Month: July 2025

I’m Losing my Patience with Celebrities (posted 7/28/25)

Is it just me, or are leftist celebrities getting even more obnoxious? 

On Friday I wrote about the insufferable Stephen Colbert’s firing, and the celebrity responses to it, which were as inane as you’d expect.  But then I was scrolling the net over the weekend, when a picture of Rosie O’Donnell popped up on my feed.  I responded, instinctively, the way I always do when that happens.

“GAH!  Boy, Michael Moore has really let himself go.”  But then I recognized that it was Rosie.  And I knew that she must have posted another anti-Trump rant.  Sure enough, she got that camera right up close to her face – and that angle doesn’t do anybody any favors, even if you don’t have a face for radio – and went to town.

She pointed out that ICE is like the Gestapo.  Because if you’re a history buff, you surely remember how the Gestapo only arrested people who had illegally entered Germany, and then followed the rules and gave them three hots and a cot until they could safely deport them to their home countries. 

And we all remember the Gestapo officers’ ominous first statement when they started interrogating an illegal immigrant: “Ve haf vays of making you…comfortable.” 

She mourned Colbert’s firing, and preached that it shouldn’t have mattered that he was losing $40 million per year for CBS, saying that, “people who only measure in money…it’s a disease.”   

No, Rosie.  DPGS (Delusional Political Grievance Syndrome) with accompanying TDS as a co-morbidity is a disease. 

“Measuring in money” is how a business stays in business. 

I had hoped that when Rosie crossed the ocean to bother the Irish, their loss would be our gain, and we’d get a little peace over here.  Sadly, it was not to be. 

But in Rosie’s defense, as disconcerting as her appearance has been, and as deranged as her thoughts usually are, at least she wasn’t swearing like a sailor who’d just hit his thumb with a hammer.  And I can’t say the same for just about any other Democrat celebrity or politician lately.

I’ve read that many Dem politicians have intentionally started swearing on camera, as part of an effort to seem cool, and appeal to young male voters.  So many of them do it so awkwardly that those rumors must be true, and that is really pathetic. 

Colbert himself used the f-word – and I don’t mean “friend” – when he announced his own cancellation.  He quoted Trump dunking on him because, “His talent was even less than his  ratings.” 

Colbert’s self-owning comeback?  “How dare you sir.  Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?… Go friend yourself!”

Ugh.  Yes, that’s exactly the sad excuse for a witticism that an untalented man – backed up by a staff of 20 writers, don’t forget! – would come up with! 

But another talk show “comedian” – Jon Stewart – one-upped Colbert, friend-wise. 

A quarter-century ago, Stewart was a cool young comic/host, surfing the political zeitgeist and having way more political influence with young people than he deserved.  He could be authentically funny, but even in the early days, way too many of his “jokes” relied on him reading a stupid statement from a politician and then making a stupid face at the camera. 

Being cool is like being attractive; it’s a lot easier when you’re young, and it often doesn’t age well.   It’s especially hard to stay cool when you are elderly.  A few can pull it off.  Clint Eastwood is still cool in his 90s.  Dean Martin was cool into his late 60s, and Tom Petty was cool until the day he died.  I’m an elderly gentleman myself, and yet still as cool as the other side of the pillow. 

But we’re the exceptions, and Jon Stewart is decidedly not.  After he recently came back to do one Daily Show per week, it was clear that his schtick had aged like milk left out in the sun in August.  Endlessly ranting about Trump, especially when the Democrats are providing such a rich vein of comic material that you’re ignoring, is not bringing in the ratings. And mugging for the camera with an old-guy face doesn’t work as it once did.

To make matters worse, Stewart chose to do his performative rant about Colbert using a repetitive string of F-bombs, accompanied by – of all things – a gospel choir. 

Now I’m not the type of Christian who is easily offended by what more sensitive types would consider Christian-mocking humor.  I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything funnier than Kinison’s take on Christ coming home to his hypothetical wife after being dead for three days, for example. 

Although if Stewart could be held to his own side’s rigid standards of wokeness, I’m not sure I could think of any more extreme example of “cultural appropriation” than a Jewish atheist carpet-bombing a tv audience with F-bombs to the musical stylings of a Gospel choir.

(By the way, if you like actual gospel music, I’d point you to Ray Charles and the Voices of Jubilation’s live performance of “Oh Happy Day.”  (I listened to that multiple times every day for a week after Trump got re-elected.)  Or, for a modern variation on the theme, you could watch Tyler Childer’s video of “Way of the Triune God.”)

Anyway, Stewart did his impression of a Baptist/Jewish minister (?) flailing around in front of a gospel choir, hollering, “Go friend yourself!” and “Friend, friend, friend yourself, just go friend yourself” over and over again. 

Only it wasn’t a real gospel choir, just a half-dozen blackground singers doing a parody, and the whole thing smacked of trying way too hard. 

But when it came to mind-numbingly relentless over-use of the f-word, nobody could top Hunter Biden’s bizarre interview with some unknown guy called Andrew Callaghan, who the left is hoping will become their Joe Rogan.  (Spoiler alert: they’re out of their friending minds.)

Hunter’s interview was a fascinating combination of brutally cruel truth-telling and colossally clueless self-deceiving, all delivered with a mother-friending friend-storm of friended-up vulgarity. 

He definitely told the truth about a lot of leftist figures.  He said that George Clooney doesn’t know a friending thing about politics and is just a brand, and that James friending Carville hasn’t won a friending election in 40 years, and that Jake Tapper has the smallest friending audience on cable.

He also touted the healthiness of crack cocaine over both alcohol and regular cocaine, because when you make crack, you burn off all of the impurities, or something.  I think we’ll all just take your word for that, scooter.     

But his lack of self-awareness resulted in some entertaining moments, as when he attacked David Axelrod and David Plouffe for “dining out on their relationship with Obama for years, making millions of dollars.”

Um, Hunter, remember that time when you had no skills or knowledge about painting, or Ukraine, or energy, and yet brought in millions of dollars for your terrible paintings, and your positions with energy companies in Ukraine?  Because your name was Biden? 

Finally, my personal favorite story of the last several days involved everybody’s favorite faux-Bronx girl from Westchester, AOC.  Most people remember when she went to the fancy Met Gala a few years ago, and wore a white designer dress with the words “Tax the Rich” in big red letters on its back.    

Well it turns out that even though she’s a self-proclaimed socialist who shouldn’t have been willing to be caught dead mixing with the evil rich folks at their fancy ball, she also improperly accepted free admission to the party for her boyfriend, and she didn’t pay full market value for her statement-making dress. 

Unexpectedly! 

So now a House ethics commission is requiring her to cough up $2700 that she should have paid.  

Got that?  She’s a gal from a tony suburb pretending to be from the Bronx, and a rich person pretending to be a lower-middle class person, and a tax dodger pretending to be all for rich people like her paying lots of taxes.

When she was shopping for her dress, AOC almost certainly asked, “Does this ‘Tax the Rich’ dress make my juicy booty (her words, not mine) look fat?”

But she failed to ask, “Does this idiotic, hypocritical slogan make me look stupid?” or “Shouldn’t I be paying taxes on this expensive donation to emphasize my best political asset?”

Contemplating these stories has given me an idea for two Executive Orders that Trump could use to address our budget deficit.

EO #1 would require a full audit of every Democrat House member and Senator – and throw the Republicans in there too, just to keep things kosher – and then a Brinks truck to be sent to all of their offices to collect the billions in taxes that they’ve undoubtedly dodged.

EO #2 would install a series of swear jars in every Democrat office and public building in the DC metro area.  Charge a buck for every “friend” – and while we’re at it, five bucks for every “narwhal.” 

We’ll have the deficit closed by Christmas.

Hunter “friending” Biden/AO- “friending” -C, 2028!

Two Economics Lessons, from the WNBA & Stephen Colbert (posted 7/25/25)

Hey kids, today I’m introducing a new feature called Economics Corner with Martin! 

Before you can scroll to the next story, I know what you’re thinking: “Martin, we come to you for the humor and the mockery.  And sure, for the eye candy.  But what do you know about economics?  Would anybody with any economic sense spend a decade getting a PhD in English?  If we want some smart econ talk, we’ll go to the mysterious and powerful CO, or to Christopher Silber.” 

To which I can only say, fair enough.  I’m no financial brainiac like those guys, with their 10-year-T-bill this, and their Laffer Curve that, and their bitcoin other thing. But in my defense, I have a little something I like to call “horse sense.”

Which, ironically, is the kind of instinct that tells you not to bet on horses.  But it also allows me to be smarter about economics than you’d expect, as I will demonstrate with the following two cautionary tales.

The WNBA is a professional basketball league, like the NBA, only with female players.  Until a year and a half ago, the most exciting thing to happen in an WNBA game would be a steal, leading to a pulse-pounding sprint down court, ending in a thrilling…lay up.

In addition to routine lay ups, like you might see during your grandson’s middle school basketball games, the WNBA offers something that middle school basketball games couldn’t offer.  Lesbians. 

So many lesbians.

Unfortunately, these aren’t your Cinemax lesbians, which you might remember from educational women’s prison movies from the 1980s.  These films taught viewers that most lady criminals are in their 20s and cute as a button, and that nobody enters a women’s prison without being strip searched, and that the best place to plan a prison break is always the shower room.

Perhaps I’ve said too much.  

Anyway, the WNBA lesbians aren’t those lesbians.  They’re the kind who look like they could drive an 18-wheeler, or teach shop, or be a hulking defensive presence in the paint.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  But alas, it has not made for ratings gold.

The league was started 28 years ago, and it has never made a profit.  Despite tons of promotion and oodles of “you go girl” gender cheerleading, reports suggest that on the most optimistic view, the league has lost an average of $10 million per year.  Gallingly, the NBA has actually been subsidizing the WNBA all that time.

This situation has flummoxed the marketing geniuses behind the WNBA.  Their thinking seems to have been, “We’re giving them lay ups and lesbians!  What else do they want?”

But last year, a galvanizing presence entered the league.  Caitlin Clark is an excellent player.  She’s a skilled ball-handler, a deft passer, and she regularly drains threes from the parking lot.   She quickly developed an energized fan base, and her presence on the court guaranteed bigger crowds and higher ratings. 

People who know sports and money say that’s she not just a franchise player, she’s an entire league player.  Her games have been moved to bigger arenas, and when she’s out with an injury, attendance and viewership drops by over half.  She’s truly a Golden Goose for the WNBA.

Which leads me to one of the common-sense economic principles that even I understand: if you’ve got a Golden Goose, you pamper that fine fowl.  Make it a soft bed, feed it a good-tasting and nutritious diet, monitor its health and its cholesterol, if geese have cholesterol.  Surround it with a security team that will tase first and ask questions later.

You know what you shouldn’t do with a Golden Goose?      

Scratch its eyes, knock it down, and then kick it.  And then call it racial slurs.

Because Clark is only part Golden Goose; she’s also a swan. 

She’s white, is what I’m saying.  And that’s a problem in the WNBA, because about 65% of players in the league are black, and many of those are super jealous, and super racist.   (Let’s just say that while there has NEVER been a narwhal reference during a WNBA game, there have been plenty of derogatory “white girl” insults thrown her way.)

Most major sports leagues have been smart enough to protect their players, and especially their star players.  During the Bulls dynasty the NBA used to have what was derisively called “The Jordan Rules,” which meant that Michael Jordan got many close calls, and the refs got whistle-happy when opposing teams started fouling him too hard.

The NFL has done something similar, evolving their rules to give more protection to quarterbacks, and to minimize the types of plays that usually result in more and serious injuries.

But not the WNBA.  They’ve got two main groups making two major economic – and I would say ethical – mistakes.  The owners have ignored the racial animus and jealousy directed at Clark, and have allowed a bunch of little-known, angry, and less talented players beat the hell out of her.  

They’ve allowed their swan who has been laying golden eggs to be surrounded and set upon by a bunch of no-name Mallard Luther Kings.  (Hat tip to Theo Von.) Except that that’s a terrible analogy, since MLK was fighting the good fight, while these harpies are fighting to kill off their own meal ticket.

The other group making a dumb economic decision, sadly, is the players.  Before the recent WNBA all-star game, they came out for warm-ups wearing t-shirts saying, “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”  Which is the most obnoxiously entitled way to phrase what is an insane economic proposition.

In a free market, you are owed what you earn.  And in big-time sports, what you earn is a piece of what you bring in: gate receipts, product sales, tv ratings and ad revenue.  Unfortunately for the WNBA players, what they’ve been bringing in is less than zero, for a very long time.  If they were paid what they are truly owed, Clark and maybe another 8-10 players would make very good livings, and the rest of the players would have to pay the league to let them play.

And I don’t say that with any animus.  I’ve seen bits and pieces of WNBA games and clips over the last year and a half, and the league has some talented players.  If they can weed out some of the racism and envy in their ranks, they can put out a good product.  They’re not as strong or fast as their male counterparts, but that’s a matter of biology, and non-insane people don’t see that as an insult, or a deal-breaker.

Women’s tennis and golf are popular, and women’s gymnastics are more popular than men’s.  But none of those sports are peopled by petty, racists jerks.  Because that’s bad for business.  

Speaking of bad for business, have you ever heard of an angry, unfunny professional comedian? 

If you’ve heard of Stephen Colbert, you have.

You’ve also probably heard that his late night show has been cancelled.  Which has unleashed a cavalcade of leftist outrage and general imbecility.  Celebrities like Ben Stiller and Jimmy Kimmel panned the decision, as did the actress last seen killing the Snow White IP as dead as Julius Caesar, Rachel Zegler. 

Many dimwits saw conspiracies behind the decision.  “I am so upset about this.  I need more information,” said the once-perky Katie Couric. 

A certain Pale Pawnee went further, detecting the malignant influence of an orange hand working behind the scenes.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher) Grandma Squanto noted that the axe fell only three days after Colbert had called out CBS’ corporate owner Paramount for settling with Trump for $16 million over his lawsuit against 60 Minutes for dishonestly editing Que Mala’s interview to make her look less idiotic shortly before the election. 

Warren self-importantly proclaimed that “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”   

Yes. And America deserves to know how a blue-eyed blonde straight from the fjords went to a job interview at Harvard wearing a buckskin dress “Apache Princess” Halloween costume and came out with a tenure-track job.  And whether we should ever stop mocking her.

Which we should not, as I may have mentioned before. 

You may have noticed that I just slid right past the fact that Colbert had publicly crapped all over his bosses. And then, three days later, his cancellation was announced.   Unexpectedly!  Many sharp-eyed students of cause and effect might have connected those dots. 

But it turns out that there is an even bigger and more obvious elephant in the room.  And that elephant is called “economics.” 

Colbert’s show brings in $60 million per year, which is pretty amazing, because he despises more than half the country, and spends the lion’s share of his air time being doggedly, relentlessly, remorselessly unfunny. 

Unfortunately for CBS and for Colbert, it costs $100 million per year to produce his terrible show.  (Which even by my English professor math means that the show is losing $40 million per year.)  Colbert’s salary is $15 million, and more than 200 people work on that show, including 20 writers!  20!

By comparison, I write this column all by my lonesome, and my entire overhead is the electricity for my computer and a minimal bourbon budget that covers just enough to lubricate my coy muse.  I’ve signed an NDA with CO that forbids me from revealing how much he pays me, but if you guessed, “Less than $15 million per year,” you’d be safely in the ballpark.

My least funny column – it was probably either the one about my dad’s death, or the one after Biden’s election – was still three standard deviations funnier than Colbert’s average show. 

And if I ever wrote anything as horrifically unfunny as that musical sketch when Colbert danced around the stage surrounded by gay guys dressed as giant human syringes in service of a creepy propaganda push to urge people to get injected with an experimental, ineffective vaccine, I’d go straight from the studio to a lonely hilltop, where I’d hang myself by the neck until I was dead.

By the way, I loved how CBS twisted the knife with a double insult to Colbert.  First, they issued a transparently false fig leaf excuse for his cancellation, claiming that the move was “a financial decision,” and “not related in any way to the show’s performance [or] content.” 

Right. The fact that the show was so repellent to audiences that it was bleeding viewers and cash had nothing to do with the show’s performance. 

That’s as believable as breaking up with your significant other right after she banged your best friend, got a Swastika neck tattoo and emptied your bank account and sent it to the “Mamdani for NYC” super-pac, and saying, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Second, they announced that not only is Colbert being cancelled, but he’s so badly damaged the Late Show franchise that they’re permanently ending the program as well.  That’s like if I finally realized my life-long dream of playing quarterback for the Bears, and after a few horrendous seasons, the owners decided that they were disbanding the team, dynamiting Soldier Field, and dousing the site with radioactive waste so that no one else will ever go there again. 

So congratulations, WNBA and Stephen Colbert!  You’ve both failed Econ 101. 

WNBA, if you don’t repent and change your ways, you’re going to be the dancing gay syringes skit of the sports world.

And Colbert, you’re already a Caitlin-Clark-less WNBA.  May God have mercy on your unfunny soul.

And by the way, Stephen, it’s not us.  It’s you.

Colbert/Angel Reese 2028!    

More (Belated) Good News from Florida (posted 7/21/25)

I was so excited to hear on Friday that Trump was signing the GENIUS act into law, thinking that finally, at long last, my status as hilarious genius would be formally acknowledged by an act of state.  I sat with my phone all day, waiting for a congratulatory call from the White House that sadly, never came.

Finally, around midnight, after my wife had gone to bed and Cassie the Wonder Dog had fallen asleep at my feet, I gave up and went online to read about that act.

Imagine my disappointment when I found out it was about crypto, which I can’t even pretend to understand.  So maybe it’s possible that I’m not the genius I think I am…

In my column last week about how Florida is kicking arse and IL and CA Dems are making arses of themselves, I didn’t mention two of my favorite Florida stories from the last month, both of which demonstrate common sense in crime fighting. 

The first is Alligator Alcatraz, which is an example of amazing branding attached to a great idea.  The name has it all: pleasing alliteration, a reference to a famous prison that all Americans know, and the vivid, evocative mental image that it creates. 

As in, “You thought the Rock was a tough place to escape from?”  At least there, if you made it out and could survive the swim, you’d find yourself in San Francisco.  Sure, that’s not the reward that it might have been, decades ago.  But still, if you stepped carefully through the human feces and filthy syringes, and could avoid getting bitten by a shambling, zombi-fied, narcotics-addled, straight-ballot Democrat voter, you’d soon be free.

But Alligator Alcatraz?  If you manage to make it out of there, you’d be facing miles of uncharted swamps, filled with animals whose bite is even more terrifying than that of a hepatitis-riddled leftist with meth mouth.

And no, I’m not talking about the Sexual Harassment Panda.  (Sing it with me, people, “Don’t say that, don’t touch there. Don’t be nasty says the silly bear!”)  I’m talking about an apex predator from the age of the dinosaurs, with a mouth as big as Maxine Waters’ and skin as tough and scaly as… Maxine Waters’. 

Many soft-hearted lefties have pronounced themselves appalled and offended by the cruelty of conservatives who would subject the “undocumented” to such a place, and would even give it a hilarious name like “Alligator Alcatraz.”  (I would have also accepted “Sing-Sing in the Swamp,” but that is wordier, and many youngsters might not have heard of that northern prison.)

But since very few of them have expressed any regret or shame over Biden’s-open-border-enabled rape and murder of Jocelyn Nungaray, Laken Riley, or the myriad victims of illegals’ violence, we are not going to lose any sleep over their bruised feelings.

In fact, DeSantis has released a useful list of some of the delightful illegals whom Biden and the Dems invited into our country, and who are now at Alligator Alcatraz.  These Citizen-of-the-Year candidates include a Cuban convicted of sexual assault in Texas; a Honduran convicted of murder in Florida; a Guatemalan convicted of burglary, forced entry and voyeurism in Miami.  Another Cuban slit the throat of an old woman and then tried to burn her house down to destroy the evidence.

Yep, this group is like a United Nations gathering of terrible human beings.  (Coincidentally, many UN committees are actually a United Nations gathering of terrible human beings.  I hope Trump has got a team looking at the process for pulling out of the UN ASAP.) 

My favorite scumbag on the first list of detainees at AA – and one I hope will soon prove his machismo by trying his luck in the swamp – is a Honduran MS-13 member with a string of charges including assault, resisting arrest, RICO offenses and conspiracy to commit murder, called – and I swear I am not making this up – Oscar “Satan” Sanchez.

That’s who the Democrats are fighting for.  Drug traffickers, sex traffickers, human traffickers, gang bangers, wife-beaters like Cuddly Kilmar, and Satan!  (I couldn’t help by hearing Dana Carvey’s Church Lady voice just then.)

I’m trying to get a suggestion to Ron DeSantis.  (Maybe CO can reach out to him when he and the COW get back from Alaska, because I’ve heard that they have friends in high places.)  And that is: pay-per-view gladiator-style cage matches featuring the worst-of-the-worst in Alligator Alcatraz who are willing to get into the octagon with a gator, with a guarantee of freedom if they win. 

Trump is already friends with the MMA’s Dana White and Joe Rogan.  White can set up the matches, and Rogan can call them.  We can put the proceeds from the pay-per-view – which should bring in as much as the tariffs – toward hiring more ICE and border patrol bad-asses.

I can see it now.  A huge gator wriggles into the cage, while a graphics package lists his stats:  Length, 13 feet.

Weight, 1000 pounds.

Number of teeth: 80. 

Bite strength: 2,125 PSI. 

Record: 37-0 – 33-0 vs foreign criminals, 2-0 vs. dull-witted tourists taking selfies, 2-0 vs oblivious poodles.       

Then Satan Sanchez struts in, and his stats are listed:

Height: 5’ 9”

Weight: 185

Record: 9-1 – 3-0 vs children, 4-0 vs women, 2-0 vs senior citizens.  One loss to an ICE agent using the Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol (groin kick) followed by pepper spray.

Life Expectancy: 2 more minutes.

Then they throw to Joe Rogan with the call: “Our first bout tonight features The Gator vs. Satan.  In this corner, a slimy, dead-eyed, reptilian killer. 

In the other corner, an Alligator.  Let’s get ready to rummmmbllll—

Yow!  Ouch.  The gator just took off Satan’s right arm.  That’s going to be a problem for him, since he’s a rightie, and his right cross is his best mov—

Gah!  There goes the left arm.  And…down goes Satan!  Down goes Satan!!”

And, scene.

The second great Florida crime-fighting story is from a DeSantis interview with Dave Rubin on June 13.  (Before you can ask, I know: this story is over a month old.   And no, I’m not tired of winning.  But I am getting a little tired trying to keep up with writing about all of the winning!)

Rubin asked DeSantis about several recent stories from blue states wherein people whose cars were surrounded by violent protestors hit a few protestors in an effort to get away, and were subsequently charged with a crime.  

DeSantis said that Florida drivers “have a right to defend themselves” if they feel threatened.  “If you are driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety, and so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you.”

He further explained that, “You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets.  You have a right to defend yourself in Florida.”

A minute after I heard that on Rubin’s show, my wife walked through our dining room and stopped in her tracks, saying, “Are you re-enacting that Meg Ryan scene in the diner in When Harry Met Sally?”

And I said, “Maybe.” And ran a hand through my hair, while I tried to get my breathing back under control. 

In a recent email exchange with a lefty buddy, he said that he thinks conservatives don’t have as much empathy as leftists do.  I countered that both sides of the political divide have empathy; the difference is in who we empathize with. 

Many lefties seem to feel a lot more empathy for criminals than for cops, and “trans women” athletes than for their actual women competitors, and for illegals than citizens.

Meanwhile, we righties feel empathy for ICE agents being attacked by rioters, and people victimized by criminals.  And yes, alligators.

Because some day soon, God willing, some poor gator is going to have to pass chunks of Satan Sanchez in his stool.  And that seems like it would have to be uncomfortable.

In the meantime…   

“Satan” Sanchez/Gavin “Satan’s Helper” Newsom, 2028!

Hamas delenda est!

Three Tales, About Three Stooges (posted 7/18/25)

I missed a WAPO op-ed last week. 

Actually, I think I’ve missed every WA-PO op-ed since late May of 1972.  Because that’s when I turned 10, and officially became too wise and world-weary to trust anything I read in the WAPO. 

But I saw this opinion piece, one week late, because it made its way into my news feed as a great example of MSM imbecility.  You may have seen it too.  It’s the one titled, “I’m a clown.  Donald Trump is not one of us.”

It appeared over the picture of a guy in a bowler hat and a red nose, and my first thoughts were: “I thought Ted Kennedy was dead,” and, “Where’d he get that bowler hat?”

But no, the piece wasn’t written by the late drunken weather balloon from Massachusetts.  Its author is an actual clown named Tim Cunningham, and the op-ed is one long, unfunny joke to the effect that we shouldn’t call Trump a clown, because being a clown is a noble profession, and should be taken way more seriously than a fascist like Trump. 

I’ll bet that Jeff Bezos is just thrilled with his management team’s efforts to restore the Washington Post’s credibility. 

But I’ve got news for Mr. Cunningham.  Trump is not a fascist, and clowns are mostly not funny. 

How un-funny are clowns?

Three of the most famous clowns in the world were John Wayne Gacy, Jerry Lewis in that Holocaust movie (look it up), and that super-creepy guy who lived in a sewer and had a disturbing affinity for frightening children.

No, not Joe Biden (RIP).  Although if you’ve seen any of those photos of him sniffing the hair of traumatized kids, that’s an image that will stay with you.  Also, he did that one trick where he pulled a bowel movement out of his hat.

The Pope was expecting a rabbit, and was not pleased.

Also, rumors that Biden once tried to make a very simple balloon animal, and the secret service had to intervene because he nearly strangled himself have not been confirmed.  

I’d love to have been a fly on the wall at the WAPO editorial meeting when they came up with the idea of asking a leftist clown – of all people! – what he thinks about politics.  Because who needs a Marxist Abbott and Costello when we already have the comic stylings of Crockett and the Booty in congress? 

(Yes, I know: that would be a great name for a wacky FM “Morning Zoo” DJ team.  And in a sane world, that would be the most prestigious job that Jasmine and AOC could aspire to.)  

Speaking of beclowning oneself, did you catch Grandma Squanto’s attempt to dunk on Trump on Wednesday?  She tried to play the corruption card against Trump.  (By the way, have you ever seen a Democrat pack of cards?  All four queens are scowling gender feminists, so naturally, all four kings are suicide kings.  And the Jacks can all turn into Jills, somehow.  And there are still four suits, but diamonds are “corruption,” hearts are “weird sex stuff,” clubs are “sexism,” and “racism” is….  I’m not saying.)    

You could say that Lizzie’s attempt at a card trick blew up in her own face, as if someone had rigged her peace pipe with an exploding charge, like a Dakota (Sioux) Daffy Duck.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

In an X post, she presented a chart listing six entities and how much they donated to the Trump library.  Above the chart she wrote, “Government should work for the people, not whichever giant company or foreign government can dump the most money into the president’s future library.”

Never mind that most of the billionaires who donated in 2020 gave to the Democrats, or that Cackling Que Mala was given $2 billion to blow (phrasing) in a few months. 

Just look at Lizzie’s six categories.

She doesn’t even bother to try in the last one; the “Who” is “other special interests” and the amount listed is “unknown millions.”  Which is brilliant!  “I accuse you of taking…some money, from…somebody.” 

But the other five are hilarious.  See if you can spot the pattern:

Paramount/CBS News gave $16 million.  Meta gave $22 million. Disney/ABC News gave $15 million. X gave $10 million.  And Qatar gave $400 million (Jet)

The Qatari jet was not given to Trump, but to the United States, and if the gift ever does happen, the jet will act as Air Force One, and then go to his library.  He will never have any private use of it at all. 

(I still don’t think that he should accept the jet, but it is not personally enriching corruption like – oh, I don’t know – [begin Kinison filter] HAVING YOUR HOOKER-BANGING ADDICT SON COLLECT BAGS OF CASH FROM THE CHI-COMS!  OHH!  OHHHHH!  [end Kinison filter])

The remaining four examples were not bribes, happily given by fat cats wanting to buy Trump’s favor.  They were ALL lawsuit settlements, grudgingly handed over to their hated nemesis by corrupt MSM power players who had slandered him so blatantly that they stood to lose many millions more if they had gone to court, where Trump would have beaten them like Cuddly Kilmar beat his wife. 

If I thought Elizabeth Warren was capable of feeling shame, I might say, “Boy, is her face red!”  (#wemustneverstop)  But I’ll just leave it at, “Nice forked tongue, Lizzie.  (#mockingher)

Finally, Scott Jennings continues to be the only reason to ever watch CNN, and as of Tuesday, he has run his record to 147-0 in his battles against hapless leftist panelists.  The latest contender was Democrat Strategerist Julie Roginsky, with an attempted assist from host Abby Phillip. 

The on-screen chyron defined the topic this way: “The Debate: US Inflation Rises as Trump’s Tariffs Push Up Prices.”  That subject should offer Ragin’ Roginsky a chance to score at least a few minor points.  I mean sure, when Biden took Trump’s 1.5% inflation rate up to 9% in 14 months, CNN probably called that “a barely noticeable bump,” whereas an increase of .2% from May to June under Trump gets WWIII-level headlines.

So how does Roginsky kick aside a chance for a tiny victory and grab hold of defeat with both bony hands?  When Jennings suggests that the current small increase is no reason for panic, she says, “When we were promised on August 15th last year that the price of eggs, the price of bacon, of apples—”

Obviously at this point she was going to say, “would be down.”  But once he heard “eggs,” Jennings jumped in, as one does when an opponent makes a mistake.  Because of all the things she could cite, she chose the one grocery item that was hyped in the news before the election and inauguration, and that everyone knows has dropped in price. 

So Jennings says, “The price of eggs are down.”

If that segment had been a fencing competition, a little buzzer would have sounded, and a ref would have announced a strike.  Or a stab.  Or whatever they call it when one fencer skewers the other’s thorax.  (Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the fencing analogy, since I obviously don’t know much about it.) 

But apparently Roginsky’s thorax is as numb as her skull, because she offered a meaningless rebuttal.  “Year over year, eggs are up 27%.” 

Jennings shook his head as if he didn’t think she’d really said that, and replied, “Since he took office, they’re down.”

And Roginsky insisted, “Year over year!” 

Think about that.  Roginsky thought that she could score a point by saying that since last July 15th, egg prices have gone up.  But since Joe Biden was still the president for six more months – during which egg prices nearly doubled – she surely couldn’t be dumb enough to claim that Trump was responsible for the increase in egg prices when he had no ability to influence egg prices, could she?

Don’t call her Shirley.  But you can certainly call her dumb.  Because that IS what she was claiming.  And Jennings’ response was the only sane one: since Trump took office and had the chance to influence egg prices, they’ve gone down.  

This is the kind of dispute that could be solved in 5 seconds by looking up egg prices, which reporter Joe Concha did (but CNN didn’t).  And it turns out that the national average price of eggs (according to TradingEconomics) when Trump took office was around $6.60 a dozen.  Because Biden needlessly killed 4 million chickens in his last days in office – and because dead chickens lay surprisingly few eggs, for you city slickers out there – the price climbed to a little over $8 in the first week of March.  Since then, it has plunged to $2.89 this week. 

So Jennings was right.  But Abby Phillip – noticing that Roginsky had suffered a serious thorax poke – put that weird fencing strainer thing on her face and rushed in to help her slow-witted friend.

To wit, “Let’s not fight over statistics here.”  Oh good, maybe Abby knows a chicken’s hind-end from a hole in the ground—  “She’s right, year over year, they’re up significantly.”

Good lord! 

Since a good thorax-piercing apparently cuts off blood flow to the brain, Roginsky stepped on the same rake again, in this quote which I could not make up, no matter how much bourbon I drank:

“Let’s be clear.  He promised three things: the price of eggs, bacon and apples were going to go down.  I can quote him, it was on August 15th of last year…. All of them are up.  They’re up year over year, and that’s a fact.” 

Yes it is.  An utterly irrelevant fact. 

As she pushed on and doubled down on the year-over-year thing, Jennings was finally exasperated enough to say, “You are literally lying—”

And then the tide of imbecility rose up all around the table, with several people saying, “Whoa!” and Abby jumped in again, unknowingly taking another skinny fencing sword in the soup-strainer mask: 

Abby:  Before you accuse her of lying, I literally just went over this.  She is correct that year over year—

Scott (speaking slowly and emphatically): Since Donald Trump took office, what’s happened to the eggs?

Abby: Oh my god, do you not understand—   

After more insane crosstalk that lasted for the longest minute of your life, Abby accused Jennings of derailing the conversation, and ended it this way: “I think people have the ability to understand the difference between the price of eggs today and the price of eggs a year ago today. Versus what you would prefer to talk about, which is the price of eggs when Donald Trump was inaugurated.  You’re just talking about two different time horizons.”

YES!  He “would prefer to talk about” the relevant time horizon, rather than one that holds Trump responsible for what Biden did as president.

Whatever else you can say about that segment, it’s clear that Jennings foiled them again.  (Boom!  Late, game-saving proper fencing reference.  Because I looked it up, and a fencing stick is called a “foil.”) 

Whatever CNN is paying Scott Jennings, it’s not enough.

And whatever they’re paying Julie Roginsky and Abby Phillip, it’s way too much.

So… 

Roginsky/Phillip, 2028!

Also,

Hamas delenda est!

Florida vs. Blue States — It’s a Rout!(posted 7/16/25)

Today’s hump-day column will be a Florida-centric one, starting with a little gushing over the founder of the CO Nation feast himself, the great and powerful CO, who has been doing an excellent job curating and commenting on an interesting variety of stories lately.

As I’ve started writing more columns, I’ve taken less time to comment on the stories and columns – and the comments – here, but everybody has been hitting the ball hard lately!  The COSIE’s offerings have been great – and not just because of the awesome Aussie pics – and Christopher Silber keeps breaking down economics and Chinese history in columns that make me feel smarter after reading each one.  The Correspondent for Thinly Researched Conspiracy Theories doesn’t write often enough for my taste, but each posting is a gem. 

In an online world that sometimes seems to consist mainly of Temu ads, porn, and fighting characterized by the bad manners born of keyboard courage, this site continues to be a refuge, with the comforting ambience of a virtual corner pub.  I’m very grateful for the opportunity to hang out here and crack wise!

I have one more request of CO, and that is for him to post a review of the Elvis Costello concert he went to a few days ago.  I’ve been a huge fan of Elvis since the “My Aim is True” days, but have never seen him live.  So please assuage my jealousy, and allow me to live vicariously through your account of the evening.

Okay, since I’m a “count your blessings” kind of optimist, CO’s recent post about the amazing roll that Florida is on lately got me thinking. 

You remember the bullet points: The #1 economy for the third consecutive year; #1 in new business formation; fewest state workers, lowest per capita debt, second-lowest per capita spending, law-and-order policies; lowest in-state tuition; no state income tax, etc. 

Fortunately for us, we don’t take all of this for granted, because televisions and computers exist.  And each day we can use them to check on how things are going in the blue cities and states in this great nation.  And… yikes!

Comparing Florida to blue states is enlightening, and allows for some healthy, Nelson Muntzian “Ha-Ha!” gloating, with a side of soul-restoring in-your-face-y “I told you so!”

For example, I lived in my beloved home state of Illinois for my first 24 years, and have been in Florida for the last 39.  Florida’s financial success and growth is the mirror opposite of what’s been going on in Illinois.  They’ve got a state income tax and higher property taxes, but their infrastructure is deteriorating.  They’ve got a greedy D-irigible for governor, and we’ve got a lean, mean D-Santis.

They’ve welcomed in hordes of illegals, and they’ve spent $2.5 billion – with a “b” as in “bonehead” – on them in the last three years, and their state debt is amongst the worst in the nation.  Chicago public schools just announced that they’re staring at a shortall of $750 million (with an “m” as in “moron”), and will have to make deep cuts to their already atrocious system. 

Florida grabs our illegals and flies them to Martha’s Vineyard.  And then we laugh and laugh at the rich white liberals panicking and giving the noble brown folks the bum’s rush right off of their precious island.

The most obvious counterpart to Florida is California, and there too, the big picture is obvious.  Florida is economically health and vibrant, while California is stagnant and covered in feces and the bodies of homeless people, some of whom may have actually been dead since February.

Florida cops fight crime; California cops fight for their lives.   Florida is building; California watches their buildings burn down.  

Florida’s main immigrant group is plucky Cubans who came legally, and will punch you in the face if you say something nice about communism.  California’s main immigrant group is (mostly) entitled Mexicans who came illegally, and will punch you in the face if you say something nice about America.

We prepare for hurricanes, and when one knocks a bridge down, we rebuild it in 72 hours.

Californians drain their reservoirs and allow homeless addicts to make campfires among their native kindling plants, and when entire zip codes burn to the ground (unexpectedly!), they issue permits to rebuild…to the great-grandchildren of the owners, just in time for the tri-centennial celebrations in 2076.   

Both states have a Disney park.  When covid hit, Florida’s Disney World closed for less than 4 months, and re-opened to a blizzard of headlines along the lines of “Reckless Red State Re-opens ‘Disney Dachau’ Despite Raging Epidemic that Will Kill Us All!” 

Meanwhile, CA’s Disneyland was closed for over a year, while they watched people enjoying Florida’s Disney World, and waited for the pile of bodies stacked up like cordwood that never materialized.

Both states took on an ambitious high-speed train project.  Florida built the Brightline to connect Miami and Orlando (with a stop near the CO compound and world headquarters).  The project broke ground in mid-2014, with a few parts of the route opening in 2018 and the entire line being finished by September of 2023.  It was largely privately financed, and cost $6 billion.

California’s high-speed rail project was talked about since the 1990s, and was approved by voters in 2008, with the goal of linking San Francisco and Los Angeles by 2020 for an estimated cost of $33 billion.  But CA politicians all held their hands out, and CA environmental activists all stuck their feet out, and it was decided that Phase 1 would join the small inland towns of Bakersfield and Merced, neither of which most Californians had ever heard of, except for those who had heard the song “Streets of Bakersfield.” (Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam did it best.) 

By the time Trump took office this year – five years after the line was supposed to have been completed – the estimated cost had ballooned to $128 billion, with an estimated completion sometime in the 2030s.  At this point, a grand total of zero feet of track has been laid, for the low, low price of… wait for it… $7 billion dollars!

So if you’re counting on your abacus at home, that sums up the difference between the prudent, conservative governance in Florida and the Marxist/Leninist Schiff-show that is Democrat rule in California:

The citizens of Florida got a high-tech train joining thriving population centers in 9 years and at the cost of $6 billion dollars.

Meanwhile, the likes of Haircut Newsom and Big Mouth Bass took 17 years and only one billion more dollars to provide Californians with no tracks laid between two towns that nobody wants to go to anyway.

Newsom/Mamdani, 2028!  

Also…

Hamas delenda est!

Our Lefties Are Loopy, but the Finns and Germans Have Lost It! (posted 7/14/25)

To start your week off on an upbeat note, I’ll recount how two girls under the age of 14 have applied the Simpson Gender Confirming Protocol™ to a surprised volunteer on the Fourth of July.  The girls were swimming at the Little Platte Swim Beach in Missouri and waiting for the fireworks to start when a strange man swam up to them.

After asking them inappropriate questions, he allegedly groped them and tried to remove part of their swimming suits.  They administered a SGCP™ maneuver to him (i.e. kicked him in the groin), then got out of the water and alerted their parents.  The groper had apparently been identified by the SGCP™ as an intact male, because the police were able to catch him as he limped toward the parking lot a short time later.     

The miscreant – one Carlos Climaco-Garcia – only had identification from Guatemala, and was found with someone with an ICE detainer.  So the police reported that “the suspect’s citizenship status is unknown.”

Because of course they did.  (I’m sure that his great-great-great-great abuelo and abuela came over on the Mayflower.)

Sure, technically this creep wasn’t claiming to be a female trapped in a male body when he underwent the procedure – the primary test subjects for which I’d invented the SGCP™.  But the salutary effect the procedure had in this case is a testament to the incredible versatility of the SGCP™.  Is there anything it can’t do?

It slices, it dices, it determines gender, it dissuades descendants of pilgrims who celebrate Independence Day by groping pre-teen girls. 

It’s going to be tough to work that into my Nobel prize acceptance speech, but I accept the challenge.  

Speaking of immigration-related foolishness, I’m beginning to suspect that Trump has planted a bunch of undercover agents in the leftist “peaceful riots” movement to discredit all leftist efforts to fight deportation.  The only alternative is that that movement is littered with poor souls with  Crockettian levels of intelligence.  (Yes, I have turned Jasmine Crockett’s name into an adjective indicating barely detectable levels of brain activity.)

In every anti-ICE protest story, MSM and Democrat commenters describe ICE acting like the  Gestapo, terrorizing blameless citizens, and arresting Gandhi-esque peaceful protestors for no reason at all. 

And then video comes out, and it shows that the ICE officers were arresting a bunch of illegals and showing great restraint while violent mobs of protestors screamed and interfered and attacked them.   

To pick just one example, we can look at the case of Jonathan Caravello.  He is a Cal State Channel Islands (?) professor and a member of “an anti-racism, social justice union” which is now claiming that he was “kidnapped” for no reason by federal agents last Thursday, during a peaceful protest of an illegal raid by fascists. 

Alternatively, he was “protesting” at the raid on the Glass House pot farm, where a lot of illegals were found.  A US Attorney says that Caravello “was arrested for throwing a tear gas canister at law enforcement” and is charged with “assaulting, resisting or impeding certain officers or employees.”   

Customs and Border Protection officials said that 10 of the illegals found there were juveniles, and 8 of those were unaccompanied minors.  Oddly enough, the Glass House corporation has been “hit with multiple wage and labor law complaints in recent years,” and the president and co-founder has donated many thousands of dollars to Democrats in CA, including $10K to Ken-Doll Newsom. 

Unexpectedly! 

While we’ve all been told that you can’t judge a book by its cover, we’ve all also noticed that you can very often judge a book by its cover.  And if you’ll look up Caravello’s faculty photo – the official one, that he posed for, knowing it would go on the university’s website! – you’ll see what looks like the cover of a book entitled, “Nightmare Journals: What if Charles Manson and A Crazy Karen from Libs of Tik-Tok Had a Baby?”

He’s got the wildly unbrushed long hair, the sad attempt at a beard.  And the eyes.  Always the crazy eyes.  And again, this was an official photo!  You just know that the photographer had to say something like, “Hey Jon, would you like to borrow a comb before I take this professional picture?”

And Caravello said, “No, no, I’m good.  I’m going for the Jim Ignatowski from Taxi look.”  And damned if he didn’t nail it!

He also has a pic on a CSU-associated Instagram page, a self-dramatizing shot of him posing with a fist upraised and a somber expression.  (By the way, in that photo he’s got a SFPI™ [Simpson Face Punchability Index] rating of 93 out of 100.)

But before you conclude that the US of A is the most screwed up country when it comes to dealing with immigration, I’ve got to stop you right there.  Because the nations of Finland and Germany exist, and they have been making complete fools of themselves on this subject. 

I can’t say that I’ve thought a lot about the Finns during my life – around here, when you discuss the Finns, you’re talking about the Miami Dolphins – but what thoughts I’ve had have been positive.  I like Scandinavian types, and I love the fact that plucky little Finland kicked some Soviet arse in the Winter War. 

And I find a lot to like about Germany too, despite their…oh, let’s call it “uneven performance” in the 20th century.  But both Germany and Finland have in recent years decided that it would be a great idea to welcome a large group of Islamic immigrants into their countries.  And things have not gone swimmingly. 

Unexpectedly!

Finland’s population is one of the oldest in Europe, and whiter than Liz Warren. #wemustneverstopmockingher  (The white part is irrelevant; I just couldn’t pass up a chance to mock the Albino Apache.)  The majority (70%) of Islamic asylum seekers in Finland, on the other hand, are male and under 35, and they come from cultures who believe that foreign women who reveal more than their eyes are infidel harlots who are there for the taking. 

Thus, a story in the liberal Helsinki Times that tried to downplay migrant crime, had to admit that “Certain nationalities…have been disproportionately represented in specific crime categories.  Iraqi and Somali men, for example, appear more frequently as suspects in sexual and drug-related offenses.” 

Odottamatta!  (That’s Finnish for “Unexpectedly!”) (Research!)

So what have the Finns done to combat the (migrant) sex assault crisis?  The town of Oulu spent 2.5 million euros to make the strangest video you’ve ever seen.  As soon as you’re done reading this column, look it up – search for “Finland no-no video” – because I’m not sure I can do it justice with a verbal description. 

But I’ll try. 

Five Finns stand in what looks like a hallway – three women in front, and two men behind – and they gyrate and gesture to what sounds like a $4 synthesizer.  They have grimly serious looks on their faces and never open their mouths, but a voice-over song repeats these lyrics, which I swear to you I am not making up: “Stop, don’t touch me there/This is my no-no square.”

It’s tough to pick which element of the video is more amateurish.  The music is terrible, the lyrics are a joke, and I could “dance” as well as these people do.  (And that comparison is not even damning with faint praise.  It’s just damning!) 

But the choreography.  Good lord, the choreography!  When they say, “Stop,” they hold a hand up to the camera, palm out.  When they say, “Don’t touch me there,” they cross their arms in an “X.”  When they say, “This is,” they point at their hips, and then they gesture vaguely at their thorax as they say, “my no-no square.”  Then they hold both arms out to their sides, bent at the elbow with their forearms hanging down, and gyrate back at forth. 

If you haven’t seen the great South Park’s parody of this very type of misguided liberal insanity, you have to find and watch the episode where the school has a mascot come to visit the children and sing a song to teach them about sexual harassment.

Search “Sexual Harassment Panda song,” and behold some satirists putting the Finns to shame.  But trigger warning: that stupid song is an earworm, and you may find yourself humming it to yourself for several days.  

I’ll try to paint the picture:  A guy in a panda suit stands in class and does a minimalist jig, while singing in a voice muffled by a panda costume head, accompanied by what sounds like a middle-school quartet recording of a circus merry-go-round soundtrack.

The immortal lyrics:

“Who lives in the east ‘neath a willow tree?  Sexual harassment… panda

Who explains sexual harassment to you and me? Sexual harassment… panda

Don’t say that! Don’t touch there!

Don’t be nasty says the silly bear.

He’s come to tell you what’s right and wrong. Sexual harassment… panda.”

The Finns could have saved themselves 2.5 million euros and had a better product if they’d just dubbed over those lyrics in Finnish.  If they wanted to make it a little more relatable to their Finnish audience, they could have used AI to sub-in a native Finnish animal, producing the same video about the “Sexual Harassment… Reindeer.”

Germany has the same problem – an increasing rate of sexual crimes, and a rate of violent crimes committed by foreigners that is 400% higher than that of native Germans – but they’ve reacted even more stupidly than the Finns, if that is possible.

The Germans have created a series of cartoon “Don’t touch me there” educational posters depicting gropers at public swimming pools, an environment that has proved problematic for interactions between Islamic males and scantily clad German women and girls.

It’s sad enough that a country would even have to create a campaign to explain to people that sexual assault is bad.  But it’s infuriating that the German posters actually cast the Germans as the villains and the foreign immigrants as the victims!

I’m not making that up.  One poster shows two white boys shoving a brown girl into a pool.  Another shows a white boy grabbing the butt of a brown girl as they’re both floating in the pool.  A third shows a white guy in swim trunks going into a women’s locker room to peep at a brown woman in a towel. 

And best of all, a fourth poster shows a large white woman with red hair floating in a pool behind a brown male, who is for some reason missing his lower leg!  He’s got a peg leg there, presumably from being blown off in a peaceful suicide bombing or by an IED, I guess? 

And the redhead is grabbing his butt with both hands! 

So it’s not just male Germans who are vile, groping offenders.  Female Europeans also cannot be trusted around Muslim males, who are apparently stereotypically known for being sexually preyed upon by infidel women!  (Oh, won’t someone think of the Muslim males?!  Where is their “Me Too” campaign?)

Bah! The slow-motion suicide of much of the European West should be a powerful warning to us.  Our elite leftists are as reflexively dishonest as the Europeans – they refer to illegal immigrants as “immigrants” or “undocumented migrants;” they call legal arrests “kidnapping” or “disappearing innocent people;” they call men “women,” and gender-denying mutilations “gender-affirming treatment.”

But most Americans see through those lies, and reject them. 

Not the Europeans.  Throughout much of the EU, members of groups who disproportionately prey on European women are not only not chastised, they are cast as victims.  And a public “education” campaign that is supposed to decrease sexual harassment cannot even honestly identify the source of the problem.    

One bit of good news: after sustained backlash and public pressure, the idiotic German posters were removed and an apology issued.  So maybe there’s hope for Europe yet.

Speaking of how we can often judge books by their covers, I found a picture of the German woman who created the public service posters in Germany, and she looks exactly as you would expect her to:

Large very white lady, wearing a childish black-and-green horizontally striped sweatshirt (and those stripes are NOT slimming).  Round, large glasses, unhinged smile.  And her dark hair is dyed bright green. 

Because of course it is. 

Rumors that she is the white lefty lady who would have had carnal knowledge of Charlie Manson and produced California kidnapping victim Professor Jonathan Caravello have not been confirmed.

Hamas delenda est!

I See Some Bad Things on the Horizon for the Dems (posted 7/11/25)

Yes, faithful readers, your eyes are not deceiving you: you are reading my fifth consecutive daily column.

I know: a five-column week is an impressive achievement.  It’s like shooting under 60 in one round of a golf tournament, or throwing back-to-back no-hitters in the MLB.  Or the Bears drafting a quarterback who doesn’t rip the hearts out of Bears fans and stomp on them with inexplicably sharp cleats by the time Halloween rolls around and we’re eliminated from the playoffs.

Would I be able to do this if I weren’t semi-retired?  No. 

Would I be able to do it without your faithful readership, which I might even describe as verging on adoration, if my instinctive modesty didn’t restrain me?  No. 

Would I be able to do it if I didn’t have the strength of ten men, because my heart is pure?  No way.

Okay, enough of that.  It’s Friday, baby, so where my narwhals at?

Today I’m focusing on some escalating bad behavior from mainstream Dems in the congress and the MSM that is not going to end well for them.  I’m talking about their increasingly unhinged and violent rhetoric aimed at ICE agents who are just doing their jobs and enforcing our immigration laws.

The Dems are in such an impenetrable bubble that they really do seem to think that the public is on their side, and that the Cuddly Kilmar doll is going to be a big seller this Christmas.  (You pull a string on his back, and he says, “MS-13 forever, homes!” and “My old lady had that beating coming, your honor.”)  (Unregistered car filled with illegals he was caught trafficking sold separately.)

Many Democrats are in the throes of anger, and convinced that it’s the righteous kind.  Axios interviewed a dozen Democrat House members who anonymously reported that their voters are getting more and more heated.  One said that, “our own base is telling us that there needs to be blood to grab the attention of the press and the public.” 

Another reported that his constituents are saying that “civility isn’t working” and to prepare for “violence…to fight to protect our democracy.”  A third said that “people online have sent me crazy sh*t, told me to storm the White House and stuff like that.” 

(Because insurrection is (D)ifferent when they do it.)  

Of course, this is the predictable result of Democrat elites ramping up hatred on their side in recent years.  By last November, their supporters didn’t think Trump could ever win, or that if he did, it would be through some illegitimate trickery.  So when he swept the swing states, won the popular vote, and beat Que Mala in the electoral college like Kilmar tuning up his wife because she looked at him wrong, they didn’t know what to do.  

The same boneheads telling them to “fight for democracy” – until democracy worked, and swept Trump into a second presidential term – have now gone back to the Extremist Handbook of Inflammatory Slogans and recycled “Conservatives are Nazis and ICE is the Gestapo!” 

They have no idea that they’re racing down F**k-Around Street with the pedal to the metal, and they’re fast approaching Find-Out Avenue.  And that intersection is strewn with spike strips and Jersey barriers, and both sides of the cross street are lined with empty prison buses.  The seat belts in those buses come with complementary handcuffs, and in front of each bus is a squad of Homan’s Heroes®.  And those guys are there to do calligraphy and jail rioters.

And they’re all out of fountain pens.

Okay, that got a little weird at the end.  Annnndddd…I’m pushing away the glass of Knob Creek 9 until I finish this column.

Anyway, the lefty activists have been asking for trouble, and now they’re starting to get it.  More and more stories are coming out about imbeciles interfering with ICE and getting arrested or worse.     

On Tuesday four morons were caught after they put out devices that spiked the tires of ICE vehicles.  Their mugshots send the clear, non-verbal message we’ve all come to expect in these situations: “My prospects for ever having sexual congress with a decent woman are slim and none, and slim has left the building.”

A day earlier, at a Border Patrol station in McAllen, TX, an idiot armed himself and dressed up in tactical gear and attacked border patrol agents and local police.  He managed to wound one of them before they shot him a lot, and he quickly took the pavement temperature challenge.  Because: Texas.

Or, as a Breitbart story put it, “Cops Neutralize Attacker.” 

I love the use of the term “neutralized” here.  You almost never hear it outside of thriller novels or movies, or IDF after-action reports, which regular readers know are my favorites.   “We neutralized that Hezbollah leader’s eyes and hands in our pager attack three weeks ago.  And we just neutralized the rest of him with a missile strike on a goat pen where he was having a conjugal visit.  Shalom, and thank you for your attention to this matter.”

Ten radical freaks ambushed an ICE facility on the Fourth of July, wounding one agent before escaping, frustratingly un-shot.  But they were soon arrested, and their chances of being home in time to find a Cuddly Kilmar under their Christmas tree are not good.

Just yesterday a Texas Constable arrested a 22-year-old Mensa member named Serio Olivares (tragically, an American citizen), whose dad owns a business where ICE agents arrested some illegals.  As the agents were about to leave, Serio arrived and confronted them, damaging one of their cars.  When they left, he pursued them, driving recklessly, until they stopped and arrested him. 

The local “liberal Democrat district attorney’s office” would not press any more serious charges than misdemeanor traffic violations, so the constable is contacting the Feds to bring more serious interference with federal agents charges. 

My favorite part of the story is that Serio is a serial offender.  Unexpectedly! 

Because last November, he was charged with interfering with an officer’s public duties – sound familiar? – but that charge was later dismissed, in a deal in which he pled to one felony charge.  In March he was given diversion after cocaine possession and unlawful carrying of a gun – C’mon, Texas!  You’re letting me down here – on the condition that he not commit another crime within one year.

Right now Serio is staring intently at a calendar, trying to do some basic calculations.  I’d love to be there when he figures out that from March to July is four months.  And I’d REALLY love to be there 10 minutes later, when he realizes that four months is less than one year.  

Which means that he can still serve two years on the earlier coke charge, in addition to whatever sentence the Feds are going to give him for his latest stunt.

To paraphrase the Captain in Cool Hand Luke, “What we’ve got here is a failure to cogitate.”    

If the Dems keep this up, one of their unstable foot-soldiers is eventually going to kill an ICE agent, and they are not going to enjoy what comes next.

In the meantime, I’m praying for our cops, border patrol and ICE agents, and bracing for more winning, and the lefty activist tantrums that come with it.

Hamas delenda est!

Tucker Goes Off the Rails, & Jamaal Bowman Thinks the N-word Causes Obesity? (posted 7/10/25)

As enjoyable as it is to make fun of leftists when they beclown themselves, we also need to call balls and strikes on our side too.  And I have to do that now with Tucker Carlson, who has sadly joined Jonah Goldberg as one of my formerly favorite voices on the right who has gone off the rails.

Within the last year I’ve written about Tucker doing some inexplicably bad interviews.  He talked with a weirdo named Darryl Cooper – Carlson called him “the best and most honest popular historian” – who claimed that Churchill (not Hitler) was the chief villain of WWII, and that the Nazis killed millions of POWs out of pity, to save them from starving to death.

Because the Nazis were known for nothing more than their humanitarian compassion for the sub-human untermenschen.

Tucker also did a shockingly sycophantic interview with Putin, in which he praised the magnificence of a Soviet Potemkin subway station, and the cleanliness and great prices in a similarly phony Moscow grocery store. 

His recent debate/interview with Ted Cruz was another low point.  He used cheap gotcha questions, bad faith arguments and ad hominem attacks in the service of a utopian, anti-war stance that he contradicted a few minutes later.  When he asked Cruz what Iran’s population is and Cruz admitted he didn’t know, Carlson adopted an exaggerated astonishment, asking how Cruz could justify going to war with Iran when he doesn’t even know the population.

The debate was about the wisdom and risks of Trump potentially striking Iran’s nuke facilities, and Cruz asked the obvious question of what difference it would make, in that context, whether Iran’s population is 80, 90 or 100 million?  Carlson snapped, “If you don’t know anything about the country—” and when Cruz objected, Carlson asked what the ethnic breakdown of Iran was.

Cruz (correctly) answered that it is Persian and mostly Shia, but then refused to play Tucker’s game further.  Carlson accused Cruz of not believing that Iran has tried to kill Trump – a pretty well-established fact, I think – or else he would have supported going to war with Iran beforehand.  Eventually Cruz got Tucker to reveal how dishonest he was being, when Tucker said that if HE believed that Iran had tried to kill Trump, he’d support nuking Tehran!

This following months of Tucker virtue signaling about how he was against even one person ever dying in a war, and calling people “warmongers” and “ghouls” if they supported Israel’s strikes to take out Iran’s nukes and top military personnel. 

Hey Tucker, around 9 million people live in Tehran.  Even my weak, English professor math tells me that that’s roughly 9 million times the one single person you would never want to see die in a war.  

Tucker’s rhetorical games avoided the real issues that the debate should have focused on:  Has Iran been sponsoring terrorist attacks on Israel, America and her allies throughout the Middle East for years?  (Yes!)  Are the Iranian weird beards racing to get a nuclear weapon?  (Yes again!)  Are they likely to use such a bomb to dominate the region and threaten our allies and interests?  (Hell yes!)    

Tucker ignored the (glowing) elephant in the room, instead arguing that Cruz’s position is corrupt and evil because he doesn’t know that Iranians’ favorite food is chelo kebab, and that their top three turns-ons are moonlit walks in the desert, a well-defined unibrow (on a man or woman), and paying others to murder Jews.

Oddly enough, Carlson’s breathless predictions of the resulting apocalypse if Trump struck Iran’s nuclear sites – A forever war! An American ground invasion with mountains of casualties! Russian and China jumping in on Iran’s side! – were quickly proven to be ridiculous hysteria.

Unexpectedly!

But Carlson’s cage-match interview with Ted Cruz looks even worse when compared to the obsequious tongue-bath he just gave to Iran’s president, a man whose name is not even worth my time to look up, since he’s a powerless puppet of the radical ayatollahs who actually rule Iran.  

Carlson went after Cruz hammer and tongs, like Thor after drinking a flagon of mead dosed with cocaine and meth.  (Mmmm, meth-mead…)  But when he talked with Mahmoud the Grouch (on-point puppet reference), Tucker sounded like Oprah interviewing Que Mala.  No follow-ups, no challenges.  Just a series of questions with no pushback whatsoever, no matter how outrageous the lies being spouted.

There are a dozen examples, but I’ll just cite two that made me shake my head so hard I was in danger of becoming self-concussed.  (In the commentary business, we call this, “Pulling a Crockett.”) 

When the prez claimed that Iran has never and is not now trying to build a nuclear bomb – only clean, green, oh-so-civilian nuclear power – Tucker was silent.  He didn’t ask, “Why would the world’s most oil-rich nation need nuclear power?”  Or “Why have you already enriched uranium to the 60% range when civilian use only requires 3-5%?” or even, “Who buries a civilian power plant hundreds of yards under a freaking mountain?!”

Later, Tucker did manage to ask him what’s up with the constant “death to America” chants. 

And Jihadi Lambchop (puppet reference for the over-60 crowd, and Shari Lewis enthusiasts) says that it doesn’t mean “Death to America.”  Don’t be silly.  It really means death to “crimes, to killing and carnage, to insecurity and stability… [and to] “bullying.”

Got that?  “Death to bullying.”  Because who amongst us, when we see bullying going on – or insecurity, too! – doesn’t race up behind the bullying, pull its head back, and cut its head off with our scimitar, while screaming, “Death to bullying!?”

If that doesn’t make you say, “WTF?” or “You’ve got to be Schiff-ing me!” that’s because you’re not Tucker Carlson.  Who just nodded and moved on.   

Watching this made me miss the old Tucker I thought I knew.  But on the bright side, it also taught me something about the Iranian president:  If Jeff Dunham ever fires him from his gig as Achmed the Dead Terrorist’s sidekick (and there’s the puppet reference hat-trick, my narwhals!), his skill at torturing the language qualifies him to land a tenured position at Harvard as the new occupant of the Bill Clinton Chair for Post-Modern Deconstructionist Prevaricating. 

That job comes with a six-figure salary, all the interns you can grope, and some sweet stationery with an embossed illustration from the Kama Sutra under the position’s Latin motto: “Pendeat ex quid significat ‘est’ ‘est’.” 

(In English: “It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ ‘is’.”)

Rather than leaving you on that down note, I’ll close with my favorite comedy story from the last week in June.  (I know that was last month.  I’m mocking as fast as I can!)

You might remember Jamaal Bowman from that time when he was the congressman who pulled a fire alarm to prevent a House vote that the Democrats were going to lose.  When it turned out that his devious act was caught on camera, his defense was – did I mention that he was a former school principal? – “I don’t know how fire alarms work.”    

So he lost his next election – unexpectedly! – and has now been reduced to selling his blood, collecting cans, and appearing on CNN panels.

In his most recent CNN appearance, he announced that he’s made a breakthrough medical discovery that might hurt my chances of getting the Nobel Prize for Medicine (for my Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol™ – see yesterday’s column). If he edges me out, I’m going to be at the end of my rope.  Especially after I’ve been runner-up for People Magazine’s Sexiest Man of the Year for the last 20 years running!

(George Clooney?  I get it.  Chris Hemsworth?  Understood.  But John Krasinski?  Now you’re just rubbing salt in my wounds, People Magazine!)

Where was I?  Oh yeah.

Jamaal Bowman has discovered the cause of heart disease, cancer, diabetes and obesity in the African-American community.  And he rushed straight from the laboratory to CNN to explain, in this quote which I swear to you I am not making up:

“You can’t be calm about this! I’m a black man in America! The reason why heart disease and cancer and obesity and diabetes are bigger in the black community is because of the stress we carry from having to deal with being called the N-word directly or indirectly every day.”

And before you can ask: No, he is not talking about the word “narwhal.”  But the fine people at COOSP (the Cautious Optimism Office of Standards and Practices) have asked me to proceed as if he is.

Sure, at first glance this quote would appear to suggest that Jamaal Bowman is a race-hustling, imbecilic grifter.  At second glance, too.  But if you hang in there long enough, at around glance number 147 or so, Bowman’s theory starts to make sense.

So I’ve spent the last 3 weeks researching his claims.  I decided that heart disease is tougher to quantify quickly, so I focused on cancer, diabetes and obesity.  I found 1000 black volunteers and exposed them to various sources of n-word exposure, and calculated how much each exposure would increase tumors, blood sugar levels, and weight gain.

Here are my preliminary results, adjusted per capita:

Reading Huckleberry Finn (one of the main characters is named “Narwhal Jim,” so…) – 1 tumor, a 10 mg/dl increase in blood sugar, and 4 pounds of added weight. 

Watching Pulp Fiction’s “dead narwhal storage” scene –  2 tumors, 15 mg of blood sugar, 10 extra pounds

Watching Richard Pryor “Live on the Sunset Strip” – 5 tumors, 30 mg blood sugar, 30 pounds

Watching any Dave Chappell Netflix Special – 6 tumors, 70 mg, 50 pounds

My research found a little good news, because as with many medical conditions, some people are more susceptible than others.  Sure, for bitter racial hypochondriacs like Joy Reid or Whoopi Goldberg, just hearing a conversation about the west African nation of Niger is close enough to cause a skin rash and 5 pounds of weight gain.

Meanwhile, role model and great man Clarence Thomas – who has been called a “house narwhal” by half the malevolent leftists in academia and the MSM thousands of times – is still strong like bull.

Anyway, I’ve got bad news and worse news for Jamaal Bowman.

The bad news is that even though Hippocratic-oath-related concerns forced me to cut my final test short, that one produced the highest rate of TVNE (Toxic Verbal Narwhal Exposure), which resulted from listening to a complete album by any rapper other than Kid Rock. 

To wit: head-to-toe metastatic cancer, more sugar than a super-sized Mountain Dew/ice cream float, and weight class: Pritzker. 

The worse news is the Recommended Course of Treatment: spend more time around white people.

I can hear Jamaal now: The cure is worse than the disease!

Hamas delenda est!

The BBB, U Penn Bends the Knee, + The Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol is Born (posted 7/9/25)

I’m trying to make this a five-column week, so I didn’t have time to respond to all of your kind words about yesterday’s column, but thank you all.   I was especially glad that the narwhal references went over well.

A little bourbon had been consumed before that word popped into my mind, and sometimes the brownest of the brown liquors can cause me to over-estimate how well a running joke is going to play.  But now I’m toying with the idea of starting every column with, “Where my narwhals at?”  

Anyway, this is my third column in three days, and still I’m running like Tom Cruise across the roof of a skyscraper in Mission Impossible 17.  Because lately there is both too much winning, and too much news.

So I still need to circle back – like Jen Psaki, only intelligently – to some recent stories.

Even though Trump blasting the Iranian nukes feels like it happened years ago, I’m still reveling in it.  Israel’s accomplishment of taking out or crippling Iran’s proxies (Hezbollah, Hamas, Assad, and the Houthis) and then destroying their air defenses and systematically launching surprise attacks that decapitated their military leaders and scientists and heavily damaged their nuke sites was really amazing. 

Then Trump’s surprise, bloodless strike to take out the rest of their nukes was another masterstroke.  In a sane world, Bibi and Trump would be sharing a Nobel Peace prize.  In this world, they’ll probably both be lucky if they aren’t impeached!

I saw a couple of good, funny posts about the Iranian mission shortly after it happened.  One said, “Democrats are okay with Iran having a nuke.  But they won’t let you have a gun.”

And the other said, “Now that Iran is out of business, there are only 3 Islamic countries with nukes left:  Pakistan, France and the UK.”

Both, sadly, receive the designation of “Fact Check: true.”

The passage of the Big Beautiful Bill was necessary, and mostly a blessing, though it is still hard to tolerate how fiendishly difficult it is to pass an actually fiscally conservative bill that will cut our bloated federal government’s spending!   (Sadly, the BBB isn’t that, though it does nibble at the edges at least.)  

On the plus side, the extra funds for border enforcement are much needed and will pay big dividends, and the extension of the tax cuts will fend off economic damage that would likely have screwed us in the mid-terms.  Enforcing work requirements for Medicaid and denying it to  illegals are beneficial as well.

One other great aspect of the BBB passing: watching the impotent rage and pointless theatrics of the leftists, inside and outside of congress.  Hakeem Jeffries’ marathon speech was probably the most Democrat thing to happen that week.  It didn’t even rise to the level of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  It was basically empty talking points and hypocrisy, signifying less than nothing.

The word coming out of Democrat circles was that Jeffries hadn’t let the other Dems know he was going to blather on for so long, so the smarter Dems were not happy.   But that just provided an added bonus: watching Marcy Kaptur (D-Who Cares?) falling asleep behind him.  (Which was also my strategy after Biden got elected: take a bunch of Benadryl and hope that when I wake up, Biden’s term will be over.)

The Dems had to get her out of there, so they replaced her with – I swear I’m not making this up – a male who thinks he’s a female, Tim/Sara McBride (D-‘oh!).  Thus the lefties created a visual tableau that perfectly illustrated the bankruptcy of their party: an old woman put to sleep by their pointlessly droning leadership, followed by the walking embodiment of their gender lunacy. 

Great optics, geniuses!  If that little psychodrama doesn’t make it into a GOP ad for the mid-terms, we’re leaving money on the table.

Other Democrats continued to take the path most traveled, and unfortunately for them, it was strewn with rakes, which they kept jumping on with both feet.  Because they have not learned the lesson of the boy who cried wolf.  (Or as Tim McBride calls it, “the boy who’s really a girl who cried wolf.”)  They could not just say that this is a bad bill, or point to its flaws.

They had to insist that it was the most cruel and evil bill they’d ever seen.  AOC fought back tears and said that this “was one of the saddest days in modern American history.”  Many warned that “millions will die because of this bill.” 

Can they not anticipate this backfiring in a year or two, when nobody has died and the world didn’t end?  As CO pointed out a few days ago, the predictions that Trump’s original tax cuts in 2017 would surely usher in another great depression are still accessible, and they have not aged well.

Speaking of not aging well, how about everybody’s favorite Nosferatu with scoliosis, Chuck Schumer, and his brilliant idea to scuttle the BBB?  He insisted that the entire bill be read on the floor of the Senate, giving an impassioned speech about how it’s a crime against humanity to vote on a bill that no one has even been able to read. 

Cut to Imhotep Pelosi, rising from her tomb and marching slowing out from beneath her pyramid, trailing burial wrappings all the way to Schumer’s senate office, where she broke the canopic jar containing her heart over his liver-spotted old head, while yelling at him about how he set her up.  “Don’t you know that the most famous thing I ever said was telling the Senate that they’d have to pass the [Obamacare] bill so that you can find out what’s in it?”

One other good news story that I loved was U Penn’s bending the knee and admitting their defeat in the transgender wars, by stripping male athletes of the trophies they won in women’s competitions, and apologizing to the women and correcting their records. 

It’s amazing to see how quickly the cultural dominance of the transgender fever has broken.  Just a year or two ago, our universities, corporations and federal government were on a deranged jihad to cancel everybody who dared to say that biology exists.  You couldn’t swing a dead, nonbinary cat in public without hitting a pride flag, and when our least qualified SCOTUS nominee confessed that she didn’t know what a woman is, everybody just laughed and gave her a lifetime appointment.  (And how’s that working out for us?)  

But now the shoe is on the other foot, and the genitalia are back in the proper locker rooms.  SCOTUS has given “gender affirming” mutilations and chemical poisonings the kibosh, even as Ketanji Jean-Pierre yells from the men’s room, “I dissent!  And why are these strange toilets on the wall?”        

Even though sane gender rules have returned to our society, I anticipate a rough transitional period ahead, during which many of our young people – along with university administrators and leftist politicians – will need to re-learn how to distinguish between males and females.  And because I am both a doctor (PhDs count!) and an Ameri-can, I have turned my considerable brainpower toward solving this vexing problem. 

And my deep (some might even say heroic) modesty cannot prevent me from admitting that I’ve done it.  I’ve come up with a test that I hope will one day be as famous as the Heimlich Maneuver, thus immortalizing my name in medical history.  Like the Heimlich, my method is low-tech, simple and effective.  And it doesn’t require expensive lab work, invasive cheek swabs, or embarrassing physical examinations.

I call it the SGCP™ – the Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol™ — and I plan to give a presentation about it to the College of Medicine at Johns Hopkins this fall.

Here’s how it works:  Before an Olympic event – or a sanctioned grade school, high school, college or professional athletic competition – all of the contestants who want to compete in the women’s division will line up in front of a SGCP™-certified test administrator. 

Each administrator will be accompanied by an assistant who qualifies as a PWFE – Person With Functioning Eyes.

The PWFE will separate the would-be competitors who are obviously males into a separate line.  Then the administrator will grab a clipboard and stand in front of each person in line.  After recording each competitor’s name and date of birth on the clipboard, he will carry out the Simpson Gender Confirmation Protocol™ by administering a swift kick to the groin.

If the candidate falls to the ground and writhes around, praying for the sweet release of death for the longest, most agonizing minutes of his life, the administrator will check the box marked “physically intact.”  If, on the other hand, the candidate just grunts, and continues staring at the administrator with crazy Dylan Mulvaney eyes, the administrator will check the box marked “previous bottom surgery.”

Either way, the candidates will be sent to intensive psychiatric treatment, and will be banned from women’s sports and women’s spaces.  Problem solved, and you’re welcome.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to work on my acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Medicine.

So far all I’ve got is the last line (“Thank you for your attention to this matter.”) and a partial opening:

“We’ve all heard the cliché that you should never meet your heroes.

(Here I’ll dramatically pause while I look around the auditorium at the assembled dignitaries, picturing them in their underwear so I don’t get nervous.) 

Nevertheless, the faculty at the Johns Hopkins College of Medicine met me in the fall of 2025…” 

Hamas delenda est!

AOC’s Troubles, and a Rapper Learns a Valuable Fireworks Lesson (posted 7/8/25)

Okay, there’s no time for small talk.  It’s July 8th, and I’m somehow already two weeks behind on July stories, and that’s not to mention the stories I didn’t get to in June.  So here we go. 

AOC has had a rough couple of weeks.  Besides the big things going wrong – the BBB passing despite the fact that she and the other Dems in congress fell on the floor and kicked their feet and held their breath; the Iranian leadership failing to start WWIII after Trump pulled out the MOP (not gay slang) – she’s made some missteps that have hurt her own personal brand. 

She’s tied herself to Mamdani in his bid to become NYC’s worst-ever mayor.  (And DuhBlasio and David Dinkins were NYC mayors, so the bar has been set high.  Or should that be low?)  Aligning herself with an extremist train-wreck like Mandami is playing well with the dead-end leftists in NYC, but it will become a big liability if she eventually wants to run for president, God help us all.

The bad news is that Mamdani is a phony.  He’s a trust fund baby pretending to be a poor Third Worlder; he’s used more phony accents than Cankles McPantsuit and Que Mala combined; he’s claimed to be black to get affirmative action preference when both of his parents are Indian.  (Dot, not Warren.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

The worse news is that the things he’s NOT phony about are his worst beliefs.  He’s an authentic Jew-hater, and an authentic communist.  So…great.

But AOC has also done more to expose her own phoniness, too.  Just like Mandami, she’s long pretended to have a much more hard-scrabble, blue-collar background than she actually does.   Her motive is obvious – being from an intact, financially successful family and earning good money yourself is a huge handicap for Democrats.  Which tells you a lot about the dysfunctionality of the Democrat party.

AOC has always tried to portray herself as a tough Latina “Rosa from the block,” and she’s leaned into her Bronx roots nearly as hard as she’s leaned into the rolling “r” and “s” sounds of her exaggeratedly Spanish pronunciation of “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.”   Unfortunately for her, the people who knew her in grade school and high school are only in their mid-30s, and were not all killed by either global warming, net neutrality, or Covid.  Also, high school yearbooks from 17 years ago exist.

So the truth is out there.  AOC lived in the Bronx until she was 5, after which her family moved to tony Yorktown, in suburban Westchester County.  And though records are murky, she apparently caught a case of “WASP nickname syndrome” that may have resulted in a subsequent “Ocasio-ectomy.”  Because in high school she was not a chola from the Bronx, but sweet little Sandy Cortez from the ‘burbs. 

Not that she didn’t have some hardships in her life.  Her dad was an architect who started his own firm, but he died from lung cancer when she was only 19, and her mom did work some blue-collar jobs.  So there are some sympathetic aspects to her life story, if only she didn’t exaggerate to give her some non-existent street cred.

For example, in 2018 she said, “My mom scrubbed toilets so I could live here and I grew up seeing how the zip code one is born in determines much of their opportunity.”  Except that her own story demonstrates the opposite, since her birth on the mean streets of the Bronx didn’t stop her family from moving to the suburbs before she started school.

Also, “the scrubbing toilets” reference is a nice rhetorical flourish, and sounds much more downtrodden and noble than “cleaning houses.”  I don’t want to be a one-upper, but as a landlord for the last 29 years, I’ve unclogged and snaked out more than my fair share of tenants’ toilets, and I know how to remove and re-set one with a new wax ring, too.    

And don’t get me started on that time I had to crawl underneath a house to extract a decomposing possum.  (Did only part of his body come with me when I pulled on his creepy tail?  Do I still re-live that PTSD-inducing experience – including hearing the sounds and smelling the smells – on nights when I can’t sleep?  I don’t want to talk about it.)

So I guess I could steer into that skid, and call myself Martino from the barrio, and whine about how Bruce Springsteen hasn’t written a working-class anthem about my heroic rise from flannel-shirt-wearing hillbilly to Dr. Hilarious Genius who wears a full tuxedo around the house most weekdays. 

But I have too much stoic dignity for that.

Anyway, AOC has been catching more heat for her fabulist tales of her rough teen years lately, as many Yorktown residents are posting messages saying, “You’re from here!” 

One such guy – who I am sure I would love to hang out with – is a retired FDNY firefighter from the Bronx who now lives near Yorktown.  He told a reporter, “You can tell right out of the gate that she isn’t from the Bronx.  Listen to her!  [Then] listen to us!  We’ve been out of the Bronx for years but we still sound like idiots!  It doesn’t just go away.” 

But so far, AOC has not been dissuaded.  She recently made things worse for herself when she tried to engage Trump in an insult battle.  To be fair, Trump started it, by referring to her as “one of the dumbest people in Congress,” which as a president he shouldn’t do. 

On the other hand…Fact Check: true. 

(In fact, the quote I’m about to share with you isn’t even the dumbest part of her tweet.  That was her accusation that his taking out the Iranian nukes was “betray[ing] the American people… by illegally bombing Iran and dragging us into war.”  Annnndddd…the “war” was over before she could spell-check and post her tweet.)

But AOC had to take a closing shot at Trump’s roots in Queens: “Also, I’m a Bronx girl.  You should know that we can eat Queens boys for breakfast.”

Now you may remember that Que Mala kept using the line, “I eat ‘No’ for breakfast!” until she was mocked out of it, on account of how stupid it sounds.  But you’ve got to give the Cackler this: at least it didn’t sound uncomfortably sexual.

Regular readers will know that I’m not up on gay slang.  And at my age, and after nearly four decades out of the dating game since I conned a Norwegian smoke-show goddess into becoming my smoke-show wife, I don’t even know much straight slang anymore.

But I know enough to recognize that a female boasting that she can eat Queens boys for breakfast is not coming across like she wants it to come across.  (Phrasing!)  Because here’s the bottom line (phrasing!):  If a guy from Queens is about to go on a date with a young lady from Yorktown, and he hears that she recently bragged about Yorktown gals being able to eat Queens boys for breakfast, he’s going to be…how can I put this?… NOT offended.

Perhaps I’ve said too much.  So let’s move on.

If you’re like me, you’ve been following rapper 4XTRA for years now.

What’s that?  You’ve never heard of him?  Really?  So you’ve never seen his “No Jumper” podcast, or heard any of his hit “songs,” such as “Gang Slide,” “Off the Bacc,” or “Who Imma Call?”  (I think that last one is a Sinatra cover.)       

Okay, let me fill you in.  He’s a large African-American fellow (unexpectedly) who is a rapper and “influencer” in LA.  He’s had a few run-ins with the law, but who hasn’t?  (I first met CO, Alan Paterson, and Jamie Galioto when we were all in the same cell block, and had to jump in and help Mark Teufel and Christopher Silber out of a jam.  My “thug life” knuckles didn’t tattoo themselves, people.) His last arrest came in April, only a few days after he’d gotten out after a previous arrest.

But he’s a patriotic guy, so naturally, he was excited about the Fourth last weekend.  He even recorded a short video for his fans, during which he was showing off a couple of impressive-looking M1000 fireworks.  In what I’m sure was just some light-hearted joking, he said he was going to use those against some of his rivals, in a 20-second video which featured around a hundred uses of the “N” word.  And I don’t mean “narwhal.” 

But let’s pretend for a minute that I do.

Saith 4X: “Imma ‘bout ta blow a narwhal up.  Friend all the narwhals…. I’m blowin’ a narwhal up!  See these, narwhal?  I’m throwin’ em in yo house.  I’m throwin’ em atchya, narwhal!” 

Annnndddd… a few hours later he blew two of his fingers off.  Unexpectedly!

Reports that his last words before the premature detonation were, “I AM bein’ careful!  Narwhal, please!  Hold my blunt and watch this, narwh—YOWCH!”  have not been confirmed.      

On the bright side, he can now use his influencer experience in a campaign to influence youngsters to not blow their fingers off with powerful fireworks.

On the downside, he is allegedly a member of the Rollin 40s Crips street gang.  I know even less about gang signs than I do about gay or straight slang, but I’m hoping for his sake that the gang signs for the Rollin 40s don’t involve the use of the two fingers he no longer has. 

Great.  I used over 1600 words, and I only got to two stories.  Just between you and me, I thought I’d knock AOC around (phrasing!) for 3-4 paragraphs – I’m way too immature to pass up that “eating Queens boys for breakfast” line – and then I’d be on to more stories. 

But I got on a roll, and Ocasio-ectomy popped into my head, and what’s a fella to do?  When God sends you a big wave and you’re on a verbal surfboard up on the crest, you ride that baby all the way into shore.

In other words, this looks like it might have to be a five-column week.   

Stay frosty, my narwhals.

Hamas delenda est!