Update, plus the Continuing Imbecility of Jasmine Crockett (posted 11/21/25)

Update first:

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving!  Below is my column that I posted last Friday at Cautious Optimism, but I just wanted to update you on the fate of the CO Facebook page.  Unfortunately, there’s not much of an update, because CO still hasn’t heard anything else from Facebook, and the page is still down.

We’re still hoping that FB will reinstate the page at some point, and I suppose that if we don’t hear anything from them after another week or so, we’ll try to figure out a Plan B for another location of the site.

In the meantime, I got a great response from you all on Wednesday, and am very encouraged by how many of you want to keep the CO community going, and have written in to say that you’ll follow us to wherever we end up next.  So thanks so much!    

For now, I’m going to keep writing my usual columns and posting them here; the next one will be up on Monday morning.  Once again, if you’ve haven’t done it yet, please click the “Subscribe” button on this page; it doesn’t cost anything, and it will mean that every time I post something new, you’ll get a notice.   

And if you know any of the regulars from the Cautious Optimism Facebook page – or anyone who might enjoy the new page, whenever/ if ever we get it up and running – please point them to this page and ask them to subscribe.    

So here’s the column I posted on November 21^st:

Barely 24 hours after I felt compelled to write about what a phony dope Jasmine Crockett is, I have to do so again.  Because you can’t spell “Crockett” without “crock,” and she really stepped in it yesterday.

On Wednesday she read a rant on the House floor that was as Crocketty as can be.  On the bright side, whoever wrote it for her didn’t include a lot of “he be doin’ this” and “she be doin’ that;” on the down side, she did say “y’all” a lot.  Which made me wonder if her script literally said “y’all,” or whether it said “you” or “you all,” and she improvised.

You’ve probably already heard the key line: “Folks who also took money from somebody named Jeffrey Epstein, as I had my team dig in very quickly, Mitt Romney, the NRCC, Lee Zeldin” and etc..  Then she rambled a bit more, and you could see when she left the script, because she got even more incoherent, babbling until some House official said, “Time has expired.”

And a grateful nation was relieved.

You already know where this is going.  Because Lee Zeldin quickly pointed out that the Jeffrey Epstein who contributed to him is a doctor, and a different person than the Democrat pedophile (who contributed way more heavily to Dems than he did to Rs) Jeffrey Epstein. 

That mistake is bad enough, and if Crockett had even a modicum of honesty, she would have immediately apologized and slunk off in shame.  But as she might say, she be Jasmine Crockett, and she ain’t havin’ none a dat honesty sh*t.

When even CNN’s benighted Katilin Collins was sheepish enough to raise her error and give her a chance to “correct the record,” Crockett saw her chance and a rake, and she jumped on both.  To wit, “Listen, I never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein.  And while I’m at it, when I’ve been comparing Trump to Hitler, I meant Jerry Hitler, the accountant from Peoria.”

Okay, I made that last part up.  But it was no dumber than what Crockett actually said.  And now I’ve got a headache, just from writing something almost as dumb as Jasmine Crockett. 

Fortunately, Knob Creek 9 with water back cures a headache.  (Cue NBC music sting, “The more you know.”)  Which means I am now fortified enough to repeat the rest of her stunningly stupid response.

“So, my team, what they did is they Googled, and that is specifically why I said ‘a’ Jeffrey Epstein, unlike Republicans, I at least don’t go out and just tell lies, because it was not the same one, that’s fine.” 

Don’t be distracted by the fact that that was a dog’s breakfast of an ungrammatical run-on sentence, like I was.  (Because: English professor.)  Focus on how dumb it was.  She admits that she didn’t confirm the identity of the person she was smearing Zeldin for associating with, and then she BRAGS that she’s not telling lies! 

But it gets worse: “So, at least I wasn’t trying to mislead people.  Now, have I dug in to find out who this doctor is?  I have not…. I literally had maybe 20 minutes before I had to do that debate.”

Yikes.  I don’t think this beeyotch knows how excuses work! 

Jasmine, you’re supposed to say something that exonerates you, or at least mitigates the mistake you made.  Something like, “I was in the act of confirming Epstein’s identity when my grandma died, so I was distracted by grief.” Or “I was going to do my homework, but I lost myself in your eyes, Dr. Simpson, and realized that I’ve never really been in love before.”

Yes, I have heard both of those excuses many times in the course of my profession, and I never fell for them.  Why do you ask?

Anyway, Crockett must have seen the pained expression on Collins’ face, because she tried to bring it home one more time: “Within 20 minutes, you could not find that out, not from just doing a quick search on FEC.  So number one, I made sure that I was clear that it was a Jeffrey Epstein, but I never said that it was specifically that Jeffrey Epstein, because I knew that we would need more time to really dig in.” 

Good lord.  We’re all now dumber from having read that.  And I had to type it, which is even worse.  I feel like there had to be a better way for her to respond, if she didn’t have enough time to do a basic fact check.

So I just checked with my own adviser, Kinison Consulting, LLC, and this was his response:  “Hey Jasmine, I think I’ve got an alternative for you.  If you didn’t have time to do your homework before you spoke, you know what you might have tried?  How about SHUTTING YOUR GIANT PIE HOLE?!  OH! OHHHHH!!  DID YOU EVER THINK OF THAT, YOU EMPTY-HEADED MORON?  How about you put your money where your mouth is, and KEEP IT CLOSED!  OH! OHHHH!!”

The great Adam Carolla has a little game he sometimes plays called “Stupid or Liar.”  As the name suggests, he focuses on a specific quote from a slimy politician – Gavin Newsom is a frequent contestant – and asks the titular question: is this guy stupid enough to believe what he said, or is he just a liar?

When it comes to Crockett, I feel like the game needs a third category, i.e. “Stupid, Lazy or Liar?”  Because she’s claiming that she was smart enough to know that she could be impugning the wrong Epstein, which would be incredibly lazy.  (Just nail it down before you talk!) And it would also be stupid, since she opened herself to being almost instantly exposed. 

And she’s definitely a liar, since she claimed to not be trying to mislead people, when she obviously was.  

Whatever else this next mid-term election brings, I hope the voters of Texas send phony Jasmine Crockett packing!   

I hate to make an abrupt transition and end on a sad note, but I’ve got one other thing on my mind.

For the last several years I’ve been following the YouTube channel of Jonna Jinton, an artist and videographer who lives in the far north of Sweden.  As an Illinois boy who has been in Florida for almost 40 years, I am very nostalgic for snow and winter scenery, and she uses her camera and a drone to capture a lot of both, including some gorgeous footage of the northern lights.  (Seeing those is on my bucket list, and on my wife’s as well.  She and our oldest daughter went to Iceland together a few years ago, but the lights didn’t show up when they were there.)  

Jinton is an entrepreneur, and has rehabbed an art studio and house, and I’m a sucker for rehabbing houses.  She also has a dog who looks enough like Cassie the Wonder Dog that he could be her twin.  He’s named Nanook, which is about the most Scandinavian name for a dog that I could imagine. 

After a while away, I just checked her site again, and discovered that she’s had a rough year.  She and her husband went their separate ways, and she sold her art studio in order to buy her house after the marital split.  Most poignantly (to me), it turns out that after a year or so of declining health, sweet old Nanook died at the end of May. 

He was 15, and she’d had him since he was a puppy.  Her site has a lot of footage of him walking in the snow with her, and curling up by the fire, and I can’t watch him without thinking of Cassie.  She’s around 13 or 14 – we got her as a rescue 12 years ago, and she wasn’t a puppy then.

Nanook’s death hit Jonna very hard, and I know that the same is in store for me.  Before I’d retired, I’d fantasized about someday taking Cassie with me on a trip to Illinois or Wisconsin in the dead of winter, and renting a cabin for a week.  (My wife’s a true Florida girl, and dislikes the cold enough that she’s happy to allow me to take a winter trip each year, as long as I don’t ask her to come with!)  

I’d take my laptop and a few good books – hopefully there’d be a good internet connection so I could have some Zoom calls with Karen and stay connected to CO nation – and Cassie would get to see snow for the first time.  I pictured taking at least one snowy walk with her each day, and having a fire in a stone fireplace at night.

Sadly, that opportunity has passed.  She’s moving slower now, and can’t make it up our steep staircase anymore.  Her hearing is not what it was; I find myself inadvertently sneaking up on her and accidentally startling her fairly often.

But she’s still the same good girl, and she’s hanging in there.  She’s lying beside my desk as I write this, as she has been for every column I’ve written since CO first asked me to write something for this site in December of 2016.          

I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving, and I love the Christmas season, and between watching Nanook on a video from this past January, and listening to Cassie snoring softly by my feet, I’m feeling some kind of bittersweet pre-nostalgia.  I know I’m going to miss her when she’s gone, but I’m savoring every day with her in the meantime.

As regular readers may remember from a recent column, I think Shakespeare had it right, at the end of Sonnet 73: “This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong/ To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.” 

Have a good last weekend before Thanksgiving, everybody.

Hamas and Trantifa delenda est!