Reason #135 why Erika Kirk is a better person than me: at Charlie’s memorial service, she forgave his murderer. Which is an amazing and Christ-like thing to be able to do.
I aspire to that kind of grace, but even though I never met Charlie, and can’t possibly feel his loss anywhere near as strongly as she does, I’m not close to being there yet. In fact, last week I did some research to make sure that Utah still uses the firing squad for executions (they do, though lethal injection is their first choice, unless they can’t obtain the necessary drugs, which is often the case).
And if that’s not the perfect execution method for this coward – in a “live by the long gun, die by the long gun” sort of way – I don’t know what is. Utah uses 5 riflemen (one with a blank in his gun) to carry out executions, and they pin a little target over the criminal’s heart beforehand.
I’d like to see a guy accidently go to pin the target on the killer’s crotch, then go, “Oh, my mistake. I’m sure we’ll all be aiming for your heart.” And then wink at the guy. And possibly lean over and whisper to him, “You know that the real-life fascists are totalitarians who kill people for speaking out against them, right? So Charlie was the anti-fascist, and you are the actual fascist.”
And then maybe he could show the guy his bullet, into the casing of which he had carved, “No, YOU catch, fascist!”
And if he were really cool, the rifleman could re-enact one of my favorite scenes from the great, Elmore Leonard-inspired tv series Justified. He could hold a bullet out in front of him, and drop it into the creep’s lap, and then say, “The next one’s gonna be coming a little faster.”
I also wouldn’t be disappointed if all four initial bullets missed the killer’s heart. Maybe one could hit each knee, and one the groin? And how cool would it be if the fourth one took off a bunch of his ear? Then, while the riflemen waited a while for somebody to go find four more bullets, they could have a loud conversation that my conical purple wizard hat tells me would go like this:
Riflemen (RF) 1: Wow, what are the odds that we’d all miss his heart?
RF 2: I know, right? And now we have to wait until someone can walk slowly to the armory and try to scrounge up some more bullets, while this guy bleeds profusely.
RF 3: And whoever shot him in the groin? Talk about “aim small, miss small!”
RF 4: Taking off his ear was a pretty weird shot too. Why does it ring a bell, somehow?
RF 5 (snapping his fingers): I’ve got it! That’s where this creep’s leftist co-religionist shot Trump, who is coincidentally also another anti-fascist. (And then all five of them could give the bleeding coward a long, dirty look.)
And, scene.
So…yeah. Erika Kirk is an amazing person. And I’ve got a lot of work to do on that “forgive your enemies” part of my faith.
In other news, I haven’t commented on a lot of good things that have been going on, since I’ve been so preoccupied with the Charlie assassination story. I think CO and others have rightly pointed out some wrong moves that Trump has made recently, but overall, I think he’s still mostly on a roll, and I’d like to start the week off with a few of those.
I’m really glad that Trump is now looking into using RICO laws to go after Antifa. I’ll talk more about that in a future column, but for now I’ll just say that this is one more thing that Trump is doing that conservatives have dreamed about for years, but had given up on ever seeing come to fruition.
Ending the federal Education Department was another one of those. That department wasn’t in the constitution or any founding documents – it had only been created in the 1970s, for crying out loud! And it obviously didn’t do anything worthwhile: it didn’t train teachers, or improve curricula, or raise test scores. What it did do was fill up a huge building on some expensive real estate in DC, and employ an army of six-figure educrats who produced nothing of value.
Another former pipe dream had been the defunding of NPR and PBS. Another was building a border wall. And now those three things are a reality, along with a lot more.
Another great recent development has been Trump’s blowing up one drug-running boat full of fentanyl after another. There have been three of them so far, and they are awesome for many reasons:
1. They involve exciting videos with a chase scene that ends in a dramatic explosion.
2. They represent a lot of deadly drugs that will never make it to our shores, and a dramatic lesson for would-be Venezuelan drug runners watching their buddies get blown up on tv.
3. They also gave the usual suspects on the left the opportunity to display their own moral imbecility. The same talking heads and pols who could barely muster any concern for Charlie Kirk after he was murdered were full of grave pronouncements about the illegality and horror of those poor drug traffickers, gone too soon. What about due process, and their now fatherless children? Who is going to teach those youngsters the ins and outs of lethal drug running?
Oh, won’t someone think of the future gang-banging, American-murdering children?!
4. There’s a pretty good chance that my high school Spanish is failing me. (The main thing I remember is, “Silencio por favor, Martino.” Which I think means, “You’re doing a great job, Martin! Keep it up.”) But I’m pretty sure “agua” means water. And you can’t spell “Tren de Aragua” without “agua.”
So unless I’m mistaken, “Tren de Aragua” means “burial at sea, under mucho agua.” Which is perfect, because lately, the most common last words for predatory Venezuela criminals have been, “Ay, dios mio! Glug glug glug.”
Finally, I am all-in on Trump’s decision to change the name of the Defense Department to the War Department. The leftist establishment reacted in two equally wrong ways: some of them said that this was the end of the world, and the rest said that it was just a meaningless semantic change, and so why was Trump wasting his time doing it?
The second group is just wrong. Names of things are important, and often represent ideological battles lost or won. Many times, giving something a name that sticks represents a stolen rhetorical base that shapes everything that comes afterward.
For example, both parties try to give every bill they pass a name with positive connotations. If you call an obscenely bloated, propagandistic spending bill “The Inflation Reduction Act,” many stupid people will not notice that it inevitably causes inflation to skyrocket.
If you name a quintessentially fascist group – one whose members form “black blocs” of armed thugs and carry out organized violence campaigns to coerce and intimidate citizens – a name like “antifa” (anti-fascist), very, VERY stupid people will cite that name to hold that group blameless. (I’m looking at you, Don Lemon.)
I could go on and on. “Planned Parenthood” is dedicated to wiping out parenthood. The “American Civil Liberties Union” is hostile to the civil liberties of one half of the country. “The View” is hosted by a bunch of arousal-killing harridans wearing ideological blinders producing a Ray Charlesian political blindness.
So yes, the War Department sends a very different message from the Defense Department. I understand why the change was originally made: we are not the typical kind of empire that grinds its enemies underfoot, enslaves the defeated peoples, and claim their lands as our own subjugated provinces.
We won WWII with a War Department, and afterwards, as we looked at Japanese cities that were glowing, and German cities that were smoking, we figured we’d made our point. So we switched to “Defense Department.”
Self defense is – or at least used to be! – universally recognized as a legitimate right of all nations. And we wanted to be thought of as a nation that doesn’t start wars, but will sure as hell end them! Which was good, as far as it went.
But “defense” just doesn’t get the point across the way “war” does.
Would Shakespeare’s speech by Marc Antony stir us the way it does if it went, “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of defense!”? Would World War I carry the same emotional weight if it were called, “The Great Defense,” or “The Defense to end all Defenses?”
Is anybody going to read “Defense and Peace?” Would anybody be intimidated by a cigar-chomping general growling that “Defense is hell!”
Would Isaiah’s dream connote the same promise if he looked to the day when we “beat our swords into plowshares, and study defense no more?”
To summarize the difference between “defense” and “war:”
Joe Biden claimed to be “defending” America from drug trafficking, and that took the form of ushering unvetted traffickers across our border, with a “save the date” government form asking them to show up for a court hearing in 5 years.
But Trump is waging a WAR on drug traffickers.
And that looks a speed boat racing across the water, before being hit by a Hellfire missile and turned into a flaming wreck, while its gang-banger crew cartwheel into the water missing a few limbs, crying, “Ayieee! Why didn’t I join Tren de dry land?!”
Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!
Martin Simpson 