheed DaShawn Belvin – started to point his rifle at Cope, Cope coped with his stress by firing his shotgun.

Whereupon Belvin and his buddies all ran out to the BMW, leaving a trail of urine in their wake, with Belvin yelling repeatedly, “He shot my arm off!”

Tragically his arm was not shot off, and he was caught and arrested later at a hospital, where doctors were able to save his arm. 

The best part of the story?  A local entrepreneur raised money for Cope by selling t-shirts bearing the words, “Don’t Mess with Norco – We’ll Shoot Your Arm Off!”  

Which brings me to Mandeville, Louisiana last week, where a criminal with an amazingly great criminal name decided that he’d give home invasion and assault a try.  Police say that Careyunius Smith – how can you not smile when you say that? – was skulking around a garage when one homeowner confronted him. 

That homeowner yelled, and when a second homeowner came out and told Careyunius to beat it, he started beating on the first guy instead.  So the second guy goes back in the house and comes out with his gun. 

And then Careyunius – which does not quite rhyme with “genius” – decides to charge the armed man.  As one does.

Then yada yada yada, Careyunius gets a bullet removed from his abdomen and goes to jail.   

These three stories remind us of the eternal truth that most criminals are idiots.  But an equally eternal truth is that most leftists’ reaction to crime is idiotic.

Take the example of Encino, CA, a formerly safe area that has been experiencing a wave of home invasion burglaries lately, culminating in a homeowner being injured by two invaders, before shooting and critically injuring one on July 9^th. 

Local government officials then released an apology for not keeping law abiding citizens safe, and supported the homeowner who shot the criminal.

HA! I kid because I love. 

In fact, LA Mayor Karen Bass said that “spectacular-type crime” like brazen smash-and-grab robberies in the same area creates fear mostly because it’s “exploited by the press, and particularly the conservative press that wants to paint…Democrat-run cities as though we are in a crisis of crime.”

Yes.  That vaunted “conservative press” that has dominated California, with its misleading statistics, facts, and video of crimes as they occur, falsely suggesting that everything in Dem-run cities is neither hunky nor dory. 

An LA cop spokesman took the same approach, scolding residents that “people tend to overreact to spikes and dips in crime all the time.”  When asked about the 40% recent increase in burglaries in Encino, he said that the media have “overreported the situation.” 

It’s that kind of brilliant reaction that is making even the most hemorrhagic of the bleeding heart CA liberals considering the previously unheard of strategy of defending themselves.  Resident Sam Avishay said, “All of this has made me rethink my long-held belief that I should not be a gun owner.”

Ya think?  How’s that Ben Shapiro saying go?  “Facts don’t care about your long-held beliefs?” 

Let me close on a more optimistic note, because reality is conservative, even in California.     

Exhibit A: On July 30^th in Oceanside, a jackass armed with – and I quote – “a rock and a stick” broke into a home occupied by a male and a female.  He threw the rock at the male, hitting him in the head.  Whereupon the male shot and killed him.

Which illustrates why there is a lot more suspense involved in playing “rock, paper, scissors” than when playing “rock, stick, gun.”

Exhibit B:

When a bunch of pro-Hamas protestors shut down the Golden Gate Bridge in April, they trapped hundreds of commuters on the bridge, including a disabled school kid stuck on a bus for four hours, a surgeon who had to cancel and reschedule all of his surgeries that day, and a brain tumor patient who had to delay his surgery appointment. 

Now – mirabile dictu! – San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins (who replaced commie disgrace Chesa Boudin after he was recalled) announced that 26 of the moronic, narcissist protestors are being charged with crimes, and 8 of them with felonies. 

That’s not enough, and I’ll believe it when they get convicted and receive long sentences.

But it’s a start.

Hamas delenda est!

Regular readers will know that I am crazy about my wife, and that my daughters are the apples of their daddy’s eye.  But this week I’ve discovered a love that almost threatened to supplant their place in my affections.  The object of that love?

Electricity.  Sweet, quality-of-life-improving electricity!

Which is my way of saying that because of the storm, our power was out for 27 hours, from 2:15 Monday morning until 5:30 Tuesday morning.  For much of that time I was home alone, but I had various battery-powered lights, including a LED light on a headband that I usually use during handyman projects.

And I had my faithful Wonder Dog at my side.  Plus three indifferent cats, who skulked around on the edges of darkness, inscrutably.   

I made bacon and eggs for breakfast on our gas stove, and I cooked some steak on our gas grill for supper.  And with no tv to watch or computer to write with, I read a novel and a half in those 27 hours. 

The biggest downside – other than the heat and humidity that quickly displaced the indoor air conditioning on which human life in Florida during August depends – was that I had just bought a gallon of ice cream on Friday.  And my frugal Midwestern upbringing brought me to a dark night of the soul around 2:30 on Monday night: should I try to eat an entire gallon of ice cream right now, so that it won’t go to waste?

I fought off the temptation, hoping that the power would be restored soon.  So RIP, gallon of ice cream.

My wife and daughter’s plane – returning from Emily’s 10-week research fellowship in Boulder, CO – landed at 7:30 Monday night, and we got to spend that evening together, sweating in our living room around a small pop-up camp-style light while she told us how much fun she’d had, and how much she liked the school, her professors and her classmates.

By the way, if any of you would like to learn about her summer project – snappily titled, “Numerical Simulations of the Interaction of Jupiter’s Magnetospheric Plasma with the Atmosphere of Europa” – don’t ask me, because I don’t understand it.  But mom and I are both proud of her.   

So I woke up to sweet electricity, and spent the day cleaning up fallen palm fronds, Spanish moss and mostly small tree limbs.  I took a pick-up load to the dump, and then cleaned up the yards of our rental houses too, filling a bunch of barrels and another truck-bed before coming home for a shower.

Then I checked the computer and found that Que Mala had thrown us all a curve ball and picked Tim Walz from Minnesota for her VP. 

As I wrote before, I had thought she’d pick one of two smarter choices, Mark Kelly or Josh Shapiro.  Shapiro was the heavy favorite throughout the weekend, and her turn away from him is a big tell.

I thought he’d have been the smartest choice, mostly because he was perceived as more moderate – which he isn’t – as always, thanks, lying MSM scumbags! – and because PA is a must-win for her, and he would’ve made that more likely.  I’d been prepared to write that despite the general  awfulness of the national Dems, it’s an encouraging sign that they over-rode their own Jew-hating, jihadi caucus to pick him. 

But NOPE! 

On that theme, CO’s musings last week about how Jews vote Dem was thought-provoking.  I think he is sadly right that so many Jews continue to vote left even as the anti-Semites on the left hold serious sway, and the left generally is either neutral or anti-Israel on that nation’s existence.  Which is mind-boggling to me; CO is more understanding and compassionate on that issue that I am.

However, I think there is a huge voting difference between secular Jews and orthodox and/or take-their-religion seriously Jews.  I met and worked with many Jewish people in my years in academia, but the vast majority of them were secular, and voted left.  (As the vast majority of academics in liberal arts fields do.)

But the couple of seriously religious Jews I knew, as well as a majority of high-profile seriously religious Jews in our culture – I’m thinking of people like Dennis Prager and Ben Shapiro – are conservative.  Post 10/7, both of them have talked about how everybody in their synagogue will be voting GOP in November, in large part because of the way national Democrats have welcomed people like Tlaib and Omar, and actively worked against Israel’s defense since the latest Hamas genocidal attack. 

There are some exceptions of course.  Alan Dershowitz is committed to his Judaism and describes himself as a life-long Dem/liberal, but he’s excoriated the Dems over the last several years, and has hinted that he’ll vote for Trump, and definitely not for the Dems.

In any event, Que Mala’s choice of Walz was a huge, unforced error.  MN is already a blue state, and as a far-lefty like Kamala, Walz doesn’t bring any votes to the ticket that she didn’t already have wrapped up.  Plus he’s got a lot of baggage – the DUI, his support for BLM riots and open borders, etc. – that the Trump team can exploit.

Maybe worst of all, at a time when the MSM is working themselves into positions not seen since Kamala was “dating” Willie Brown to try to falsely re-make her image – she was never the border czar, or the most leftist senator, etc. – picking Walz belies all that. 

If she were really the competent centrist the MSM is pretending that she is, why would she pick a leftist Mini-he like Walz?!  

The smart money says that the election will come down to who can get the most independents and persuadable moderates, and an extremist like Walz only makes that harder for Que Mala.

So what have we learned today? 

First, electricity is our friend. 

Second, Kamala Harris is a dope, and this – her first major decision as the post-coup, selected-not-elected candidate – is a major fail. 

But I do have a suggestion for a theme song for her campaign.  As soon as I heard Walz’s name, I thought of the old folk song, “Waltzing Matilda.”  If you haven’t heard it, Tom Waits’ version – Tom Traubert’s Blues (Waltzing Matilda) – is my favorite, but there are a million of them floating around. 

I’m no songwriter, but I’ve come up with a few lines in the hope that some talented folks in CO nation might be able to improve on these.  (You might want to listen to the Waits version before reading these, just to get the rhythm.)  I give you:

Walz-ing Kamala

“A radical governor, big fan of rioters,

No one thought he’d be picked,

But Kelly was bland, and Mayor Pete might get pregnant,

And Shapiro was one of the much-hated Jews…

So… he’ll… go…

Walz-ing Kamala, Walz-ing Kamala,

He’ll go Walz-ing Kamala this fall.

And the jihadi Squad members

Ululate their favor

As BLM and antifa pass out high fives.

While moderates face-palm,

Confused and forsaken,

Wond’ring if she fell out of a coconut treeeeeee.

And why she chose to go…

Walz-ing Kamala, Walz-ing Kamala?

Walz-ing Kamala, seriously?”

Hamas delenda est!

I’m posting this column earlier than usual because stately Simpson manor is a couple of hours into the first bands of a tropical storm coming through, and I expect that at some time overnight we’ll be losing power for at least a little while.

I know what you’re thinking: shouldn’t I be boarding up the windows and battening down the hatches and prioritizing my own survival, because if this nation loses me at this crucial juncture, America may not survive?

To which I can only say that you’re being a little bit of a Dylan Mulvaney-esque drama queen. Because if I do perish in the storm, there is at least a 45-to-55% chance that America survives without me.  And I didn’t get to where I am in the CO nation by NOT mocking leftists and providing conservative insights into current events, just because my life may be in danger.

And before you can ask me another question that could prolong this introduction, no, I don’t like to throw around the word “hero” lightly.  And I think you can complete the rest of that thought.

Okay, so I’ve got time for two topics: the rise of an Olympic hero, and Que Mala’s choice of VP.    

As regular readers know, I’ve not been a fan of this Olympics so far, because the people who run it appear to be idiots.  After mocking my Lord and Savior to kick things off, and then allowing a couple of dudes to beat the crap out of female boxers, the Olympics were just about dead to me.

Sure, I might drop in and pay a little attention, I mean, if my wife is watching or something.  Or when something hilarious happens, as when the Muslim Jew-hating judoist got his arm dislocated by a Japanese judoist, momentarily acting as God’s agent on earth.

And yes, I’m not sure what participants in judo are called.  And I’m pretty sure that it’s not “judoists.” But my level of caring is as low as AOC’s IQ, so I’m not going to spend the time to open Duckduckgo.com (not commie Google, which you should never use) and check. 

Or when the US Olympic female basketball team is unable to sell tickets because they left Caitlin Clark back in the states, resulting in the organizers having to practically give away tickets for yesterday’s game because of the anemic crowds.  Unexpectedly!

Good!  I hope the team is beaten by Gambia, or Burkina Faso, or by a bunch of judoists from Tongo who mistakenly wander out onto the court and decide to try their hand at basketball for the first time ever. 

So yeah, I have no positive reasons to watch the Olympics.   

But then my amazing wife showed me a short video of the coolest Olympian of this (or possibly any) age: the Turkish pistol-shooting guy. 

I watched the first 15 seconds of it and then insisted that she email it to me immediately.  She rolled her eyes and said, “You’re going to write about this, aren’t you?”  And I said, “How could I NOT?” 

Because really, how? 

I know what you’re thinking: Normally, when you hear “Turkish guy with a gun,” you don’t immediately jump to “feel-good story” or “my personal hero!”  Added to that, his first name is “Yusuf.” 

And that makes it even worse.  When you hear the set-up, “Let me tell you about an armed Turk named Yusuf,” your only question is, “Let me guess, his last name is al-Ghoul, and he really hates the Juden?”

But no.  Not this guy. 

By now you’ve heard about him.  He’s Yusuf Dicek

First off, I didn’t know there was a pistol competition in the Olympics.  I knew they had that weird thing where you ski for a while, and then stop and shoot a rifle, and then ski some more.  But I figured that was just something Finland came up with and snuck into the Olympics in the 30s, as a clever way to entice their young men to train for shooting a lot of Russians who would be needing shot in the coming Winter War.

But the Olympics have a pistol competition too, so good for them.   (In fact, a little more pistol shooting and a little less Christ-mocking would be my suggestion for all future olympics.)

Anyway, all of the Olympic pistolists (again: life is too short to look up names for obscure-sport details) are “decked and teched,” as they say.  (Actually no one says that.  I just made it up, but I like the way it sounds.) They’ve got coordinated and branded outfits made of high-tech fabrics, with sponsors’ names and their countries’ Olympic logo on them.  They’re using futuristic pistols that look vaguely like what Arnold’s enemies in the future used in the first Terminator.

And they’ve got headgear. Oh have they got headgear!  Stuff that you’d expect Schlomo Bond to have.  (Yes, I’m trying to make that a running joke.)

Headsets that offer ear protection, noise cancelling, hypnotic sub-sonic tone generators, and probably high-def Sirius radio.  They wear glasses that were personally made after biometric scans of the shooters’ retinas were fed into a super-computer which then fashioned each lense in a sterile lab in Switzerland, I’m guessing.

Some of the glasses come with one lense blacked out, to favor the pistolist’s strongest eye.  (I call those the “Moshe Dayans,” and they look impressive.) (And yes, FYI, “I’ll take ‘bad-ass Israeli military commanders for 1000,’ Alex.”)  

So the best prima donna pistolists on the planet are all sitting around with their entourage of coaches and technical assistants, going over their millions of dollars’ worth of gear and guns, and in walks Yusuf Dicek.  And one of the coaches said, “Did anybody order kebob?  The delivery guy is here.”

Dicek stood out in that crowd.  First off, he’s 51 years old.  Because as everyone knows, your eyesight really peaks in your early 50s!  (I’d had very good vision my whole life, but when I reached my early 40s and was taking an eye test to get my pilot’s license, I started guessing at letters on the chart, and the doc wrote some notes on my file that amounted to, “It is illegal for you to ever fly an aircraft without wearing glasses.”)

So there’s Dikec, wearing tennis shoes, a pair of what looked like Dockers, and a t-shirt with “Turkiye” on it that looked like he’d picked it up from a street vendor right outside for 2 euros.  (I later found out that that’s Turkey’s official t-shirt.  Which tells us that Turkey apparently doesn’t have a big “olympic apparel” budget.)

Instead of fancy ear protection, he had a couple of yellow foam things that I get from Lowes when I’m going to be using power tools a lot.  He also wore glasses that looked like a pair of cheaters from Wal-Mart.  (“Are you just using those for reading?  If so, a 1.5 magnification should be fine.  What’s that?  You’ll be in a shooting competition in the Olympics in a half-hour?  Better take the 2.0s”)

As the other pistolists were assuming unnatural stances that combine the posture of a yoga nut, a ballerina in the Bolshoi, and a Prussian officer in 1878 standing at attention, Dicek stepped up to the line, put one hand in his pants pocket (!) and aimed with his other hand.  

If you look up “nonchalant” in the dictionary, you’ll see a picture of this guy getting ready to shoot.  He looked as calm as some ne’er-do-well who just finished a sleeve of pot brownies knocking over a 7-11 in Bakersfield.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if he had turned the gun sideways before he started shooting, like the dumbest gang-banger in Chicago’s mostly peaceful weekend shootouts. 

So there he was, looking like a guy getting ready to try to win his wife a stuffed animal at a crooked carnival’s rigged shooting gallery.  And he started to shoot WITH BOTH EYES OPEN! 

Now almost the only shooting I’ve ever done was at pop bottles and cans with a b.b. gun, and at imaginary Nazis with a cap gun.  But even I know that when you’re zeroing in for that head shot on Hitler, you’re supposed to close your weak eye and squint like hell through your strong one. 

And as I went back to watch Dikec’s competition, I saw that sure enough, they all shoot with one eye closed.  Even the ones without the space-age Moshe Dayan glasses.

Not Dicek.  He was there to smoke hookah and shoot bullseyes.  And he was all out of hookah.   

Unfortunately, Dicek only won silver.  And the guy who won gold, standing next to him, had a ridiculous Willy Wonka-looking piece of headgear on. So Dicek definitely won on style points. 

What’s that?  The Olympics don’t award style points?

Okay, I’m out again.   

Topic 2:  Que mala’s possible VP choices. As of the middle of last week, contenders mentioned include Shapiro from PA, Bashear from KY, Mark Kelly from AZ, and Mayor Pete. 

The governors of MI and NC had reportedly been in contention earlier, but they apparently didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree, because they were smart enough to back slowly out of the room when asked about being tied to Que Mala’s political fortunes.

In the last several days, though, the field seems to have been winnowed down to Kelly and Shapiro, with the latter now being the favorite.  But I was really hoping for Mayor Pete.

Because now that he’s back from paternity leave – and who amongst us can gainsay the kind of physical toll taken on his body by not carrying a baby in his non-existent womb for nine months, and then going through many hours of pretend labor pains, following by the miracle of passing that baby through his non-existent birth canal, and don’t get him started on how he’s coping with the non-existent episiotomy stitches and unsightly non-existent stretch marks – he’s rested and ready to hit the ground running. 

While wearing his pristine first-ever pair of work boots and his hard hat that looks every bit as authentic on his pointy little head as that tanker headgear looked on Mike Dukakis.  

So why would I be rooting for him to make the ticket?  Simple: for years the Dems have been caterwauling about how toxic masculinity has been ruining American society, so I’d love for them to show the world what a presidential ticket with literally zero masculinity – toxic or otherwise – looks like.

However, as of now it looks like Pete is destined to be always the bridesmaid and never the non-child-bearing bride.

Conventional political thinking would say the Cackler should go with PA’s popular governor Shapiro, because he could conceivably nudge the crucial battleground state into the blue column in November.

But wait.  Shapiro is Jewish.  And there are a number of Dem voters – most importantly in Michigan, but also throughout the country and in congress – who are jihadi sympathizers and really hate Jews.  So smart insiders say that if Shapiro doesn’t get the nod, the most likely reason is the religious bigotry of many Democrats.  (I’m paraphrasing just a tad, for greater clarity.)

I’ve always thought that the main theological school of thought motivating the national Democrats was their religious commitment to atheist, destructive socialism.  But now it appears that the anti-Semitic tail may be wagging the Marxist dog. 

Well done, Democrats!

Hamas delenda est!