I had a great early Christmas with the family, watching my daughter’s graduation and catching up with everybody last weekend. The best part may have been the most unSimpson-like experience of having VIP seating!
Every year the university gives one Freshman a specific scholarship that pays all expenses (tuition, dorm, food) for all 4 years, plus a six-week study-abroad course in Oxford. Regular readers may remember that my little sarcastic astro-physicist daughter won that scholarship four years ago.
She had an amazing time in Oxford, right up until she got a concussion from getting hit in the head by a metal pole while punting past C.S. Lewis’ Magdalen College rooms on the Thames. (If she had been eating a crumpet while humming “God Save the Queen” during the experience, that would have been the most British thing any American has ever done.)
When my wife picked up our tickets for the graduation, we found out that the scholarship winner’s family gets VIP seating, in the second row center, right behind the spouses of the school’s big shots in the front row, and in front of the faculty.
My wife got teary eyed when they lead us to the seats, which was sweet to see. But I just felt like Jed Clampett driving his jalopy up the circular driveway in Beverly Hills. (How did we get here, and when will someone realize their mistake and ask us to leave?)
The ceremony was very nice, and we had some good family time for several days afterwards. We got home yesterday, and I’m going to be heading back down to the Gulf coast to visit a cousin of mine for a few more days, before returning this weekend to get ready for Christmas. I’ll have one more pre-Christmas column on Monday.
Meanwhile, I thought I’d touch on the continuing stream of green flags I’m seeing in the wake of Trump’s re-election. (As opposed to red flags – warning signs that something is going wrong – I’m trying to make “green flags” – indicating the opposite – a thing.)
I’m enjoying watching the members of the legacy media still staggering around, their beaks knocked around to the side of their dazed faces like Daffy Duck after he held a bomb that went off. They’d done everything they could to knock Trump off the political stage, and after his amazing win, they still haven’t figured out if they’re afoot or horseback.
The dullest of them – the competition is stiff – can’t seem to understand that they might be held accountable for their most egregious breaches of journalistic ethics. Hostile Sunny Hosten has inadvertently started a popular regular feature on The View: the daily reading of the legal notes.
This happens whenever she sprints through the infield of stupidity, into the outfield of cluelessness, across the warning track of dipsh*ttery, and leaps the fence of legal liability, landing on her empty head. In the booth, network lawyers shriek like the clipboard guy when Ron Burgundy confidently read the teleprompter telling the residents of San Diego to go friend themselves. (“Oh! Great Odin’s raven!”)
When they come back from commercial, Sunny has to read corrections of her slanderous blatherings, forced on her by ABC so they don’t get sued into oblivion. (“Matt Gaetz didn’t sexually assault an entire tour group on the House floor.” “RFK Jr. hasn’t promised to give polio to every toddler in America.” “Pete Hegseth didn’t shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”)
It’s great fun to watch her force the words out; she tries to read them robotically, but she can’t help grimacing. The miserable look on her face communicates the corresponding and unending immiseration way deep, deep down in the tiny, compressed cinder of malice where her soul used to be.
Not to be outdone by Sunny, ex-Clinton hack and pretend journalist George Snuffleupagus climbed up onto a stack of dictionaries so he could look Nancy Mace in the eye during an interview last spring, and then repeatedly tried to shame her for supporting Trump, whom he repeatedly and creepily said had been found liable by a jury for rape. (This despite the fact that the jury had replied “No” to the first question on the jury form in that sham trial, which was, “Do you find Trump liable for rape.”)
This week his network gave Trump $16 million and a formal apology to settle his defamation suit against them. George reportedly threw himself on the floor and kicked his tiny feet when he heard that news.
Luckily for him, ABC must have some real dullards in charge, because they just signed Snuffy to a new, multi-year contract. Which is good news for the future Trump presidential library, to which the $16 mil of ABC’s settlement has been earmarked. That thing is going to have more funding than CO’s HQ compound by the time Trump finishes his second term!
It’s stunning that even as the MSM is suffering one mortifying and hilarious defeat after another, many of them seem incapable of learning their lesson. A great example of that is the clump of biased lefties running Politifact, which fancies itself a “fact-checking” outfit.
Every December they choose a “Lie of the Year.” I appreciate the magnitude of their challenge this year, since it’s been filled with a cloud of gigantic lies from January 1st to 30 seconds ago. One would think that contenders for the title would be chosen based on the prominence of the person telling the lie, the overall importance of the lie, and maybe the frequency with which it was told.
By those standards, even in a year as saturated with dishonesty as this one, two big lies would have to top the list. In second place, I’d put Joe Biden’s repeated promises that he would never, never EVER pardon Hunter, which easily meets all 3 criteria. It was said by the leader of the free world, it was repeated a dozen or more times in high visibility settings, and since it was used as the basis of hundreds of Dem attacks on Trump (“The moral gulf between Biden righteously accepting the rule of law and not pardoning his son and Trump’s lawlessness is huge!”), it had a huge impact on the election.
But for me, the winner would have to be the omnipresent lie – from every MSM outlet, Democrat official and Dem political analyst/talking head/propagandist – that Joe Biden was in fabulous shape, and totally mentally fit. Every prominent leftist told it, thousands of times, and it was so patently false that it beggars description.
And when it was dramatically revealed in the disastrous debate, it imploded an incumbent president’s campaign and forced him out of the race, thereby becoming a contender for the biggest, most consequential lie of this century so far.
So which of those did Politifact choose? Neither.
They chose Trump’s claim that the Haitians in Springfield, OH were “eating the pets!”
Okay, Trump was a presidential nominee, and he repeated it a handful of times, mostly when MSM reporters asked him about it, so it could potentially be a contender. But it may have been a murky combination of exaggeration and lie, because some ducks in city parks were eaten by Haitians, and there were multiple – unconfirmed – accounts of the illegals eating more than just ducks.
Compare that to the “I won’t pardon Hunter” and “Joe Biden is compose mentis” lies. Even the most fanatical Democrat can’t dispute that Joe pardoned Hunter, or that Joe is physically and mentally compromised.
But let’s assume that it’s false, and while the Haitians ate the ducks, they didn’t eat the dogs. In typical Trumpy fashion, the prez used a clumsily (even stupidly) phrased attempt to get at a larger truth: unvetted millions of Third World illegals flooding into small communities create a variety of problems.
I don’t even think you can say that that lie had any important impact. To the extent that it highlighted the negative impact arising from illegal immigration, at most it added to a perception already held by the vast majority of Americans. For Politico to choose that lie as more significant than Biden’s top 5 or 10 lies is ridiculous.
The MSM really has backed themselves into a corner. If they stick to their propagandistic, leftist ways, their audience will continue to be tiny, and made up of emotionally dysregulated weirdos working on manifestos drawn directly from the DSM-5.
But if they try to veer back to the political middle, even those weirdos will abandon them. When Mika and Joe went crawling to Mar-A-Lago to beg the Mango Mussolini to talk to them, almost half of their audience abandoned them. And that’s 11 people they cannot afford to lose!
CNN has hired intelligent conservative Scott Jennings to try to bring a little viewpoint diversity to their network, which is a risky move. Just by being not-insane, he has been routinely reducing their far-left panelists to howling rage, and making them look even more ridiculous than they already did.
That makes for intermittently good television, but how can it possibly work, given the bone-deep bias in the DNA of all of those shows? Either the new “conservative” hires will quickly acclimate and move to the far left, making their hiring pointless (e.g. Jennifer Rubin and other formerly “conservative” hires at the WAPO or NYT, or the only attractive one on the View), or else they will remain conservative… and mow through the leftist pap on those shows like Sherman through Georgia!
More green flags for January arise from the super satisfying reversals of fate for so many of Trump’s cabinet and governmental nominees. Medical experts like Jay Bhattacharya and Marty Makary who had been slandered by the Fauci pro-maskers and “vaxes 100% stop the spread” types will now head up medical oversight agencies.
Border hawks like Tom Homan who were sidelined and frustrated by open-border jerks will now oversee the border. Tulsi and RFK Jr. were dissed and banished from the Democrat party and will now be in positions of authority.
Of course, the biggest reversal is Trump’s himself, since he went from targeted (literally) “felon” and pariah back to the top of the government. I can’t help but think of Uncle Jesus’ musings on “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.”
Am I saying He was thinking of this election cycle?
In the words of an obscure and failed politician whose name I can’t recall, I’m saying that we should have that conversation.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 