Month: August 2025

How To Destroy Your Business (posted 8/27/25)

I’ve always thought that it’s really  tough to succeed in business.  You’ve got to worry about government regulations, a shortage of dependable employees, the 20% of customers who are Karens or Karen-adjacent, and brutal competition. 

Grocery stores have profit margins between 1-2%; half of restaurants are out of business within 5 years.  If you’re a small business, the big boys will try to crush you.  If you’re a big business, the Chicoms will steal your IP and undercut you.

I started out as a landlord with a net worth of about $6K, and had to buy a house that was in such bad shape that no other real estate people wanted to buy it and put the work in that it needed.  When I managed to finish it, after surviving a dozen rookie mistakes, I had to compete for tenants with big-dollar real estate companies and large apartment complexes.

And if some leftist d-bags moved into the neighborhood and put a few obnoxious, virtue-signaling “In this house we believe…” signs in their yards, no reasonable people would want to live there, and my property’s value would plummet. 

So yeah, business is tough.  (It’s certainly not government, where you have to embezzle millions and rape a nun in front of many witnesses to lose your job, and a program or department can fail for many decades, and still have eternal life.)  You’ve got to put substantial stakes at risk and work your butt off, and you still might fail.

That’s what I used to think, anyway. 

But now I’ve been watching our culture for the last five years or so, and I’m starting to ask myself a new question: How hard is it to NOT ruin your business?

Consider Bud Light.  You’ve got a built-in audience of semi-drunk frat boys and former frat boys who will continue to buy your product out of a kind of tipsy muscle-memory.   You’re on autopilot.  Just keep turning out middling beer and hammering checks. 

But no.  You hire some woke management who puts an AWFL (affluent white female liberal) in charge of marketing, and she starts by saying that frat boys are disgusting, and we want a new audience.  And she hires a ridiculous boner-killing he/she to call into question the masculinity of anybody seen drinking Bud Light in public.  And billions of dollars fall off your market valuation overnight.

Or say you’re Jaguar.  British vibes, sexy lines; even the ridiculous Brit mis-pronunciation of your name (jag-you-are) is cool, somehow.  (For the proper pronunciation, check the Jacksonville NFL franchise: jag-wahr.  You’re welcome, Nigel.)  So do you run an ad campaign with some James Bond-looking guy in the driver’s seat, with an attractive female in the passenger seat, giving him a look like she can’t wait for him to get her home so she can throw herself on him like JB Pritzker on a deep-dish pizza?

No.  You hire a bunch of androgynous freaks with rhombus-shaped haircuts who look like the casting call for that old SNL sketch about the German new-age music show. (“Now is the time on Sprockets ven ve dance!”) (Google it.)  And you shoot them on a sound stage modeled on a Salvador Dali nightmare on Planet Teletubby, with a soundtrack from an Eastern-block Devo cover band.

And you never show a Jaguar for even one second! 

Annnnnddddd… market share collapse. 

Or how about Victoria’s Secret?  Talk about a bullet-proof built-in market!  You’re shooting for the 97% of men who will drive into the back of a city bus or fork a piece of steak right into their own eye if an attractive female walks by wearing a lot more clothes than a Victoria’s Secret model.  And the 97% of women who want to appeal to those men, or look like those women. 

For decades VS followed a tried-and-true approach: pay 20-something genetic freak supermodels to eat like a rabbit and be photographed with six square inches of fabric covering the points of most interest, and then back up a Brinks truck to the cash register and watch millions of customers throw heavy bags of cash into it. 

But along come the AWFLs and the misogynistic gay guys, with their brilliant plans to fix something that isn’t just NOT broken, it’s un-freaking-breakable.

“Let’s get some morbidly obese women whom men would pay to put on some clothes, and shoehorn them into some slinky unmentionables.  Make sure the camera crews wear mylar face-shields lest a thong or garter belt succumbs to physics, snaps with a rifle-shot sound, and takes out an eye.” 

Then another one says, “I’ll see your Rosie O’Donnell gambit, and raise you a Dylan Mulvaney.  That’s right, let’s strap some mentally unstable men into that lingerie. And before you can ask, NO, we’re not going to photoshop out their shaving shadows or tell-tale testicles.” 

(Worst Edgar Allan Poe story ever, by the way.) 

That’s a thing that happened in the world.  Victoria’s Secret kicked Gisele Bundchen’s and Heidi Klum’s firm behinds and voluptuous breasts to the curb, replacing them with Admiral “Rachel” Levine in a lacy Babydoll contraption and a Lizzo look-alike in a pair of critically unstable boy shorts. 

It was all bulges – either phallic or adipose – as far as the eye could see and the gorge could rise.

And Sports Illustrated followed suit (!), turning the once-coveted swimsuit edition into the visual equivalent of Chinese water torture, without even the chance to catch a glimpse of a random Fang Fang in her skivvies.  (#Swalwellisaflatulenttraitor)         

Or how about the NFL?  Football is an un-screw-up-able product, right?  It’s America’s sport, and the competition is not particularly close.  Your audience is largely straight males and their straight female companions; a majority of them are white, and the kind of non-racists who will happily root for a largely black league.  The vast majority of them are politically conservative, and the few others are a-political. 

And you want to talk about loyal?  The Bears have sucked for a generation, but Chicago still supports them.  Cleveland hasn’t been decent since Jim Brown was a teenager, and that town comes out in a snowstorm to watch a mathematically eliminated team play in a blizzard in the first week of December.

So what does the NFL do?  They try to force whiny leftist politics down the throats of their rock-ribbed conservative audience! They dress their players in pink and deck them out in “stop breast cancer” gear. 

Because as everybody knows, the top two causes of breast cancer are complicated blocking schemes and a blitzing defense, I guess?  “Did you hear about Janice in accounting?  She just had to have a double mastectomy.”  “Oh no!”  “Yep.  Apparently she had a lot of exposure to pulling guards and trap blocks on stunting defensive ends, so…”

You have a chance to highlight a player like Tim Tebow – studly, telegenic, proudly Christian and patriotic.  He does all kinds of charity work, including putting on prom events for disabled kids.  He’s the closest thing to Jesus to ever put on cleats – if Jesus could bench four Mamdanis, each holding 100 pounds that they couldn’t lift by themselves. 

So does the NFL brass thank their lucky stars and put Tebow on the cover of Madden 2011?  No, they rend their garments and cry out, “Give us Barabbas!  And by Barrabbas we mean America-hating, whitey-hating far-left problem-child Colin Kapernick!” 

Then the league slathers the field with insulting sayings like “End Racism,” as if a bunch of white guys cheering for guys named (I’m not making these up) Barkevious Mingo, D’Brickashaw Ferguson, and Dontayvion Wicks need to be reminded not to be so racist.

And after all that…flamboyantly gay male cheerleaders.

Look, I’ve got nothing against gay guys.  They bring a lot of panache to parades and drag shows, both of which I’m never going to, but you do you. 

And I’ve got nothing against male cheerleaders.  Back in the day, they were muscular straight guys who finagled their way into a job that required them to toss petite cuties over their heads and look up their skirts in broad daylight.  For safety, or something. 

So well-played, old-school male cheerleaders.

But these guys are not those guys.  These guys are the Richard Simmons crossed with backup dancers for Lil’ Nas X type of guys.  (I’ll take “Pop culture references that I’d never expect from Martin for a thousand, Alex.”) 

And zero NFL fans want to see that! 

Again, I’m not saying there’s not a place for those fellas.  But I wouldn’t put them on an NFL sideline in hotpants, any more than I’d cast Dick Butkus or Bud Grant for next season’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.  (I’ll take “Pop culture references that I would ABSOLUTELY expect from Martin for a thousand, Alex.”)

Which brings us to Cracker Barrel. Oh, Cracker Barrel.  Another franchise that is not broken. So naturally, some woke doofi are intent on fixing it. 

One of my extended family members manages a Cracker Barrel, and I’ve eaten at their restaurants quite a few times.  Since I’ve lost some weight and am trying to maintain my professional-athlete-like physique, I don’t eat there as often as I used to. 

But when I get a hankerin’ for 4000 calories-worth of French toast and sausage, or some chicken-fried chicken – or even just whenever I feel like going to a place where I can use the word “hankerin’” without a bunch of snooty AWFLs looking down their noses at me – I’ll enjoy a meal at Cracker Barrel.

But now they too have steered into the skid of “how can we remake ourselves into something that our customers will hate?”  And I just don’t get it.  They’ve seen what happened to Bud Light, and Jaguar, and a dozen others.

And yet they still said, “Hold my sweet tea, and watch this.”  They took their familiar logo – which consisted of an old white guy sitting next to an old barrel – and they removed both the cracker and the barrel.  And replaced them with a generic black-letters-on-orangish-background logo saying, “Cracker Barrel.”

Which looks like it could just as well say, “Dollar General.” Or “DeWalt Tools.”  Or “Federated Waste Management.” 

And after a brutal roll-out during which they’ve received 99% negative feedback, the corporate chieftains – none of whom I’m guessing could bait a hook, load a shotgun, or tell grits from Shinola – are sticking with their idiotic re-brand. 

Seriously, THAT’s the hill they’ve decided to die on.  “You can’t have your barrel, and we killed the old cracker!  But get back in here and tolerate the new logo and the new décor.  Because now is the time at Cracker Barrel ven ve donce, you in-bred hicks!”

Does that approach remind you of somebody? 

Bud Light, Jaguar, the NFL, Cracker Barrel…. They’re all treating their customers the same way Democrats have been treating their voters for the last 4 years or so. 

The voters say, “We want a secure border, and more cops on the beat, and no more dudes in women’s sports and locker-rooms, and lower inflation, and cheaper gas.” 

And the Democrat bosses say, “Oh yeah?  Well here’s a bunch of MS-13 gangbangers for your neighbors, and lawless streets, and Will Thomas is going to shower with your daughters and whip them in the pool, and you’ll eat $20 eggs and pay $6 for a gallon for gas, and you’ll LIKE IT!  No crackers for you, and the barrel is empty!  Now watch Dylan Mulvaney put on makeup and pretend to be aroused!!  You in-bred hicks!”

I’m just a humble country English professor, and far from a marketing expert. 

But I don’t think that’s going to work out so well for them. 

Hamas delenda est!

Illnesses Aren’t Usually Funny… But TDS Is (posted 8/25/25)

When you think of illnesses, you don’t usually think “humorous,” because most diseases are obviously the farthest thing from funny.  That being said, it’s a very human thing to find humor – usually dark humor – in all contexts, including those involving sickness and even death.

There are holocaust jokes, and ebola jokes.  The late great Sam Kinison brought the house down with a bit about a crime wave carried out by gay necrophiliac rapists.  (That one’s not for the squeamish.)  Two of the Monty Python guys’ funniest bits were about amputation (the knight who loses one limb after another, but is undaunted, calling each horrific wound “just a scratch”) and death (the sketch about the parrot that John Cleese smacks against the pet store counter, pointing out that it’s “gone to join the choir invisible”). 

So call me adorable but warped if you must – and I’ll be perfectly happy if I had you at just “adorable” – but I find a few illnesses inherently funny.     

One of them is Tourette’s.  Don’t get me wrong, I know that must be an agonizing condition to have, and God bless all of those who do. 

But from the outside, it can be pretty funny, and so odd.  I know that it is largely characterized by tics and nonsense sounds, but when it involves swearing or insulting comments shouted out randomly?   That would be a young boy’s dream condition, and I’m surprised that more of them don’t try to get phony diagnoses, just so they can snap at their teachers or peers.  “Bite me!  Friend off! Schiff for brains!” 

Tourette’s must not have been widely publicized in the 1970s, because if it had been, one of my friends or I would definitely have been the first diagnosed case in central Illinois, and junior high legends in our own time!      

And what about the odd perversity that in a condition that involves shouting out a rapid string of words, why are those never positive, uplifting words?  No sufferer ever snaps, “Have-a-nice-day!” or “God-bless-us-everyone!”  It’s always, “Suck-it-Trebek!” or words to that effect.

There’s an even more rare condition in which someone who suffers a head injury suddenly begins to speak with a foreign accent.  I’m not making that up.  Some British lady gets hit by a cricket bat and suddenly sounds like Ghandi.  Or maybe Grandma Squanto Warren falls over that desk during a congressional vote and pops up speaking fluent Apache.  #Nda’íí’ nídéé’ nitsí’í’ nídéé’.

(Which is Apache for, “#Youmustneverstopmockingme”) (Because: research!)

Better yet, a Simpson-adjacent hillbilly in Appalachia takes a fastball to the noggin and starts speaking in a BBC/King’s English accent.  Which would be hilarious, I don’t care who you are.  Picture Henry Higgins doing Richard Burton as Hamlet saying something like, “Y’all’re fixin’ to get your butts whipped if I have to stop this car!”     

But by far the most entertaining mental condition in America today is Trump Derangement Syndrome.  

Sure, it’s a national irritant, and has brought a lot of heat and absolutely no light into our body politic.  But Man oh Manischewitz, has it brought some top-shelf comedy onto the national stage!

When Trump was inaugurated in 2017, thousands of red-faced, blue-haired women in female genitalia hats screamed like a chorus of tone-deaf banshees throughout the ceremony, and they’ve been on the TDS Crazy Train ever since.  Some have gone on a “sex strike,” vowing not to share their bodily charms with anyone who won’t denounce Trump and all his works.

(By the way, I think I can speak for all of the straight males in Christendom when I say, “Please accept the thanks of a grateful nation, ladies.”)

And the “males” – I use the word loosely – have been as bad as the females.  A bunch of D-list celebrity Dem guys came out as “White Dudes for Kamala,” thus unleashing an epidemic of beta-male-induced feminine dryness that troubled gynecologists from coast to coast.

More recently, one sad fellow dressed like a non-binary golfer pictured himself as a brave non-conformist standing in front of a Chicom tank in Tiananmen Square…but he was just a doofus throwing his footlong sandwich at a federal agent. 

And the “assault with a deli weapon” jokes wrote themselves.  (Apparently the TDS-afflicted sandwich chucker was unaware that all law enforcement officers are equipped with hoagy-proof vests for just such an occasion.) 

(Rumors that J(um)-B(o) Pritzker tried to enlist in ICE when he found out that officers routinely have sandwiches tossed at them have not been confirmed.)  

When Trump engineered half a dozen cease fires and peace treaties, and tried to stop the war in Ukraine, a bunch of fossilized hippie peaceniks hit the streets behind walkers adorned with such pacifistic sentiments as, “We demand more Ukrainians be fed into the Russian meatgrinder!” and “Give war a chance!” while their tin-eared compatriots warbled, “War! (huh), what is it good for?  Absolutely many things! (Say it again.)”  

When Trump eliminated taxes on tips, TDS-suffering advocates for blue-collar wage slaves tweeted, “Tax the Working Class!”  and “Pay Your Fair Share, Hourly Workers!” 

When Trump took out the nuclear facilities of the homophobic weird-beards running Iran, gay leftist activist groups marched around the White House with signs reading, “We support the Mullahs!” and “Throw us off of Roofs!” while wearing t-shirts proclaiming, “Queers for Stoning Gays in Palestine!”

When Trump’s crackdown on crime in DC resulted in the confiscation of dozens of illegal guns, leftist gun-control fanatics marched on the capitol, chanting through bullhorns, “You can have our criminals’ guns when you can pry them from their cold, dead hands!” and “Charlton Heston is our president!”

If Trump gets interest rates down to 2%, they’ll cry, “Savers devastated by low returns on CDs!”

If he cures cancer, they’ll form the NAACT (National Association for the Advancement of Cancer Tumors), and trademark the chant, “What do we want?  Metastasis!  When do we want it? NOW!”

These people can’t be reasoned with.  But they can be opposed.  And they can sure as hell be laughed at.

Speaking of being laughed at, I thought that maybe Joy Reid – the most whitey-hating racist east of the Pecos – had disappeared from the earth after even MSNBC said she was too nutty for them.  But no.  She turned up on the podcast of somebody named Wajahat Ali, just to remind us how nice it is when she’s not here.

(If you’re wondering what Wajahat Ali is known for, other than having a first name that sounds like the cough of a dying man, your guess is as good as mine.)     

Reid launched into another of her classic racist rants, this time covering topics such as how white folks “made this country into a slave hell,” and how they “can’t originally invent anything, more than they were ever able to invent good music.  We black folks gave y’all country music, hip hop, R&B, jazz, rock and roll, they couldn’t even invent that.”

It’s tough to tell whether those thoughts are more stupid, or more evil.

They are definitely stupid.  Because Reid spewed that garbage about whites not inventing anything into a microphone and a camera, and it was viewed on the internet…all 3 of which were invented by whitey.  And because all significant social developments – whether bad or good – are inevitably the product of interactions among many ethnic groups and cultures. 

Slavery, for example, originated when human society originated, and it was omnipresent in every powerful civilization in Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa.  The slave trade in the modern era involved Africans enslaving other Africans, and selling some of them to Europeans who took them mostly to the Americas, and more of them to Arabs who took them mostly to the Middle East.

It’s true that most slave owners in America – they were called “Democrats” – were white.  But at the outbreak of the Civil War, 10,000 black slaves were owned by black masters, a fact that would curl the culturally-appropriated blonde hair on Joy Reid’s empty head, if she were to learn it.  (Ironically for a person named “Reid,” she doesn’t seem to read a lot.)

The same cultural mixing is present in positive cultural phenomena, such as Reid’s example of music, especially when she talks about country music.  Yes, the banjo was an African instrument, but the guitar was invented in Spain, the violin in Italy, the harmonica in China, the accordion in Germany.  The yodel came from Alpine regions of Europe, and most early country music originated in folk songs in England, Scotland and Ireland, transplanted here by Scots-Irish hillbillies.

But in addition to the lying stupidity of Reid’s argument, her racial cheerleading is evil right down to the bone.  Because every group obviously has good and bad in them.  If white people want to take racial pride in Shakespeare, Adam Smith, and Ronald Reagan, they also have to be saddled with Hitler, Ted Bundy and Jim Acosta. 

Smart black people don’t want to claim Idi Amin or Al Sharpton, but they want to claim Thomas Sowell and Clarence Thomas.  Dumb black people want to claim Sharpton and Obama, but don’t want to claim Sowell or Thomas.

And NOBODY wants to claim Jussie Smollett, Whoopi Goldberg or Joy Reid. 

But if I were going to play the ethno-centric cheerleading game – which, again, is stupid – I’d point to something that the Joy-less one somehow forgot in her illiterate screed about music: classical. 

Classical is as white as hip hop is black, for example.  (It’s not as white as Liz Warren, but almost.  #neverstop) So if we were forced to pick teams in a racialist music draft, we’d happily take Beethoven, Mozart and Bach, and Joy could have Megan Thee Stallion, Cardi B and Lizzo.         

Sure, “Baby Got Back” is fun, and “WAP” is a timeless treasure. 

But if I’m betting on what’s going to stand the test of time, I’ll take “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring” and “Ode to Joy,” and give her the points. 

After all, nobody has ever written – or will ever write – an “Ode to Joy Reid.”

Hamas delenda est!

When it Comes to Crime, Many Democrat Chickens are Coming Home to Roost (posted 8/22/25)

I’ve been writing about crime a lot lately. 

And I’m not done, because as I’ve said in earlier columns, crime – what causes it, how to punish it, how we should balance the rights of criminals vs. law-abiding citizens – is one of several key issues (along with taxation and how the courts should view the Constitution, maybe?) that most clearly distinguishes conservatives from liberals.

While I think there are weighty, even philosophical issues at stake re: crime – to what extent does free will play a role when people are brought up in a debased criminal environment; in what circumstances can rehabilitation work for some criminals – the vast majority of crime raises much more basic questions.

Questions like, “How stupid is the average criminal?”  (Spoiler alert: Very, very stupid. Thankfully.)  or “Why are nationally elected politicians, and especially Democrats, so comically inept at it?” 

Taking the first question first, I can usually get some much-needed comic relief from the hilariously pathetic bungling of most criminals. 

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll remember stories about dip-Schiffs who crawl under a car on a sloping driveway and use a rusty, wobbly bottle-jack to lift it so they can steal its catalytic converter…only for it to fall on them and crush their dumb arses.

Unexpectedly!

Or the stories about rappers who confess to their crimes in their terrible “music” videos, or post social media pictures of them flashing a stolen pistol with a clearly visible serial number on it.

Or the story about the rapper 4XTRA, who recorded a video flaunting his possession of illegal M1000 fireworks, and shortly after a brilliant monologue about his plans for them – “You think I won’t blow schiff up wit’ dese, my narwhal?  Don’t friend with me, Imma blow a motherfriendin’ narwhal UP!” – that crazy narwhal blew two of his mother-friending fingers off. 

(I’d say, “Cue the sad trombone,” but no rappers play the trombone.  And I don’t think you can make a sad record-scratching sound on a turntable.)

In the movies, criminals are slick professionals.  They create elaborate distractions to draw away the police, and devise multiple pre-planned escape routes.  They wear disguises, and stash different clothing near the crime scene to change into.  They have multiple sets of identification papers in various aliases, and they stay off law enforcement’s radar.

In real life, criminals get prison tattoos that advertise their gang affiliations and their past crimes, so that cops can recognize them from a block away.  (“I’m a Gangster Disciple and I’ve killed 9 people, all of whose gang names I’ve inked on my body.”)  Even before they go to prison, they get a prominent tattoo on their face or neck, so that if they’re ever in a line-up – spoiler alert: they will be! – they can be easily identified.

And it’s always something memorable, like “Born to Lose,” or “No Regerts!”

Movie criminals drive non-descript panel vans with a magnetic business sign and multiple sets of plates that can be quickly switched out, or else fast cars that they drive up a ramp into the back of a semi-truck, or a hidden garage within a mile of the scene of the crime. 

Real criminals drive 100 pounds of meth and six illegals from the Texas border to New York in a car with two mis-matched doors, one working headlight and two broken taillights.  And a gaudy adhesive memorial stretching across the rear window that says, “RIP Chuy!  MS-13 Forever!”  And they don’t have insurance or registration, but they do have an expired Guatemalan driver’s license. 

And they speed and change lanes without signaling for the entire trip.

And their car is full of pot smoke, as if it were 1981 and they were Kilmar and Chong.  Or possibly Cheech and Kilmar.

Sure, those mouth-breathing low-life criminals provide us some easy laughs.  But what about the high-level masterminds, those who reach the peak of their profession, and should therefore have their criminal act together?

Nope!  I give you three quick examples: New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and CA Senator Adam Schiff.

On the surface, Tish James might appear to be fairly smart.  She has three degrees, including a Master’s from Columbia and a JD, and she managed to get herself elected to multiple public offices, culminating in the top enforcer spot in New York state. 

Alas, degrees are often not worth the paper they’re printed on, and the majority of voters in New York state are imbeciles.  And Tish James is as dumb as a bag of hammers. 

Because she publicly went after Donald Trump on flimsy charges that he had committed mortgage fraud.  Other than wrongly listing a NYC penthouse of his as having 30,000 square feet when it was only 11,000 – an easily proven error on his part – her whole case came down to his valuation of Mar-A-Lago.  He said it was worth a ton of money, and Tish said it was worth $28 dollars and an expired bus pass. 

Yes, she managed to get a verdict against him from a transparently corrupt far-left judge, and a judgement for half a billion dollars, which was just thrown out by an appeals court as ridiculously excessive.  The judgment itself will almost certainly be overturned too, because James’ valuation of Mar-A-Lago was laughably low; Deutsche Bank assessed Trump’s properties and net worth to be sufficient collateral for his loan; and he paid that loan back with interest. 

But all of that is beside the point, because James made one of the most crucial blunders of morons: she falsely accused someone of doing what she was actually doing herself. 

She claimed that Trump was able to get lower interest rates on his loans by lying about the property he was borrowing against.  But she has a long history of doing exactly that, involving several mortgage applications and mortgages on which she perjured herself to receive preferable interest rates.  Most brazenly, in August 2023 – when she was going after Trump – she lied on a mortgage application in Virginia, claiming that house as her principal residence when it was not, and when NY law required her to live in NY to be AG.

Lisa Cook made the same corrupt move.  In the summer of 2021 she bought a home in Michigan by swearing on mortgage documents that it was her principal residence.   Two weeks later, she bought a condo in Atlanta, claiming that IT was her principal residence.  Unless it turns out that she has a third “principal residence” somewhere else, it looks like the Michigan place is her actual residence, since she is renting out her Atlanta condo. 

Again, the brazen stupidity of her fraud is hard to understand.  She’s a governor of the powerful Federal Reserve, which is charged with setting national interest rates that control mortgage rates, and she committed mortgage fraud?! 

A masked crack head who robs a convenience store and then immediately removes his mask in front of a security camera is not acting any dumber than a mortgage regulator cheating on her mortgages!   

Even better was her response when called on it.  Here’s what an honest and innocent person would say:

“These charges are false.  I did not lie on any mortgages, ever.  I’m immediately releasing both of the mortgages and applications in question, and they prove that I didn’t claim both properties as my principal residence, which would be fraud.  I demand an apology.”

Here’s her statement:

“I have no intention of being bullied to step down from my position because of some questions raised in a tweet.  I take any legitimate inquiries about my financial background seriously and am compiling accurate information to address them.”

Really, Lisa?  You’re “compiling accurate information?”  That shouldn’t be hard, since all you’d have to do is hold up the second mortgage and application, and point to the many spots in the documents where you identified the Atlanta condo as NOT your principal residence, but a rental or a second home. 

What’s that?  That’s not what the documents show? 

Keep compiling, sweetheart.

Finally we come to Adam Schiff, one of the sleaziest corrupticrats in Washington, DC. 

Schiff did manage to avoid the temptation to get a tattoo of his nickname (“Pencil Neck”) inked onto…well, his pencil neck.  But sadly, he was unable to resist the siren song of fraudulently obtained lower interest rates, just like Cook and James.

In 2003 Schiff bought a house in Maryland that he declared as his principal residence.  In 2009, he bought a condo in CA, which he identified as his principal residence, and for which he took a homestead exemption on his CA state taxes.  In 2020, after falsely claiming two principal residences for over a decade, he finally declared his Maryland house as his second residence. 

Last month, a Fannie Mae financial crimes investigation concluded that Schiff had engaged in “a sustained pattern of possible occupancy misrepresentation” on five Fannie Mae loans over the years. 

I don’t know what that “possible” is doing in there, because you can’t have two “principal residences,” and he clearly claimed that he did. 

To top it off, the DOJ has now found that he’s been paying a 3% interest rate on both properties, well below any legitimate second home mortgage rate at any time when he financed or refinanced both properties. 

Did I mention that he also failed to disclose his mortgages on required annual financial disclosure forms until 2011?  Or that he’s now accused of wire fraud, mail fraud, bank fraud and making false statements to financial institutions? 

If I did, it’s only because it’s hard to make all of those points when you’re giggling uncontrollably. 

Looking back, Tish James ran for AG on a repeated promise to get Trump, and when she’d gotten her corrupt judgment against him, she gloated about how she was looking forward to foreclosing on Trump Tower and Mar-A-Lago and everything else Trump owns.  And with the possible exception of James, nobody cut more ethical corners in pursuit of Trump than Schiff did.

I guess it’s true what they say – it’s always the ones you most suspect. 

Ironically, the one truthful thing that Pencil Neck and Tish James said over the last several years – and they said it a lot! – might now be coming back to haunt them:

“No one is above the law!” 

In the words of Nelson Muntz…

HA HA!

Hamas delenda est!

Red and Blue See Crime & Punishment Very Differently (posted 8/18/25)

In recent decades, attitudes toward crime from the right and the left have diverged, not because the GOP has moved a lot, but because the Dems have raced to their extreme left.

Conservatives have always been enthusiastic about law and order, and prone to more vigorous law enforcement, and it’s no coincidence that red states are the ones who allow the death penalty.  The attitude of many conservatives has been parodied as, “If you kill someone in a red state, we’ll kill you back.”

And most of us don’t mind that jibe one bit.

While old-school Dems also wanted to live in crime-free communities, their approach to the justice system was heavy on the rehabilitation and light on the punishment.  They had some good points, and for prisoners who were willing to make changes in their lives and rehabilitate themselves, some good came out of that approach.  But nobody can say the results weren’t mixed, at best.

However, conservatives’ attitudes toward law enforcement have also been complicated, due to our instinctive skepticism about the encroachments of the power-hungry State.  Tensions were brought to the fore during covid, when conservatives in blue states had repeated and increasingly contentious run-ins with states who quickly instituted draconian restrictions, and then held onto them like grim Pelosi.

Sorry, that’s “grim death.”

Most blue states imposed mandatory lock-downs, mandatory school and business closings, mandatory masking, and Rube Goldberg rules about everything.  You had to wear a mask on a plane, but the airline served snacks…which you could eat by lowering your mask…but only for long enough to stuff some snacks into your mouth.   After which you should yank your mask back up, so you could aspirate a mouthful of peanuts and choke your way to a covid-less death.  Hooray for science!

You had to stay 6 feet apart, and could only occupy some buildings at 25% capacity – two numbers that were plucked out of thin air, and meant nothing.

California filled skate parks with sand…because young kids who were at no risk from the virus needed to be prevented from getting fresh air and exercise, lest they be slain by the virus that was no threat to them in the first place. 

California also arrested a guy who was paddle boarding.  Alone.  In the ocean.

So normally pro-law-enforcement conservatives became scofflaws during Covid.  Most of them will explain the contrast by drawing a distinction between laws – which we support pretty enthusiastically – and regulations – some of which are reasonable…but not many.

Traditional Democrats/leftists have usually been much more fond of regulations in general – they love to tell you what kinds of toilets or light bulbs or cars you may buy, and (recently) that you ladies must allow a creepy dude to watch you shower, while he levitates a towel in front of him without the use of his hands.

And you are legally required to call him “Crystal.” 

What has changed lately is that what had been the extreme fringe of the left has wrested away control of the Democrat party.  They have not just energetically piled into the lefty clown car, they’re now driving it!  

Consider the dramatic changes in just the last several decades.  In the early 1990s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously coined the phrase “defining deviancy down,” by which he meant permissively normalizing bad behaviors.  Some of those were social – removing the stigma from out-of-wedlock births, allowing “social promotion” of under-performing students in schools – but many involved the greater acceptance of criminal behavior.

Think about that.  Not that long ago – not in Pilgrim America, or Victorian England, but when Kurt Cobain was still alive! – one of the most influential Dems could write an essay calling for more stringent enforcement of traditional social and legal norms, and get a respectful hearing and a lot of support from elected and influential lefties all over the country.

Today, that world seems as dead and gone as Julius Caesar, or Joe Biden.

The dominant far-left – the group who cheers on the murder of a CEO by a trust-fund coward, who will elect Commie Mamdani in NYC, and who has stage-four TDS – has lost its ethical moorings when it comes to crime.  They’ll ignore and deny that crime is happening, and dare you to disagree.

Baltimore and New York City are as safe as Pennsylvania Dutch country during Amish-Fest.  Publicly defecating meth-enthusiasts in San Francisco are “outdoorsmen.”  Shambling armies of mentally ill addicts living in filthy tents all over LA and Seattle and Portland are “urban campers.”  Brother’s-widow-jumping addict Hunter Biden is “the smartest person I know.”    

Nearly a century ago, four gunmen killed seven rival gangsters in Chicago in the still-infamous “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.”  Today, seven Chicagoans are killed every other weekend, and it barely makes the papers.  And if you do notice it, Mayor Brandon will call you a racist.

Even worse, lefty pols and media actively excuse the most brutal acts if they’re perpetrated by one of their pet victim groups.  The half-dozen black criminals who beat and stomped three defenseless middle-aged white folks in Cincinnati were defended by a black elected official on racial solidarity grounds, and by a black police official because the video you watched “lacked context.”

There is a silver lining in this mess, though, because the legacy media’s ridiculous crime coverage is giving them even more opportunities to discredit themselves.  They’ve already greatly decreased their ability to harm their enemies and help their friends.  Accusations of racism used to end careers; now they elicit mostly eye rolls.  Reports that some leftist project is succeeding or some rightist action is bringing about the apocalypse are both greeted with instinctive skepticism or outright disbelief.

And the Left’s doubling down on crime is putting them even more behind the 8-ball.  Trump’s move into DC has maneuvered them into insisting that DC is super safe, and the residents there resent law enforcement coming in and ham-handedly arresting all of the violent criminals who weren’t really there, and confiscating all the illegally-owned guns that don’t exist.  Or something. 

The infamous covid-era “mostly peaceful protests” (spoken by a leftist reporter in front of a block full of burning buildings) has now got two new contenders in dishonest cluelessness.  The first was CNN empty head Erin Burnett’s idiotic description of the whacko who killed three people in NYC a couple of weeks ago: “male, mustache, sunglasses, possibly white.”

Burnett immediately became a laughingstock, because viewers could see a picture in real time of the killer walking into the building while carrying a rifle.  Burnett was referencing that picture, and she got the male, facial hair, and sunglasses parts right.  

But that guy was as white as Liz Warren is Cherokee.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher) 

The sunglasses hid his eyes – which in subsequently released pics had an Asian look to them – but he was clearly black, and it wasn’t a close call.  He had a short Afro, and he looked like if John Shaft and Billy Dee Williams had had a baby. 

By the way, this just in from Cincinnati: Seven people have been arrested in the beatings, and they include a Montianez, a Jermaine, a Dekyra, a Dominique, and an Aisha. 

Or, as Erin Burnett would put it, “they’re all possibly white.” 

The second contender in the leftist cover-up sweepstakes comes to us from New Jersey, courtesy of a “journalist” named Dana DiFilippo.  Dana was covering the story of an illegal alien named Raul Luna-Perez, who was picked up for DWI three times in four months.  The third time, he caused a wreck that killed a woman and her daughter.

So Perez is an illegal who could have been detained and deported just for that.  And he should have been arrested, detained, convicted and eventually deported for either of his first two DWIs.  But it’s a blue state, so he was able to go for the drunk driving hat-trick, and kill two innocent people.  But at least he was jailed and held for trial and eventual deportation then, right?

Have you not been paying attention?  Blue state.  Leftist judge. 

So he was released pending his trial. (Fortunately, Biden and Que Mala lost last November, so he was quickly picked up by ICE, and is no longer on our streets.)

So how did Dana cover this story?  First, she called Perez an “undocumented immigrant.” Because of course she did. 

Then she said that he was “at the center of an immigration fight between Trump and NJ’s Governor.”  Nice use of the passive voice there.  He’s not an illegal immigrant serial drunk-driving killer.  He’s just caught up in a fight between Bad Orange Man and NJ governor of indeterminate political persuasion.

But the part of her one-paragraph post that caused Dana to quickly delete her entire X account and flee into the night came next, when she claimed that Perez “had a largely clean driving record, despite prior DUI arrests.” 

Let that sink in.

Wouldn’t Dana make a great defense lawyer? 

“Your Honor, members of the jury, my client Mr. Bundy has met literally THOUSANDS of women in his lifetime, and he’s accused of murdering no more than a few dozen of them, tops.  I’d call that a largely clean dating record. I rest my case.”

Ugh.  We don’t hate the media enough, people.

But we’re getting there.            

Hamas delenda est!

Correction re: Mamdani, the MSM Love Hezbollah & Hate DeSantis (posted 8/15/15)

Okay, so I made a mistake in Wednesday’s column about Commie Mamdani and his campaign to give the benighted voters of NYC what they are asking for, good and hard, and sans lubrication. 

I mistakenly said that he was born in Ghana, when he was actually born in Uganda. 

In my defense, both of those names share many of the same letters.  Also, I’m not totally convinced that they are actual countries, and if they are, I’m guessing that they are very similar.  I mean, it’s not like I said he was born in Switzerland, when he was born in Uganda. 

(“Martin,” nobody is asking, “is that a fine Ugandan timepiece you’re wearing on your wrist, as you savor that decadent Ugandan chocolate?”  And I am not replying, “Remember when that Swiss leader ate that guy from a rival canton just a few short decades ago?”)

Still, I can’t just go around making mistakes, like a mere mortal.  So I hereby confess my error, take full responsibility, and ask that in case the Nobel committee was contemplating awarding me one of their prizes for Wednesday’s column – which in a sane world they would be – they hold off on that.  At least until they can read some of my upcoming Nobel-worth columns.

Now if only we could get the WAPO and NY Times to do their own mea culpa, and return the Pulitzers they gave themselves for getting the Russia collusion hoax story wrong, and the “Hunter’s laptop is Russian disinfo” story wrong, and the “Joe Biden is a cognitive marvel, and fully prepared to serve another term” story wrong, and…

Today I’ve got several “we don’t hate the media enough” stories for you, starting with the AP, which published a story last week that cast the Hezbollah terrorists on the receiving end of Israel’s amazing pager attack as sympathetic victims. 

To be fair, the story did admit that even Hezbollah “acknowledged that most of those wounded and killed were its fighters and personnel.”   Nevertheless, the story interviews six survivors, five of whom – if we can trust the writers even on this point – are anomalies and exceptions: two women, two children, and one “preacher,” in addition to an admitted “fighter.”  (I’m guessing that the preacher wasn’t preaching the Gospel, or the Torah, or the teachings of the Dalai Lama.)

The fighter is presented in a shocking image, with his disturbing-looking glass eye.  (He’d be much better off wearing an eye patch, but since Israeli badass Moshe Dayan wore one of those after losing an eye in battle, the Hezbollah Jew-hater probably wouldn’t wear one, just out of spite.)

(By the way, “Moshe Dayan” is probably Hebrew for “Uncle Bob,” for all I know.)

The story details the one-eyed terrorist’s wounds, noting that “he can no longer play football.”  If they were striving for accuracy, they would have followed that with, “Of course, he could never have played football anyway, because he lives in a backward society that only plays soccer.”

There are horrible pictures of the wounds of both women and a 12-year-old boy, and heartstring-tugging descriptions of the gory details. 

But the story is at least minimally honest enough to tangentially reveal the real problems with these people it so badly wants us to sympathize with.  Both women and the fighter are pictured with images – on their walls or on their phones – of Hassan Nasrallah, the Hezbollah terrorist who died in a big, beautiful Israeli strike, surrounded by terrorist commanders.  One woman has spoken at Hezbollah religious gatherings to boost morale, and the 12-year-old boy is a member of the Hezbollah scouts (think: Hitler Youth for Arab jihadis). 

The key sentences were mentioned early on, and in passing: “The survivors expressed ongoing support for Hezbollah but acknowledged the security breach. They blamed Israel for their wounds.” 

Because of course they did. 

This is why you can’t have nice things, “Palestinians.”  Your heroes tortured, raped and murdered helpless Israeli men, women and children, and after you reaped just a small portion of what you have sown, you still think of yourself as victims, support the killers, and hate the Jews.

Good luck with all that.

Not content to let the AP hog all of the pro-terrorist propaganda glory, other legacy media rags jumped on a different slanderous story out of Gaza.  This was the tale of an Israeli air strike that killed a “journalist” named Anas (and if you noticed that that name is only one vowel off, you’re right) al-Sharif.  One outlet after another led with claims that al-Sharif was a journalist, and only noted later that the IDF “alleged” that he was a member of Hamas. 

PBS and NPR – man, am I glad that we just cut off their taxpayer funding! – both took that tack. NPR said that “press advocates described [al-Sharif’s death] as retribution against those documenting the war in Gaza.”  (If by “documenting” you mean “propagandizing about.”)  They then reported that the IDF said that al-Sharif was a Hamas fighter, “an allegation that Al Jazeera and al-Sharif had previously dismissed as baseless.” 

Shocking! 

By the way, if I were a PR rep for the IDF, I would have headlined my press release, “We shot the Sharif, but we did not shoot a journalist.”  (Hat tip to Bob Marley.)

Newsweek – which I was surprised to find is still a thing that exists – was typical of the biased MSM approach.  They didn’t just present al-Sharif’s identity as a “he said/they said” story; they took sides by calling him a journalist, and then skeptically reporting the IDF’s “allegations.”  But as you read their own story, you see that the only evidence they cite for al-Sharif NOT being a Hamasnik is the denials from his side. 

Meanwhile, they start clearing their throat and trying to hurry past the IDF’s claims and evidence, as you will see in this accurate re-enactment, made of actual details from the Newsweek story:

IDF spokesman:  Al-Sharif served as the head of a terrorist cell in the Hamas terrorist organization that was responsible for advancing rocket attacks against Israeli civilians and IDF troops.

Multiply-pierced Columbia Undergrad (MPCU) wearing a keffiyeh:  Well, anyone can claim somebody is in Hamas, but if that were true, wouldn’t they have military documents to back that up?  Huh?  Wouldn’t they?  I mean, if he were really—

IDF spokesman: Here are Hamas documents showing that al-Sharif was a member, includ—

MPCU: Yeah, right!  If those docs were legit, they’d list his rank, salary and military ID number!

IDF spokesman: Let me finish.  …including his rank, salary, and military ID number.

MPCU: Crap!

IDF: We also have a Hamas injury report for al-Sharif from 2017.

MPCU: Oh, come on!  If you had a report like that, you’d have to know which specific battalion he was from. Which you don’t.

IDF:  As a matter of fact, it’s right here.  He was a member of the Hamas East Jabaliya Battalion.

MPCU:  Oy vey.

IDF: What did you say?

MPCU (panicking): I mean, oh crap!  (He dabs at some sweat with his keffiyeh.)  Look, it’s easy enough to make wild allegations about some anonymous, low-level foot soldier.  I mean, it’s not like you’ve got a picture of him being hugged by and shaking hands with late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a ballroom filled with Hamas big shots.

IDF: It’s funny you mention that…

MPCU: Oh, crap…

IDF: …because if you’ll look at the screen behind me, you’ll see a picture of Anus al-Sharif being hugged by and shaking hands with late Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in a ballroom full of Hamas big shots.

MPCU (face-palming himself and muttering):  His name is “Anas.”

IDF: Is it, though?

And, scene.   


Finally, you’ve probably seen the domestic story that gave the pro-Hamas MSM a run for their money, bias-wise: the Daily Beast piece that ran under the title, “Veterans Beg Ron DeSantis to Stop Killing Them.”

You read that right.  Veteran Ron DeSantis has apparently gone rogue, and is now murdering veterans in Florida!  If you don’t believe me, read the first sentence of the story: “Ron DeSantis is under fire for turning against his fellow service members and letting executioners slaughter five veterans this year alone.”

Good lord!   Are these gangland executions, or possibly some kind of barbaric “feed them to the dinosaurs” type killings you might hear about at Alligator Alcatraz?

Nope.  The next paragraph mentions that Florida carries out the death penalty by either lethal injections or the electric chair, and the truth begins to come out. 

This left-wing hack writer is talking about people who were once in the military, but who then pursued an exciting second career in beating, raping and murdering people.  One of them – Bobby Joe Long – was a serial rapist and killer with at least 12 victims on his record, though the writer doesn’t mention that.

The story is so transparently ridiculous that it was quickly ratioed into oblivion.  And DeSantis’ Comms director, when asked for comment, administered the verbal gut punch perfectly, saying “A simple trick to avoid execution in Florida is to not murder people.” 

That sounds just crazy enough to work!

Ugh!  We truly don’t hate the media enough. 

But the good news is that they’re not getting away with it anymore.  Their ratings are terrible, their audiences are shrinking, and the only ones who take them seriously are the far-left, ineducable, dead-end partisans.

The legacy media has worked long and hard to ruin their reputations, and they are now reaping the fruits of their labors.

Unexpectedly!

Hamas delenda est!

The Hypocrisy of Mamdani, and the Flight of the Texas Democrats (posted 8/13/25)

You may have noticed that the Democrats have recently upped their game when it comes to hypocrisy.  You could say that they’re here to drink kale smoothies and be hypocrites, and they’re all out of kale smoothies.

Let’s start in New York City, where the logic-challenged voting base of Manhattan masochists continues to rush headlong into the electoral nightmare of a Commie Mamdani administration.  In addition to being a rabid Jew-hater, Mamdani is the kind of economic ignoramus who thinks that grocery stores – which have about the skinniest profit margins of any business – are “gouging” New Yorkers, and the solution is to have the city government run them.  

Get ready for the grand opening of dozens of city-run outlets of the “Empty-Shelves-R-Us”  franchise!

Like most high-profile, power-hungry socialists, Mamdani is a spoiled rich kid cosplaying as a working-class hero.  Which is pretty tough to pull off when you’ve never had a real job in your life. 

You probably heard about Zohran’s lavish wedding in a luxury compound in Ghana, where he was surrounded by extensive security, including devices to jam cell signals during the ceremony.  I’m no expert on the Ghanian telecommunications system, but I’m pretty sure that Gha Bell (Ghana’s version of Ma Bell, duh!) consists mostly of hollowed-out coconut halves connected with strings.

So using high-tech cell-signal-jammers seems like over-kill, doesn’t it?

Though Zohran is totally lacking in real-world and governing experience, he’s already hit for a leftist hypocrisy hat trick: 

1. After years of calling for defunding the police, he recently laid out $34K (of mommy and daddy’s money, I’m guessing) on AS&I.  No, not “Arseholery, Smugness and Incompetence,” though that was a great guess, and a fine Democrat slogan for the ’26 mid-term elections.  It’s “Advanced Security and Investigations,” a private security firm that will give him the kind of protection that New Yorkers will most definitely NOT be getting from the former NYPD cops who are now all down in Florida protecting Mar-A-Lago and CO’s equally lavish world HQ.

2. Despite his unearned wealth, Zohran lives in a rent-controlled apartment, an archetypal, chef’s-kiss-perfect betrayal of all the New Yorkers struggling to find affordable housing.  Because if there’s one thing a trust-fund kid who’s about to decimate the NYC housing market needs, it’s a subsidy from the saps who vote for him.

3. When Zohran was applying to college, he had to identify his ethnicity on paperwork.  His mom is Indian, and his dad is Indian.  (Not F-Troop Indians like Grandma Squanto Warren – #mustweeverstopmockingher? #Ithinknot – but India Indian.) So the only sane and honest answer was “Indian.”

But the DEI religion looks down on Indians, because they are generally successful.  And we can’t have that.  So Zero/Zohran checked the box for “Black or African American.”  Because he was born in an African country, and lived there for a few years as an infant.

You know, the same way that if you had been born in Australia, you’d check the box indicating that you identify as “koala or arboreal marsupial” on your Columbia application.

Boy, New York voters will have no excuse if they vote for this jerk in November.  Because he is an open book. 

And that book is a mash-up of “The Communist Manifesto” and “Mein Kampf.”   

Speaking of the Albino Apache Liz Warren (#neverstop), she naturally endorsed Mamdani, giving him a tip of the headdress, from one phony to another.  The NY Post had the perfect headline when Warren and Mamdani talked before the endorsement: “African American Meets Native American.”

Because I am basically a grown 8th grader, I also enjoyed when she was hanging around in the House chambers and leaned back on a desk, which then fell over, dumping her dishonest butt to the floor. 

She tried to cover up the gaffe, but nobody believed her excuse that she was just putting her ear to the ground to see if she could detect any nearby buffalo herds that might be stampeding. 

But my favorite example of Democrat hypocrisy lately has been their kabuki theatre outrage about the evils of gerrymandering.  

A few weeks ago, Ron DeSantis (peace be upon him) won a three-year court battle when the state Supreme Court upheld his 2022 redistricting map that cemented the redness of this red state after years of GOP gains.  Several other red states – Missouri and Indiana among them – are considering redistricting too, following in the footsteps of Texas, where Governor Gregg Abbott is pushing a new map that could give the GOP 5 more House seats.

In the past, the left made the term “gerrymandering” a feared accusation, at least among RINOs and other political invertebrates so spineless that they wouldn’t even take their own side in an argument.  But one happy result of last November – among many – was that Trump’s victory gave many in the GOP a spine, and then instilled some steel in it.   Hence Abbott’s plan.

Hilariously, the strategy of Texas elected Democrats was to take arms against a sea of troubles by…running away to Illinois, to deny a quorum that would allow the Texas legislature to pass their redrawn congressional map.     

On the one hand, the decision by several dozen Texan Dems’ to flee to Illinois was a smart one.  Because if the FBI came looking for them, they could all escape detection by hiding behind J.B. Pritzker (D-irigible).

On the other hand, it was incredibly stupid, since Illinois is arguably the most corruptly gerrymandered state in the union, and only highlighted their hypocrisy.  In fact, many of the bluest states – IL, CA, NY, NJ, MA, etc. – have already been so heavily gerrymandered that even after Texas’ new map passes, it will STILL be less lopsided than the Dems’ current maps.

And that reality made national Dems even more of a laughingstock when they threatened to re-draw their own districts to cancel out Texas’ efforts.  Because the briefest glance at their maps showed how much they’ve already used the tactic that they’re now pretending to be so offended by.

For example, Trump got 44% of the vote in Illinois, but the GOP only holds 18% of the House seats there.  He got 40% in CA, where the GOP holds only 21% of House seats.  And in MA, where Trump won 36% of the vote, the GOP holds zero House seats!  Those numbers attest to how aggressively the Dems have worked to thwart democratically representative state maps, all the while stroking themselves over how they are righteous fighters to “save our democracy!”

And now the GOP is beginning to fight fire with fire.  (And you know how much that terrifies Imhotep Pelosi, since her burial wrappings are so flammable that she’ll go up like a desiccated Roman candle.  Or Egyptian candle, I guess.)  

The irony and schadenfreude are delicious!  The very fact that Republicans have played the game more “fairly” in the past is what gives them the chance to gain so many seats now.  Ben Shapiro gave some raw numbers yesterday:  there are 67 Democrat House representatives from red states, vs only 39 GOP reps from blue states.  Those 39 GOP congressmen are likely the bare minimum number that can be produced given how many GOP voters there are in the country – what are MA Dems going to do, reduce their GOP members from zero to a negative number?! – while a decent amount of those 67 Democrat red-state congress-weasels can likely be gerrymandered right out of their seats.

Additionally, Trump’s idea of re-doing the 2020 census now is a great example of the way he’s been leaning forward, and winning battles that past GOP presidents have been too squeamish to fight.  The Census Bureau has admitted that it under-counted many red state populations in the 2020 census, and the numbers show that red states would have at least 5 more electoral votes right now if that count had been accurate. 

Knowing that, why should we have to wait 10 years – which would span 5 congressional and 2 presidential elections – to correct that error? 

Yes, sure, the census is traditionally only done once per decade.  But have I mentioned what hypocrites the Democrats are?

Because you know what else also used to be traditional?   Just off the top of my head…

Requiring a filibuster-proof majority to approve federal judges…which Harry Reid and the Dems did away with in 2013. 

And not jailing opposition party members when they defied a congressional subpoena…as the GOP declined to do when Eric “Steadman” Holder and Lois Lerner both defied legitimate subpoenas during Trump’s first term.  The Dems returned the favor by jailing both Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro based on much less serious subpoenas just a few years later.

And not having their own partisan local judges launch a flurry of illegitimate rulings to thwart the opposition’s president.

And not using the legal system with some bogus lawfare attacks on your political opponent.

I could go on and on.  But this taste of bile in my throat is quite unpleasant.

This just in: as I was writing this, I saw the headline that the Texas Dems have announced that they are returning to Texas.  But they want us to know that their tails between their legs are not a sign that they lost.  They are declaring victory, because “they accomplished their mission by raising national awareness about the mid-decade redistricting effort.”

Yes.  You made fools of yourselves, thus raising awareness of how foolish you all are.

So what have we learned today?  Only what we already knew: the Democrats have completed the FA portion of their national partisan gamesmanship, and they’ve now entered the FO phase. 

The political landscape is littered with the Dems’ petards, and it’s time to start hoisting them. 

Or, as Uncle Bob would say, “The barn is smoking and the tractor tires are on fire.  Let’s go!”

Hamas delenda est!

More Uncle Bob Stories (posted 8/11/25)

After the positive reaction to my column on Friday about our family reunion and Uncle Bob’s exploits, I decided that I’d tell a few more Uncle Bob stories today, and be back on Wednesday to celebrate some of the happy conservative wins and schadenfreude-drenched tales of Dem losses from the last 10 days.  

So after the tractor fire two Thursdays ago and before our family reunion that Saturday, my cousin Darryll and I went out to Uncle Bob’s on Friday afternoon.  When we got there we first saw the burned tractor and the burned Miata.  The tractor was totaled, and the Miata’s passenger-side taillight assembly looked to be fine…but the rest of it was burnt right down to the frame. 

Other than the two roasted front tires, the tractor Bob saved had no other damage.

We found Uncle Bob sitting on a lawn chair in the shade of a huge, old oak tree, with his daughter Lisa’s good dog Lola sitting in the grass beside him.  (Yes, I have a cousin named Lisa Simpson.  And I swear I’m not making this up: she married a guy named Bart.  Fortunately, we live in a patriarchal society where wives take their husbands’ last names, so they were spared the burden of going through life as Bart and Lisa Simpson.) 

After Darryll and I put some treats for the reunion in the fridge in Bob’s shelter, we sat down and talked with him for a while.

Bob had a .22 pistol on his lap.  Because of course a guy who just drove a burning tractor out of a burning barn would have a pistol close at hand.  Maybe the tractor fire had been arson.  You can’t be too careful.  (And better to have a gun and not need it…)

After he told us the story about Illinois Bob and the Burning Tractor of Doom – he made it sound more like a Three Stooges short, because he’s modest that way – we then went on to other subjects.

He’s a good storyteller in his old age, which is strange, because he was famously taciturn as a young man.  I mentioned before that he and my dad were “Irish twins” – dad having been born in January of 1938, and Bob that December – so they were in the same year in school.  I remember dad telling me that when one of their teachers read the class roster the first day of high school, her face went pale at the prospect of two more Simpson boys in her class at the same time.

Their two older brothers, Ray and Bill, had done some hell raising in town, so teachers were apparently braced for the worst.  (Ray ended up joining the Army and going to the Korean War, apparently as a result of some alcohol-involved incidents that resulted in a “go to jail or join the army” choice.  Afterwards he moved out to California, so I didn’t get to know him very well.  When I asked my grandma what Ray was like – I was around 9 or 10 at the time – she said that he was a pretty good boy, but “Ray like to tussle.”  Which I think is the most grandmotherly way to say that.) 

(Fortunately, when Ray did some tussling with some North Koreans and Chicoms, he lived to tell the tale…although he never did much talking about it, as I understand.)

But the teachers had nothing to fear from my dad and Bob, who were thick as thieves, but caused no real trouble.  They had polar opposite personalities.  Dad was an extreme extrovert, and Bob an introvert, and there was no better proof of that than their senior year school yearbook. 

Their pictures were right next to each other, of course.  Beside dad’s picture was so much writing it could barely fit: 4-year letterman in track, basketball and football; captain of the football and basketball teams; senior class president; homecoming king; voted “most popular.”    

Beside Uncle Bob’s picture?  “Bob Simpson.” 

Somehow the subject of high school came up when we were talking to Uncle Bob and petting Lola under his oak tree.  And he told the story of his final English class, during the spring of his senior year.  What follows is as close as I can remember to his exact words.

“I already had enough credits after December to graduate, so I didn’t want to be in school, let alone in that English class.  And our teacher told me that everybody in class was going to have to give an oral report on some story we’d read.  I told her I didn’t want to, and she said I had to.  I said I’ve barely talked in four years of school, and I wasn’t going to get up in front of class and talk about some story.”

Here he added, “Why would I want to talk about a weird story about some old sailor with a bird tied around his neck?”

Darryll looked at me, because I’m the English professor, and I said, “You mean, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?’”  (It’s a once-widely-anthologized Coleridge poem, an archetypal Romantic piece filled with the kind of symbolism perfectly designed to be unappealing to a 17-year-old Uncle Bob.)

“That’s it,” he said, and shook his head.  “After I said I wouldn’t do it, she sent me to the principal’s office.  I asked him why I couldn’t just take shop again, and he said, ‘You can’t take four years of shop!’” 

(By then Bob was already a decent carpenter, and he ended up becoming a union carpenter, after stints as a barber – he built his own barber shop – and the proprietor of a small take-out restaurant.   When everybody “started growing long hair like a bunch of freaks in the ‘70s,” he quit cutting hair and converted his barber shop to “Fish ‘n’ Chicks,” and ran that for about 8 years.  All while he was also doing some carpentry on the side, too.)

A compromise was finally reached.  Bob would have to write a book report on any story he wanted, and he wouldn’t have to read it in class.  “So I saw a movie about a story where a young couple buy each other gifts that they can’t use, and I wrote about that, so I could graduate.” 

I said, “The O’Henry story, ‘The Gift of the Magi?’”  (The husband owns a pocket watch but no chain, and the wife has beautiful hair but no comb.  So he sells the watch to buy her some combs, and she sells her hair to buy him a watch chain.  When I got back to Florida, I looked it up, and found the movie Bob watched: “O’Henry’s Full House,” a 1952 anthology of five stories, which serendipitously offered him a path to graduation in the form of a way to write a book report without reading the book!)  

And Uncle Bob looked at me and said, “How many stupid stories do you know?”

And I said, “All of them.” 

Afterwards, when Darryll I were heading to a local golf course, I asked him why Bob had a pistol with him.  He said that there were some moles in his yard, and on days when the weather is good, he likes to sit in the yard and look for movement, and then fire controlled bursts of two or three shots into the ground.

It won’t surprise you to hear that Bob has worked on other handyman projects over the years.  When he was in his mid-60s, he built a duplex that he kept as a rental for about 10 years before selling it.  My dad and two other uncles on my grandma’s side pitched in during part of the framing; I was in Florida by then, but I remember hearing how 4 men in their 60s struggled to lift lam beams into place.   

Probably to the consternation of the same women who took a dim view of Uncle Bob driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn in his mid-80s! 

(By the way, if Bob had talked about building that duplex last week, I would have made a reference to J.D. Salinger’s novella “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.”  And Uncle Bob would have just shaken his head at me.) 

His latest projects have involved working on a series of mobile homes in Bradenton, Florida.  He started coming down for the winters about 15 years ago.  He bought a trailer that was okay, but needed some work done.  He worked on it for two winters, got it perfect, and then got itchy and sold it, buying another fixer-upper.

He’s now on his fourth trailer, and he had just finished working on it when Hurricane Debby came through last August, taking off the carport and damaging the roof.  My cousin Darryll has a trailer about two blocks away, and he and Bob’s son Bobby came down after the storm and tarped the roof and cleaned up the lot.   

(Darryll and Bobby are the two cousins I’ve taken the May trips with in recent years, starting with driving Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica in Darryll’s 1976 Caddy El Dorado in 2021.  New CO members can read my journal of that trip at Martinsimpsonwriting.com.  Just scroll down the right side until you see “Route 66 Road Trip.”)

When Darryll came down in November, Bob and Aunt Lilly were already in Florida.  Darryll called him the night he got in, and said that he’d be over to help Bob with the roof the next day.  Does anybody want to guess where Darryll found him when he got to Bob’s trailer?

That’s right.  On the roof. 

Fun fact: Uncle Bob is 4 years older than Joe Biden.  And Bob’s still climbing ladders, while Biden hasn’t climbed a staircase without falling since late last century. 

I miss my dad every day, but I’m glad that Uncle Bob is still here, and that he’s already dodged the two leading causes of death for octogenarians: falling off a roof you’re working on, and driving a flaming tractor out of a smoking barn.

Am I saying that America needs a lot more men like my dad and Uncle Bob, and a lot fewer Gavin Newsoms and Beta O’Rourkes?

That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying.

Hamas delenda est!

Family Reunion: Mom Did Well, and Uncle Bob Saved a Flaming Tractor (posted 8/8/25)

I’m happy to be back home in the free state of Florida, after my trip up to Illinois for the family reunion.  I just saw CO’s post celebrating over 33,500 followers on this site, and after everybody’s generous responses to my column about the struggles of my friend’s wife, my mom, and Cassie the Wonder Dog, this growing group feels like a huge family right now. 

As it happens, this is my 700th Cautious Optimism column, and I’m grateful to have had the chance to write every one of them.  Especially since number 700 will be less somber than number 699 was. 

Starting with the best news from the trip, mom had a really good time, and everybody was glad to see her.  My sister arrived with her around 2:00 on Saturday, which gave us a chance to drive her around town for a couple of hours before the reunion dinner started. 

The weather was great, sunny and in the 70s, and we first drove past the house mom grew up in on Post Street.  The current owners have let some over-grown bushes and trees obscure part of the building, but mom recognized it right away, pointing out the porch before we drove around to an angle that let us see it. 

At this point her Alzheimer’s is like a fog that descends on her and then lifts for a while, following no particular pattern.  We never know when the mists will dissipate or for how long, but seeing her face light up when she recognized the house made the trip worthwhile all by itself. 

From there we drove down Ottawa’s main street, through a quintessential Midwestern downtown, past the leafy town square featuring a fountain and a statue of Lincoln and Douglas, commemorating their debate there.  Mom recognized the square and the courthouse, but enough of the old buildings have received face lifts over the years that she didn’t recognize a lot more.

We drove to the cemetery beside the Illinois River where her parents are buried, and while she didn’t recognize the cemetery, she recognized their headstone.  We wondered how she might react, because for the last several months she has gone back and forth between remembering that they are dead, and thinking that she just talked to Grandma on the phone, and is supposed to meet her at the Post Street house. 

But the fog seemed to have lifted for most of the weekend, and she seemed undisturbed, and contented to visit their graves.  From there we drove by grandpa and grandma’s last house, a tiny place on the other side of the river that she didn’t recognize.  We drove her over to Marseilles, the town where she and dad had started their married lives, and where I spent the first 10 years of my life.

As we crossed the river and drove up Main Street, she recognized the downtown, and a few familiar sights.  One of the two houses we lived in has been extensively remodeled, and all of us had a hard time figuring out which one it was.  But she recognized their first marital home, on Fillebrowne Street. 

I don’t think mom remembers the story of how they bought that house anymore, but she and dad told us so many times that Rhonda and I will never forget it.  Mom was going to a baby shower for a friend of hers, and dad wanted to go to a garage sale on Fillebrowne.  But because they were broke and he was impulsive, she made him promise not to buy a mower, or tools, or anything.

And he didn’t.  He bought the house!  For $4500.  Then they had to go to see her dad, to ask him to borrow the $450 down payment.

Over the years, every time that house has come up in conversation, or whenever we’ve been back in town and seen it, mom and dad would tell us that story.  On Saturday, for the first time, mom didn’t repeat it.  But she recognized the house, and that was good enough for us.

We all met for dinner at a local restaurant.  Dad had been one of nine kids – five boys and four girls – and eight of them survived past childhood, which was not something to take for granted in their generation.  (Dad’s brother Donnie got sick and died before he turned two, and nobody is even sure what he died from.)  Three of the nine siblings in dad’s generation are still alive, and two of them were able to make it, along with their spouses.  We had 27 people there, including 8 of my cousins and their assorted kids, and the food and the conversations were great. 

Afterwards we went to my Uncle Bob’s homestead north of town, for more visiting and stories.  Bob’s got about 60 acres, some of it cornfield, but a lot of timber and a huge, shady yard with old oak trees.  He’s got a big, old barn and several smaller and newer ones, and he built a nice shelter between his house and the treeline years ago.  It has a fireplace, and enough tables to hold 35 to 40 people, and several of the attendees brought possessions that had belonged to their parents or our grandparents.

Everybody did a show-and-tell, and there was a lot of laughter, and some tears.  A lot of people brought pictures that most of us haven’t seen in years, if ever.  My cousin had an old trunk full of grandpa and grandma’s stuff.  There was a wooden high-chair that all 9 kids had used at one time or another, and an old, red onesie and a metal toy car of Donnie’s, which choked everybody up.  There was also a pair of his baby shoes, though there was some joking that, as poor as the Simpsons were, every boy and a few of the girls probably wore those shoes before they were handed down to Donnie.

Mom recognized everybody from her generation and most of the cousins, and she had a great time.  There were a lot of stories about dad and Uncle Bob, who were “Irish cousins,” and very close.  (Dad was born in January of 1938, and Bob in December of that same year.)  Mom soaked it all in, and was happy but tired by the time Rhonda and Jimmy took her back to their hotel. 

The fog descended on her again the next day.  A little while after they got back on the road for Tennessee, she became worried that they’d left dad behind in Ottawa.  Rhonda reminded her that he passed away ten years ago, but mom was certain that she’d seen him the night before, apparently thinking that dad had been there with the rest of the family at Uncle Bob’s.  To be fair to her, a lot of us felt that way.  

When they got home that evening, mom went to bed early, and by the next day she didn’t remember the trip at all.  But for that one night, she was in her old hometown and surrounded by family.  And when she wakes up from this life and the fog has lifted for good, she’ll remember it all.

One more story from the weekend.  I got up to Illinois on Thursday night, planning to pitch in with some preparations, including cleaning up and stocking the shelter for the reunion.  But as I was driving up on Thursday, Uncle Bob couldn’t wait for the kids to get there and help. So that morning he took one of his two tractors out and mowed the ginormous yard, before returning the tractor to the newer barn, and going back in the house.  

A little while later he smelled smoke, and ran out to the barn to find that the tractor that he’d put away hot was on fire.  He ran back to the house and told his wife to call the fire department, and then ran back to the barn.  The burning tractor was parked between his bigger tractor and their Miata; the Miata had a full tank of gas, and it was on fire, and the other tractor’s front tires were on fire.  And Bob is going to turn 87 in a few months.

So naturally, he ran into the barn and jumped onto the big tractor to try to drive it out of the barn and save it.  The metal he grabbed to get up into the seat was hot, and the seat was hot, and the gear shift was hot.  But it started up, and he drove it out of the barn – both front tires fully engulfed – and drove it into the closest grass that was still damp from dew, and drove in a serpentine pattern to put the tires out. 

His daughter and her husband had gotten there that morning from Minnesota, and she came out of the house to see her octogenarian dad come barreling out of a burning barn on a smoking tractor, twisting the steering wheel from side to side as he tried to extinguish the flaming front tires. 

THAT is an Ameri-CAN, people!

Afterwards, he felt a little shaky about what he had done, and his wife and daughter were mad at him for doing it.  But he got a lot of furtive fist-bumps from the Simpson men and cousins at the reunion.  And Saturday night, when all but six of us had gone home, and we were sitting around a fire under a clear night sky, my cousin Darryll told Uncle Bob that he was his hero, and that he hoped he’d be able to pull stupid stunts like that when he’s 86. 

Because: toxic (or at least reckless) masculinity.

I just wish that my uncle had a ring camera on the door of his house, because that video – possibly with a little Indiana Jones theme music as the soundtrack – would be great for a show-and-tell 20 years from now, with our kids and grandkids. 

Next week I’ll be back on the politics beat – there is so much great stuff going on! 

But tonight I’m just appreciating the afterglow from the trip.  Cassie is asleep beside my desk, where she’s been while I’ve written all 700 columns, except for the small number I’ve written when I was traveling.  And we’ve made some new memories with mom, and the rest of the family.

Thank you all for being part of CO Nation, and have a great weekend!

Throw-Back Friday (posted 8/1/25)

I’m up in Illinois with the cousins now, and looking forward to the reunion on Saturday.  I was overwhelmed with the warmth and number of your responses to my bittersweet column on Wednesday.  Thank you, one and all!

When I checked my computer last night before hitting the sack, one of my old columns came up in my feed.  I don’t know how that works, but it felt like a sign, since it was as goofy and lighthearted as my Wednesday column was somber. 

So I thought I’d re-post it here, for those of you who might have missed it the first time around.  I posted it 5 years ago in May (as you might be able to tell from the fact that I was still half-accepting the “covid came from Chinese bats” cover story).

I don’t know if it’s a “Best of,” but I hope it will be a little palate cleanser for you as you start your weekend!

New Entry in the “Stupidest Article of the Year” competition (posted 5/1/20)

Bill Weir has a newborn son, born during the quarantine.  That’s a cause for celebration, maybe even more than usual, against the backdrop of this time of disruption and social isolation.  After spending part of the lockdown watching hours of You Tube videos of surprise pregnancy and twins and even triplets announcements – with all of the accompanying shouts and cheers and tears and joyful shock – I’m even more attuned than usual to appreciation of new life.

But there are some red flags for the newborn Weir boy.

First, his dad named him “River.”  And no, it’s not a “Boy Named Sue” situation, in which you stick a kid with a name guaranteed to toughen him up via all of the expected abuse he’ll suffer because of it.  He’s just the kind of dad who names his kid “River.”  Strike one.

Second, Bill Weir works as the Chief Climate Correspondent for CNN.  Strike two.

Third, he wrote a ridiculous letter to his son, and published it for all the world to see.  And it is long, and tiresome, and packs more wrong-headed leftist tropes into one column than I would have thought possible.  (And I’m known for packing lots of tiresome and wrong-headed political tropes into over-long columns myself!) (By people who are wrong about everything, I mean.)  Strike three.

I won’t put you through the whole thing, but I think it’s worth sharing a few lowlights.

The letter starts,  “My dearest River,  Against all odds you were conceived in a lighthouse, born during a pandemic and will taste just enough of Life as We Knew It to resent us when it’s gone.  I’m sorry.  I’m sorry we broke your sea and your sky and shortened the wings of the nightingale.  I’m sorry that the Great Barrier Reef is no longer great, that we value Amazon™ more than the Amazon and that the waterfront neighborhood where you burble in my arms could be condemned by rising seas before you’re old enough for a mortgage.”

Yikes!  There’s so much wrong with that, I don’t know where to start.

No, wait a minute: I do know where to start.

Don’t tell your kids where and how they were conceived!  The letter starts and ends with references to a vacation that he and his wife took to Croatia, and the Dubrovnik lighthouse they stayed in.  Where – he wants River and the world to know – they “did it.”

Ugh.  First, I can’t think of anything more gross for this young kid to read as he gets older than the details of his parent’s love life. 

Second, what an erotic narcissist: “You plebes probably conceived your normally-named kids in a bland 3 bedroom tract house, in the missionary position.  Yuck.  Meanwhile, my lover and I (and you know this is the kind of gag-inducing male who calls his wife his “lover,” just to stick you with  a mental image that you do NOT want) hiked up a wind-swept cliff-face in a romantic foreign land during a thunderstorm to break into a century-old lighthouse, where we alarmed the livestock with our creative lovemaking and exotic outfits.”

As you regular readers know, one of the best life strategies you can follow is to ask WWMD (What Would Martacus Do?), and then act accordingly.  So what have I told my children about their conception, I know you are wondering.

Did I tell them, for instance, that their mother and I – having grown bored after romping our way through a series of sexual escapades that made the Kama Sutra look like a spring 1956 edition of the Saturday Evening Post – decided to try something different, when the Ringling Brother’s Circus came to town?  So we broke into the big tent at 2 in the morning, and after spending a half hour getting the hang of the trapeze, managed an aerial encounter involving several flips, hanging onto a bar upside down with just my knees, and finishing in a fall into a giant net, and 9 months later our oldest was born?

Or that four years later, we came up with the idea for an assignation on the back of a 2-year old Palomino that incorporated the kind of horsemanship worthy of a young Crazy Horse at the height of his powers, in a little trick I like to call the ol’ “canter-canter-trot-TROT-GALLOP!”  And that 9 months later, our youngest was born?

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

The point is that of course I haven’t told them that!  All they know is that when a man and woman love each other very much, the man carries the woman through a bedroom doorway that is in black and white for some reason, and then the door shuts and the credits roll (“Gregory Peck as Martacus,” “Lauren Bacall as Mrs. Simpson.” “Nancy Pelosi as the Mummy,” “Elizabeth Warren as the Cigar Store Indian.”) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)  And nine months later, one of them is born.

And nobody is named “River.”

Weir moves from erotic narcissism to climate narcissism: “I’m so sorry that we broke your sea and your sky?”  I’m pretty sure that the sea is still there, and I was just looking at the sky this afternoon. Doesn’t seem broken.

And because he’s apparently learned all his science from Al Gore and Captain Planet, he thinks that his house is going to be underwater in 20 years or so.  And just like with my old lefty buddies who were sure that the oceans would be dead by now, and acid rain would have wiped out half of our population, and a new global ice age would have wiped out the other half, I’d like to call Weir and remind him of his hysteria and laugh at him, as he sits in his un-condemned and totally dry house.

Weir goes on:  “See, for decades, scientists told us that if we weren’t careful, humans would unleash an invisible enemy out of the jungle and into our lungs. But that was a story few wanted to believe.  So we kept cutting down jungles — and prairies and mangroves and the last few the places where the wild things are — to pave and plow, develop and devour everything inside.”

Does this guy think that the Flu Manchu came from humans cutting down jungles?  Has nobody told him about the Chinese boneheads eating the bats, or the Chicom boneheads and their fifth-rate lab safety procedures, or the progressive slave-state bureaucrats in Beijing who lied about everything (as commies are wont to do) until it was too late to stop a pandemic?  Apparently not.

“As you get older, this will be hard to understand. But we were under the spell of Genesis 1:28: to take dominion over every living thing.”

Good lord!  I love when non-Christians who wouldn’t know Saint Paul from Minneapolis-St.Paul expound on how the evil Bible teaches that we should destroy the environment.  “And God said, go forth and cut down the jungles, and pile up the wood and make a great fire, upon which thou must roasteth the bat, notwithstanding that it is the least delicious of all the fowl that flieth through the air. Then shalt thou cough on thy neighbors, who must thenceforth flee to the airports and disperse throughout the globe, spreading the pestilence while your vile and indolent government lieth about it all, and keepeth on with the intellectual property theft and the exporting of lead-based toys and contaminated drywall.”

I’m no theologian, but you don’t have to be Aquinas to understand that the Biblical mandate is for humanity to be stewards of the environment, not destroyers of it.

Weir isn’t done:  “We had the strange urge to carve straight lines out of nature’s curves and were under the spell of a uniquely human force called “profit motive.”

You mean like the profit motive that has allowed you to get a six-figure job writing terrible “journalism,” and allowed you to afford a house to take River home to?

The article goes on and on, but it’s too painful to spend any more time on.  I just find myself feeling sorry for his son, because he’s less than a month old and his dad is already filling his mind with alarmist doom and gloom.  “We’ve killed the planet, we’re all cursed, you’ll never know how things used to be so great, but now they’re terrible, and getting worse every day.  Sorry about that.  By the way, did I ever tell you the story about the time I absolutely wrecked your mother doing downward-facing dog on a faux bearskin rug on the flagstone floors of a Dubrovnik lighthouse?”

Not since the Cuyahoga was so filled with chemicals that it caught fire has any River been so badly treated.

To get the bad taste of this article out of my mouth, I’ve written a letter to my oldest daughter, to cosmically balance Weir’s toxic letter:

Dear Katie,

First, aren’t you glad to have a great name like “Katherine,” which is classic, timeless and versatile, and not something ridiculous like “Conifer” or “Aquifer” or “Saguaro Cactus Simpson?”  You’re welcome.

Second, never mind how your mom and I made you.  You’re here now, and you’ve been nurtured and educated and equipped to make your own way in the best nation ever.  You’re welcome again.

Third, we used to be much worse stewards of the environment that God has given us responsibility for, but because we have free markets, we have gotten wealthier, and our wealth has allowed us to innovate and improve our treatment of nature.  We’ve found ways to grow more food on less land, and our modes of building and transportation are becoming cleaner and less destructive with each passing year.  If we can just not watch CNN, elect less leftists, and get the Chicoms to stop eating the freaking bats, your future is going to be brighter than for any other generation in history.

Now get out there and be an Ameri-CAN!”

Avenatti/River Weir 2020!

This Week I am Feeling the Bittersweet Brevity of Life (posted 7/30/25)

This is going to be an unusual column for me, because I’m in a more contemplative frame of mind.

As you’re reading this, I’m on the road heading up to Tennessee and then Illinois. I’ll stop over in TN and see my mom and sister – today is mom’s 87th birthday – and then continue on to Illinois, where we’re having a family reunion on Saturday. My sister and her husband are bringing mom up on Friday, and this will be her last trip back home.

Regular readers know that my mom has been struggling with Alzheimer’s, as her mother did before her. She lives with my sister and her husband, and they have risen to the occasion beautifully. Mom is still as sweet as can be, so her care is less challenging than it often is for people whose loved ones’ cognitive decline can be marked by belligerence and inappropriate behavior.

But it still takes its toll, and while I’ve been lucky to be able to go up there frequently and give my sis and her hubby the chance for week-long vacations on a fairly regular basis, Rhonda has still been doing the lion’s share of the work with mom. We’ve recently come to the point where we’re looking at some memory care nursing home options for her.

Rhonda took her for a visit to a very nice one close to her home, and was impressed with it. Mom talked with the people there and took a tour, and at the end, she said that she really liked it, and asked if she could stay there now! Which lifted some of the burden.

Of course, the next day she’d forgotten that she’d been there. On the bright side, when Rhonda showed her brochure from the place, mom thought it looked great, and agreed that she’d like to go see it.

Our fear is that when the moving day comes, if mom gets upset or cries when we take our leave, that’s going to be brutal.

We’ve read a lot about the importance of routine and familiar surroundings to ease an elderly person’s disorientation and anxiety, which has motivated us to keep her at home for as long as possible. A while ago we arranged for someone to come in and stay with her several days a week, and that has helped Rhonda.

But over the last six months or so, mom doesn’t recognize the house or her room as hers, and every evening has involved reassuring her that she’s at home. She’s had a harder time going down for the night because she doesn’t like being alone, even if Rhonda is only 70 feet away, in her own bedroom.

The memory care center has two nurses on duty 24/7, and we hope that mom will likely recognize her room there as well or better than she does her own room now.

The whole situation is fraught, of course, and this weekend will be a bittersweet one. We know it will be her last visit to her old home state and hometown, and the area where she and dad raised us. We hope that she’ll recognize all the family who will be gathered there, and her old church, and her parents’ graves in a pretty cemetery overlooking the Illinois River.

We’re pretty sure that she’ll recognize the two-story brick house she lived in on Post Street, and from where she moved away to begin her adult life when she married dad in 1958. Because she’s been obsessing about that house, convinced that her folks just sold it, and she needs to get back there and help them clean it out before the new owners arrive to move in.

In addition to mom’s decline, a few months ago I got some tragic news from a good friend of mine. He and I met in grad school 40 years ago, and we’ve been close friends ever since. My wife and I have vacationed with him and his wife over the years, and I’ve gone up to Maine to see him at least a couple of times per year for the last 15 years or so. He and I both know that we outkicked our coverage when we managed to land our amazing wives, and have been greatly blessed in our marriages.

In April, doctors discovered that his 50-something wife had a glioblastoma brain tumor, and although they performed a successful surgery and she’s been getting the best care, that kind of tumor is heartbreakingly aggressive, and she probably has around a year to live. We’ve been praying for both of them, and I’d ask that if you’re so inclined, you would do the same.

We husbands know that we usually die younger than our wives, and we are generally prepared for that, in no small part because we know that most of us would be fairly helpless without our wives. So it seems especially cruel when a younger wife gets news that upends her life and family so shockingly.

She has two kids and a husband who love her, and a church family who is surrounding and supporting her. But still, there are no words.

On a much less weighty note – but one that still involves grieving – my much-loved Cassie the Wonder Dog seems to have entered the last stretch of her life. Since the late winter she has been gradually losing steam. She’s got the heart of a lion, but it’s in the body of a 13-year-old Aussie shepherd.

I’ve always taken nightly walks with her for around a mile and a half, which involved going to the edge of the UF campus and through the law school; I tried to teach her to bark and lunge at lawyers, but she’s more well-mannered that I am, and has charity for everyone.

In the late fall I noticed that she was missing a step – just a momentary stumble – maybe half a dozen times during the walk.

Around four months ago, she started to sit in the street when we got a couple of blocks from our house, until I turned around and we headed for home. For a while she would only do the whole law school route 4 times a week, and now we’re down to maybe once.

We have a steep set of stairs in our house, and she started to struggle getting up them, stopping several times on the way up. A couple of days ago I carried her up them for the first time.

There’s nothing dramatic going wrong, and no sickness or injury. Just aging. She’s getting regular check-ups, and we’ve got her on food for older dogs, and we’re giving her a little helping getting into and out of the car. Her eyes are getting slightly milky; it’s easier to see in the brown one than in the blue one.

I know. A dog, even a world-class one like Cassie, is not the moral equivalent of a mother, or a wife. But we’ve had her since she was a year old or so. She delighted my kids when they were young teenagers, and she’s co-existed with my wife’s cats like a champ.

She made the weekly trip up and back to Tennessee with me throughout a tough autumn 10 years ago, when my dad was dying, and I think he was almost as glad to see her as he was to see me every time we got there.

She’s going to leave a little hole in our world when she’s gone.

In the meantime, I’m spoiling her more than usual, and spending as much time with mom as I can, and praying for and talking to my buddy and his wife as often as I can.

All of these gut punches from mortality lately have got me thinking about Shakespeare, even more than usual. Because: English prof.

Sonnet 73 has always been one of my favorites, and as with most of Shakespeare, it gets richer and deeper, the more life experience I get. The speaker is an old man, and uses metaphors of the parts of a day and the seasons of a year to describe his mortality.

The two opening couplets:

“That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

That last line always kills me.

I’m in my 60s, but I was a young man just a few months ago. I was king of the world, broke and living in a tiny apartment, my sights set on landing my smoke-show wife. Dad was still alive, and mom was fully herself. My buddy and his wife were newlyweds with kids and life and love ahead of them. Cassie was still a glint in her great-great-grand-dog’s eye.

And now, life is still amazing, and beautiful. But I don’t have to look too far or too hard to see “bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.”

The final couplet sums things up the way only a God-touched poet could:

“This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”

Yes!

And ouch.

I won’t have a column on Friday, and likely not on Monday either, while I’m the road, trying to savor the choirs before they become bare and ruin’d. I’ll be back with my usual goofiness and mockery next week, because so many good things are happening for our country, and our political opponents are making such entertaining fools of themselves.

And as jarringly dislocating as this is to say – considering what an elegiac column this has been – I look forward to getting back to it, and celebrating our victories in our national life, even as I’m simultaneously struggling with the impending losses of loved ones in my own.

But isn’t that our natural state? “In the midst of life, we are in death,” as the Book of Common Prayer says. (There is a great Gregorian chant on that theme, if you like that sort of thing, in Latin: “Media Vita in Morte Sumus.”) Despite the current storm clouds, I’ve got a Savior, and the hope of a life beyond this one.

Shakespeare knew it, and we’re all learning it: the sweetness of this life is heightened by the knowledge that it is fleeting.

So I’m going to make the most of this week, and I hope you will too.