For many, many years, ever since I was just a hilarious zygote with a dream, I have loved watching the best laid plans of bad actors blowing up in their faces.
I remember watching Wile E. Coyote painting a black tunnel entrance on a rock wall, then – after watching the Road Runner somehow race through the tunnel – smashing himself against it.
I enjoyed hundreds of cartoons featuring bad guys setting traps involving dropping anvils on heads, disguising quicksand pits, or giving their nemeses exploding cigars, only to be crushed by those anvils, sunk into that quicksand, or having their beaks blown around to the side of their heads by those exploding cigars.
Which brings me to the Democrats’ entertaining travails over the last 9 years.
When Trump considered running in 2015, many Democrats loved it. They mocked him and dared to run, and they gave him hours of free publicity on their tv programs. Many of them crossed over to vote for him in primaries, and some contributed money to his campaign. And then they got what they asked for, good and hard.
It still warms my heart to remember them in the Javits Center on election night, after Cankles McPantsuit had thundered out of the gate, only to snap a fetlock on the first turn. They stood around with shell-shocked expressions, soot all over their faces and the stub of a detonated cigar clamped between their teeth.
But soon they had wiped off their faces and got back to their wicked ways, using every under-handed tool at their disposal to try to hamstring Trump’s first term, and ensure that he lost in 2020. They launched the Russia hoax and the resulting Muller investigation to tie him up for most of his first term.
By the time the 2020 election rolled around, they weaponized covid as an excuse to hide Biden from the public during his campaign, and conspired with 51 dishonest deep state hacks who pretended that they didn’t know that Hunter’s laptop was Hunter’s laptop.
Ironically, their success against Trump in 2020 laid the foundation for what looks to be a much more successful Trump second term now. Between Biden’s awful performance for four years, and Trump’s time in the wilderness – which provided him the space to learn from the tactics the left used to undermine him during his first term – Trump approached his second term a much wiser politician than he had been in 2017.
But first he had to win again. And the left once again used tactics that backfired on them in the most hilarious and schadenfreude-tastic ways possible. They launched a four-pronged lawfare attack – five-pronged, if you count looney E. Jean Carroll’s patently absurd accusation that cost him time and money (until it is inevitably overturned on appeal).
But just like most of their other efforts against Trump, this one backfired again. The more bogus charges they pressed against Trump, the more popular he got. His own base rallied around him, and open-minded independents did the same, and before the Dems knew what hit them, Trump had dispatched the Cadaver and steamrolled the Cackler.
Now that Trump has been in office for a month, the hits just keep coming. One of his most potent weapons is DOGE. It would have been logistically tricky for Trump to try to create that agency, but luckily for him, Barry O had created the US Digital Service ten years earlier, providing Trump with a ready-made cudgel to re-name, and then begin bashing the deep state with.
Also luckily for him, many deep state creeps had also outed themselves, secure in the belief that Trump would never be president again. They left a treasure trove of social media posts and MSM appearances that basically screamed, “I’m a hateful, anti-American jerk, please fire me immediately!”
In fact, most of the Democratic elite seem to be following a knee-jerk strategy of doubling-down on everything that hasn’t been working for them. They are grabbing the “20” position on every 80/20 issue, and then hanging on to it like a ballplayer hugging a base after trying to stretch for a double and being called out.
My favorite recent example involves the National Parks. Trump wants to cut 1000 park service workers nationwide. While that amounts to just two positions from each national park, it represents an opportunity for the left to score a few points, because the park service is one of a handful of government agencies that the public enthusiastically supports.
Unlike cutting the leftist slush funds flowing from USAID, and firing rapacious IRS agents and corrupt educrats like Randi Weingarten, cutting park rangers could give many citizens pause.
But the Dems seem to be addicted to stupid. Instead of making a disciplined, reasonable defense of park service priorities and workers, the most visible push back took the form of in-your-face protests and angry leftist cliches.
One group hung an upside-down American flag on El Capitan, and released a hyperbolic statement that “national lands are under attack,” and urging citizens to consider “your public lands on strike.”
Some lefties also protested the cuts carrying signs saying, “Silence is violence!” – a tired cliché that is transparently false – and, “All cops are bastards.” Sure, the police have nothing to do with the funding of national parks, but hey, most Americans hate cop-bashing, so why not turn them against you, too?
The most ridiculous rake-stomping leftist self-own on this issue came from the Washington Post.
Unexpectedly!
Some earnest young WAPO staffer thought he could really stick it to Trump by touting an example of a model employee doing essential work at a national park whom Trump has unfairly fired. So he came up with… wait for it… a locksmith at Yosemite!
I know what you’re thinking: Are there a ton of intricate, Get-Smart-style series of high-tech doors scattered about our national parks? Is there some kind of retinal-scan/finger-print-accessed barrier that encloses Old Faithful, or a bank vault that must be defeated before you can gaze upon El Capitan?
Nope.
The WAPO describes the locksmith in question, in a quote that I swear I am not making up, as, “The sole employee with the keys and the institutional knowledge needed to rescue visitors from locked restrooms.”
Institutional knowledge?! We’re not talking about what would happen if Oppenheimer or Edward Teller quit the Manhattan Project, are we? I mean, this is Gus the janitor, holding a fistful of keys in front of a locked bathroom door! Even the kind of brainiac SCOTUS judge who can’t define “woman” can intuit that you put the male key into the female lock and then turn it, can’t she?
As a landlord with 29 years of experience, allow me to share some institutional knowledge with the National Park Service: You can take the one key that unlocks all the bathrooms in Yosemite to Lowes or Home Depot, and you can make a dozen copies of it for a little over $2 each. Then you can hang one of those keys on a hook in 12 different Ranger Stations, and voila! National crisis averted!
Hey, wait a minute. I just noticed something else in that WAPO jeremiad. It described the Nobel-worthy locksmith to the stars as someone who could “rescue visitors from locked restrooms.”
Does that mean that some dimwit visitors have locked themselves INSIDE a bathroom, and need to be rescued?
Good lord! Would any of us, if we were walking by a park bathroom and heard someone frantically shouting that they were locked inside, not stop and say, “Hey buddy, you should see either a latch or a raised ridge on a button on the lock. Turn that a quarter turn to the right, and then open the door, you moron.”
But here is the scenario that the hysterical WAPO leftist wants you to believe:
Gus the Yosemite janitor is passing by when a panicked bystander grabs his sleeves and yanks him toward a park bathroom.
Gus: What’s going on here?
Bystander: There’s a woman in there, and without your help, she’s going to die!
Voice from the Bathroom (VFB): Help! Is there anyone out there?!
Gus: I’m a park employee. What’s the problem?
VFB: I’m trapped, and I’m running out of oxygen!
Gus: You can’t run out of oxygen in a public bathroom. There’s an air gap under the door, and several windows at the top of the wall.
VFB: Don’t contradict my lived experience! I’m telling you my truth!
Gus (skeptically): Are you a Democrat congressman?
VFB: Congress-person!
Gus (nodding): Okay, AOC. Just open the door and come out.
VFB: How am I supposed to do that?
Gus (sighing): Do you see a metal latch right above the doorknob?
VFB: Yes! What should I do with it? Should I lick it?!
Gus: What? No! Why would you lick it?! It’s a deadbolt lock, and you use it to open a door!
VFB: Don’t man-splain to me!
Gus (rubbing the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb): Stupid juicy booty–
VFB: What did you say?
Gus: Never mind. (under his breath: Your words, not mine.) Just grab that metal latch, and turn it– (He gasps, grabs his chest, and his face turns red. He staggers, loses consciousness, and falls to the ground.)
Bystander: Oh no! Now we’ve lost this man’s institutional knowledge!
VFB: What’s happening out there? What should I do?
Bystander: Make your peace with God, because you’re going to starve to death in there!
VFB (raising her fist and howling to the ceiling): F-ing Trump! This is all your fault!!
And, scene.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 