Author: martinsimpsonwriting

Figuring out the bank closures this week is above my pay grade.  Fortunately, we’ve got financial big brains here like CO and the Silber Surfer to explain the details, and I’d recommend that all CO nation follows their analysis on this topic.

For me, just hearing that the Silicon Valley Bank managed to find $73 million to donate to various BLM- and social justice-related causes is a red flag that they were bound to fail.  Ditto the news that Barney Frank was on the board of Signature Bank, which also went down last week.

Speaking of going down, remember that time when Barney Frank’s live-in gay hooker boyfriend ran a gay prostitution service out of Barney’s DC apartment?  I’m not making that up.  That is a thing that really happened. 

When the news got out, Barney insisted that he had no idea what had been going on.  But I don’t know which is worse: enabling your hooker boyfriend to run a gay brothel in your apartment, or being so clueless that your hooker boyfriend can do that while you remain clueless.

But either way, let’s definitely put a guy with that kind of judgment in charge of a bank!  What could possibly go wrong? 

My favorite part of the bank scandal story came from hacky Jen Psaki, whom I once thought had secured the title of the worst presidential spokesperson ever.  Until along came KJP, whose mindless word-for-word readings of stale and disingenuous talking points have vacillated between infuriating and soporific.

But she loves the girls as much as Barney Frank loves the boys, so your criticisms are invalid.

Anyway, after a jittery weekend, Biden’s handlers re-animated him with a huge jolt of electricity — if you’ve seen the classic movie Frankenstein, it was just like that, except that instead of a lightning strike, they used a diesel generator, and instead of taking place in a Gothic castle, it happened in the White House basement – and he staggered out to make a brief statement in front of the cameras on Monday morning.

The gist of it: Nothing to see here folks.  That’s no joke.  Our banking system is as solid as my economic agenda and our immigration system.  

He closed with a flourish: “Americans can rest assured that our banking system is safe.” 

I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that it would be easier to rest assured if Biden would just rest in peace, instead of being jolted back to life to come out and scare the children (along with the men, the women, and the markets) every time a chicken comes home to roost in the Rose Garden from one of his earlier terrible decisions.  

Once Biden was safely back in his crypt, the Ginger Prevaricator appeared on an MSNBC panel, to reassure their high-school-gymnasium-sized audience that the Biden White House is obviously on the case.  But the evidence she cited had to be the least reassuring message since Biden told the residents of East Palestine, OH that Mayor Pete was taking the reins on that train derailment situation.

Psaith Psaki: “What [Biden] needs to project to the public is, ‘We’ve got this, we have a plan….’ It’s important to know that President Biden does nothing at 9:00 a.m., he is a night owl.   The fact he is doing this at 9 a.m. anyway speaks to how vital the White House recognizes this is to have his voice out there, conveying it to the American public.”

I guess we’re just supposed to forget that for the last several years it was widely reported – if anything on CNN can be considered “widely reported” – that Joe Biden has an “early-to-bed” schedule. 

And really, isn’t that idea a lot easier to believe than a diligent Joe Biden burning the midnight oil?  If that codger isn’t tucked in for the night no later than 10 minutes after Matlock is over, I’ll eat my pointy purple magician’s hat.

Good lord, how much has our leadership bar been lowered?!  In the past, presidents would show that they were fully engaged in a crisis by demanding an emergency meeting with the Joint Chiefs, or calling their cabinet together on short notice, or sending a carrier group into the Persian Gulf.

But Joe Biden got out of bed to squint at – and mumble his way through – some boilerplate text in giant print on the teleprompter by the time most working people had already been on the job for an hour!  Hoorah!   

Psaki should be ashamed of herself for even psaying those words.  If Peter Doocy is reading this, I’m begging him to ask this question to KJP at the next WH presser:  “If the President’s getting up by 9:00 a.m. is supposed to be an indicator of how seriously he takes this crisis, can you give us a list of other wake-up times that would indicate the seriousness of other potential crises the WH may face in the future?”

My guesses:

Putin uses a tactical nuke against Ukraine?  Joe rolls out of bed by 7:00.

A Girl Scout troop with freshly washed, highly sniffable hair arrives for a photo op?  7:05

A single border agent on horseback in Del Rio uses his reins to speed up his horse?  7:15

Another video surfaces of Hunter snorting coke off of a hooker’s behind?  8:15.

Corn Pop shows up on the WH lawn with brass knuckles?  11:30.

A million MS-13 thugs breach our southern border, gas hits $9 a gallon, our national debt hits $38 trillion, and a Chinese spy balloon crashes into a train carrying deadly chemicals, setting off an explosion that kills every citizen in a Midwestern red state?

Joe hits the snooze button.

On a lighter note, I’m always on the lookout for funny stories, even if the political ones are sometimes tinged with tragedy, because they involve our leaders and how bone-deep stupid they can be.  But the harmless stories are even more enjoyable.

An example of such a recent one is a 2022 incident involving Whoopi Goldberg.  When she’s not being flatulent and oblivious on the unwatchable The View, she still occasionally acts in movies.  After a recent performance, one reviewer questioned why she had worn such a distracting fat suit in the film.

And then Whoopi had to come out and admit that… wait for it… she hadn’t been wearing a fat suit.

Ouch!  (Also, HA!) It’s almost enough to make one feel sorry for her.  I mean, if she weren’t constantly spewing misinformed hatred and slander at all even quasi-conservative Americans.

So in the spirit of punching up rather than down – since Whoopi is rich and famous and I’m just an obscure hilarious genius – here is an appropriate joke at her expense:

I never fat-shame people, because you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.  On the other hand, if a book is really, really thick, no one is ever going to read it.     

(By the way, if Whoopi’s future biographer chooses “Flatulent and Oblivious: the Whoopi Goldberg Story” as a title, I expect royalties.  Because that is the perfect title, and I hereby copyright it, right now.)  

What prompted this is another very funny story you may have heard about: last week, Newark, New Jersey had a televised ceremony in which they became a sister city to the Hindu nation of Kailasa.

The ceremony featured the usual accoutrements of such an occasion: a joint signing at City Hall of a cultural trade agreement, along with an exchange of trophy-like gifts and a series of hand-shake photos.  

Usually, the worst criticism of such a harmless event is that it is a time waster.  As you may know, Newark is a Democrat-run city, which unfortunately (but necessarily) means that it is badly run. 

Therefore, it would probably be a better use of city employees’ time and resources to tackle the usual serious problems: potholes unfilled, criminals un-caught and un-jailed, taxes higher than a Biden-era grocery bill, city officials running gay brothels out of their homes. 

You know, the usual.

But if Newarkians want to take a little escapist break from the misery of the grifters and incompetents they’ve voted to saddle themselves with, what is the harm in extending the hand of friendship to the Kailasans?

Only one thing: Kailasa doesn’t exist. 

It’s a made-up Hindu nation, the invention of a notorious scam artist named Swami Nithyananda.  And because the city officials went to Dem-run public schools, and don’t have access to either maps or Google – not to mention Google Maps – they fell for it.

Of course, not that long ago Newark elected Cory “Spartacus” Booker as its mayor.  So this is hardly the most laughable fraud they’ve been duped by.

Their first clue should have been that sister city programs traditionally involve two cities – as the name “sister cities” implies – rather one city and one nation.

Their second clue?  That a nation anywhere on earth would want to be voluntarily associated with Newark, NJ. 

This situation gives me a great idea, though.  I say we reach out to Swami’s people, and get them to approach Biden and Que Mala, and propose an executive branch exchange with Kailasa.  They get our current leadership, and we get whoever they can round up to pose as their leaders.  

(To paraphrase the late, great William F. Buckley, “I’d rather be governed by the first 300 people in the Kailasa phone book than by the entire Biden administration.”)

We could even throw a few senators into the deal.  I know at least one who would jump at the chance to claim that she is an India Indian, since the American Indian thing didn’t pan out.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Have a great weekend, everybody!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Grandma Squanto Nithyananda, 2024!

I saw a couple of stories last week that only require a short response, followed by an article that requires more attention.

Stories first:

Biden had what is being called a “cancerous lesion” surgically removed last week.  Yet oddly enough, “Dr.” Jill Biden, Que Mala Harris and Mayor Pete have all been seen with Joey Gaffes in the week since the surgery.

So speculation on who exactly was the cancerous lesion on the presidency continues…

Here is a PJ Media headline from last Tuesday: “They’re on to Him: a Shockingly Low Percentage of Americans Think Old Joe Biden Is Really Running Things.” 

I like PJ Media, and I would generally be loath to correct them, but in this case I feel like I must.  The article points to a survey finding that only 30% of likely US voters are “very confident” that Biden is physically and mentally up to the job of POTUS. 

“Only” 30%?  ONLY?  That number is far from “shockingly low.”

In fact, after watching Joey Gaffes’ performance for the last two years, any number higher than zero is shockingly high!

Then again, I guess if John Fetterman can sponsor 6 bills despite being incommunicado in a hospital being treated for what sounds like multiple strokes and depression, I guess our Cadaver in Chief can lead the free world from the comfort of his metal tray in the White House Morgue.

(Also, while I’m not a physician – although my PhD makes me more of a doctor than “Dr.” Jill is — I think that if you could excise the cancerous lesion that is his wife, Fetterman’s condition would markedly improve.) 

But the most interesting thing I’ve read this past week is a piece by Matthew Yglesias on why young liberals are more depressed than young conservatives.

Yglesias is a lefty, but a mostly reasonable one.  He co-founded Vox, but he left several years ago to go to Substack – along with some other smart lefties, including Andrew Sullivan, Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald – to write and think independently, outside of a uniformly leftist bubble.

The article that Yglesias reacted to was called, “The Politics of depression,” and it found higher rates of depression in young females than young males, which made sense to leftist commentators, since they generally think that males are evil little want-to-be patriarchs, who naturally make females miserable.

But the far larger depression gap didn’t involve gender, but politics: while liberal females were considerably more depressed than liberal males, and conservative females were slightly more depressed than conservative males, it turns out that conservatives of both genders (spoiler alert to lefty readers: there are only two genders) are way less depressed than liberals of both genders.

In fact, liberal males are considerably more depressed than conservative females.  Which has to be especially galling to a certain type of feminist, since female leftists like themselves are the saddest, and the conservative males they hate are the least depressed. 

Cue the sad violin.  (Because to this type of feminist, the sad trombone is probably too disturbingly phallic, what with that slide protruding farther and farther as the note becomes sadder.)  

If you are an irreverent roving correspondent with a fondness for cheap jokes, you could easily make a few snarky comments at this point.

So I will.

I’m no scientist, but I can give you two quick reasons why leftist young people might be depressed:

1. The females are mopey because their males are all betas who weren’t raised to be chivalrous men, and couldn’t open a door for you if they wanted to because of their lack of upper body strength due to the hormone blockers they are on while they’re trying to decide if their authentic self is more of an effeminate male or a masculine female.

2. The males are depressed because of the above, and because the only females they have any chance with are their political co-religionists, and news flash: scowls, genitalia-simulating hats and psychotic daddy issues and hatred of testosterone are not the turn-ons that they are cracked up to be.

Seriously.  Look at the women on Fox News, and then at the women on CNN, or MSNBC, or the View.  They are the visual equivalent of the antidote to Viagra.  And unfortunately for them, they’re as pretty on the inside as they are on the outside.

So… yikes!

But childish mockery aside, I think there is more at play than just physical attractiveness.  Those of us on the right aren’t all paragons of physical beauty (CO Nation excepted, of course), and I’m sure that there are some attractive lefties out there somewhere.

But leftism carries its own unhappiness with it, for several reasons.

Leftists replace God or any legitimate higher purpose with hack politicians who have recruited them into the service of a poisonous, immiserating ideology cobbled together from the envy and mean-spirited bile of Karl Marx, Saul Alinsky, Michael Moore and Satan.

That’s no recipe for contentment.

Peer pressure is also a big source of unhappiness, a situation exacerbated when your peers come pre-depressed. Because as the old saying goes, “Democrats love company.”

Sorry.  That’s not it.  Oh yeah: “Feminists love company.”

Shoot.  It’s on the tip of my tongue.

Ooh, I’ve got it: “Misery loves company.”

Honest mistake. 

Another contributor to depression is losing all the time.  Believe me, the rib-kicks of the elections of 2018, 2020, and 2022, have still got me wincing.  

But while they’ve been winning way more elections than they should, have you noticed that most lefties aren’t real happy about that? I think part of that arises from the fact that they’re not content with partial power.

The main point of being a little totalitarian is that you want total control.  So as long as there are red states out there – with their infuriating successes that are drawing productive citizens to flee there from your power-hungry blue states – you can’t really be happy.

To add salt to their wounds, wherever the left has gotten real power, the results have been disastrous.     

As I’ve written before, the socialist agenda has been implemented in at least 50 countries, starting with the Russkies in 1917, and it’s produced nothing but gulags, misery, environmental devastation and democide. 

Seriously, their record is 0-50-2, if you count a couple Scandinavian countries with short-lived, quasi-socialist experiments as draws.  How can you help but be depressed with a record like that? 

And who would your all-stars be?  Stalin?  (He’s got the silver medal in terms of body count.)  Mao? (Gold!)  Pol Pot, Castro, Chavez, any of the blocky, glowering Russian mass-killers between Stalin and Gorbachev? Ortega in Nicaragua, Ceausescu in Romania, 98% of the liberal arts faculties in the Ivy League? 

That’s a weaker lineup than the Mumblers’ Row that the Dems put up in their 2020 primary! (And how terrible were they?  Joe Biden whipped them all!)

So what’s to be happy about on the left?  Your women look like Bruce Jenner, your men look like Caitlyn Jenner, you’ve got the win-loss record of the 1976 Tampa Bay Bucs, and even when you win, you’ve got to immediately put up a Berlin/blue-state Wall to keep people from running away from you.

But perhaps the biggest cause of depression among lefties is that they’re the opposite of we few, we happy few, we band of cautious optimists: they look at every half-full glass and see it as half-full of hemlock.

They live in the greatest nation in history, where opportunity abounds, and the universal scourges of human life – war, disease, racism, sexism, soccer – are less oppressive than they are anywhere else.  And still they see problems everywhere. 

Their view is best summed up by creepy leftist cry-bully Taylor Lorenz, who reacted to the depressed liberals study with this quote, re-defining depressed young lefties as realists: “we’re living in a late stage capitalist hellscape during an ongoing deadly pandemic w record wealth inequality, 0 social safety net/job security, as climate change cooks the world.”

Every word of that is wrong!   Our economy’s problems are mostly caused by her ideology, and pale in comparison to those in the rest of the world; covid was way less serious than the flu for otherwise healthy young people.

Our wealth inequality arises from everyone getting wealthier, but some faster than others.  We have more safety net than ever before, to the point that it’s become an atrophy-causing hammock for millions.  And 2 degrees of warming over a century couldn’t cook a scrambled egg, let alone a planet.

All of which reminds me of one more reason for us to be happy: we don’t have to trade places with lefties! 

Before I go, I wanted to mention that I was on another audio podcast that just posted today.  This time the topic was, “When Does Humor Cross a Line?”  My cousin’s take was that most people are way too easily offended, and my take was that I enjoy jokes even when they should conceivably offend me.

As part of the discussion, I told several borderline-tasteless jokes as examples.  So if you enjoy my foolishness here, please download and/or listen to the podcast at this link, and let me know what you think: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2041434/12423113

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Taylor “Waah!” Lorenz, 2024!

Hello All,  

This is your humble Roving Correspondent, speaking to you on behalf of the whole brain-trust team here at Cautious Optimism: the Big Man himself (CO), the COW, COSE, the Silber Surfer, the Correspondent for Thinly Researched Conspiracy Theories, etc. (I mean, I haven’t actually cleared this with any of them, or even discussed it with them, but I’m sure they’re with me on this.) 

Gather around, and I’m going to give you some valuable advice that you’ll want to return to again and again throughout your life:

You know who you should trust for accurate news of the world, and solid reporting on and interpretation of the same? 

Us.  Especially me. 

You know who you should NOT trust as far as you can throw them, even if you have a trebuchet in your back yard that can toss a stupid human several blocks away? 

(By the way, if you do have such a trebuchet and are planning to launch a stupid person several blocks away, please be mindful that their empty-headed body may do damage to whatever it lands on.  So check out the surrounding area and see if anybody has one of those obnoxious signs in their yard which starts out, “In this house we… welcome migrants, believe in the glorious socialist future, don’t believe in X and Y chromosomes or sex-differentiated genitalia…”  Then adjust your trebuchet’s aim accordingly, and let ‘er rip!)

(Hat tip to Woo Hah and Yee Hah, ancient Chinese inventors of the trebuchet.)

(Also, coincidentally, “Woo hah!” and “Yee hah!” are the sounds you make when your trebuchet launches a Biden voter violently up into the sky, followed by his diminishing cry of, “I deserve this because of my white privilege…” as he disappears from sight.)

(Before a distant, yet satisfying crunch as the virtue signaling dullard lands on a Volvo with a “Coexist” bumper sticker on it in the driveway of the yard with the “Black Lives Matter” sign in it two blocks away.)  

Wow.  A four-level-deep parenthetical diversion.  Now I’m a little light-headed.

Where was I? 

Oh yeah: who should you NOT trust for news about the world or politics?

Entertainers! 

For example, even though Jane Fonda was quite fetching 55 years ago in Barbarella, she also thought it was a great idea to pose for a photo-op with some commie murderers on an anti-aircraft gun.

And even though Bryan Cranston was amazing in Breaking Bad, he recently explained that,“Make America Great Again” is a racist slogan.

And even though Ken Burns made the great documentary series The Civil War, he went on CNN this week, and in front of literally dozens of viewers compared DeSantis’s attempt to keep hateful, anti-American whitey-hating pseudo-history out of Florida schools to a Hitlerian “rewriting of history.”   

And now comes yet another example.

This time it’s Cyndi Lauper, the moderately talented singer of a few inconsequential 1980’s pop songs with the desperate-cry-for-attention hair color.

By the way, if you remember my most recent column on the unfairness of life re: so many irritating people outliving great ones, here are a few more data points:  

Walter Payton and Sam Kinison were both born in 1953, and they’ve both been dead for more than 20 years.  Norm MacDonald was born in 1959, and died in 2021.

But Cyndi Lauper — also born in 1953 – is still with us.  And she’s got opinions.

And man ‘o Manischewitz, are they are stupid! 

For example, you’ve probably heard about laws being enacted by voters to keep some docs and hospitals from making huge profits operating on gender-confused children and teens, followed by a stream of lucrative life-long income from providing those poor kids with hormones, therapy and more surgeries to try to keep them from killing themselves once they’ve realized the monstrously wrong and irreversible effects of those creepy surgeries and hormonal abuse.   

You might think that those laws sound like a great idea. 

But that’s because you’ve never covered yourself with too much makeup and too many bracelets and sold a million records 40 years ago.  So stay in your lane, and listen to Cyndi.

She has looked at legislation requiring that people use the correct bathrooms and wait to have genital-mutilating surgery until they are adults, and drew the obvious conclusion, in this quote which I swear I am not making up: “This is how Hitler started, just weeding everybody out.”

Yes.  Exactly!  I think we all remember the early, grainy footage of Hitler bursting into a clinic to stop a bunch of strapping Hitler Youth boys from being turned into members of the League of German Girls.  (Look it up.) 

Because THAT’s the one thing Hitler was best known for: his deep and abiding respect for the gender we are assigned at birth!

Mein gott!  

Cyndi, there were indeed many cruel and barbaric surgeries on people in Germany in the 1930s and 40s, surgeries in which people were used as human guinea pigs, with no moral weight or respect given to their bodily integrity. 

Do you know who did those surgeries, Sweet Pea?  [cue Sam Kinison voice] “THE NAZIS! THEY DID THAT!!  OH! OHHHHH!”

And you know who stopped those atrocities?  The good guys.  We shut down the medical “clinics” by way of B-17 bombing raids, brave Allied troops, and lots and lots of tough fighting.  And we chased those creepy surgeons down, some of them even all the way to South America.

Read a book, Cyndi.  But be prepared to have your mind blown when you find out that in your own analogy, you are actually supporting the Nazis and their modern-day Mengele-esque doctors.

By the way, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun,” is a catchy, harmless pop tune, and I can see why you had a hit with it. 

You know what song would NOT have made the pop charts?  (What’s that?  The ghost of Sam Kinison is back?  Ok…)   “GIRLS JUST WANT TO HAVE THEIR HEALTHY BREASTS CUT OFF!! OH!  OHHHHHH!” 

And yes, Cyndi, we do see your true colors, shining through.

And those colors are a black swastika, in a white circle, on a blood-red banner.  Knock it off!

On a happier note, I am very glad the GOP has a majority in the House, because otherwise we would not have seen Tucker Carlson’s great exposure of what actually happened on January 6^th.  And we also would not have seen the MSM, the Dems, and too many “Republicans” losing their Schiff over it. 

One after another, they’ve denounced Carlson for the way he’s “depicting… his version of events.” 

It’s not “his version” of anything, you idiots!  He’s literally just showing actual video of the actual events.

Now I could see one reasonable counter-argument: if Tucker selectively shows some video excerpts and not others, he might be skewing the totality of what happened. 

For example, it could be that 95% of the protestors that day were violent thugs (they weren’t), the right-wing version of antifa or BLM, and only 5% were peaceful, non-violent protestors (they weren’t).  And maybe Tucker is ONLY showing those 5%, and thus giving a biased picture of the totality of what happened on J6. (He isn’t.)

But if you agree that that might be true (it’s not), don’t you realize the logically necessary corollary to that?  By showing only a very tiny slice of the thousands of hours of J6 video footage, and vigorously fighting the release of all other footage, the dishonest leftist hacks on the J6 committee – I’m looking at you too, Crybaby Kinzinger and Lyin’ Liz Cheney – did exactly that!

And I don’t remember Cocaine Mitch, Willard Romney and the rest of the RINOs screaming about the unfairness of that.  (Because they didn’t.) 

Oh, if only there were a way that we could get to the truth!  If only—

Wait a minute.  An idea occurs to me, and it might be just crazy enough to work!  

What if someone made ALL of the J6 video publicly available?  Sure, that would require some determination, in the hands of someone with the political power to make it happen.  But that would answer all of our—

What’s that?  The Democrat star chamber running the multi-year Potemkin J6 show-trial had total control over all that video and could have released everything 2 years ago, thus revealing the unvarnished, un-spun truth to the American public? 

And yet they didn’t do that?

And now they’ve got their gender non-binary footie-pajamas pulled up over their heads and they’re shrieking that Tucker is Hitler – or Tucker hit her, or tacky hiccup, or something?

(You can’t really hear them clearly, because their howling is muffled by the fact that they’re yelling through what is supposed to be the butt-flap in their footie pjs, but is now over their faces. Because they’ve pulled them up over their heads, as I think I mentioned earlier.)   

Huh.  Why, it’s almost like they’re a bunch of colossal hypocrites, speaking with forked tongue, as Liz Warren’s tribespeople used to say.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Whew!  I’m a little out of breath after that.  Let me just take one more sip of Knob Creek 9 and review my original goals for this column: 

Provide useful and timely trebuchet knowledge to the general public?  Check.

Rhetorically Hillary-slap dopey old Cyndi Lauper?  Check.

Lambaste MSM, Dems and RINOS for their J6 perfidy?  Check.

Last-minute insertion of the hilarious, never-gets-old hashtag about never stop mocking pale Lizzie Warren?  

Check and mate!

Thus ends yet another valuable public service announcement.  As pretty much everything here at Cautious Optimism is.

You’re welcome.

Thanks to Alan Greenleaf and Ivy Shafer for hitting my tip jar, and have a great weekend, everybody!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Woo “The Trebuchet King” Hah, 2024!

The actor Tom Sizemore, who died this week at 61, was great in four movies I really liked:  Saving Private Ryan, True Romance, Blackhawk Down and Heat. 

Usually it’s a mistake to learn too much about actors’ or musicians’ lives, because they too often turn out to be dimwits, jerks or leftists.   (Not to get Que Mala too excited, but if you make a Venn diagram of those three groups, you’ll get a lot of overlap.) 

There are exceptions, of course.  Denzel Washington seems like as good of a person as he is an actor, and I admire what I know of the life and work of Nick Searcy and Neal McDonough.

I don’t know much about Sizemore as a person, but I understand that he had some addictions that likely hastened his death.  But even so, the unfairness of the world always weighs on me at times like these. Tom Petty is dead, as is John Prine, Vince Flynn, Rush, and Andrew Breitbart. 

Yet some of the worst people are in their late hundreds – Noam Chomsky, Paul Ehrlich, Bernie Sanders, Imhotep Pelosi, Joe Biden (sort of) – and are all still alive and kicking.  Or at least falling up airplane mobile staircases, in Brandon’s case.

Doesn’t seem right.  RIP, Tom Sizemore

I heard two of the lamest rationalizations of bad behavior this week.  The first involves the lunatic male teacher who has been going to work in a blonde wig and enormous fake breasts for the last year or more.  (I’m glad he’s in Canada, because lately I’d started to think that we’d cornered the market on nutjobs here in the US.)  

If you didn’t catch the story, he finally got in real trouble this past week, when a reporter staked him out and got some pictures of him without his ridiculous drag-teacher costume, and looking like a regular, schlumpy middle-aged guy.

So now the school board in Ontario has removed him from the classroom, and it sounds as if he might actually get fired.  Which makes perfect sense, and is obviously way overdue.

The insane part is that as long as this guy was parading in front of his students as a grotesquely disproportionate female impersonator, this uber-woke school board didn’t think that they would be justified in intervening.  Because he identifies as a woman who apparently caught a chest-full of whatever radiation it was that caused the titular actress (HA!) in “Attack of the 50-Foot Woman” to get her most famous leading role, I guess?

But now, after it turns out that he only intermittently identifies as a gender-confused circus freak, the school board is galvanized to take action! 

In other words, the Ontario school board decided that whenever this guy had a posture-threatening pair of patently fake breasts strapped onto his idiotic carcass, he was teacher of the year material.

But when he took them OFF, he had to be fired immediately.

Brilliant!

If you haven’t been a reader here for long, you may be tempted to challenge me.  “Martin,” you might say, “it is impossible to top the sheer idiocy of that reasoning!”

My response is to say, “Hold my bourbon” — which I am medicinally forced to drink whenever my high calling as your Roving Correspondent requires me to see or even think of that Canadian mammarian monstrosity (try to type THAT when you’re two bourbons in to a column!) – “and watch this!”

Attorney General Merrick Garland was questioned by several GOP senators this week on various topics,  and it is beyond my humble powers of description to communicate to you how badly it went for him.

If it were a fight, they would’ve stopped it. 

The senators beat him like a rented mule.

It was more lopsided than the infamous Rumble on the Runway, when Joey Gaffes squared off against a mobile airplane staircase, and was TKO’ed after three falls on the first 12 steps.    

Senator Mike Lee asked Garland about why the DOJ has gone after a lot of non-violent pro-life people for protesting at abortion clinics, and only a very few pro-abortion vandals for violent and expensive property damage to pregnancy support clinics and churches.

The numbers are pretty damning: since the start of 2022, the DOJ has pursued charges against 34 individuals for blocking access or damaging abortion clinics.  On the other hand, since the leak of the Dobbs decision, there were over 81 attacks (vandalism, break-ins, firebombings) on pregnancy centers and 130 on Catholic churches, and Garland’s Guerrillas have only been able to bring charges against 2 suspects.

Garland stuttered through a transparently foolish lie — “We apply the law equally” – before admitting the obvious: there are many more prosecutions of actions against abortion clinics than those against crisis pregnancy clinics or churches.   

But he had an explanation: it’s because the actions against abortion clinics happen in the daytime, when “seeing the person who did it is quite easy.”  On the other hand, the criminal geniuses who are attacking Catholic churches and pregnancy centers are – and I am not making this quote up – “doing this at night.  In the dark.” 

Got it?   The dastardly pro-aborts have been waiting for nighttime! 

What do you expect Merrick Garland to do? It’s not like DOJ workers have superhero-like powers to see in the dark!   They don’t employ Doctor X, the man with X-ray vision, or any other Marvel or DC character with similar abilities whom I can’t name right now because I’m a grown-ass man and don’t read comic books any more.

If only someone could invent some sort of power source or device that would allow us to illuminate our surroundings, even after the otherwise impenetrable “cover of darkness” (I just now invented that phrase – thank you, noble Kentuckians who invented Knob Creek 9!) descends at sunset to protect evildoers from detection. 

Can you imagine that? 

I mean sure, if such a thing ever became a reality, we’d first use it to put up what I suggest we should call “lights” at Wrigley Field so that the Cubs could start playing some night games.  And next we should probably use some of them in Las Vegas, because gamblers keep bonking into one dark casino after another, resulting in many minor injuries and spilled drinks.

But right after that, we could give that awesome power of illumination to Merrick Garland, and in no time he’d be blinding hundreds of red-handed pro-abortionists like they were Paul on the road to Damascus!

I mean, if Paul had been on his way to Damascus to firebomb Catholic churches.  (I mean, if Catholic churches had been invented when Paul was heading to Damascus.)    

Garland looked commensurately worse when asked why he has done nothing to arrest the packs of leftist thugs who have been staking out and screaming at SCOTUS judges’ houses, in clear violation of the law. Inconveniently for Marvelous Merrick, those creeps have been out in full daylight for months.

And it’s not like they couldn’t be tracked down just on eyewitness descriptions alone: 

Look for males who are malodorous, effeminate, unkempt, and look like they live in their parents’ basements. 

Look for unwell females – either morbidly obese or frighteningly spindly – with a general demeanor that just screams, “I hate you, dad!” and who elicit in all who see them a phrase that ends in, “…not with a ten-foot pole.”

For both genders, watch for hairstyles involving colors not found in nature, and/or erratically shaven heads.  In terms of facial piercings, think “fell head-first into a huge tackle box.”    

So let me leave this poll question up to CO Nation: what reasoning is more idiotic?

Canadian educrats saying that they were fine with a perv teacher wearing obscenely ginormous fake boobs, but not with him taking them off,

Or

Merrick Garland saying that the United States Department of Justice will vigorously pursue all crime… as long as it happens when the sun’s out.

I know one thing: we should thank our loving Creator every day that Merrick Garland is not on the Supreme Court!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/ Merrick “Sherlock” Garland, 2024!

I want to start this month by answering a question that has vexed the most sophisticated thinkers in our great nation: if you are black, female and gay, how bad at your political job do you have to be to get fired? 

You might suspect that this is a trick question, because such a thing can never happen.  Especially if you are thinking of a certain elfin White House spokesperson who is constantly breaking glass ceilings in the field of “worst presidential spokesperson ever in the history of our galaxy.” 

And if you took that position before this past week, I would have had to agree with you.

But now a glorious new age has dawned!  Because on Tuesday, the struggling, once-great city of Chicago had a mayoral primary, and when the dust had cleared, neither of the top two vote-getters — who will face each other in a run-off next month – was Lori Lightfoot!

Ah, Lightfoot.  She may have an alliterative, whimsical name, but everything else about her is terrible. 

She is a walking amalgam of the worst aspects of many rotten leaders: the intellectual vacuity of Que Mala; the destructive political ideology of Stalin; the personal charm of, well, Stalin; the hateful race-hustling of Al Sharpton; and the stubborn resistance to disastrous feedback of most big-city Dem mayors.

Not to mention the worst case of “resting river-carp face” this side of Maxine Waters.   

Add all that together, and she has presided over the worst years in Chicago’s history.  And I’m including the year of the great Chicago fire, along with the year when a horrific pop song (“The Night Chicago Died”) was made about that disaster.  Plus the year when Walter Payton died (peace be upon him).   

It’s hard to even pick out which lowlights should make the anti-sizzler reel of Lightfoot’s (mercifully) only term as mayor.  But one bottom-five pick has to be the way that her decisions to hamstring the police and release every violent thug she could find touched off a crime wave that made the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre look like a St. Valentine’s Day speed dating event that produced many happy marriages, and not a single murder or carjacking.

But my personal favorite is still the time when she recorded a PSA ordering all the little people not to be selfish and get their hair done during the needless and destructive Covid lockdown, and then went straight to a hairstylist herself.  That has to make the bottom 5 list, if only because she paid good taxpayers’ money to a professional barber, and still came out looking like THAT! 

(By the way, rumors that her instructions to the hairstylist were, “Give me the Bug-Eyed, Lesbian George Jefferson cut,” have not been confirmed.)

Anyway, when I first heard that Lightfoot had lost on Tuesday night, I fired up my traditional go-to celebration song: Ray Charles (I miss him!) and the Voices of Jubilation (that many dashikis, including a few on white folks, always cracks me up) doing, “Oh Happy Day.”

And it is a happy day for Chicago, especially if the remaining “defund the cops” far-lefty doesn’t win in April.  There’s only so much progress they can make with that many Dem voters, but any step away from Lori Lightfoot is a step up!

In other good news, Ron DeSantis received two political attacks which turned out to be amazing endorsements, as they came from exactly the type of people you would NOT want to approve of you.

First up was convicted murderer Donald Dillbeck, who I’m going to call Dillweed, as a childish insult to an a-hole who doesn’t deserve to have his actual name spoken. 

So Dillweed was a teenaged carjacker from Indiana who fled to Florida in 1979.  When a cop rousted him as he was sleeping in a stolen car, he fought with the cop, and shot him to death with his own pistol.  If he had been executed about six weeks later, the taxpayers would have saved millions of dollars taking care of him for another 44 years. 

But because so many Americans are too “compassionate” for that, he got life in prison.  “Life” meaning “you’ll be out on work release catering jobs in 10 years.”

Sure enough, 10 years later he stole a knife while catering and ran off.  He tried to carjack a mother of two, and when she didn’t cooperate as quickly as he liked, he repeatedly stabbed her and then slit her throat. 

So in addition to millions of taxpayer dollars, the “compassion” of our justice system also cost the life of a mother and devastated her two children.  But Dillweed was finally sentenced to death. 

And just like that, the feds got right on it and carried out the sentence … 33 years later.

In his last SCOTUS appeal, Dillweed said that he shouldn’t be executed because his mom drank when she was pregnant with him, which caused him “neurological impairment.”  SCOTUS denied the appeal, and his death warrant went to DeSantis’ desk. 

And because our wise governor knows that nothing treats neurological impairment more effectively than a lethal injection, he signed the warrant immediately!

Every convict is allowed some last words, and Dillweed went out like he had lived: whining like a little wuss.  He said, “I know I hurt people when I was young.  I really messed up.  But I know Ron DeSantis has done a lot worse.  He’s taken a lot from a lot of people.  I speak for all men, women and children.  He’s put his foot on our necks.  He and other people like him can suck our [Durbins].”

It was big of you to admit that you “messed up,” Donnie.  But you know what feels good after mean old  Ron DeSantis has had his foot on your neck?   No, not a tube of Icy Hot or a couple of Motrin.

A lethal injection!  Buh-bye, Dillweed.

The second, and only slightly less effective political attack on DeSantis came from Jennifer Rubin, who used to be a quasi-conservative commentator, but was never the sharpest corkscrew in the Swiss Army knife.  Trump’s election was too much for her, and she began a downward spiral into leftism. 

While she never took to meth and prostitution, she did get hired to write opinion pieces at the Washington Post and appear occasionally on MSNBC. 

And who’s to say which is worse?

Anyway, on Tuesday Rubin published a column damning everything DeSantis has been doing, with a tag line that she meant to be scary to voters:  “Imagine if DeSantis did to America what he’s done to Florida.” 

Yes!  That’s exactly what we’ve been imagining, Jennifer!  And the only downside is that the priapism is making things awkward in the office. 

I can just imagine the tension in the DeSantis camp: “If we’ve lost serial killers and MSNBC talking heads, we’ll never get above 90% in the electoral college!”    

Since I’ve already mentioned one happy-ending crime story, I’ll conclude with two more.

First is the tale of Lance Storz, a Kentucky man of many hobbies, one of which was wife beating.  Last June three cops responded to a domestic violence call, and a shootout ensued.  Storz shot three of the cops to death, and he also killed a police dog.  (Which alone would be reason enough to give him a syringe full of “Florida neurological impairment cure,” according to Cassie the Wonder Dog.  And me.)

A bunch of other cops must have been on scene at the end of the shootout, because in his booking photo Storz’s face was mostly cuts, dried blood, swelling and black eyes.  (His body wasn’t shown, but I can only hope that it had a lot of deep dog bites in it, too.)

He’s been in jail since then with a raft of charges, but damn the luck, he turned up dead in the Pike County Detention Center on Tuesday.  Police say that Storz “is believed to have died by his own hand.” 

I only wish that back in 1979, Donnie Dillweed would’ve had the same good judgment as Lance Storz.

Also, if some local newspaper writer in Kentucky didn’t headline this story, “Storz Closed,” I don’t know what they’re teaching them in J-school anymore.

And finally, I’ve mentioned the videos done by a funny ex-cop named Donut Operator before, and I can now recommend one more.  This one is titled, “Drunk Driver Turns Warning into Beat Down,” and it tells the classic tale of an imbecilic criminal making a bad situation worse through his ongoing imbecility.

The featured bonehead in this video has what might be the greatest name of all time: Winzo Tilman!

(With a name like that, he only had three occupational options: shutdown corner for a top-tier college football team, mixed martial arts fighter, or career criminal.)

 So Winzo runs a red light right in front of a cop.  Instead of pulling over when the cop lights him up, he drives like a maniac on miles of wet roads, nearly hitting a huge number of pedestrians and other cars.  By the time he finally slides into another car and the cops catch him, they’re thinking he’s probably got lots of warrants or a dead body in the trunk.

After the first cop orders him down on the ground and he complies, the cop walks toward him to put on the cuffs, and Winzo makes the saddest, slowest attempt to leap up and sprint away that I’ve ever seen.   The cop is on him within his first three steps.  (Which is why you’ve never heard the name “Winzo Tillman” during a Heisman trophy ceremony.)

As Tilman is being taken away, the arresting cop shows the others what he had in the car: a tiny bit of weed and a bottle of booze. 

Of course it later turned out that he was out on bond for battery and disorderly conduct.   But you know, Winzo’s gotta Winzo, man!

The theme for today is that even though bad judgment carries with it terrible costs for others, idiots tend to reap what they sow.

Lori is lightfooting it out of Chicago, DeSantis is undefeated against death row inmates, no one will ever take Jennifer Rubin seriously again, Kentucky is safer without Lance Storz in it, and Winzo is on ice.  

Have a good weekend, everybody!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Donnie Dillweed’s Ghost, 2024!

Today I’ve got two stories of the racial craziness that is poisoning our nation, but both of them are funny. 

For those of you who say that PBS is a lefty network partially funded by American taxpayers, and which uses that money to regularly insult and lie about half of those taxpayers – the conservative half – you are absolutely right.

PBS does have some decent shows – Austin City Limits, Rick Steves’ travel programs and This Old House are good, for example.  Still, it’s aggravating that they produce so much politically biased content, especially when they use taxpayer money to do it. 

(Can you imagine the looks on the faces of the talking heads at PBS if it was announced that they’d henceforth be forced to pay part of Tucker Carlson’s or Sean Hannity’s salary?)

But last week, PBS aired my favorite hour of television this year. 

It came on the program “Finding Your Roots,” when host Henry Louis Gates presented guest Angela Davis with the results of genealogical research into her ancestry.    

If you don’t know who Davis is, consider yourself lucky.  As an old prof, I am well acquainted with her history as a radical Communist, racialist demagogue, and widely published “academic.”  And I’ll save you the time and aggravation of reading her many screeds and polemics by summing up her world view:  whites are evil, blacks are entirely virtuous victims, America is terrible, and every blood-soaked Communist dictatorship you’ve ever heard of is great.

You’re welcome.

Davis clearly went on Gates’ program expecting to learn that her ancestors were all oppressed and victimized by evil whites.  At the age of 79, this woman has been wearing ideological blinders so long that they seem to have melded with her skull.

So it was great fun to watch reality give her a sustained, devastating, rhetorical beat-down.  (Those blinders ensured that she could never see the shots coming!)

First she found out that both of her grandfathers were white.  I don’t abide by the crude racist categorizing of the identity-politics left… but it was sweet to see this whitey hater find out that she’s at least a quarter white! 

When Gates reported that one of her grandfathers was a prominent and successful member of his community, she immediately snarked, “Was he also a member of the Klan or the White Citizens’ Council?”  (Oddly, while she confidently stated that he must have “thoroughly embraced white supremacy,” she never mentioned that he was certainly a Democrat, since he was an elected official in Alabama in the 1920s and ‘30s.)

Then she finds out that farther back in the chain, one of her ancestors also fought in the Revolutionary War.  When Gates tells her that her ancestor was a “patriot,” she looks very uncomfortable, before blurting out, “Well, the American revolution should have gone very much further than it did.”

She tries to rally, and counters the slur of having a patriot in her lineage by saying that many people have often called noble “fighters against racism” such as herself “un-American,” and she says, “I’ve always insisted that the best way to pay tribute to this country is to try to change it…” 

(She’s made a career of  judging our country purely by its worst moments – and exaggerating even those – and she thinks the best way she can acknowledge the country’s virtues is to change it.  And for some reason, people call her un-American?  It’s a mystery!)

The closest she can come to praise is that in some sense, “I can identify with the identity of the patriot, but it has to be a radical identification.”  But then Gates revealed that after the war, that patriot owned 6 slaves.

On the one hand, this should have been good news for Davis, since she’s always on the lookout for an oppressive white guy to castigate.  Except that this one was her ancestor.  In her most honest moment, she confesses, “I always imagined my ancestors as the people who were enslaved.”

Yes, you did.  And you imagined wrong. 

But it got worse for Davis, when she found out that her other grandfather was also white.  When told that in the 1920s, her grandfather had sold 22 acres to her grandmother for $200, Gates suggested that this might be evidence that the two were closely bonded. But Davis is not one to miss a chance to impugn any white guy’s motives.

“I’m thinking, why didn’t he just give it to her?”  Gates responds that “we don’t know where the $200 came from,” and that he might have given it to her to create a staged transaction that would give her rights to the land.  (Which, on the face of it, sounds more likely than a poor, black, single mother saving a large sum of money on her own in the 1920s.)

But this suggestion didn’t please Davis, who looked down, frowned, and shrugged, grudgingly saying, “That’s true.”  Sensing her discomfort, Gates quickly says, “I’m not trying to cut him some slack.”

After a few more stories that pleased Davis more – because they featured black ancestors treated badly by white folks – Gates gave her the final blow.  One of her white grandfather’s ancestors came to America on the Mayflower!

To someone who loved America despite its flaws, and who didn’t have the racialist, far-left ideological animosity of Angela Davis, finding that one ancestor was a patriot who fought in the Revolutionary War, and that another came over on the Mayflower would be good and exciting news.  

Gates keeps presenting the details as if Davis would be glad to hear them: Your ancestor was a patriot!  Your ancestor was one of the 101 people on the Mayflower!

But Davis shakes her head and smiles uncomfortably, saying, “No, I can’t believe this.  My ancestors did not come here on the Mayflower.”  Gates repeats it, as she says, “No, no, no, no.” 

He pushes it farther, “Did you ever in your wildest dreams think that you may have descended from people who laid the foundation of this country,” but she just keeps shaking her head and saying, “Never, never, never.”

It’s hard not to enjoy watching a hateful person get an arse-whipping by inconvenient facts, whether that person is a klansman who just found out that he’s partly black, or a racist like Davis discovering that she’s descended from “colonizers” and slave-owners.  

The second story involves the “chief equity, inclusion and culture officer” of a social justice group in Philly named Raquel Evita Saraswati.  As a “queer Muslim” of Latin, South Asian and Arab descent, Saraswati checked so many identity politics boxes that she was almost too good to be true.

Well, it turns out that “Saraswati” might be Arabic for “Gotcha, beeyotch!” 

Because Saraswati’s mother revealed that she is actually a white girl named Rachel Elizabeth Seidel.  Mom said that Rachel is of British, German and Italian descent, and that “I’m as white as the driven snow, and so is she.”    

If I can be permitted to make that excellent quote just a little bit better, mom should have said, “I’m as white as Elizabeth Warren, and so is she.”  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Like race-faking white girl Rachel Dolezal before her, Rachel Seidel pulled the wool over the eyes of a woke lefty group and made them look as ridiculous as they are.  What’s more disturbing is their reaction. 

A representative of the group says that they don’t “require any employee to prove their heritage as a condition of their employment, or in order to be valued as a member of our team.”  The clear implication is that no one who is white could be hired by them, or valued as a member of their team.

Is it just me, or does that sound… I don’t know… racist?  And super-creepy?

To add insult to bigotry, some group members are now attacking Rachel because she reportedly went on “right wing tv shows” after 9/11 where she was presented as “a ‘moderate’ Muslim critical of Islamic extremism.” 

One anonymous official said, “Imagine the trauma of people who confided in her, trusted in her… thinking that she’s a person of color.  And now all of a sudden, it’s a white woman with a right-wing history.  It’s scary.”

Indeed!  It’s tough to tell what’s more scary: someone who dared to criticize the jihadi freaks who had just perpetrated the worst terrorist mass murder of modern times, or a (shudder) “right-wing” white lady!

I’m encouraged by recent indications that more and more Americans are seeing through the lies of the leftist grifters pushing CRT and a bigoted racial spoils system.

But if the identity-politics leftists ever get their way, there would still be one silver lining:

Watching Rachel Seidel and Angela Davis writing reparations checks!

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Rachel Dolezal-Saraswati, 2024!

This week has given us another mixture of good news and bad news.  Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first, and then end with the good stuff.

All three bad stories today involve people stricken with idiocy.  (You’ll remember from earlier columns that we’re supposed to say, “mummified persons” instead of “mummies,” and “people with anorexia” instead of “anorexics,” and “people of fake ethnicity” instead of “Elizabeth Warren.”)  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Unfortunately, the subject of the first story is our president, who has been stricken with late-stage, metastasized, weapons-grade idiocy.

A year ago Biden signed the most unnecessary law since Porky Nork Kim in North Korea declared that nobody in that country could have the same hideous haircut as his.  I’m talking about the “Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act,” which Biden signed immediately after the titular atrocious hate crime.

If by “immediately” you mean “67 years later.”

Biden pretended that lynchings are still happening on most weekdays in America, and that Americans are passionately divided as to whether they are an admirable practice or not.  Joe bravely came down on the anti-lynching side. 

Which gives all of us hope that he’ll soon be able to ram a bill through congress to stop the constant witch trials that are currently plaguing our nation.

Not to mention creating traffic jams in many of our larger cities on “Witch Burning Wednesdays.”

Of course this charade was an empty gesture by an empty suit with an empty head.

So naturally he went back for an encore last Friday, when he hosted a screening of the movie “Till” at the White House, and used the opportunity to fan the flames of racial animus yet again. 

In a disgusting lecture, he said, “You know, folks, lynching is pure terror,” and then went on to recite the way black people were hung, burned, drowned and castrated, before aiming some racial venom at the true villains: white people.

After describing how white crowds celebrated lynchings, he said, “Hard to believe, but that’s what was done.  And some people still want to do that.”

I can’t think of any public statement by a US president in my lifetime that is as hateful and slanderous as that last sentence.  And the next time any lefties try to sell the idea of moderate ol’ Joe, the great unifier, we should all throw that quote back in their faces, and then give them two choice words.  (And I don’t mean, “happy birthday.”)

No reasonable person should accept the assignment of collective moral guilt to people based on their sharing a skin color with long-dead people who did terrible things in the past.  But if today’s national Democrats are going to try that demonizing smear, we should counter that such moral guilt would certainly better fit a sub-group of people who belonged to the political party that organized, carried out and celebrated those terrible events, i.e. the Democrat party.

Not all Democrats were secessionists, but virtually all of the secessionists were Democrats.  They started the Civil War to protect slavery, and when a GOP president waged war – carried out in large part by future GOP president Grant – and defeated the pro-slavery Dems, those Dems started the Klan, and then passed Jim Crow Laws and oppressed blacks – including lynching some – for another century or so.  

Obviously, Democrats today should not be blamed for the crimes committed by their party brethren in the past.  Unless, that is, they’re going to shamefully accuse whites in general (and conservatives specifically) of still wanting to do what their party collectively and actually did.

For our second bad story, we go across the pond, to find British leftists who are as wrong-headed and Western-civilization-hating as their American co-religionists. 

The Orwellian “Prevent” project was started in the UK after the Brits noticed that many adherents of a certain super-peaceful religion had demonstrated an unfortunate tendency to murder gay people, rape women who weren’t completely covered, and self-detonate in crowded places.  So the government leaped into action, creating the counter-terrorism project and tossing it £50 million per year to “identify warning signs of potential extremism.” 

So did they zero in on podcasts like “50 Ways to Kill an Infidel,” or books like, “Jihad For Dummies,” or websites advertising, “Wembley Stadium Behead-Fest ’23?”  

They did not.  Instead they focused on the real threats: books by “far-right extremists” like Shakespeare, Chaucer, Tennyson, Milton, Orwell, Burke, and John Le Carre, and movies and tv shows like House of Cards and Great British Railway Journeys.

I’m not making that up.  Because nobody could make that up. 

It’s difficult to decide which is more far-fetched: American conservatives just dying to lynch black people, or wild-eyed terrorists getting psyched up by reading The Canterbury Tales, then chanting the “Alas Poor Yorick” speech from Hamlet as they drive a panel van loaded with plastic explosives into a crowd at the nearest synagogue.

These people are well-funded idiots! 

Sorry.  I meant to say “well-funded people stricken with idiocy.”

I read about one final bad story in a Daily Wire article with a title that sums up the depths to which a once-great state has fallen: “California Democrats Move to Ban Uses of Police K9s, Citing Racism.”

Why not?  If non-racist conservatives today can be tarred with the brush of crimes carried out by racist Democrats 150 years ago, why can’t police dogs be racist too?

And before you can object that police dogs are overwhelmingly not white – though there might a rare white Husky or Samoyed K9 – I’m way ahead of you. 

Yes, the vast majority of police dogs are black and brown.   But that doesn’t mean they’re not white supremacists, just like the black Memphis cops who shot Tyre Nichols are black white supremacists. 

And if GOP governor candidate Larry Elder can be called “the black face of white supremacy” by moron journalists in CA, you know what the police dogs will be called:

The black-and-brown muzzles of white supremacy.  

Ironically, if this unutterably stupid proposal passes, the end result will be more minority suspects getting shot.  Because as it stands right now, letting some better-trained Cassie the Wonder Dogs play a spirited game of “Bite the Criminal Like a Pork Chop” convinces a lot of previously resistant Biden-voting recidivists to give up.

But without Man’s Best Friend in a squad car, a lot of thugs are going to discover that Man’s Second-Best Friend is a service pistol. 

And they’ll be able to thank their Democrat benefactors, as they bleed out with a thorax full of bullets, that at least they didn’t have to put up with a bigoted Belgian Malinois latched on to their arm or buttocks. 

You’re welcome!

But enough doom and gloom – let’s run through a few happier stories, all of which involve watching dullards reap what they sow.

For example, NPR has announced that they are following the example of other leftist media entities (the Washington Post, CNN, NBC news, etc.), and laying off 10% of their work force.

I normally wouldn’t celebrate people losing their jobs.  But these people have been figuratively defecating on our country and everything we believe in for years.  So don’t let the door hit you on your gender-fluid behinds, wokesters!

The delicious cherry on top of this schadenfreude sundae is that the boneheads have learned nothing from the gut punch that the market is giving them.  The CEO says that despite the cuts, NPR will continue to “support our [diversity, equity and inclusion] priorities and not disproportionately impact people of color or any other historically marginalized group.”

Perfect!  Keep it up, you geniuses!   Ignore competence and usefulness, in favor of counting melanin and genitalia, and see how that works out. 

Allow me to give the disproportionately white mopes who are struggling to carry their cardboard boxes to the elevators the same advice they condescendingly gave to displaced blue-collar workers in recent years: 

Learn to code, kids! 

In other grim employment news, it turns out that Mayor Pete still has his job.  And on Thursday, he finally made it to East Palestine, Ohio. 

(Rashida and Tlaib and Ilhan Omar would have beat him to it by several weeks, because when they heard there was trouble in Palestine, they both headed for the airport.  But then they found out that it wasn’t THAT Palestine, and there was no way that they could blame the Jews for a train derailment.  So they both faded back into their offices, like Homer Simpson disappearing into a hedge.)

Pete got peppered with questions, and his responses almost reached a Que-Mala-esque level of vapidity.  But that wasn’t the worst part. 

Because he put on a hard hat for a photo op. 

He was probably going for the construction worker from The Village People look, but what he achieved was the “Dukakis in a tank” look.

As some wag on Twitter noted, Buttigieg was proven right on Thursday, because there was at least one too many white guys on the construction crew in Ohio that day!

Finally, from the “Thank God Criminals are So Stupid” files comes the story of 31-year-old Canadian crook Michael Stamatakos.  Because lefties in America’s Hat are as gullible and delusional as American lefties, they released Stamatakos early from a jail sentence for arson, with parole conditions.

Shockingly, he violated those conditions and is now on the run, with a handful of new charges, including flight, driving offenses, criminal threats and drug possession.  The hosers have put out a nationwide warrant for his arrest.

He’s just a little punk at 5’5” and 110 pounds, so you’d think he might be able to disappear into the crowds in a big city.  But since he’s a criminal, and stupid, that might be tough to do. 

Because when he wasn’t committing crimes and voting for blackface Trudeau (I’m guessing), he was spending money on really horrific facial tattoos. 

He’s got a giant, black, zipper-like set of vertical lines running from above and below both lips all the way to under both ears; solid black flame-looking things above and below both eyes and in the middle of his forehead; and the word “HA” repeated 6 times on his forehead, along with various other designs.    

In other words, he’s wearing permanent, facial anti-camouflage: heavy black markings on a little white guy in a snow-white country.  The imbecile is going to be visible from space!

I just hope that the Mounties don’t have any racist police dogs, because they’re going to take one look at his mostly black face and tear into him before he can even say, “What’s this all aboot, ay?”

“Dr.” Jill Biden/racist K9 Bull(dog) Connor, 2024!

Today I’ve got three topics: Mayor Pete, two Dems’ reactions to crime, and a note on changing the end of my columns.  So let’s get to it.

Mayor Pete looks terrible yet again.  I know it’s been said a million times – or possibly just this once — but Secretaries of Transportation are just like offensive linemen in the NFL: the less you hear about them, the better. 

(Quick, can any of you name any Transportation Secretaries before this guy?   Have you forgotten Frederick Amtrak, or Johnny Boeing, or Carlyle Chrysler?  See!  Those are all made-up names, and none of you knew that.  And there’s no reason you should have.)

The only time in a game when you hear the lineman’s name is after a 56-yard touchdown run is called back because of a holding call on the hapless, should-be-anonymous lineman.

Similarly, when have we heard Mayor Pete’s name?  When he ran for president, it turned out that he had not done a good job of filling potholes in Indiana.  (I know that may sound like some kind of gay slang, but it’s a real thing.)  Then he was defeated in the primaries by Joe Biden. 

If that wasn’t shame enough, he became Sec Trans (again, not an odd sexual reference, but the accepted abbreviation for his job title), his only qualification being his sexual preference, since he had no job experience involving transportation since playing with choo-choos when he was a kid.  (And the pothole thing, which I guess is transportation-adjacent.  And a negative.)

Then he takes office, and we have the biggest supply chain cluster-schtup in our history.  And where was Pete?  AWOL from work for months, so that he could take his time to not breast feed the baby he didn’t carry or deliver, and to fight off the post-partum depression he didn’t experience, since he was never involved pre-partum or even mid-partum with a baby. 

The kicker was that nobody even knew he’d been away from the job for months, or missed him in any way!

By comparison, I retired from my professor job 9 months ago, and the university is still flying the flag at half-mast over it.  Faculty have stopped publishing, students have become listless and directionless, and the football team had a lackluster season.  (Half-time pep talks were met with players muttering things like, “How are we supposed to go out there and give 110% when Dr. Simpson is gone?” And, “Yeah! Plus he made Shakespeare interesting, while at the same time being a hilarious genius!”) 

I can’t even go to a local supermarket without wearing a ball cap and a big fake Ron Swanson moustache as a disguise, and if anybody recognizes me it spreads like wildfire, and the next thing you know it turns into a big, “O captain, my captain,” scene from Dead Poets Society. 

But Mayor Pete takes 4 months off, and it doesn’t leave a ripple.  Then he gets back and starts emoting about how roads are racist, and construction crews have way too many white folks on them.  (Has he ever seen a construction crew?  And the Village People don’t count, because only one of them was a construction worker.)

And now a huge environmental disaster of a train derailment happens, and he leaps into action and writes a tepid press release about it… 11 days later.

Before you criticize that, though, remember that he may have been stuck at home for 10 days, struggling to produce nourishing milk out of his not-at-all-female chest.  Which sounds really, really hard.

This guy has been, literally, a train wreck. 

And even though the hapless Biden administration has not produced anything close to the political equivalent of a 56-yard touchdown run, Joe did recently manage to shoot down a defenseless, slowly drifting spy balloon.  And then he went full Leroy Jenkins (Google it), blasting everything in the sky for a week.  (Score so far: Illinois balloon club 0, Crazy Eddie’s Buy-here/Pay-here car lot balloon 0, one very confused high-flying American eagle 0 – USAF half-million-dollar missiles, 3!)   

That was the equivalent of the Biden administration finally getting a first down, but only on a penalty.  And then the giant Jumbo-tron at one end of the stadium flashes up a big picture of Pete’s gay-guy-cosplaying-as-Mad-Magazine’s-Alfred-E.-Neuman face.

And the entire left side of the stadium groans.  

From incompetence, we move on to incarceration.  As in, “Why don’t many Democrats want to put criminals in jail?”

Two stories illustrate the bad and the good.  First, in Oakland a 48-year-old woman named Jennifer Angel started a bakery in 2008, and has worked hard to keep it going, especially during the harsh lockdowns of the last few years.  (Guess which party runs Oakland?) 

Earlier this month a couple of thieves stole her purse as she was getting into her car.   She chased them to try to get the purse back, but she got caught in the door of their fleeing vehicle and dragged for 50 feet, dying of her injuries the next day.

It was definitely a tragedy, and I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.  But what made the story unusual is that after her death, her friends and loved ones released a statement touting Angel’s longtime activism, which involved being both an anarchist and social justice warrior.

The mourners’ statement contradicted itself.  Early on it said, “We know Jen would not want to continue the cycle of harm by bringing state-sanctioned violence to those involved in her death [because she] did not believe in carceral punishment.”  But it closed by saying, “We wish for Jen’s legacy to be one of deep commitment to safety and dignity for everyone.”

It doesn’t make sense to say that you are committed to people’s safety, while saying that you don’t want the criminals who prey on them to be stopped and put in jail.  Just as it doesn’t make sense to be an anarchist business owner, since anarchists don’t believe in private property or state action to prevent theft, beliefs which would preclude her from objecting to anyone looting her business or stealing her purse.

While the criminals who victimized her are primarily responsible, Jennifer Angel’s ideology also contributed to her own death.  If they have long criminal records (as is almost always the case in soft-on-crime, Dem-run cities), her activism played a role in keeping them on the streets, where they could steal her property and murder her.

And while it might sound almost admirable (in other contexts) to be willing to die for your political beliefs, there is nothing noble about subjecting future victims – who probably have not signed on to your naïve and foolish ideological death wish – to your same fate.

Judging from her friends’ statement, no lessons have been learned so far.  I don’t know how many people signed that statement, but I wonder how many more of them will have to be victimized before the survivors begin to question their destructive ideology?

But lest you think that all lefties have lost their minds on this issue, let me remind you that it’s always the 90% of total morons who give the other 10% a bad name. 

Take, for instance, Dem congresswoman Angie Craig, from Minnesota.  She was recently attacked in DC  (ruled by guess which party?) by a thug who followed her into an elevator, punched her, and started choking her.  She threw her cup of hot coffee on him and got away, and he was caught and arrested.

(If she lived in a state that recognized the second amendment, she could have started putting bullets in him, starting with the groin and moving up.  That way, he wouldn’t be back on the streets in a nanosecond, and she wouldn’t have spilled her coffee.)

It turns out that the 26-year-old creep had a long criminal resume (Surprise!) that included indecent exposure, assaulting a cop, theft, and B&E.  He committed 12 known assaults before attacking Craig.

Craig, God bless her, told CBS news that she’d like to see people like him put in jail.  “I was assault number 13 on his record, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make sure that there’s not a 14, a 15, and a 20.”

Miraculously, the CBS reporter didn’t immediately call her a racist and spit in her face. 

However, the Dems running DC did the next best thing, because this is how the story ends: “Despite the city’s crime crisis, the District of Columbia City Council voted in January to force through revisions of the district’s criminal code in an effort to soften penalties on violent crimes and reduce penalties, even for those accused of violent crimes like murder or sexual assault.”

They say a conservative is a liberal who’s been mugged. 

It’s too late for Jennifer Angel, but Ms. Craig, please allow me to offer you some literature from Adam Smith, Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson, along with a recommendation to check out the good people here at Cautious Optimism!

One final note: Regular readers will know that I love a good running joke.  (For example: #wemustneverstopmockingthecaucasiancherokee.)

For a while now, I’ve closed my columns with a consistent joke, ending each one with a tongue-in-cheek evocation of the next Dem presidential ticket.  During the Trump years, I listed, Avenatti in the prez spot, and a name taken for each column in the VP slot.  (That was to mock all the MSM pundits who slobbered all over the sleazy porn lawyer, touting him as a worthy presidential candidate purely because he hated Trump as much as they did.)

Since Avenatti is now in the joint for a while, I switched to the next most empty Democrat suit, ending my recent columns with “Fetterman/[Different name here], 2024!

But since Fetterman was recently hospitalized, and has now checked in to Walter Reed with obviously serious physical and mental problems, it doesn’t feel right to continue taking shots at him in each column.

Don’t get me wrong.  He is still an awful politician who had no business running for Senate – in a horrifically bad campaign – and his election is an indictment of the voters of Pennsylvania, the soul-less cynics running the Democrat party, and his awful wife who helped put her husband in this position.  (Not to mention the PA GOP and GOP voters, who couldn’t blow out such a clearly unqualified oaf.) 

But he’s a human being, and he’s going through something terrible now.  To be going through it surrounded by despicable party hacks and a self-serving spouse without the compassion you’d show for a sick animal is heartbreaking. 

So I’ll pray for him, and wish a pox on his heartless political masters, and move on to a new column closing, which involves picking a different creepy leftist. 

Therefore, I give you…

“Dr.” Jill Biden/Alfred E. Buttigieg, 2024!

+The ridiculous stories just keep coming, so I’m going to jump right in.

So now we’re apparently shooting down random flying things like they’re Heinkel bombers at the height of the Battle of Britain.  I don’t have anything substantive to add to all of the Balloongate 23! craziness, other than a language note that caught my eye.

In an effort to reassure us that the many objects now apparently darkening our skies are not aliens or Chicom aggressors, several pols and commentators have called them “sky trash.”  Which sounds just great.

It’s also a blast from the past, because back when Bill Clinton was flying on Air Force One or Marine One, his secret service code name was “Sky Trash.” 

And before you can ask:  Hillary was “Sea Biscuit.”  Monica was “Humidor.”  And Chelsea was “Poor Thing.”

True story.

Today’s Red Flag story comes to us from the National Archives and the Smithsonian in DC, and involves events that happened during the week of the National March for Life, on January 20^th.

Taxpayer-funded employees at those two places were offended by many visitors’ clothing which featured pro-life slogans or statements, and systematically insisted that they either remove them or leave the premises.  Visitors from at least three states were told that slogans such as, “I am the Post-Roe Generation,” “Law Students for Life,” and “Life is a HUMAN RIGHT,” constituted, “disturbing the peace,” because they would, “incite others” and “cause a disturbance.” 

Staff members at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum demanded that Catholic students wearing pro-life hats “either take them off or leave!”  One open-minded progressive yelled at one student, “We are a museum that promotes equality, and your hats do not promote equality!”

Were people wearing gear with slogans like, “My Body, My Choice,” and “Pro-Choice!” similarly confronted, you don’t have to ask, because you already absolutely know the answer?

And these weren’t just the random actions of one or two people.  Many different security guards and museum employees did this at several times throughout the day to many different visitors at two different locations.

When the conservative law group American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) sued, the responsible organizations both retreated, giving the least believable story since Liz Warren explained that Geronimo and Crazy Horse were both her great-grandfathers. (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

They said that policing visitors’ clothing “is not in keeping with our policy,” and that they “welcome all visitors without regard to their beliefs.”  They also said that their employees were given immediate re-training.

I can only hope that the re-training involved Three-Stooges-style face-slapping.  And perhaps some light caning.

By the way, the ACLU didn’t say a word about this, because they pay as much attention to the civil rights of non-left-wingers as Karine Jean-Pierre does to male suitors.

What makes this red flag more of a scarlet flag is that many of those whose speech-bearing clothing was censored had traveled to the National Archives specifically to see… wait for it… the Bill of Rights!  Which begins with a little scribbling about our God-given right to free speech.           

Because the Left does not understand irony.

You may remember that in my last column I commented on the racial divisiveness inherent in playing the “black national anthem” at the Super Bowl.  I made the point that if one group gets a separate national anthem, everyone’s going to want one, and we’ll look like insensitive racists if we don’t give in.

Pretty soon French-Americans will insist on taking their berets off to Cheap Trick’s “Surrender,” and Icelandic-Americans will demand some hideous Bjork song, and Mexican-Americans will be belting out “Ay, Macarena!” 

(Okay, so I don’t know many Mexican songs.  And yes, the guys who sang Macarena weren’t even Mexican.  But “La Cucaracha” seems even more disrespectful.  That leaves me “The Frito Bandito” song, which I still remember from grade school, and still find hilarious.  But as they say on the cartoon Archer… “inaprops.”) 

Well, an analogous incident has happened in CA that has proven me right.  And not just because the north star of stupid – Adam Schiff – has taken the opposite side.

Instead of additional national anthems, this story involved additional flags on government buildings. 

Two years ago, the Huntington Beach city council voted to allow a LGBTQ+ group to fly the Pride flag, in addition to the usual state and federal flags, on municipal buildings.  Since a more conservative council has been elected recently, the council just voted to disallow any specific sub-group flags.

Cue Schiff-for-brains, who tweeted that not flying the Pride flag is an “attempt to marginalize LGBTQ+ individuals.  But hate cannot be allowed to win.”

Thankfully, Schiff’s moronic take got blasted in the responses, with many people asking whether we should also have straight pride flags.  And I foresee the same kind of explosion of new flags as I predicted with the multiplying ethnic anthems. 

There are already many variations on the pride flag for various sexual sub-groups (bisexuals, pansexuals, etc.), so why not the same thing on the hetero side?  Traditionalists might favor the missionary position, so do they get a flag?  How about the doggy style enthusiasts?  I know some people who are very fond of the ol’ reverse cowgirl.

I mean, not me.  Just people I know.  Not personally, but just from… you know… research.

Perhaps I’ve said too much.

Anyway, that road leads to madness, with half of next year’s city budget going to the purchase of flagpoles and flags.  And then you’ve got to cover your kids’ eyes when you’re trying to make your way past dozens of obscene flags just to get into the courthouse to pay a parking ticket. 

Enough!  One national anthem, one state flag, and the stars and stripes.  Other than that, leave us alone, you freaks!

In the “Americans stricken with Idiocy” column, reliable young lunkhead AOC had a rough fortnight.  

First she made a fool of herself, ranting when fellow squad member and jihadi-adjacent brother-marrier Ilhan Omar got tossed off the foreign affairs committee.  She bounced around and pounded the podium, and threw out all the tired cliches: this is about Omar’s race, and about her sex, and about her being a Muslim.

She didn’t mention the reasons that McCarthy had listed – Omar’s long and consistent pattern of anti-Semitic hatred – because she didn’t have a reasonable answer for those.  She also didn’t mention that the GOP is doing exactly what the Dems did to them last term, by setting a precedent of kicking the opposing party’s most abrasive members off of committees. 

Now that the GOP has the House majority, what’s good for the goose is good for the slanderers!

When I was doing some writing workshops for law students, a law professor told me a courtroom strategy that encapsulates AOC’s tantrum perfectly: “When the law is on your side, pound the law.  When the facts are on your side, pound the facts.  When the law and the facts are both against you, pound the table.”  

Then, while football fans were enjoying the Super Bowl and non-fans were critiquing the commercials, AOC donned her dunce cap again, and found the most ridiculous thing to get offended by during a 7-hour broadcast: the two short “Jesus Gets Us” ads.

If you didn’t see them, one is tagged, “Love your Enemies,” and depicts a bunch of pictures of people yelling at each other.  The closing tag line is, “Jesus loved the people we hate.  He gets us.  All of us.” 

The second one is tagged, “Be childlike,” and shows pictures of children being kind to each other, including several featuring cross-racial childhood friendships.  The closing tag line is, “Jesus didn’t want us to act like adults.” 

I know that religion is a touchy subject, to say the least.  And it would be easy to make a religious ad that would offend most Democrats. 

(For example, I could see one with Jesus saying, “I said suffer the children to come unto Me.  But good lord, I didn’t mean abort them! What’s wrong with you?!”   Or maybe one that just shows a montage of Biden fumbling around and looking like he’s ready to lie in state in the Capitol rotunda, and then fade the screen to black, and put up these words:  “’And as it is appointed unto men once to die; but after this the judgment.’  Joe Biden completed step 1 several years ago….”)

But these two ads were not that.  They were completely anodyne.  You’d have to be a pretty unhinged Christophobe to get upset over them.

Cut to AOC, plopping her juicy booty (her words, not mine) onto her computer chair and tweeting out some dumbness:  “Something tells me Jesus would *not* spend millions of dollars on Super Bowl ads to make fascism look benign.”

Fascism! 

Remember all those speeches in which Hitler and Mussolini went on and on about, “Love your enemies!  Treat them kindly!  Be nice to each other, like children!”

Me neither.

There is only one clear, rational conclusion to explain AOC’s tweet:

She thinks that Jesus wants to date her.   

On a final note, two years ago today we lost Rush Limbaugh, and that one still hurts.  But this weekend, two of the VIPs in the CO Nation who are still fighting the good fight – CO himself, and the Correspondent for Thinly Researched Conspiracy Theories, Manufactured Intrigue, and Ill-Advised Speculation – are celebrating their 60^th birthdays. 

I’m so bummed that I’m not able to make it to World Headquarters for the big event, but I will be there in spirit.  And all I ask is that somebody at the party makes a cruel joke about Liz Warren being whiter than Aspen in January.

Because whenever two or more COers are gathered, and they all chant, “#wemustneverstopmockingher” together, there I’ll be, in the midst of them.

Happy birthday, boys!

Fetterman/the musical genius who wrote “Macarena,” 2024!

Other than watching excerpts from the State of the Union speech, I tried to spend less time following politics over the last week, and that felt pretty good.   I read 2 novels, and then started Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life – loving semi-retirement so far! – and at long last I was able to watch the contractor put the new roof on my Victorian house that burned last year. 

Since I had a handful of stories from the past several weeks that I’d wanted to comment on but hadn’t had the chance, I thought that today I’d catch up on those.

But first I’ve got a new example in what I am right now declaring a recurring series: The Red Flag of the Week.

This week’s entry comes from the Super Bowl, where the unofficial Black National Anthem (Lift Every Voice and Sing) was sung before our actual national anthem.  I understand that this is the third year this has been done, but I don’t like it. 

I’m an “e pluribus unum” kind of guy – like a few founders of our country I could mention – rather than an “e pluribus divide-um” type.  (E pluribus tribalismo?) (I don’t know as much Latin as I should.)

The kind of racial identity politics that leads to separate dorms, graduations, award shows and anthems – even when it is well-intentioned (and it very often is decidedly not) — is not likely to end in greater solidarity and love for our country. 

More often, it leads to demands for more and more carve-outs for other ethnic groups.  There are now more Hispanics than African-Americans in the US; shouldn’t they have their own “national” anthem?  How about the Asians? 

And why should it stop there?  Wouldn’t Guatemalans or Brazilians be duking it out with the Mexicans for pride of place among the Hispanic anthem contenders?  And the Japanese, Koreans and Chinese aren’t traditionally the best of friends, so would they all be happy with one pan-Asian anthem?

And don’t get me started on the Fijians.

Also, if all of those groups start getting jiggy with their own anthems, what about me and my buds over here in Crackertown? I’m half Appalachian hillbilly and half German.  So do I get a stirring rendition of John Prine’s “Muhlenberg Country,” following by a rousing version of Germanic cutie Nena doing “99 Luftballoons?” 

That way lies madness… and not just because the Super Bowl pre-game show would have to last for 16 hours, instead of the modest 12 hours it now takes.  

Speaking of racial identity politics wreaking havoc in our society, does anybody still believe that choosing people for important jobs based largely on their race or ethnicity is a wise path to follow?  Because I remember when the late Joe Biden stated that he was going to pick a black female for vice president, no matter what. 

And now the second-in-command to our decomposing prez is the human distillation of cringe, whose greatest passions are Venn diagrams, yellow school buses and meaning-free repetition of vacuous banalities.   I mean, aren’t we all just fascinated with,“the significance of the passage of time?”

One of the most pernicious unwanted side effects of affirmative action hiring decisions is that they call into question a nominee’s merit, even for those who are eminently qualified, regardless of whether they belong to a group for whom a thumb is placed on the hiring scales. 

In some painful cases, some applicants are given the chance to demonstrate their qualifications, and the results are not pretty.  And I’m not just referring to Que Mala.  Or Liz Warren, whose cheek-bone-based rise has prompted many tribal spokespeople to release statements to the effect that they’ve got nothing to do with that crazy Caucasian lady.  (#wemustneverstopmockingher)

Well, a few weeks ago Louisiana Senator John Kennedy questioned some nominees for district court judgeships, and among them was Charnelle Bjelkengren.  She is African-American, and her past work includes participation in various associations with names like, “the Racial Justice Consortium,” “the Diversity Section,” and “the Systemic Racism Taskforce.” 

In support of her nomination, the Biden administration highlighted that she would be the first black woman on the District Court in the state of Washington if approved.

But when Senator Kennedy asked her a few questions that should have been softballs for an average first-year law student, she… did not do well.  (Welcome to Euphemism Corner, people!)

First Kennedy said, “Tell me what Article 5 of the Constitution does.”  The judge hesitated for a long moment, then said, “Article 5 is not coming to mind at the moment.” 

Kennedy said, “Okay.  How about Article 2?”  Her response: “Neither does Article 2.”

These are not tricky “gotcha” questions.  They don’t involve some minutiae from a civil court ruling on the penalties for stealing a pig in West Virginia in 1889.  There are only 7 articles in the constitution, and she went 0-for-2 on those!

In the interests of full disclosure, I probably wouldn’t be able to recall what those two articles involve if asked about them in that setting, either.

But in my defense, I’ve never gone to law school, and I’m not trying to become a District Court judge! 

It would be like asking a Christian who went to seminary and has been a pastor for 10 years to explain what the Golden Rule is, or to name 2 of the 10 commandments, or to recite John 3:16. 

I can’t imagine that many pastors would fail that test, yet this lady couldn’t come remember the articles of the constitution.

To quote a Bible verse I know, even though I’m not looking for pastoral work:  Jesus wept.

On the schadenfreude front, I enjoyed watching the leftist overlords of NYC being hoisted on their own petards a couple of weeks ago, when their obnoxious virtue signaling about illegal immigrants came back to bite them. 

After several years of moral preening about how they were “sanctuary cities,” a lot of Dem-run places – I’m looking at you, wokesters of Martha’s Vineyard — when given the chance to put their money where their Michael-Moore-size mouths are, have proved to be… less than consistent.  (Seriously, come on in to Euphemism Corner!)

 So when New York received a few hundred illegals a while ago, they temporarily housed them in an upscale Manhattan hotel.  But when it came time for them to move to a migrant shelter in Brooklyn, the illegals refused. They complained that the Brooklyn shelter was “inhumane,” and that instead of beds, they’d be forced to sleep in cots. 

One said, “I was promised a more stable place to stay, here at the Watson.  I feel like I was lied to.”  Many of them set up tents on the streets around the hotel, claiming that their rights had been violated.

In a country that they’d illegally broken into, and where they were being fed and housed for free.

On the one hand, that is infuriating to hear.  These people are supposed to be humble refugees, fleeing from terrible third-world conditions and political persecution, but they sound more like the arrogant, entitled offspring of Dem politicians.  

You know who sleeps on cots and doesn’t complain about it?  Members of the US military!  But that’s not good enough for these people.

Democrat NYC Mayor Eric Adams argued that it’s unfair for cities like his to “carry the weight of a national problem.”

Oh, it’s a national problem now, is it?  Because when it primarily affected small border towns in a lot of red or purple states, you dopes said that it wasn’t a problem at all. 

Until we can force the securing of our borders, I hope that every GOP governor will send every illegal immigrant who steps foot in their states straight up to the Dem-run sanctuary cities, and let them reap the consequences of their misbegotten policies.

When DeSantis sent a handful of illegals to Martha’s Vineyard last year, one of the white leftist ladies there claimed to just love all immigrants, but said, “We’re not a border town!”

You are now, so suck it up, buttercup! 

Finally, Cassie the Wonder Dog and I want to heap some praise on a Marine Corps war dog who recently received a medal after completing four deployments, 50 missions and over 350 explosive sweeps in Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq.  The Belgian Malinois is named Bass.

His skills include detecting explosive materials, and tracking a person or group of people, along with my personal favorite: “performing team protection through controlled aggression.”  I like the sound of that!

Among his missions, in May of 2019 he helped capture a Taliban bombmaker, while also detecting several bombs in the path of his squad when it was under fire.  He’s now enjoying a well-deserved retirement with his former handler in Texas, and is universally recognized as a Very Good Boy!

I just wish he could do one more brief deployment in Brooklyn, where his handler could explain to some snooty illegals that they had 5 minutes to get into their cots for the night, after which any malingerers would experience of a little old-fashioned “shelter protection through controlled aggression.”

Semper Fi, Bass!

Fetterman/ Eric “Get these migrants out of here!” Adams, 2024!