In the comments to my Wednesday column, David Michael DeLoach wondered whether, when I mentioned that “an extended family member [of mine] is a manager of a Cracker Barrel,” I may have been talking about JB Pritzker. Even though I probably wouldn’t admit it if the Round Mound of Unsound Governance were related to me, I can promise that he isn’t.
But the idea did cause me to wonder what that might be like. The first thing I thought of was a hypothetical Thanksgiving if Uncle Pritzker – D(irigible) came over for dinner. I can picture how it would start: I bow my head to say grace. “Lord, we thank you for this—”
And the prayer is interrupted by a horrific, cacophonous chomping/gnashing/slobbering/crunching sound that drives us all to instinctively crouch beneath the table, before we open our eyes and slowly peek out.
Annnndddd…there’s a stripped-clean turkey carcass that looks like a school of piranhas just swam over it and JB’s chair is empty. And probably broken into kindling.
And, scene.
Okay, having got that out of the way…
Regular readers often tell me that I’m a role model for them. Well, maybe not “often.”
Okay, one reader said that once. He said that whenever he’s faced with a choice, he asks, “WWMD?” (What would Martacus do?) and then acts accordingly. And who am I to contradict his wise plan?
So as a public service, I will now explain how I think we should behave when we’re confronted with bonehead mistakes by politicians on our side of the aisle. And it’s a pretty simple plan:
Admit it. Don’t lie about it, or try to spin it. Call it a mistake, explain your reasoning, and then do whatever you can to persuade people to agree with you, and to persuade the politician to reverse course.
Don’t be a spoiled narcissist and stomp away, pouting that your guy has betrayed you, and if you ever vote again, it won’t be for him!
After that, recognize that no politician will please you 100% of the time, and consider rating your guy with a batting average. If he’s hitting over .500, that’s good. Anything over .700 is great, and the best you’re likely to get in this fallen world.
Then move on with your life.
I’ll give you an example. I am a dedicated conservative, and pretty much no politician with a chance of winning national office is conservative enough for me. So I’m generally hoping for the best, but expecting to be disappointed fairly often, without that thought crushing me. (I might call this being “cautiously optimistic.”)
Right now I’d say that Trump is hitting around .750, and I’m loving a lot of what’s happening. Closing down the border in 20 minutes, ramping up deportation efforts through various means (raids prioritizing the worst of the worst, encouraging self-deportation through the app and even cash payments, etc.), the BBB tax breaks, cracking down on antisemitism on campuses, cutting USAID and the Department of Education and PBS/NPR, some DOGE cuts, taking out Iran’s nuke facilities etc. and etc.
But he’s not a consistent and disciplined conservative, so he’s done things I don’t like. I don’t like the “no taxes on tips” – not because I don’t like tax cuts, but because I don’t like the government picking winning and losers, and giving bennies to some blue collar workers (wait staff) over others (cooks, bus boys, etc.). Just lower taxes across the board, and let the free market work.
I don’t like the feds taking stakes in private companies (Intel, Nvidia, etc.), for the same reason.
I think his tariffs have been more chaotic and confusing than they’ve needed to be, and I don’t understand imposing them on our allies as much (or sometimes more than) on our enemies.
Speaking of the Chicoms, I also don’t like inexplicably playing nice with them, as when he has allowed them to keep TikTok going (breaking an earlier promise), and especially agreeing to allow 600,000 Chinese students to take up slots in our universities and gather intelligence for a brutal communist dictatorship.
And as positive as Trump’s governing results have been, I think he’s giving up 10-15 points in approval – which becomes political capital in future battles – as a penalty for acting more like a jackass than he needs to.
Still, all things considered, he’s doing a really good job, and considering the hellish possible Hillary and Que Mala administrations that he’s saved us from, he’s by far the best president since Reagan, IMHO.
See? Was that so hard? I know that parts of it probably bugged some of you, but we’re all fine. I might even be wrong about some of it. (Spoiler alert: nope!)
Now let’s look at the other side of the aisle, to the smoking, clattering, rattling wreck that is the national Democrat party and their MSM remoras. How have those elite Dems been reacting to Trump’s second term so far? Are they admitting the mistakes their side has made, or some of the good moves that Trump has made, and doing a little self-reflection? Are they trying to call balls and strikes, and trying not to look like they’ve gone bat-guano crazy?
Hoo-boy, they are NOT!
Start with the border. The Dems are obviously on the losing end of that issue, but they can’t just admit that Trump was right to close the border. And when he deports a high-profile bad actor like Kilmar, the Dems can’t just say, “Okay, he’s a bum, but a lot of the illegals are good people just trying to make better lives for themselves.”
Nope, they’ve got to claim he’s an unjustly victimized Maryland father. And when it comes out that his wife told the cops that he was beating her – twice! – they say, “Don’t believe all women!” And when he has common MS-13 tattoos, and when video surfaces of him smuggling half a dozen Mexicans cross-country in another gang-member’s car?
The Dems plug their ears and close their eyes and chant, “Mary-land fa-ther, Mary-land fa-ther” over and over again.
Or consider crime. When Trump goes into DC and crime immediately drops, the Dems can’t just say, “Thanks for the help, and we now realize that we need to do more, so we’ve got it from here.”
Nope, they’ve got to scream about orange fascism, and show the country that they’d rather let their black constituents die than let them be protected by the Apricot Adolf. Ken-Doll Newsom tried to troll Trump, pointing out cities in Red States with higher murder rates per capita than LA. Annnnddd… all of those cities have been governed entirely by Democrats for decades. D’oh!
When a smarter Democrat like (don’t laugh) Joe Scarborough tried to keep Chicago’s awful mayor “Let’s Go” Brandon Johnson from making the same mistake of denying his obvious crime problem, Johnson was too dimwitted to take the lifeline.
Scarborough first asked him if an extra 5,000 cops on the beat would help, but Johnson rambled about how money for more housing and education would help. Joe tried again, suggesting that more cops would be useful, but Johnson Que-Mala-ed off into some word salad about how the question is too complex and multifaceted, and root causes, and infrastructure…
To his credit, Joe said, “That’s not what I asked,” and begged the dope to just say that more cops could be part of the solution. But Let’s-Go was still muttering his previous answer. “…and systemic racism, and Jim Crow, and unequally distributed resources…”
When Joe finally threw up his hands and gave up, Johnson then had his bodyguards pop some smoke outside the studio, so that he could run serpentine to his limo amid chattering small arms fire, while he called back over his shoulder, “We don’t want Trump’s KKK storm troopers here, we’re doing fine!”
The lefties have been doing the same thing about redistricting. Rather than just admitting that they’ve gerrymandered in all the blue states but that it’s sleazy and everyone should stop it, they have to pretend that the GOP move to do it in red states is an unprecedent assault on democracy.
David Brooks, the formerly reasonable person who sold his soul to become the token “conservative” at the NYT compared Texas redistricting to the use of mustard gas in war! And he couldn’t even leave it at that, saying “I fully grant you that Trump started it,” when he knows perfectly well that the largest blue states are more lopsidedly gerrymandered than the red states will be after they redistrict.
Finally, the tragic shooting in Minneapolis, which is a story we’ve seen way too often: mentally unstable damned soul commits mass killing atrocity.
Decent people would feel the grief and hold their tongues and support the victims in any way they could. Stupid politicians would jump in and start assigning blame without knowing the facts. Evil morons would apply their political litmus test, playing the story up if the killer could be identified with their opponents, or trying to bury it if he’s associated with their side, and lying about the details either way.
Does anyone have to guess which way the Dems and the MSM (but I repeat myself) played the Minneapolis story?
Even after so many such stories have blown up in their faces in the past, the Dems can’t resist jumping on the rake again.
Mayor Jacob Frey – who you may remember as Mayor Wussy McPussington from several years ago, when he was surrendering his city to BLM rioters –sneered at those offering “thoughts and prayers,” and condemning anyone who noticed that the killer identified his own “trans” identity as one source of his misery as transphobic bigots.
A soporific NPR host, after an interview in which a Minneapolis official correctly called the male killer “he,” corrected the “error,” saying that we don’t know the killer’s identity or how “they” identify.” Later on, the New York Times cleared up the confusion, calling the male killer “her.” Because: journalism!
Talented writer/moron Stephen King – perhaps thinking that since inanimate objects in his fiction (e.g. the car Christine) kill people, inanimate guns must also kill people in the real world – shared his wisdom about the culprit. “Whether he was transgender is beside the point. The point is he had a gun.”
(Um, do I have to admonish you about misgendering the obviously female killer, Stephen? Shame on you!)
A gun “expert” on CNN agreed with King that semi-automatic weapons are the problem. Then he immediately proved that he doesn’t know the most basic facts about guns, by saying that “these things [semi-auto weapons] can shoot dozens of bullets in just one trigger pull.” (Of course, FULLY automatic weapons do that. And in this context, they are the opposite of SEMI-automatic weapons, you numbskull.)
Perhaps the best example of leftist lying about this newest story came from ABC News reporter Aaron Katersky who said that “the name of Donald Trump” was written on his guns. Could this finally be the elusive, murderous Trump supporter whom the legacy media has been waiting for, lo these many years?
Nope! It turns out the phrases, “Kill Donald Trump” and “Kill Trump Now!” appeared on the killer’s guns.
If I didn’t know the killer is already dead, I’d phone in a tip to the cops that they might need to see if Tim Wolz, Gavin Newsom or most of the Democrat members of congress can account for their whereabouts at the time of the shooting.
Because that sounds like something straight out of the DNC.
Hamas delenda est!
Martin Simpson 